Help, help, … I need a statistician!

If you ever wanted to feel as important as an emergency doctor helping people, but your nerdy skills as a data scientist or statistician did not seem to interest people, times are going to change. There are two organizations which allow you to contribute your professional knowledge to charity work. http://community.amstat.org/statisticswithoutborders/home/ http://www.datakind.org

ANNOVAR (2014nov12) is available

An updated version of ANNOVAR (2014nov12) is available. ANNOVAR is the most frequently used tool to annotate genomic variants with functional information. DOWNLOAD: http://www.openbioinformatics.org/annovar/download/g4EUwyphi9/annovar.latest.tar.gz

Bitbucket: Version Control System

I just discovered the web-based hosting service Bitbucket/SourceTree (https://bitbucket.org) as an interface to various version control systems. The website and the local client SourceTree together implement a very convenient user interface to the MECURIAL and GIT (by Linus Torvalds) version control system. There are free (limited) accounts and the option to keep private and public…

Sonderheft “Forschung & Lehre” (09/14)| “Big Data” [German]

The magazine “Forschung & Lehre” of the Deutscher Hochschulverband (DHV) published at Special Issue on “Big Data”. URL: http://www.forschung-und-lehre.de/wordpress/?page_id=302 BTW, “Significance” (2012/08) (not really current I know) also had a special issue on big data Following this issue, BBC2 broadcasted the feature “The Age of Big Data” as part of their “Horizon” science series

Other Blogs

For those who want to stay in touch with other related blogs, here is a list: Statistical Genetics: http://gettinggeneticsdone.blogspot.de http://blog.goldenhelix.com http://yurii-aulchenko.blogspot.de (watch out, partially in Russian) R, General: http://www.r-statistics.com http://www.r-statistics.com/tag/hadley-wickham/ http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com http://www.r-bloggers.com

SAS launches free version for academics (SAS University Edition, SAS on Demand for academics)

Functionality seems limited, but interesting for learning SAS … Citing the SAS web page (not necessarily my  opinion): “The new SAS University Edition will offer free use of SAS foundational technologies, ideal for data and statistical analysis in teaching, research and self-paced learning. Available via quick download from the web, SAS University Edition will be…

Effective Genetic Risk Prediction Using Mixed Models

“To date, efforts to produce high-quality polygenic risk scores from genome-wide studies of common disease have focused on estimating and aggregating the effects of multiple SNPs. Here we propose a novel statistical approach for genetic risk prediction, based on random and mixed effects models. Our approach (termed GeRSI) circumvents the need to estimate the effect…