Tag Archives: software

How to regulate ChatGPT use

9.02.2023 admin

With the even increasing use of ChatGPT there is also a debate not only on responsibility but also crediting findings to individual authors.

The artificial-intelligence (AI) chatbot ChatGPT that has taken the world by storm has made its formal debut in the scientific literature — racking up at least four authorship credits on published papers and preprints. Journal editors, researchers and publishers are now debating the place of such AI tools in the published literature, and whether it’s appropriate to cite the bot as an author.

Software recognition of AI generated text is not 100% accurate in particular if there are less than 1000 characters available. And of course, scientific texts will be always edited to evade the classifier.

Having discussed here this issue yesterday, we think that we need some kind of software regulation – sending the generated AI output not only to the individual user but keeping a full logfile of the output that can be accessed, indexed and searched by everybody.

Software

Sometimes it is better to switch bikes not gears

28.01.2021 admin

My 3 favorite programs? R, Bookends and Exposure.

The first choice is Rstudio (since 2012, being a long time SAS user). Here is the most recent JJ Allaire keynote

I was a bit with late with Bookends in 2018 (being a long time Sente user) but here is an introduction by Jon Ashwell.

And I am currently migrating to Exposure (after having used Lightroom for 13 years) by Jeff Butterworth

Life changes every day while it is sometimes better to switch bikes not gears.

Genetics, Software

Leaflet.js – layer order, layer address and links

13.08.2015 admin

Leaflet is great for mapping in epidemiology with quick results of just cut & pasting a few lines. Problems do start, however, whenever running a more advanced project. It’s a pain, as plugins overwrite functions and basic css layouts. Or layers do not allow clickable links (as propation is being prohibited). Or geojson data that are rejected for whatever reason.
A showcase project, that had been planned for 2 days, took more than 1 week as the documentation is frequently unclear, incomplete and often hard to understand without any (jsfiddle) example. Numerous Google searches helped, as well as peaking into the sourcecode, while also other stack overflow posters have been very helpful. Continue reading Leaflet.js – layer order, layer address and links →

Joke, Software

Better figures

26.09.2014 admin

A recent paper identifies 10 rules for better pictures. As I have also given several lectures on that topic, I was excited what the authors think…
1. Know your audience. This is trivial as you never know your audience.
2. Identify your message. True and not true at the same time. True as it makes your findings more evident – not true if you are allowing a reader to find his own message.
3. Adapt the figure to the support medium. Trivial. May be very time consuming.
4. Captions are not optional. Absolutely true, I also suppport good captions – mini stories for those who can’t read the whole text.
5. Do not trust the defaults. Trivial. No one does.
6. Use color efficiently. Not really, avoid colors for those of us who are colorblind and to avoid expensive page charges.
7. Do not mislead the reader. Why should I?
8. Avoid Chartjunk. Absolutely. Most frequent problem.
9. Message trumps beauty. Sure, form follows function.
10. Get the right tool. Maybe correct while the further recommendations look like a poor man’s effort to make his first graphic at zero cost: Gimp, Imagemagick, R…

Software

Mapfactor Navigator: Convert you POIs

25.07.2014 admin

I am currently switching to Mapfactor Navigator mainly to use now also offline Open Street Maps.
The main problem is to get all those old waypoints converted. Unfortunately it is confusing what developers but users are reporting on different forums. MN obviously used different tools at different times and even different directories.

Before you start, get the most recent version Continue reading Mapfactor Navigator: Convert you POIs →

Genetics, Software

PLINK: Bug or feature?

14.01.2010 admin

I am struggling now for 4 weeks with some unusual behaviour in PLINK that gives me different results with a trait of the alternate phenotype files either by calling that trait directly

plink –file mydata –tdt –pheno pheno2.txt –mpheno 1

or from a loop over all traits

plink –file mydata –tdt –pheno pheno2.txt –all-pheno

It seems that I am working with different numbers at both occasions – click to enlarge the log Continue reading PLINK: Bug or feature? →

Joke, Software

Playing with your browser

16.01.2007 admin

Some blog authors are nuts about protecting their web site from copying files. There are many ways to protect your site – but only one really good (publish nothing). I often see small javascripts that disable the ability to right-click where javascript.about.com has a much simpler solution:

<body oncontextmenu=”return false;”>

Please try a right click now…
If you are fooled by a web author in such a way, what could you do? tech-recipes has the answer: Of course, we can use javascript to turn it back on.

When visiting the offending website, type the following into the URL bar of your browser:
javascript:void(document.oncontextmenu=null)

Happy browsing, yea, yea.

Software

R-type and E-type

9.01.2007 admin

This afternoon I attended a talk at MPI of Yurii Aulchenko about his R package genABEL. He uses a nice trick to convert genotypes into 8 bit (as there are is no 2 bit format 00,01,10,11) which saves quite a lot of memory.

And here is the E type that I have seen a couple of months ago: