Like many data nerds, I’m a big fan of Tyler Vigen’s Spurious Correlations, a humourous illustration of the old adage “correlation does not equal causation”. Technically, I suppose it should be called “spurious interpretations” since the correlations themselves are quite real, but then good marketing is everything. There ...

So the votes are in: Your established blog is mostly about your work. Your work changes. Do you continue at the current blog or start a new one? — Neil Saunders (@neilfws) January 23, 2017 I thank you, kind readers. So here’s the plan: (1) keep blogging here as frequently as possible (perhaps ...

I missed it first time around but apparently, back in October, Nature published a somewhat-controversial article: Evidence for a limit to human lifespan. It came to my attention in a recent tweet: Just wow https://t.co/fupXIOAC43 pic.twitter.com/vsxT3VyTg6 — Nick Loman (@pathogenomenick) December 11, 2016 The source: a ...

I recently saw a tweet floating by which included a link to some recent statistics from PubMed Commons, the NCBI service for commenting on scientific articles in PubMed. Perhaps it was this post at their blog. So I thought now would be a good time to write some code to ...

Using R to add data to maps has been pretty straightforward for a few years now. That said, it seems easier than ever to do things like use map APIs (e.g. Google, Open Street Map), overlay quite complex data visualisations (e.g. “heatmap-style” densities) and even generate animations. A ...

I don’t “do politics” at this blog, but I’m always happy to do charts. Here’s one that’s been doing the rounds on Twitter recently: A quick look at turnout data: It seems 2016 was nothing special for the Rep-candidate. It's the Dem-candidate that didn't get the vote ...

A recent tweet: @neilfws I enjoyed this: https://t.co/ynyHRbgpLN Have you published (or are you thinking about publishing) this analysis anywhere? — Marcus Munafo (@MarcusMunafo) October 7, 2015 made me think (1) has it really been 5 years, (2) gee, my ggplot skills were dreadful back then and (3) did I really not know how ...

The Nobel Prizes. Love them? Hate them? Are they still relevant, meaningful? Go on admit it, you always imagined you would win one day. Whatever you think of them, the 2015 results are in. What’s more, the good people of the Nobel Foundation offer us free access to data via ...

About a year ago, I did a little work on a very interesting project which was trying to identify blood-based biomarkers for the early detection of stroke. The data included gene expression measurements using microarrays at various time points after the onset of ischemia (reduced blood supply). I had not ...

Last week, I was listening to episode 337 of the podcast This Week in Virology. It concerned a retrovirus-like sequence element named Steamer, which is associated with a transmissible leukaemia in soft shell clams. At one point the host and guests discussed the idea of searching for Steamer-like sequences in the ...

Last week, Mick Watson posted a terrific article on using R to recreate the visualizations in this WSJ article on the impact of vaccination. Someone beat me to the obvious joke. @BioMickWatson @pathogenomenick Nice quilt plot. — Ed Yong (@edyong209) April 9, 2015 Someone also beat me to the standard response whenever base ...

No revelations here, just a little R tip for generating more readable documents. There are times when I want to show code in a document, but I don’t want it to be the first thing that people see. What I want to see first is the output from that ...