Thursday, December 13, 2018

An Unfortunate Master Class in Poor Plotting

I hope my admiration for Pacific Biosciences intellectual acumen was clear in my post on the acquisition by Illumina, because now I'm going to be a rabid crab over a webinar they aired yesterday.  I take telling scientific stories seriously and an important part of telling such stories is displaying data well.  I'm a perfectionist in this department by intention, but not always by execution -- I'm constantly reanalyzing my plots and diagrams for errors and cringing when I find them.  The webinar is trying to extol the value of the latest developments in the SMRT platform, but the data graphs often actively fight against any understanding or excitement.

Wednesday, December 12, 2018

Flappie vs. Albacore via Counterr

I'm going to go through some analysis of Oxford Nanopore basecalling, running some quick comparisons using a freely-available tool called counterr which was announced at the Nanopore Community Meeting two weeks ago.  Counterr was developed by Day Zero Diagnostics, a startup I advise -- though in announcing yet again my COI I will stress I don't get paid to help give away software!  This is just a small bit of analysis; nothing as comprehensive as Ryan Wick's ongoing analysis with a ready-to-submit preprint masquerading as a README file.