I recently found this little gem of a web app that analyzes the clarity of your writing. Hemingway highlights long, complex, and hard to read sentences. It also highlights complex words where a simple one would do, and highlights adverbs, suggesting you use a stronger verb instead. It highlights passive voice (bad!), and tells you the minimum reading grade level necessary to understand your writing.
It's happened to all of us. You read about a new tool, database, webservice, software, or some interesting and useful data, but when you browse to http://instititution.edu/~home/professorX/lab/data, there's no trace of what you were looking for. THE PROBLEM This isn't an uncommon problem. See the following two articles: The first gives us some alarming statistics.
Coursera's free Computing for Data Analysis course starts today. It's a four week long course, requiring about 3-5 hours/week. A bit about the course: There are also hundreds of other free courses scheduled for this year. While the Computing for Data Analysis course is more about using R, the Data Analysis course is more about the methods and experimental designs you'll use, with a smaller emphasis on the R language.
The Galaxy Project started using CiteULike to organize papers that are about, use, or reference Galaxy. The Galaxy CiteULike group is open to any CUL user, and once you join, you can add papers to the group, assign tags, and rate papers.
I love the idea of using R+LaTeX+Sweave for reproducible research. This is even easier now that R has a jazzy new IDE that supports Sweave syntax highlighting and automatic PDF generation. I know I'm going to take some flak for saying this, but let's be honest here... If you're working in the biomedical sciences, chances are, your collaborators have never heard of Sweave. Physicians only use LaTeX during surgery.
Note 2010-11-17: there's more than one way to do this.
Several readers emailed me or left a comment on my previous announcement of Frank Harrell's workshop on using Sweave for reproducible research asking if we could record the seminar. Unfortunately we couldn't record audio or video, but take a look at the Sweave/Latex page on the Biostatistics Dept Wiki.
In my previous post about Q10 a commenter suggested a software called "The Journal" by davidRM for productively keeping track of experiments, datasets, projects, etc. I've never tried this software before, but about a year ago I ditched my pen and paper lab notebook for an electronic lab notebook in the form of a blog using Blogger, the same platform I use to write Getting Genetics Done.
Do you submit manuscripts to journals that are not indexed in PubMed? This can make it difficult for others to find your publications, especially if they don't have a subscription to the journal. This often happens with us when we publish in computer science journals. Using the NIH manuscript submission system you can upload your manuscript to PubMed Central, which provides free open access, and is indexed in PubMed.
Do you ever find yourself switching back and forth between your work computer, your laptop, and your home computer? This happens to me all the time when I'm writing. Rather than carry all your files on a USB stick and risk losing it or corrupting your data, give Dropbox a try. It's dead simple, and works for PC, Mac, and Linux too.