Using digital tools to version control code is slowly gaining favour among scientists, especially those who use computer programs to process and analyse data. When I first learned about version control, one of the most attractive features was the ability to version control manuscripts. Anyone who has tried to write a scientific paper or research proposal knows the document often
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In the previous post, when repeated measures data from 10 subjects in 2 conditions were compared, it seemed that subjects who took drug 1 slept fewer hours compared to when they took drug 2. How might we test whether the median number of hours of sleep after drug 1 is less than after drug 2? We can calculate the difference
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In the previous post we plotted repeated measures data from 10 subjects under 2 conditions. There are different ways to analyse small datasets. We could apply parametric methods to analyse the data values, such as describing the data with means and standard deviations, and calculating a paired difference. Or, we could also apply non-parametric methods by analysing data values based
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Experimental studies are often based on relatively small samples. It is always better to test more subjects where possible, but even if the final dataset is comparatively small we should still strive to analyse the data properly. Let’s look at one way to analyse a small dataset. We will analyse data from the sleep dataset available in R. The sleep
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In April 2015, a symposium was held on how to improve the reproducibility of biomedical research. It was attended by scientists from research institutions, funding bodies and scientific journals. A report summarizing the symposium was published in November of last year. A very readable document, the report discusses various factors that contribute to poor reproducibility, as well as various recommendations
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In the last post, we learned to use the Python input() function to ask users to enter some information. Rather than sequentially prompting a user to enter information, we can have a user enter any relevent information when the program is run. Asking the user to input values when calling our program from the command line The command line is
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