Author Archives: peterfields

Increase your broader impacts with Data Nuggets

Posted on 10 Dec, 2014 by peterfields

  This week we have a special guest post by Elizabeth Schultheis, a PhD candidate at Michigan State University and the Kellogg Biological Station, to describe her Data Nuggets project. Previous guest posts have discussed other great projects happening in the … Continue reading →

Posted in career, citizen science, community, funding, methods | 1 Comment

Haldane's Sieve

Posted on 30 Oct, 2014 by peterfields

This week we have a guest post by Graham Coop and Joe Pickrell. Here, Graham [GC] and Joe [JKP] answer a few questions we had about the development and future of their blog, Haldane’s Sieve. If you’re interested in population genetics … Continue reading →

Posted in blogging, community, interview, peer review, science publishing | Leave a comment

Random drift and phenotypic evolution

Posted on 15 Oct, 2013 by peterfields

This week we have a guest post from Markku Karhunen. Markku’s research at the University of Helsinki included the development and implementation of a number of very interesting and useful population genetics methods. In his guest post Markku discusses these … Continue reading →

Posted in adaptation, methods, population genetics, quantitative genetics, R, software, Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Scientific computing doesn't have to hurt

Posted on 24 Sep, 2013 by peterfields

Amy Brown handles communication and scheduling for Software Carpentry. The post title alludes to the goals of Software Carpentry, a volunteer organization whose members teach basic software skills to researchers in science, engineering, and medicine. It’s a great organization, and … Continue reading →

Posted in community, howto, methods, software | 1 Comment

Analytical software management for your Mac? Homebrew to the rescue!

Posted on 9 Sep, 2013 by peterfields

Source: http://www.popsci.com/diy/article/2007-08/ultimate-all-one-beer-brewing-machine Much of the big processing tasks in biological research remain the domain of clusters of computer nodes, whether local or an Amazon EC2 instance, running various flavors of Linux. It is perhaps safe to say that this fact will … Continue reading →

Posted in howto, software | 1 Comment

Best Practices for Scientific Computing…And Molecular Ecology?

Posted on 9 Oct, 2012 by peterfields

Source: http://xkcd.com/292 *Update* Best Practices in Computing has now been published in PLoS Biology! Computers and computational techniques have significantly advanced the molecular ecologist’s toolbox for answering interesting and complex questions about a range of biological systems,  model or otherwise. Imagine, … Continue reading →

Posted in bioinformatics, data archiving, population genetics, science publishing, software | Tagged | 1 Comment

Approximate Bayesian computation without the wait

Posted on 10 Sep, 2012 by peterfields

Approximate Bayesian computation (abc) is arguably one of the most exciting, and quickly developing, tools available to modern population geneticists . Requiring a combination of large scale simulations and the evaluation of summaries of simulated datasets and an observed dataset, … Continue reading →

Posted in bioinformatics, software | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

New to the blog: Peter Fields

Posted on 10 Sep, 2012 by peterfields

Greetings fellow molecular ecologists and other interesting people! I’m Peter Fields, a recent recruit to the roster of contributors at the Molecular Ecologist. I’m currently a graduate student with Douglas Taylor at the University of Virginia. My dissertation research has … Continue reading →

Posted in housekeeping, introduction | Leave a comment