This year #paperOTD (or paper of the day for any readers not on Twitter) did not go well for me. I’ve been busy with lots of things and I’m now reviewing more grants than last year because I am doing more committee work. This means I am finding less time to read one paper per day.

I read this article on the BBC recently about alcohol consumption in the UK. In passing it mentions how many people in the UK are teetotal. I found the number reported – 21% – unbelievable so I checked out the source for the numbers.

bioRxiv, the preprint server for biology, recently turned 2 years old. This seems a good point to take a look at how bioRxiv has developed over this time and to discuss any concerns sceptical people may have about using the service.

Our recent paper on “the mesh” in kinetochore fibres (K-fibres) of the mitotic spindle was our first adventure in 3D electron microscopy. This post is about some of the new data analysis challenges that were thrown up by this study.

I recently finished reading The Art of Data Science by Roger Peng & Elizabeth Matsui. Roger, together with Jeff Leek, writes the Simply Statistics blog and he works at JHU with Elizabeth. The aim of the book is to give a guide to data analysis.

Previously, I wrote a post with tips for new PIs on lab organisation. Since that time, I’ve started using Trello to organise operations in my lab. Trello is basically a way to track the progress of projects. Collaborative working is built-in. A friend had begun using Trello as she got involved in building an app.

For the past 3.5 yrs I’ve been using Unison to sync files between 3 macs. It works great. In fact, since I installed and set up my profiles for syncing, I’ve not needed to change a thing. Until yesterday. I upgraded to El Capitan on each of the 3 macs.

It’s been a while since I did some navel-gazing about who reads this blog and where they come from. This week, quantixed is close to 25K views and there was a burst of people viewing an old post, which made me look again at the visitor statistics. Where do the readers of quantixed come from?

This post follows on from a previous post on citation distributions and the wrongness of Impact Factor.

This is just a quick tip as it took me a little while to sort this out. In the lab we have two QNAP TS-869 Pro NAS devices. Each was set up with a single RAID6 storage pool and I ran them as a primary and replicant via rsync.

In the lab we have been doing quite a bit of analysis of cell migration in 2D. Typically RPE1 cells migrating on fibronectin-coated glass. There are quite a few tools out there to track cell movements and to analyse their migration.