File under “interesting articles that I don’t have time to write about at length.”
- Archaea and Fungi of the Human Gut Microbiome: Correlations with Diet and Bacterial Residents
- Mutational heterogeneity in cancer and the search for new cancer-associated genes
- The vast majority of statistical analysis is not performed by statisticians
Long ago, before metagenomics and NGS, I did a little work on detection of Archaea in human microbiomes. There’s a blog post in the pipeline about that but until then, enjoy this article in PLoS ONE.
This article is getting a lot of attention on Twitter this week. Brief summary: cancer cells are really messed up in all sorts of ways, most of which are not causal with respect to the cancer. Anyone who has ever looked at microarray data knows that it’s not uncommon for 50% or more of genes to show differential expression in a cancer/normal comparison, so this is hardly a new concept. I think we need to move away from ever-more detailed characterizations of the ways in which cancer cells are “messed up.” We know that they are and that doesn’t provide much insight, in my opinion.
Interesting post by Jeff Leek, summarized very well by its title. It points out that many more people are now interested in data analysis, many of them are not trained professionally as statisticians (I’m in this category myself) and we need to recognize and plan for that.
Bonus post doing the rounds of social media: Using Metadata to Find Paul Revere. Social network analysis, 18th-century style. Amusing, informative and topical.
What You're Doing Is Rather Desperate 