Will recently posted a set of flowcharts made by Marylyn, Jason, and Tricia, to help choose which statistical analysis to use for nearly any situation. UCLA has a very similar chart with links to Stata code, examples, and annotated output for every method they mention. Also, check out their Stata help homepage and Stata learning modules.

This abstract in BMC Bioinformatics was presented in our Computational Genetics Journal Club a few weeks back: "Gene Prospector: An evidence gateway for evaluating potential susceptibility genes and interacting risk factors for human diseases."As described by the authors at CDC, Gene Prospector is a bioinformatics tool designed to sort, rank, and display information about genes in relation to human diseases, risk factors and other

For the second installment in our Noteworthy Blog series, take a look at Chun Li's biostatistics course blog. Several years ago, CHGR faculty member Chun Li taught a class in biostatistics, maintaining this blog over the duration of the course.

How often have you needed to extract a certain column from a file, or strip out only a few individuals from a ped file? This is often done with Excel, but that requires loading the data, manipulating it, then saving it back into a format that is acceptable, which may require converting tabs to spaces or other aggravating things.

And it will do way more than display "Hello, world!" to the screen. An anonymous commenter on one of our Linux posts recently asked how to write scripts that will automate the same analysis on multiple files. While there are potentially several ways to do this, perl will almost always get the job done.

`screen` is one of the most useful system tools I've ever used. It allows you to begin a process and then detach from the process to let it continue to run in the background.

For those of you who attend our computational genetics journal club every other week, you've all heard about this. Say what you will about the "consumer genetics" enterprise, 23andMe maintains an excellent blog. In their "SNPwatch" category, The Spittoon surveys and summarizes the latest findings in human genetics research before they hit the press.

If you've ever had trouble getting started doing a data analysis, you are certainly not alone. Should I run an ANOVA, MANOVA, ANCOVA, or MANCOVA? Should that have been a McNemar's test, a Kruskal-Wallis, or a Mann-Whitney U?To at least pin down the statistical test you should run, consult these excellent flowcharts by Marylyn Ritchie, Jason Moore, and Tricia Thornton-Wells.

Many of you have used this before, but for those who haven't, SNPper is a convenient little web application for quickly annotating results. So you've done your association analysis and have a list of rs-numbers you'd like to quickly get more information about.

Last week I posted a one-page reference guide that gives a short description of the Linux commands I most commonly use. To accompany this, here is a detailed walkthrough filled with examples that will introduce any beginner to the basics of using Linux in just a few hours.

Whenever we have new students rotating through our lab who've never used Linux I always end up scrounging around the world wide series-of-tubes only to find some command line reference that's not really useful for students. So I made my own one-page reference guide that gives a basic description of most of the commands most of you will use. Feel free to distribute.