Monthly Archives: April 2013

Well, at least we've got the President on our side

Follow-up about yesterday’s fretting about Congresspeople wanting to interfere with peer review at the National Science Foundation: President Obama was asked about this yesterday at an event celebrating the 150th anniversary of the National Academy of Sciences—and he looks to … Continue reading

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Congress takes a worrying interest in peer review at NSF

Science Insider reported yesterday that Lamar Smith, a Republican congressman from Texas and the chairman of the U.S. House Committee on Space, Science, and Technology, is planning to introduce legislation to change the way the National Science Foundation decides how to … Continue reading

Posted in funding, NSF, politics, United States | Tagged | 9 Comments

What we're reading: readings for DNA Day, estimating Ne, and open-sourced data visualization

As we head into the weekend, here’s a few things we’ve noticed that might be worth your screen-time. In the journals Sixty years ago Thursday, Nature published three papers that unravelled (ha!) the molecular structure of DNA. They’re freely available online. … Continue reading

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Species distribution models in R

Update, 20 August 2013: Many readers have requested a copy of the Joshua tree data set used as an example in this post, and I’ve finally secured permission from the coauthors of the original study to post it to Dryad. … Continue reading

Posted in howto, R, software | Tagged , | 27 Comments

What we're reading: Coelocanth genomics, barcoded pollen, and publication priorities

As we head into the weekend, here’s a few things we’ve noticed that might be worth your screen-time. In the journals Amemiya, C.T., Alföldi, J., Lee, A.P., Fan, S., Philippe, H., MacCallum, I., et al. 2013. The African coelacanth genome … Continue reading

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This June, in Snowbird …

I just finished my registration for Evolution 2013, the joint annual meeting of theAmerican Society of Naturalists, Society of Systematic Biologists, and the Society for the Study of Evolution. This year it’ll run from the 21st to the 26th of June, at the … Continue reading

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What we're reading: Ring species, hominid timescales, and E.O. Wilson versus math versus the blogosphere

As we head into the weekend, here’s a few things we’ve noticed that might be worth your screen-time. In the journals Martins, A.B., De Aguiar, M.A.M. & Bar-Yam, Y. 2013. Evolution and stability of ring species. Proceedings of the National … Continue reading

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Q&A: Julian Catchen helps us dig into STACKS – Part II

As promised, below is part II of our interview with Julian Catchen. These questions focus more on the specifics of using stacks (i.e., user-related questions). Please see the first post if you are interested a general overview. Even more information, … Continue reading

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Q&A: Julian Catchen helps us dig into STACKS

Julian Catchen is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Oregon, where he uses computational solutions to facilitate the analysis of next-generation sequencing data. Prior to obtaining his PhD, Julian worked for both Intel and IBM, experiences that no doubt … Continue reading

Posted in bioinformatics, genomics, howto, interview, methods | Tagged | 2 Comments

What we're reading: Tapeworm genomes, population structure in rivers, and Mendelian pythons

As we head into the weekend, here’s a few things we’ve noticed that might be worth your screen time. In the journals Tsai, I.J., Zarowiecki, M., Holroyd, N., Garciarrubio, A., Sanchez-Flores, A., Brooks, K.L., et al. 2013. The genomes of … Continue reading

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