eBooks for €4.80 from Packt publishing

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The sale is over!

Packtpub has been actively publishing books on computer programming and related subjects for some time. More recently they have also released several titles about data analysis with R. I have found in recent years several nice books in their catalogue, and this Christmas sale of their full catalogue of approximately 2500 eBooks at a flat price of € 4.80 / $ 5.00 for DMR free PDFs and other formats, and no limitations to repeated downloads is really a nice opportunity to get hold of some good books for little money. Here are some examples of books which I have found useful or good from this publisher:

You can get books at the discounted price through Packtpub offer

Bioinformatics with R Cookbook

R Statistical Application Development by Example Beginner’s Guide

Learning RStudio for R Statistical Computing

Caveat: I had written the post before I received an e-mail from Packt publishing offering to give me two free book PDFs if I wrote such a post.

Freshness of chemicals in our labs

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Be aware that not all chemicals in our labs and storage room are fresh. What is fresh enough will depend on what is the use and also in many cases on the head space in bottles and how frequently they have been opened (how much air, and hence oxygen, has been in contact with the contents of the bottle). For many chemicals the recommended protocol of marking the date when the bottle has been opened for the first time has been followed, but in other cases it has not. Avoid headaches and inconsistencies in the results of your lab work by always checking opening dates on bottles, and information about shelf-life, to make sure that you are always using fresh reactants of the required purity. We have noticed more than once that some of the chemicals in our shelves are well beyond their recommended storage life, in some cases, by many years.

“Flow”, success and hapiness

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Yesterday after our Biophilosophy Society session, I had an interesting chat with Matan about whether switching research subjects is good or bad.

Today, just by chance I ended watching this video from 2008. I think it nicely answers what we discussed. NOW WATCH THE VIDEO… (19 minutes long, but really worth your time)

Only after watching the video, you will understand what follows:

If you you feel that the field your are working on, does not provide enough of a challenge to get you into ‘flow’ at least now and then, then you have two options: find new challenges that you find exciting within your current discipline, or shift your interests to another discipline. Which of these routes you take, is quite irrelevant as long as you can reuse enough of your current skills in the new subject to be within your safe zone of comfort. Reusing the skills does not require the skills to be used in the same way as in the previous discipline, just that you find a way of making use of your skills even if by analogy when analysing a new problem.

I am currently participating in the “Leadership training” organized by the university, and in one recent meetings of my research group when discussing how to better work as a group, I emphasized that for every member of the group their work should be fun. This idea is formalized, and backed with data in the talk in the video I embedded above. So, if you skipped it, scroll up the page and watch it!

 

PDF files from my recent talks

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Some of you have missed my talks on statistics because of other meetings and a retreat. If you would like to have a look at the presentations, they are now available on.line, together with another couple of talks on LEDs and research on plants’ responses to UV radiation that I gave recently at a conference and at a seminar. You can access them from the SenPEP’s website in the NEWS section.