Omegahat

I know I'm the only one writing on this blog, but this time I think I've an interesting topic to share with you guys.
Yesterday I attended a lecture by John M. Chambers, one of the guys who invented S.

He talked about the interface between R and object-oriented programming languages, such as C++, python, java, ..., in a much easier way than using .C or .Call functions.
Also, he talked about object-oriented programming in R.
If you're interested in these topic I can share some links:
http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/Rcpp/index.html (package to interface R with C++)
http://www.omegahat.org/OOP/ (package for object-oriented programming in R)

Bustra, give it a try! :)

cheers!

The Big game is coming...

The big game (Cal vs. Stanford) is coming and the campus is setting up the right atmosphere...
(maybe a little trashy...)

Unmasking a Psychologyst

Hey guys!
This morning I was reading la Repubblica and I found this:
http://www.repubblica.it/scienze/2010/11/12/news/veggenti-9050929/?ref=HRERO-2
and, eventually, this:
http://dbem.ws/FeelingFuture.pdf

Now, I started reading and immediately I had the feeling that there is something wrong with the statistics there... (I didn't read the whole paper, though)
Since the journal has a high impact factor (number 3 within psychology journals), it would be nice to unravel the mystery showing (if it's the case) that it's all about bad use of statistics...
I know... I have a lot of time to waste...
but if someone is interested, let me know!

Checca che fine hai fatto?

Perfect world of research

Hi guys, this is really funny.

Living in the US in an international and scientific environment is a wonderful experience that is teaching me a lot of things about science and life as well. More and more the "perfect world of Research" is becoming just a work, made of compromises and things not totally fair. Like the one I'm gonna tell you...

I was at lunch with one of my friend, that as almost all my network here is a young and smart scientist. Zrinka is a postdoc at the Department of Radiation Oncology here at Duke. She published a paper last year: "The novel amidocarbamate derivatives of ketoprofen: synthesis and biological activity" on Medicinal and Chemistry Research available here. Notice the received date of the paper: 16 July 2009.

What happened few months later is amazing. Two indian guys Prasanta Kumar Sahoo and Pritishova Behera saw her paper while it wasn't still accepted for publication. What they did? They cut&paste the whole paper, changed the author's names (clearly!) and slightly changed the title. They submitted to the European Journal of Medicinal Chemistry the copied paper with title "Synthesis and biological screening of some novel amidocarbamate derivatives of ketoprofen"! The paper, received the 15th of September was eventually accepted and published! And it is still available here!Amazing, but it is not the end of this story.

Maybe Prasanta Kumar Sahoo and Pritishova Behera were not totally happy about "their" pubblication result. Hence they decided to submit the same paper, again changing sligthly the title in "Cytostatic Activity of Some Novel Amidocarbamate Derivatives of Ketoprofen" to the Journal of Cancer Therapy, which again accepted their paper. Received date April, 19, 2010. Note that "their" first copied paper was already published when they submitted for the second time.

The last paper is no more available online, since Zrinka realized what was happening after a google search. She and her coauthors wrote to all the journals involved and one replyed dropping the fake pubblication, while the other still did nothing (sad, isn't it?). After few days she also received an email from Dr. (maybe just Mr.) Sahoo that's hilarious!

(somebody suggest me to drop this part...)

Riccardo & Maestro, could you please send me your working paper about clustering via nonparametric density estimation? ;)