Archive for February, 2015

Steve Jobs’ cancer and pushing the limits of science-based medicine « Science-Based Medicine

Monday, February 9th, 2015

Dr. Jeffrey Norton, chief of surgical oncology at Stanford, operated on Jobs

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-death-of-steve-jobs/

America’s elite An hereditary meritocracy – Economist

Monday, February 9th, 2015

http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21640316-children-rich-and-powerful-are-increasingly-well-suited-earning-wealth-and-power

North Korea Says Famous Satellite Photo Shows U.S.’s Fate – Korea Real Time – WSJ

Sunday, February 8th, 2015

http://blogs.wsj.com/korearealtime/2015/02/09/north-korea-says-famous-satellite-photo-shows-u-s-s-fate/

ROSALIND | About

Sunday, February 8th, 2015

Useful helpers for #teaching #bioinformatics: Biostars forum https://www.biostars.org & Rosalind assignment evaluator http://rosalind.info/about

Ozobot: The tiny robot that comes alive on your iPad REVIEW

Sunday, February 8th, 2015

Ozobot: The tiny #robot that comes alive on your iPad http://mashable.com/2015/01/09/ozobot-review Similar to @gosphero; Follows crayon-drawn lines

Why Most Published Research Findings are false

Saturday, February 7th, 2015

Why Most Published Research Findings are False http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124 Evaluating 2×2 confusion matrix, effects of bias & multiple studies

PLoS Medicine | www.plosmedicine.org 0696
August 2005 | Volume 2 | Issue 8 | e124

QT:{{"
Published research fi ndings are sometimes refuted by subsequent evidence, with ensuing confusion and disappointment. Refutation and controversy is seen across the range of research designs, from clinical trials and traditional epidemiological studies [1–3] to the most modern molecular research [4,5]. There is increasing concern that in modern research, false fi ndings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims [6–8]. However, this should not be surprising. It can be proven that most claimed research fi ndings are false. Here I will examine the key


Research fi ndings are defi ned here as any relationship reaching formal statistical signifi cance, e.g., effective interventions, informative predictors, risk factors, or associations. “Negative” research is also very useful. “Negative” is actually a misnomer, and the misinterpretation is widespread. However, here we will target relationships that investigators claim exist, rather than null fi ndings. As has been shown previously, the probability that a research fi nding is indeed true depends on the prior probability of it being true (before doing the study), the statistical power of the study, and the level of statistical signifi cance [10,11]. Consider a 2 × 2 table in which research fi ndings are compared against the gold standard of true relationships in a scientifi c fi eld. In a research fi eld both true and false hypotheses can be made about the presence of relationships. Let R be the ratio of the number of “true relationships” to “no relationships” among those tested in the fi eld. R

is characteristic of the fi eld and can vary a lot depending on whether the fi eld targets highly likely relationships or searches for only one or a few true relationships among thousands and millions of hypotheses that may be postulated. Let us also consider, for computational simplicity, circumscribed fi elds where either there is only one true relationship (among many that can be hypothesized) or the power is similar to fi nd any of the several existing true relationships. The pre-study probability of a relationship being true is R⁄(R + 1). The probability of a study fi nding a true relationship refl ects the power 1 − β (one minus the Type II error rate). The probability of claiming a relationship when none truly exists refl ects the Type I error rate, α. Assuming that c relationships are being probed in the fi eld, the expected values of the 2 × 2 table are given in Table 1. After a research fi nding has been claimed based on achieving formal statistical signifi cance, the post-study probability that it is true is the positive predictive value, PPV. The PPV is also the complementary probability of what Wacholder et al. have called the false positive report probability [10]. According to the 2 × 2 table, one gets PPV = (1 − β)R⁄(R − βR + α). A research fi nding is thus
"}}

What makes art popular?

Saturday, February 7th, 2015

What Makes Art Popular?…Luck & #Opinion of Others
http://www.fastcocreate.com/3027193/what-makes-art-popular-science-says-its-luck-and-the-opinion-of-others Author buys 15k copies of his book to create a bestseller

Google Scholar Wins Raves—But Can It Be Trusted?

Saturday, February 7th, 2015

#Google Scholar Wins Raves—But Can It Be
Trusted?http://www.sciencemag.org/content/343/6166/14 #Citation spam possible, fake papers artificially inflating H-index

Science 3 January 2014:
Vol. 343 no. 6166 p. 14
DOI: 10.1126/science.343.6166.14

NEWS & ANALYSIS
SCIENTIFIC PUBLISHING
Google Scholar Wins Raves—But Can It Be Trusted?
John Bohannon

Google Scholar is picking up adherents in the scientific community. But the search service’s ascendancy is not going unchallenged.

PLOS Genetics: A Massively Parallel Pipeline to Clone DNA Variants and Examine Molecular Phenotypes of Human Disease Mutations

Saturday, February 7th, 2015

Massively Parallel Pipeline to Clone DNA Variants & Examine…Disease
Mutations http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1004819 CloneSeq leverages NextGen sequencing

With the advance of sequencing technologies, tens of millions of genomic variants have been discovered in the human population. However, there is no available method to date that is capable of determining the functional impact of these variants on a large scale, which has increasingly become a huge bottleneck for the development of population genetics and personal genomics. Clone-seq and comparative interactome-profiling pipeline is a first to address this issue.

Can be coupled to many readouts.

Stream of Foreign Wealth Flows to Elite New York Real Estate – NYTimes.com

Saturday, February 7th, 2015

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/08/nyregion/stream-of-foreign-wealth-flows-to-time-warner-condos.html?_r=0