Study details how taxpayer-funded agencies choose what science to support, previously a ‘black box’ Northwestern-developed software enabled analysis of Human Genome Project archive NIH supported academic scientists, developed shared research infrastructure, study found Continuity of NIH leadership preserved expertise across decades-long projects ’Funding agencies matter beyond the funds they distribute’ ...
Why the Eurovision Song Contest never fails to entertain
In brief ETH Zurich researchers analysed nearly 1,800 songs from around 70 years of Eurovision. The study combined decades’ worth of song data, lyrics, AI models and voting results. Pop, English and danceability were consistent features, but no longer provide the edge they once did. Full news release here
Fraudulent scientific publications threaten the trust needed for science to function properly
Numerous recent scientific and journalistic investigations demonstrate that systematic scientific fraud is a growing threat to the scientific enterprise. In large measure this has been attributed to organizations known as research paper mills. We uncover footprints of activities connected to scientific fraud that extend beyond the production of fake papers ...
Visualizing excess deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic by race and ethnicity
American communities of color have shouldered a disproportionate share of the COVID-19 pandemic’s burden. How can we visualize this impact?
Brief example about data interpolation
Today, I want to talk about some data interpolation I had to do recently. As part of a project of mine, I had to deal with US census data. As you probably know, the US census collects data on many aspects of US society (population, education, income, race, and many ...
Getting longitude-latitude coordinates for a (long) list of cities using Python and a free API
[This post was originally published on my blog] Today I’ve decided to expand the number of cities included on my murder rate map to everywhere with 100,000+ people. In order to do that using the FBI data (which only includes the names of the cities), I need to find the ...
Step-by-step: How to plot a map with slider to represent time evolution of murder rate in the US using Plotly
[This post was originally published on my blog ] This post in based on this other one I posted a few days ago, where I’m exploring a new data set about murder rates in the US. I decided to write a plot detailing how to plot a map of said ...
Interactive visualizations with Plotly
For the last couple of years, I’ve been using Plotly to create visually appealing interactive plots. You can create an account at plot.ly and then create and edit your plots from their online platform (they also have a premium option with extra features), but I prefer using Plotly offline, just ...
New paper out in PLOS Biology on Why potentially important genes are ignored
We just published a new paper performing a large-scale investigation of the reasons why potentially important genes are ignored.
New paper in Nature Human Behaviour on Personality Types
We just published a new paper investigating personality types in four large datasets (>1.5M respondents) finding robust support for at least four personality types.
New paper in Science Advances combining topic models and complex networks
Topic models are a popular way to extract information from text data, but its most popular flavours (based on Dirichlet priors, such as LDA) make unreasonable assumptions about the data which severely limit its applicability. Martin Gerlach, member of the Amaral-lab, and co-authors explore an alternative way of doing topic modelling, based on stochastic block models (SBM), thus exploiting a mathematical connection with finding community structure in networks. A network approach to topic models Science Advances 4, eaaq1360 (2018)
Alumni consulting company acquired by Ideo
Ideo is a San Francisco Bay Area consulting firm that helps companies design new products and services. It has 52 employees in Chicago and will add 16 more, including 15 data scientists, with the acquisition of Datascope Analytics. Datascope, founded by two Northwestern University and Amaral Lab alumni, has partnered ...
New paper linking fractal dynamics of worms to aging and stress
Luiz G. A. Alves, Peter B. Winter, Leonardo N. Ferreira, Renée M. Brielmann, Richard I. Morimoto, and Luís A. N. Amaral: Long-range correlations and fractal dynamics in C. elegans: Changes with aging and stress Physical Review E 96, 022417 (2017)
Shootings in U.S. schools are linked to increased unemployment
By Megan Fellman EVANSTON – A rigorous Northwestern University study of a quarter-century of data has found that economic insecurity is related to the rate of gun violence at K-12 and postsecondary schools in the United States. When it becomes more difficult for people coming out of school to find ...
New paper out in G3:Genes|Genomes|Genetics!
The recent work of Chuyue Yang, a talent undergraduate (now recently graduated!), and graduate student Adam Hockenberry is now online. This work is a part of a multi-year collaboration with Professor Michael Jewett investigating the mechanisms by which the sequence of messenger-RNA can influence its translation. In this particular work, ...
Unintended effects of data privacy in healthcare
I would like to draw attention to an instance where I believe the pendulum has swung too far: the Healthcare Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)