It is time for my annual post of the papers I selected for a module that I teach (MD9A8, the module formerly known as MD997). Previous selections are grouped here or here. The list serves as a snapshot of interesting papers published in the previous 12 months or so. I hope it is useful to others who are looking […]
Author: Stephen Royle
Tips from the Blog XVI: getting FASTA sequences
I am having some fun running AlphaPulldown on a computing cluster. A requirement is to have input sequences in FASTA format. I found that I needed to get ~600 sequences. I had a list of the relevant Uniprot IDs. Surely getting the sequences for these proteins should be straightforward? Solution The Uniprot IDs can be […]
Running Around: 2023 running dataviz in R
2023 has been a great year in running for me. Previous running round-ups are here (2022, 2021). My two main goals for 2023 were to run 3000 km and also to run 50 HM-or-more distance runs. I managed both with a couple of weeks left. I also bagged new PBs for 5K, 10K and half […]
No Synths! Use of AI in scientific publications
Bands have been known to declare “No Synths!” on their albums. This statement was a badge of pride indicating that the artists hadn’t used any modern trickery in their recordings. Today, the growing use of artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLMs) in science has created a similar scenario. Advocates argue that these tools […]
What’s In The Box: Albums of 2023
It’s getting towards the end of the year so it is time to assemble a list of my favourite albums released in 2023. I have sporadically posted lists in the past e.g. here. These twenty albums were the ones I liked the most (and the ones that I thought other people might like to hear). […]
Airy Area: approximating surface area of a cell from a 3D point set
In the spirit of “if it took you a while to find out how to do something, write about it”, I will detail a method to approximate the surface area of a 3D shape. Our application here was finding the surface area of a cell but it can be used on any shape. We start […]
All The Right Friends II: clustering papers using Google Scholar data
In a previous post, I looked at how Google Scholar ranks co-authors. While I had the data available I wondered whether paper authorship could be used in other ways. A few months back, John Cook posted about using Jaccard index and jazz albums. The idea is to look at the players on two jazz albums […]
Crosstown Traffic: new paper on vesicle transport
We have a new paper out describing how vesicles move inside cells. The paper in a nutshell In science-speak We analysed how small vesicles are transported in cells. In contrast to large vesicles and organelles, which move using motors inside cells, our analysis revealed that passive diffusion is the main mode of small vesicle transport. […]
All The Right Friends: how does Google Scholar rank co-authors?
On a scientist’s Google Scholar page, there is a list of co-authors in the sidebar. I’ve often wondered how Google determines in what order these co-authors appear. The list of co-authors on a primary author’s page is not exhaustive. It only lists co-authors who also have a Google Scholar profile. They also have to be […]
Like I Said: archive of tweets
Hopefully I will soon break out of this funk of posting about either Mastodon or Twitter. But not yet! This post is to say that: I made a static archive of tweets for @quantixed and for @clathrin. There, you can read all my posts, which ended in 2022. Edit: removed the archives in October 2024. […]