What do I want in a conference website? Not this. I want to be able to browse sessions to find the ones I’m interested in. That means being able to see the session title and time as well as the speakers and talk titles. A super-long web page is perfectly fine. If you can’t show […]
I was thinking about department websites, partly because my own department’s website is terrible, and recently a colleague asked me whether I could suggest some good department sites. I’ll describe the basic principles for a good department website, and then I’ll comment on a number of examples. But first: No discussion of academic web pages […]
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 […]
Another R tip: beware of as.character applied to a list. Really, beware of grep with a list: You might have thought that the result would be just 1, but grep expects a vector of character strings. If the input is not that, it uses as.character(). Since the result of that starts with "c(", grep finds […]
The New York Times has an article about how Microsoft will have users pay a yearly fee for MS Office, instead of buying it outright. There’s some mention of competition from Google Docs. Why should one still use Microsoft Office? The brilliant Excel graphs! As for Google, Mr. DelBene said it has not “in any [...]
Last week, I wrote about the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health logo. I now present part 2 of the story. Hopkins SPH had done some fancy renovations of part of the building, including an important new feature, the “Wall of Wonder“: a big display composed of nine LCD screens in the atrium of [...]
I was just telling a distinguished visitor a few of my various stories about the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health logo. She suggested that it would be a great blog topic. And now that I’m a tenured faculty member at a different university and so can’t get into any [further] trouble over this… [...]
I read an interesting post on the NY Times site this morning, which said: Analyzing data from the 2008 American National Election Study, we found no relationship between negative feelings toward African-Americans and opposition to government-provided health care among whites without college degrees. For college-educated whites, however, negative racial feelings were strongly associated with increased [...]
Maybe it’s just that I’m stupid and haven’t been paying proper attention to Rafa’s work in the past decade, but microarray data have really been kicking my ass the last few weeks. Here are a few of the lessons that I’ve re-learned. Lesson 1: What the hell is that? Many (or all) of my interesting [...]
The annual ENAR meeting (eastern North America portion of International Biometric Society) was a few weeks ago in Washington, DC. It was great to see old friends, and I learned a number of things outside of the sessions, but mostly I was annoyed by the meeting. Ways to annoy me Distorted aspect ratios: I’m often [...]
