The end of the month sees the Coventry Half Marathon. I looked at what constitutes a good time over this course, based on 2015 results. I thought I’d post this here in case any one is interested. The breakdown of runners by category for the 2015 event. Male Senior (MSEN) category has the most runners, […]
Tag: plots
The Great Curve: Citation distributions
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Division Day: using PCA in cell biology
In this post I’ll describe a computational method for splitting two sides of a cell biological structure. It’s a simple method that relies on principal component analysis, otherwise known as PCA. Like all things mathematical there are some great resources on the web, if you want to understand this operation in more detail (for example, this great […]
Tips from the blog III – violin plots
Having recently got my head around violin plots, I thought I would explain what they are and why you might want to use them. There are several options when it comes to plotting summary data. I list them here in order of granularity, before describing violin plots and how to plot them in some detail. […]
Half Right
I was talking to a speaker visiting our department recently. While discussing his postdoc work from years ago, he told me about the identification of the sperm factor that causes calcium oscillations in the egg at fertilisation. It was an interesting tale because the group who eventually identified the factor – now widely accepted as […]
My Favorite Things
I realised recently that I’ve maintained a consistent iTunes library for ~10 years. For most of that time I’ve been listening exclusively to iTunes, rather than to music in other formats. So the library is a useful source of information about my tastes in music. It should be possible to look at who are my favourite artists, what bands need […]
Belly Button Window
A bit of navel gazing for this post. Since moving the blog to wordpress.com in the summer, it recently accrued 5000 views. Time to analyse what people are reading… The most popular post on the blog (by a long way) is “Strange Things“, a post about the eLife impact factor (2824 views). The next most popular […]
What The World Is Waiting For
The transition for scientific journals from print to online has been slow and painful. And it is not yet complete. This week I got an RSS alert to a “new” paper in Oncogene. When I downloaded it, something was familiar… very familiar… I’d read it almost a year ago! Sure enough, the AOP (ahead of print […]