What we're reading

reading - lectura
For your weekend reading list, a few items from ours:
From the journals
Boettiger, C. and A. Hastings. 2012. Early warning signals and the prosecutor’s fallacy. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2012.2085.

Here, we examine a critical difference between selecting systems for study based on the fact that we have observed a critical transition and those systems for which we wish to forecast the approach of a transition. This difference arises by conditionally selecting systems known to experience a transition of some sort and fail- ing to account for the bias this introduces—a statistical error often known as the prosecutor’s fallacy.

Supek, F., M. Bošnjak, N. Škunca and T. Šmuc. 2011. REVIGO summarizes and visualizes long lists of gene ontology terms. PLOS ONE 6:e21800. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0021800.

Outcomes of high-throughput biological experiments are typically interpreted by statistical testing for enriched gene functional categories defined by the Gene Ontology (GO). The resulting lists of GO terms may be large and highly redundant, and thus difficult to interpret. REVIGO is a Web server that summarizes long, unintelligible lists of GO terms by finding a representative subset of the terms using a simple clustering algorithm that relies on semantic similarity measures.

From the blogosphere
How to succeed in academia by really, really trying.
It’s no puggle, but this video visualizing the assembly of a newborn’s microbial gut community is pretty neat. (h/t Jonathan Eisen)

About Jeremy Yoder

Jeremy B. Yoder is an Associate Professor of Biology at California State University Northridge, studying the evolution and coevolution of interacting species, especially mutualists. He is a collaborator with the Joshua Tree Genome Project and the Queer in STEM study of LGBTQ experiences in scientific careers. He has written for the website of Scientific American, the LA Review of Books, the Chronicle of Higher Education, The Awl, and Slate.
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