Mailund on the Internet

Today we celebrate (or morn, depending on your chosen profession) the 25 year birthday of DNA fingerprinting.

It is really an exciting field both from a statistical and genetics point of view.

At our Mols Retreat at BiRC this year we had an inviting talk by Bo Thisted Simonsen, Deputy Director of Forensic Genetics here in Denmark – one of the most interesting invited talks we have had ever – and later this year David Balding will give a seminar here on the same topic, which I look very much forward to.

We have a national DNA database here in Denmark for crime related samples.  Anyone arrested for a crime that could lead to prison for 18 months or more can be put in that database, and the hit rate there is about one third, meaning that one third of the samples they send in hits a known criminal or one or more crime scenes, so it is an extremely effective tool for crime investigation.

The statistics involved in preventing false positives is really exciting and a perfect introduction to Bayesian statistics.  As you can imagine, it is a perfect situation where an informative prior based on previous convictions, other evidence, etc. can be used to judge the likelihood that a hit is random or a true hit.

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…oh, almost forgot, there is one feature with Snow Leopard I really like that is not programming related: support for VPN!

I have been using that ugly Cisco VPN client to access journals and such at home and to log onto the AU wireless network on my laptop, but it just hurts the eyes to see it sitting there amongst all the OS X applications…

Anyway, with Snow Leopard VPN is built in, so I could just set up the VPN info in the Networks Settings and everything works beautifully.

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Just a quick new Mac related post.  You might have heard of the Rock’n'Roll event yesterday.  There, a new version of iTunes was released, and I’ve downloaded that on my two home machines this morning (will do it on the office machine later).

I don’t actually find an update of iTunes that exciting next to stuff like OpenCL, but I can see the use for home sharing if it means I can easily share music between my office machine and my home machines (where I could just share the music already over the network).

I can also see the use for Genius Mixer, but I haven’t gotten that to work yet.  I probably just need to update Genius, though.

Now what would get me excited was if I could use TDC Play – a free service from my internet provider with more than two million downloadable songs – in iTunes, but sadly that only works with Windows Media Player, so with only Macs at home I’m pretty much screwed there…

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