It is an annual event on quantixed to post the papers I have selected for MD997 Frontier Techniques and Research Skills in Biomedicine. Previous selections are grouped here. The deal is that each student picks a paper from the list and then uses it to write a “grant application” for a research project. They also present the paper to the class and finally we do a grant panel where projects are scored!

I was working on a figure in Adobe Illustrator today. The ai file had 32 embedded TIFF files (we tend to embed images rather than linking them for portability reasons). I wanted to change all of the images, but to do this I needed to know where the originals were.

The database clinicaltrials.gov is a web resource of clinical trials around the world. It has a REST API that gives access to clinical trial data. There are some resources available to interact with this resource using R, such as rclinicaltrials and ClinicalTrialsAPI. We were interested at looking clinical trials for rare diseases and particularly whether this year, COVID-19 had affected these trials.

A short follow-up post. Previously, I looked at how to reproduce a Strava feature that compares performance over similar courses. With a few modifications to the code, I was able to analyse a much larger dataset of cycling performance on similar courses. Two courses with the highest number of tracks are shown below. I cycle these courses all the time. Well, I did until the pandemic struck.

One of several features that Strava put behind a paywall was the ability to compare performance on similar courses. I miss this comparison tool and wondered how hard it would be to code my own. This post is a walkthrough of how I approached the problem. The code is available here. It uses the trackeR library in R to convert the GPX tracks to a huge dataframe. This is then processed by IgorPro.

We have a new preprint out. This is a short post to describe our findings and highlight some of the software I developed for analysing cell migration and cell shape data.

I searched several times in vain to solve this problem. After finding a solution, I thought i’d put it up here. The problem Formatting of units using siunitx in LaTeX does not match the typeface of the body text. We like to use the helvet package to get a close approximation to Helvetica in LaTeX.

Here is a fun post about using colour palettes in R. It starts with a computer game… After a few years of sporadically playing Super Mario World 2 – Yoshi’s Island on the Retropie, I made it to the final level.

During the pandemic, many virtual seminar programmes have popped up. One series, “Motors in Quarantine”, has been very successful. It’s organised by my colleagues Anne Straube, Alex Zwetsloot and Huong Vu. Anne wanted to know if attendees of the seminar series were a fair representation of the field. We know the geographical location of the seminar attendees, but the challenge was to find a way to examine research activity at a country level.

The coronavirus crisis has meant that scientific meetings and seminars have moved online. This change has led to me wondering: why don’t scientists give talks the way that musicians do gigs? The idea is: after posting a preprint or publishing a paper, a scientist advertises that they will livestream a seminar to explain the work. Attendance is free.