Dave Lunt

Talking about Darwin and the Tree of Life? Better read this first. Title almost put me off, glad it didn't. - Dave Lunt from Bookmarklet

"How many evolutionary psychologists does it take to change a lightbulb? None. Millions of years of sexual selection have adapted us to navigate in total darkness by tripping over furniture. And in the interest of balance: How many evolutionary biologists does it take to change a lightbulb? Only one—but, you know, if we wait long enough, we strongly expect non-deterministic processes to change the bulb for us." - Dave Lunt from Bookmarklet

"Darwin didn't keep a notebook for several months after returning from his 5-year-long voyage aboard the HMS Beagle. Instead, Darwin — then just 27 years old, with his theory of evolution half-formulated — made notes in the margins of books he read." - Dave Lunt from Bookmarklet

"We compare DNACLUST to two popular clustering tools: CD-HIT and UCLUST. We show that DNACLUST is about an order of magnitude faster than CD-HIT and UCLUST (exact mode) and comparable in speed to UCLUST (approximate mode). The performance of DNACLUST improves as the similarity threshold is increased (tight clusters) making it well suited for rapidly removing duplicates and near-duplicates from a dataset, thereby reducing the size of the data being analyzed through more elaborate approaches." - Dave Lunt from Bookmarklet

A very detailed history of the project - Dave Lunt from Bookmarklet

Secretly, I want to have a very Neanderthal genome. Can't wait to try this. - Dave Lunt from Bookmarklet

Yes! Yes! Yes! A whopping 7%, almost twice as much as the wife. I wonder if there is a Neanderthal league table? Who is the most Neanderthal person? - Dave Lunt

"In the 1990s, the Harvard Business School author Clayton Christiansen coined the phrase ‘disruptive technologies’ to describe technology shifts that completely change a market, fundamentally altering the behaviour of a group of users. If you are old enough to remember life before laptops/smartphones (mainframe computers), mobile phones (land lines) and digital cameras (dropping your camera film at the chemist and paying ten pounds for 24 prints), think about how dramatically your computer, phone or photo use has changed." - Dave Lunt from Bookmarklet

This is how I want to browse journal articles! Surfboard- like Flipboard for iPad but for RSS feeds. Not quite there yet (images, Chrome support) but still very functional and beautiful. Already better than Google Reader? - Dave Lunt from Bookmarklet

"The usefulness is debatable at this point, and as the developer humorously says “nothing works yet” but there’s no doubt that TermKit is beautiful." - Dave Lunt from Bookmarklet

"As a solution, we present two general methods, Crumble and Prune, for breaking a phylogenetic alignment problem into smaller, more tractable sub-problems. We call Crumble and Prune \emph{meta-alignment} methods because they use existing alignment algorithms and can be used with many current alignment programs. Crumble breaks long alignment problems into shorter sub-problems. Prune divides the phylogenetic tree into a collection of smaller trees to reduce the number of sequences in each alignment problem." - Dave Lunt from Bookmarklet

"He again successfully uses the Chewbacca defense, this time to defeat the record company and make them acknowledge Chef's authorship of their song. In the second use of the Chewbacca defense, he ends by taking out a monkey puppet and shouting "Here, look at the monkey. Look at the silly monkey!" causing a juror's head to explode." - Dave Lunt from Bookmarklet

Today I have learned something! I have heard it many times, but I now know what it is called. Does the Encyclopedia Britannica discuss the Chewbacca defense? I doubt it. Cheers Wikipedia!! - Dave Lunt

A very nice summary of the weakness of a highlighted paper and of Nature itself. "We think the publication of this article in a high-profile journal, along with the large media coverage it received, is an illustration of some serious shortcomings in current scientific practice. Arguably, the impact of NTW’s paper reflects to a large extent the rhetorical ability of the authors, rather than the scientific value and novelty of the paper" - Dave Lunt from Bookmarklet

"This studentship will aim to understand the origin and evolution of wide-scale patterns of diversity in animals. It is currently not clear how environmental factors interact with speciation, extinction, and genetic and morphological rates of change to produce diversity. It is often assumed that these different measures of diversity are closely tied; for example, where there are more species we would expect greater morphological diversity. There is a growing literature that suggests this is not the case: reproductive isolations can occur with little or no genetic change; genetically very closely related species can have wildly divergent morphologies; some large groups of species can be indistinguishable from gross morphology where as other, species-poor, groups are diverse. If this is the case how does diversity accumulate? The student will address this question using cutting-edge statistical phylogenetic comparative methods applied to multiple datasets encompassing a wide range of... more... - Dave Lunt from Bookmarklet

PhD I'm involved with. Contact Chris Venditti (c.venditti@hull.ac.uk) - Dave Lunt

"Ever had this problem? "Boy, I could sure use a silhouette of [some kind of organism] for this diagram I'm working on. But I can't find anything on the web! Well, except for a few images which are copyrighted...." What if there were a website with an open database of reusable images, available under Creative Commons licenses? What if you could do phylogenetic searches, so that, even if there weren't a silhouette for the taxon in question, you could at least find something close?" - Dave Lunt from Bookmarklet

"a script to easily download your FULL friendfeed stream. I mean: every post with comments, likes and even images and/or files." - Dave Lunt from Bookmarklet

Great faculty position for any evolutionary biologist or similar. I can provide more details if you want. Closing date 17 February. - Dave Lunt from Bookmarklet

"Amazon has announced that in the US it sold more e-books for its Kindle device than it sold paperback books in the last three months of 2010." I get the impression that science books are lagging behind in this healthy trend. - Dave Lunt from Bookmarklet