Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen in an Age of Musical Plenty Ben Ratliff (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) A non-science book review for today’s post. This is a great read on “how to listen to music”. There have been hundreds of books published along these lines, the innovation here however is that we now live in an age of musical plenty.

This year #paperOTD (or paper of the day for any readers not on Twitter) did not go well for me. I’ve been busy with lots of things and I’m now reviewing more grants than last year because I am doing more committee work. This means I am finding less time to read one paper per day. Nonetheless I will round up the stats for this year.

I recently finished reading The Art of Data Science by Roger Peng & Elizabeth Matsui. Roger, together with Jeff Leek, writes the Simply Statistics blog and he works at JHU with Elizabeth. The aim of the book is to give a guide to data analysis. It is not meant as a comprehensive data analysis “how to”, nor is it a manual for statistics or programming.

I have just finished reading this excellent book, Statistics done wrong: a woefully complete guide by Alex Reinhart . I’d recommend it to anyone interested in quantitative biology and particularly to PhD students starting out in biomedical science. Statistics is a topic that many people find difficult to grasp. I think there are a couple of reasons for this that I’ll go into below.

When I started this blog, my plan was to write about interesting papers or at least blog about the ones from my lab. This post is a bit of both. I was recently asked to write a “Journal Club” piece for Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology, which is now available online. It’s paywalled unfortunately. It’s also very short, due to the format. For these reasons, I thought I’d expand a bit on the papers I highlighted.

I have been doing paper of the day (#potd) again in 2014. See my previous post about this. My “rules” for paper of the day are: Read one paper each working day. If I am away, or reviewing a paper for a journal or colleague, then I get a pass. Read it sufficiently to be able to explain it to somebody else, i.e. don’t just scan the abstract and look at the figures.

A great quote from a classic paper by J.B.S. Haldane “On Being The Right Size” (1926). You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft; and, on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away, provided that the ground is fairly soft. A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes. The paper is available here. — The post title is taken from ‘Falling and Landing’ by The Delgados from their LP ‘Domestiques’.

Books about the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology are plentiful. If you haven’t read any, the best place to start are the books written by some of the Nobelists themselves: “I Wish I’d Made You Angry Earlier” by Perutz, “My Life in Science” by Brenner.

#paperoftheday #potd A common complaint from other PIs is that they “don’t read enough any more”. I feel like this too and a solution was proposed by a friend of a friend*: try to read one paper per day. This seemed like a good idea and I started to do this in 2013. The rules, obviously, can be set by you. Here’s my version: Read one paper each working day.