The 2010 Cancer Biostatistics Workshop seminar series begins next Friday with a workshop by Ayumi Shintani on sample size estimation and power analysis. Here's the entire 2010 workshop schedule. Be sure to check out my previous post on software for power calculations in genetic analysis.

Learning R blog details some of the new features in the latest update to ggplot2. The latest version includes functions to make it easier to change axis and legend labels, as well as a function to easily set the limits of the plot display outside the range of the data. Be sure to check back next week - I'm putting together a short introductory ggplot2 tutorial.

I've covered plyr once before, showing you how to get means and variances for two quantitative traits across multilocus genotypes. JD Long over at Cerebral Mastication recently posted a nice screencast illustrating how plyr "just works" as an alternative to R's family of apply commands.

Just discovered this very handy R command to capture the output from a system command as an R object.  I wanted to use R to read in the output from another program (PLINK) and do some processing on each output file. Of course if the files are named sequentially (plink1.out, plink2.out, plink3.out, etc.) this would be simple with a for loop.

Do you ever find yourself switching back and forth between your work computer, your laptop, and your home computer?  This happens to me all the time when I'm writing.  Rather than carry all your files on a USB stick and risk losing it or corrupting your data, give Dropbox a try.  It's dead simple, and works for PC, Mac, and Linux too.

A tip of the hat to a commenter on my previous coverage of a next-gen sequencing paper for pointing out this detailed and perhaps more technically-oriented review on sequencing by synthesis recently published in Nature Biotechnology.  Thanks, Clive. Review: The challenges of sequencing by synthesis (Nature Biotechnology)Getting Genetics Done by Stephen Turner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) License.

If you've never heard of it before, check out my previous coverage on Pubget. It's like PubMed, but you get the PDFs right away.  Pubget has recently implemented a number of improvements. 1. Citation matching.  Pubget's citation matcher seems to work better than Pubmed most of the time.

This looks interesting. Department of Biostatistics Seminar/Workshop Series: A Multivariate Methodology for Analyzing Genome-wide Association Studies, by Janice Brodsky, PhD, UCLA.

GGD is now on Twitter! I'll be linking to all of our posts on the Twitter page, and occasionally post something there that may not make its way into a full length post here on the blog. You can follow us on Twitter here @genetics_blog.Getting Genetics Done by Stephen Turner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) License.

One of R's biggest strengths is its unparalleled graphing capabilities.  Just see any of our previous posts on ggplot2, visualization, or other posts tagged with R. R has several fundamentally different systems for plotting, including base graphics, lattice, and ggplot2.  Furthermore, many add-on packages come with their own functions for producing problem-domain specific graphics.

Following up on last week's coverage of the Genotyping Portal, check out this new review article on next-generation sequencing in Nature Reviews Genetics.  One major focus of this paper is that the next generation of sequencing platforms each use fundamentally different technologies.