Having recently got my head around violin plots, I thought I would explain what they are and why you might want to use them. There are several options when it comes to plotting summary data. I list them here in order of granularity, before describing violin plots and how to plot them in some detail.

When I started this blog, my plan was to write about interesting papers or at least blog about the ones from my lab. This post is a bit of both. I was recently asked to write a “Journal Club” piece for Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology, which is now available online. It’s paywalled unfortunately.

I have been doing paper of the day (#potd) again in 2014. See my previous post about this. My “rules” for paper of the day are: Read one paper each working day. If I am away, or reviewing a paper for a journal or colleague, then I get a pass.

Back of the envelope calculations for this post. An old press release for a paper on endocytosis by Tom Kirchhausen contained this fascinating factoid: The equivalent of the entire brain, or a football field of membrane, is turned over every hour If this is true it is absolutely staggering. Let’s check it out.

I was talking to a speaker visiting our department recently. While discussing his postdoc work from years ago, he told me about the identification of the sperm factor that causes calcium oscillations in the egg at fertilisation.

I realised recently that I’ve maintained a consistent iTunes library for ~10 years. For most of that time I’ve been listening exclusively to iTunes, rather than to music in other formats.

A bit of navel gazing for this post. Since moving the blog to wordpress.com in the summer, it recently accrued 5000 views.

The transition for scientific journals from print to online has been slow and painful. And it is not yet complete. This week I got an RSS alert to a “new” paper in Oncogene.

An IgorPro tip this week. The default font for plots is Geneva. Most of our figures are assembled using Helvetica for labelling. The default font can be changed in Igor Graph Preferences, but Preferences need to be switched on in order to be implemented.

Last week, ALM (article-level metric) data for PLoS journals were uploaded to Figshare with the invitation to do something cool with it. Well, it would be rude not to. Actually, I’m one of the few scientists on the planet that hasn’t published a paper with Public Library of Science (PLoS), so I have no personal agenda here.

What is your h-index on Twitter? This thought crossed my mind yesterday when I saw a tweet that was tagged #academicinsults It occurred to me that a Twitter account is a kind of micro-publishing platform. So what would “publication metrics” look like for Twitter? Twitter makes analytics available, so they can easily be crunched.