Here are citations for the articles discussed at our most recent meeting (July 31). Our next meeting is scheduled for August 14.~JuliaBogdanowicz W, Allen M, Branicki W, Lembring M, Gajewska M, Kupiec T. Genetic identification of putative remains of the famous astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus.

That's the title of a good article published yesterday in the New York Times about the emergence of statistics being in huge demand in the career market, becoming "the sexy job in the next 10 years" as Google's chief economist puts it. Now I just need to find one of these don't drink and derive t-shirts...For Today’s Graduate, Just One Word: StatisticsGetting Genetics Done by Stephen Turner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC

I've used this a little bit recently. Pubget indexes essentially everything that PubMed does, except you get the PDF you're looking for right away. Lots of other useful tools as well. I sent one email to the Pubget team and CC'd the biomedical library, and a few days later they've worked it out so PubGet recognizes Vanderbilt's subscriptions.

Here are citations for the articles discussed at our most recent meeting (July 17). Our next meeting is scheduled for July 31.~JuliaBianconi G, Pin P, Marsili M. Assessing the relevance of node features for network structure.

It took me a while to figure this out, so I thought I'd share. I have a dataframe with millions of observations in it, and I want to estimate a density distribution, which is a memory intensive process. Running my kde2d function on the full dataframe throws and error -- R tries to allocate a vector that is gigabytes in size. A reasonable alternative is to run the function on a smaller subset of the data.

This handy introduction comes from UCLA's Statistical Computing webbook on logistic regression. If you're familiar with linear regression but you've never used logistic regression before, this is a good place to start.

***Update Monday, November 09, 2009: The sma package is no longer available on CRAN.  See this updated post for making QQ-plots in R using ggplot2.*** Nearly everyone who has read a paper on a genome-wide association study should now be familiar with the QQ-plot.

As far as I know there are 3 different systems for producing figures in R: (1) base graphics, included with R, (2) the lattice package, and (3) ggplot2, one of the newer plotting systems which is, according to the creator Hadley Wickham, "based on the grammar of graphics, which tries to take the good parts of base and lattice graphics and none of the bad parts.

Last week personal genomics giant 23andMe launched Research Revolution, a new project aiming to recruit 1000 study participants for each of ten complex diseases, including Migraines, Psoriasis, several cancers, and autoimmune diseases.

Yesterday President Barack Obama announced his intent to appoint former leader of the Human Genome Project, discoverer of delta-F508, and all around science rockstar Francis Collins as the director of the National Institutes of Health.In his statement, Obama noted: "The National Institutes of Health stands as a model when it comes to science and research.

Nice review on the genetics of quantitative traits with good figures and references published this morning in Nature Reviews Genetics. Abstract:The genetics of quantitative traits: challenges and prospects (NRG AOP)Getting Genetics Done by Stephen Turner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) License.