Places we find interesting

Andrew Gelman’s blog, Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, covers a range of topics, many of them relevant to biology. It’s particularly good for discussions of different approaches and coverage of poor data analysis practices, including fraud allegations.

Debra Mayo’s site, Error Statistics Philosophy

Storytelling with data goes with Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic’s books on data visualisation.

Flowing Data has lots of good ideas on visualisation

While not about data analysis, Terry McGlynn’s Science for Everyone (also available as email subscription), formerly Small Pond Science is great, and particularly good for biology academics and graduate researchers. We also like his book The Chicago Guide To College Science Teaching (University of Chicago Press).

Scientist Sees Squirrel is an interesting blog with links to several good books (including by the site’s author, Stephen Heard) and resources to improve our writing.

Software and advice

Power analysis. Outside the packages available within R, we find GPower the most useful. It’s free, but of course its use should be acknowledge or cited.

Multivariate approaches. Two of the best places for new, interesting multivariate approaches are web sites of Marti Anderson and Pierre Legendre. Marti’s site includes distance-based redundancy analysis (Chapter 15) and her robust, non-parametric MANOVA approach (Chapter 18). Pierre Legendre’s page largely supports his Numerical Ecology book, but also has lots of other useful software.
Marti Anderson’s web page: www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/PEOPLE/marti has some of her older software. Much of this has been subsumed by the combination of Primer and Permanova (see primer-e.com). Marti is now at Massey University
Pierre Legendre’s web page: www.fas.umontreal.ca/biol/legendre/indexEnglish.html

If you are interested in environmental monitoring, you might also want to check out this book:

 Downes B.J., Barmuta L.A., Fairweather P.G., Faith D.P.,Keough M.J.,Lake P.S., Mapstone B.D. & Quinn G.P. (2002) Monitoring Ecological Impacts: Concepts and Practice in Flowing Waters. xii + 434 pp. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK