Statistical genetics for all occasions
I tracked local infection rate data during the COVID pandemic (between 2020 and 2022). I am saving the resulting page here as a historical record. I stopped updating this page on December 20, 2022 after Tompkins County stopped publishing daily data tables.
This page displays plots tracking COVID-19 …
Read moreWhen I first set up this here outfit more than five years ago, I needed to quickly set up a website to advertise myself. At the time, I heard about Squarespace from their ads on some podcasts I was listening to. It fit the bill perfectly: nice clean design templates, analytics displayed in a …
Read moreI have been using Apple computers close to full time since mid-90’s. Originally because I used Photoshop extensively for processing confocal microscope images and Macs were the standard platform for that. It helped that they were also relatively safe from viruses and generally stable. I …
Read moreThere is a fascinating discussion happening on science twitter about what it means to be a scientist. It boils down to the question: is science just another job or is it some higher calling that demands total dedication? My colleague Lyza Maron wrote a particularly clear and compelling argument for …
Read moreThe recent New York Times opinion piece by the geneticist David Reich on genetics of differences between human races has generated much discussion among my scientist friends. It was followed by a rebuttal from 67 scholars of diverse backgrounds, and a sympathetic article by the blogger and essayist …
Read moreEver since I left my academic position and became independent, I have been interested in the idea of using minimal computer resources to perform big-data statistical analyses. I do not have a permanent office, so the only computer I own is a laptop, although it is a close to maximal-spec 15-inch …
Read moreApple recently released High Sierra, the new version of Mac OS. While it is billed as one of those “stability releases” with few user-facing changes, it introduces a new file system, APFS. This system has already been rolled out for iOS devices. This is not something users interact with …
Read moreThe recently-published memo (full text can be found at the end of this article) from a Google employee about the causes of gender disparity in the number of people working at the company generated a lively discussion. The arguments are as wide-ranging as the original post and involve many important …
Read moreWorking on a Drosophila population genetics project, I needed to extract SNPs from a large-ish data set of sequence alignments from the Drosophila Genome Nexus. The alignments are in a slightly strange but handy format: each line and chromosome arm is in a separate file. The sequences are all on one …
Read moreThe unexpected election of Donald Trump as the next President of the United States has generated an avalanche of articles and social media posts attempting to explain what went wrong and why the pre-election predictions were so off. This event seems of a piece with the earlier similarly unexpected …
Read moreAfter about 20 years in academic science (25 if you count volunteering in a lab as an undergrad), I finally decided to go my own way. My academic career path has been unorthodox up to now, and I have been lucky to have the support of great advisers along the way. However, the mismatch between what I …
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