Mailund on the Internet

The story is all over the net these days, see e.g. here, but are women really getting more beautiful?

Walking down town in the summer time I wouldn’t necessarily say no.  They do look beautiful in their summer dresses and miniskirts, but still… the genetics would have to be a bit special for it to be true, and the statistics isn’t really supporting it.

My bet would be on a classical multiple testing problem, as described here (PDF).  I’m not saying that multiple testing is all there is to it, but I would like to have that ruled out before I believe the story…

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209-208=+1

Got this by mail today:

Seminar Series on Human Population Genetics

As part of the PhD summer course in Human Population Genetics Analyses from the 3rd of August to the 7th of August 2009 at the University of Copenhagen, the Department of Biology will host a seminar series with distinguished Danish and international researchers in the field of Human Population Genetics.  The lectures are open to the public.

Monday the 3rd of August 2009
Montgomery Slatkin
Department of Integrative Biology, UC-Berkeley
Population genetics of the Neanderthal genome project

Tuesday the 4th of August 2009
TBA

Wednesday the 5th of August 2009
Thomas Mailund
Bioinformatics Research Center, University of Aarhus
Open problems in association mapping

Thursday the 6th of August 2009
Anders Albrechtsen
Department of Biostatisitcs, University of Copenhagen
New methods for modeling large scale human genetic variation data

Friday the 7th of August 2009
Andrew G. Clark
Department of Development and Genetics, Cornell University
Population genetic attributes of rare alleles – a deep resequencing study

All lectures will be held at 4:15 PM in room 1.2.03 at the Biocenter, Ole Maaloes Vej 5, 2200 Copenhagen N, except for the lecture Thursday, which will be held at 4:00 PM in Chr. Hansen Auditorium at CSS, University of Copenhagen, Øster Farimagsgade 5, building 34

If you are in Copenhagen next week, I will recommend you go to some of these. I bet they will be quite interesting.

I will certainly be there Wednesday, for obvious reasons, but I’ll probably go Monday as well.  I would prefer to be there all week, but it might be a bit later for finding a place to stay and such, unless I can find a place to crash…

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209-207=+2

Gene Frantz asks this question at embedded.com:

I have challenged several of our senior technologists to think about what the state of the art will be in the year 2020. You might say that we need to have 20/20 vision for the year 2020. I have invited a number of technologists to provide their point of view (POV) of what the state of the art in IC technology will be in the year 2020, and I’m interested to hear what you have to say on the topic. But, since this is my blog, I will have the first and last word on what the year 2020 will hold for us.

My guess, which most people will probably agree with, is that 1) clock rate will not be much different from today, 2) the memory architecture (levels of cache, RAM, disk…) will still have orders of magnitude differences in access time, and 3) we are going to see parallelisation – and multiple cores – in a big way.

This means that the (computer science) theoretical RAM model is going to be increasingly bad at modeling real computers.  Access time is not constant and execution is not sequential.

The PRAM model will probably be pretty good at dealing with multiple cores (where it isn’t really that good for modeling distributed computing).

I’m not sure which models there are for dealing with memory hierarchies.  I know there are some, but there were no classes on this when I studied, and I haven’t kept up with this… I know there are cache-oblivious algorithms – I have friends at the CS department who works on this – but I don’t really know much about it.  I should probably start worrying about it before 2020…

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209-206=+3