A great new website from the Royal Society has come online (http://trailblazing.royalsociety.org/). It is has a timeline with important scientific milestones published in royal society journals available for download (free access). I am a history buff so this is a great one and a good complement to other similar sites like classics in PNAS (http://www.pnas.org/site/misc/classics.shtml). [...]
So, having just built my home machine I wanted to test this (1x Quad 2.83 Ghz) against 1) my work desktop machine with equivalent processors but Xeon (so server chips instead of desktop chips; 2x Quad 3 Ghz) and then I wanted to test against someone’s new Nehalem Xeon server chips (2x Quad 2.66 Ghz [...]
Just finished building a Linux analysis and development machine for the house. I wanted to share a little of the experience and the materials because it is a great way to save money on analysis machines. Generally this machine runs about 40% faster than last years MacPro 3 Ghz Dual Quad Core machine with 8 [...]
There has been a recent trend in biology (and as is relevant to me, ecology and evolutionary biology) to learn and push programing in very “high-level” languages and frameworks such as python and R. This tries to get the programmer to defer much of the programmatic stuff to the language itself so the scientist (in [...]
Just published a paper in the Journal of Biogeography that describes a way in which to use the maximum likelihood biogeographic reconstruction method lagrange to integrate over the posterior distribution of dated phylogenies as produced from BEAST. It is great to see some of that dissertation get out there (a year later)!
An interesting news post on /. about “where are the science heroes” or at least where are the new ones. link “As a kid I was (and still am) heavily influenced by Carl Sagan, and a little later by Stephen Hawking. Now as I have started a family with two kids, currently age 5 and [...]
There has been some new about the “girl that doesn’t age” link. Most of the news is interested in the potential for understanding her condition and how that relates to a modern anti-aging cure. I read about the story on /. and found some of the comments pretty interesting (that is always the case with [...]
Some really interesting things are going on in the alignment and phylogenetics world. Rapid and Accurate Large-Scale Coestimation of Sequence Alignments and Phylogenetic Trees Kevin Liu,1 Sindhu Raghavan,1 Serita Nelesen,1 C. Randal Linder,2 Tandy Warnow1,* Inferring an accurate evolutionary tree of life requires high-quality alignments of molecular sequence data sets from large numbers of species. [...]
For those of you that don’t know about IRC. It is a kind of chat room system that has been around since the 80′s and the early days of the internet. There is already a small presence of evolutionary biology on IRC but a couple of us (specifically Brian O’Meara and myself) decided to make [...]
Posted in science | Tagged evolution, science |
Among the programs I develop, one called phyutility has the largest user base with over 1248 downloads. The original impetus for the development of the program was two fold: 1) to complete some work on the metazoan phylogeny (Dunn et al., 2008) and 2) to complete some work on megaphylogenies (Smith and Donoghue, 2008 and [...]
