Frank Harrell, chair of the Biostatistics department here at Vanderbilt, is giving a seminar entitled "Sweave for Reproducible Research and Beautiful Statistical Reports" tomorrow, Wednesday, May 12, 1:30-2:30pm, in the MRBIII Conference Room 1220.

If you attended Frank Harrell's Regression Modeling Strategies course a few weeks ago, you got a chance to see the rms package for R in action. Frank's rms package does regression modeling, testing, estimation, validation, graphics, prediction, and typesetting by storing enhanced model design attributes in the fit.

A few weeks ago I covered an R package for efficient mixed model regression that is capable of simultaneously accounting for both population stratification and relatedness to compute unbiased estimates of standard errors and p-values for genetic association studies.

Definitely a seminar not to miss: Curtis Fideler, director of Sales at Pacific Biosciences, will be giving a special seminar here at Vanderbilt Thursday, May 20, 11:00a-noon in 202 Light Hall entitled "An Introduction to SMRT Sequencing: A description of Pacific Biosciences single molecule real time sequencing technology." Science: Real-Time DNA Sequencing from Single

First, if you haven't taken a look at the comments on my previous post on this paper, go take a look. Thanks to everyone for sharing your thoughts and pointing out some of my own oversight regarding this paper. There was one issue in particular that deserves more attention than just another comment thread.

Check out this paper in PNAS and the corresponding synopsis in the New York Times. The authors take a unique approach to finding genes likely to be associated with human traits using orthologous phenotypes in model organisms, or phenologs. The idea is simple. The authors have a database of ~2000 disease associated genes in humans.

Here's a very good 3-page essay on how modern scientific policy and culture (e.g. short-term funding, unstable job security, publish-or-perish mindset) is adversely affecting young scientists, causing lots of bright minds to abandon academia in search of other careers (via @WileyScience). BioEssays: How today's scientific culture affects young scientists Anyone care to comment?

The authors here invited ACM KDD Innovation Award and IEEE ICDM Research Contributions Award winners to each nominate up to 10 best-known algorithms in data mining, including the algorithm name, justification for nomination, and a representative publication reference. The list was voted on by other IEEE and ACM award winners to narrow this down to a top 10 list.

The recent settlement between Arizona State University and the Havasupai Indian tribe is calling attention to (and perhaps challenging) the ideas of informed consent. While I'm sure there are arguments to be made supporting both sides of this case, regardless of your position this is an excellent reminder that there are people's lives behind the alleles in our spreadsheets and PED files.

Update 2010-04-21 : I forgot to post the link last time. That would have been helpful. Here you go: Vanderbilt Biostatistics: Statistical Problems to Document and to Avoid ..... At the Regression Modeling Strategies course I attended a few weeks ago, Frank Harrell pointed out the checklist on the biostatistics department's website of statistical problems to document and avoid.

This looks like a must-read for anyone starting out in computational biology without extensive experience at the command line.  The 135-page document linked at the bottom of the Google Group page looks like an excellent primer with lots of examples that could probably be completed in a day or two, and provides a great start for working in a Linux/Unix environment and programming with Perl.