This post follows on from a previous post on citation distributions and the wrongness of Impact Factor. Stephen Curry had previously made the call that journals should “show us the data” that underlie the much-maligned Journal Impact Factor (JIF). However, this call made me wonder what “showing us the data” would look like and how journals might […]
Author: Stephen Royle
Tips from the blog VIII: Time Machine on QNAP NAS
This is just a quick tip as it took me a little while to sort this out. In the lab we have two QNAP TS-869 Pro NAS devices. Each was set up with a single RAID6 storage pool and I ran them as a primary and replicant via rsync. We recently bought a bigger server […]
At a Crawl: Analysis of Cell Migration in IgorPro
In the lab we have been doing quite a bit of analysis of cell migration in 2D. Typically RPE1 cells migrating on fibronectin-coated glass. There are quite a few tools out there to track cell movements and to analyse their migration. Naturally, none of these did quite what we wanted and none fitted nicely into […]
Your Favorite Thing: Algorithmically Perfect Playlist
I’ve previously written about analysing my iTunes library and about generating Smart Playlists in iTunes. This post takes things a bit further by generating a “perfect playlist” outside of iTunes… it is exclusively for nerds. How can you put together a perfect playlist? What are your favourite songs? How can you tell what they are? […]
Tips from the blog VII: Recolour Z-stack and Save Projection
I’m putting this up here in case it is useful for somebody. We capture Z-stacks on a Perkin Elmer Spinning Disk microscope system. I wanted to turn each stack into a single image so that we could quickly compare them. This simple macro does the job. We import the images straight from the *.mvd2 library using […]
Creep Diets: Fewer papers published at JCB
A couple of years ago, a colleague sent me this picture* to say “who put J Cell Biol on a diet?”. I joked that maybe they publish too many autophagy papers and didn’t think much more of it. Recently, Ron Vale put up this very interesting piece on bioRxiv discussing what it takes to publish […]
Tips from the blog VI: doc to pdf
A while back I made this little Automator script to convert Microsoft Word doc and docx files to PDF. It’s useful for when you are sent a bunch of Word files for committee work. Opening PDFs in Preview is nice and hassle-free. Struggling with Word is not. It’s not my own work, I just put it […]
Pull Together: our new paper on “The Mesh”
We have a new paper out! You can access it here. Title of the paper: The mesh is a network of microtubule connectors that stabilizes individual kinetochore fibers of the mitotic spindle What’s it about? When a cell divides, the two new cells need to get the right number of chromosomes. If this process goes wrong, it […]
Green is the Colour: mNeonGreen spectra
I was searching for the excitation and emission spectra for mNeonGreen. I was able to find an image, but no values for the spectra. Here is an approximation of the spectra (xlsx format, still haven’t figured out csv for wordpress). I got these values using IgorThief.ipf a very handy tool that allows the extraction of XY […]
Tips from the Blog V: Advice for New PIs
I recently gave a talk at a retreat for new PIs working at QMUL. My talk was focussed on tips for getting started, i.e. the nitty gritty of running an efficient lab. It was a mix of things I’ve been told, worked out for myself or that I’d learned the hard way. PIs are expected to be […]