There was an interesting news item in Nature on code review. It describes a project by some folks at Mozilla to review the code (well, really just 200-line snippets) from 6 selected papers in computational biology. There are very brief quotes from Titus Brown and Roger Peng. I expect that the author of the item, […]
There was lots of discussion on twitter yesterday about Graham Coop’s paper with Peter Ralph (or vice versa), on The geography of recent genetic ancestry across Europe, particularly regarding the FAQ they’d created. I was eager to take a look, and, it’s slightly embarrassing to say, I first did a search to see if they’d […]
It’s great that, in a step towards improved reproducibility, the Nature journals are removing page limits on Methods sections: To allow authors to describe their experimental designs and methods in enough detail for others to interpret and replicate them, the participating journals are removing length restrictions on Methods sections. But couldn’t they include the Methods […]
Much has been written about reproducible research: that scientific papers should be accompanied by the data and software sufficient to reproduce the results. It’s obviously a Good Thing. But it can be hard to stick to this ideal in practice. For my early papers, I’m not sure I can find the materials anymore, and that’s […]
Visualization is often considered to consist of three phases: exploration, analysis, and presentation. While the former two topics are covered well in the literature, there has been very little work specifically on presentation. In an upcoming paper, Jock Mackinlay and I argue that presentation, and in particular storytelling and communication of data, are the logical next step for the field, and provide some research directions. The paper is titled Storytelling:…
Wired magazine had a short article last month on how to read a scientific report, which basically was about how to interpret the statistical results. It’s reasonably well done.
I was flipping though the contents of G3 and saw this paper, which includes Jim Cheverud as an author. I poked through the paper, and my eye was attracted to the following figure. These are supposed to be functions, but some weird smoother was used,...
Visualization is largely defined as the transformation of data into images. Visualization tools don't have a way of assessing their output, though: were there enough pixels to represent all the data? Are there too many overlapping lines? In a paper to be presented at EuroVis next week, Aritra Dasgupta, Min Chen, and I propose a taxonomy of the different sources of uncertainty when working with parallel coordinates.
