Long-time readers might remember the short-lived series on quantixed called The Digital Cell. There is a reason why I stopped these posts, which I can now reveal… The Digital Cell will soon be a book! Published by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, The Digital Cell is a handbook to help cell and developmental biologists get to […]
Communication Breakdown
There is an entertaining rumour going around about the journal Nature Communications. When I heard it for the fourth or fifth time, I decided to check out whether there is any truth in it. The rumour goes something like this: the impact factor of Nature Communications is driven by physical sciences papers. Sometimes it is […]
Rollercoaster IV: ups and downs of Google Scholar citations
Time for an update to a previous post. For the past few years, I have been using an automated process to track citations to my lab’s work on Google Scholar (details of how to set this up are at the end of this post). Due to the nature of how Google Scholar tracks citations, it […]
Turn A Square: generative aRt
A while back I visited Artistes & Robots in Paris. Part of the exhibition was on the origins of computer-based art. Nowadays this is referred to as generative art, where computers generate artwork according to rules specified by the programmer. I wanted to emulate some of the early generative artwork I saw there, using R. Some […]
Timestretched: audio stretching on the command line
I was recently reminded of the wonders of paulstretch by a 8-fold slowed down version of Pyramid Song by Radiohead. Paulstretch is an audio manipulation widget that can stretch or compress the time of an audio recording. Note that it doesn’t “slow down” or “speed up” a recording, it resamples the audio and recasts it […]
Garmonbozia: Using R to look at Garmin CSV data
Garmin Connect has a number of plots built in, but to take a deeper dive into all your fitness data, you need to export a CSV and fire up R. This post is a quick guide to some possibilities for running data. There’s a few things that I wanted to look at. For example, how […]
Not What You Want: our new paper on a side effect of GFP nanobodies
We have a new preprint out – it is a cautionary tale about using GFP nanobodies in cells. This short post gives a bit of background to the work. Please read the paper if you are interested in using GFP nanobodies in cells, you can find it here. Paper in a nutshell: Caution is needed […]
Five Get Over Excited: Academic papers that cite quantixed posts
Anyone that maintains a website is happy that people out there are interested enough to visit. Web traffic is one thing, but I take greatest pleasure in seeing quantixed posts being cited in academic papers. I love the fact that some posts on here have been cited in the literature more than some of my […]
All Around The World: Maps and Flags in R
Our lab is international. People born all over the world have come to work in my group. I’m proud of this fact, especially in the current political climate. I’ve previously used the GoogleMaps API to display a heat map on our lab webpage. It shows where in the world people in the lab come from. […]
One With The Freaks – very highly cited papers in biology
I read this recent paper about very highly cited papers and science funding in the UK. The paper itself was not very good, but the dataset which underlies the paper is something to behold, as I’ll explain below. The idea behind the paper was to examine very highly cited papers in biomedicine with a connection […]