Current Activities – Susan Vanderplas

Program Cuts and The Yo-Yo of Hope and Despair

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This is definitely not told in linear order from start to finish – for one thing, between Sept 11 and Dec 5, time itself lost all meaning for me. I was working about 3x…

Susan Vanderplas

Experimenting With AI as UNL Closes Departments

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Today is the last day that UNL is allowing public comments about program closures, so I’ve been having a bit of fun shitposting comments on behalf of the departments…

Susan Vanderplas

Automated Residual Plot Assessment With the R Package autovi and the Shiny Application autovi.web

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Visual assessment of residual plots is a common approach for diagnosing linear models, but it relies on manual evaluation, which does not scale well and can lead to…

Weihao Li, Dianne Cook, Emi Tanaka, Susan Vanderplas, Klaus Ackermann

Teaching Statistical Computing with R and Python

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Computing courses can be daunting for students for a variety of reasons, including programming anxiety, difficulty learning a programming language in a second language, and…

Susan Vanderplas

Hidden Multiple Comparisons Increase Forensic Error Rates

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When wires are cut, the tool produces striations on the cut surface; as in other forms of forensic analysis, these striation marks are used to connect the evidence to the…

Susan Vanderplas

A Guide to Designing Experiments to Test Statistical Graphics

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In this paper, we discuss considerations and methods for experimentally testing visualizations. We discuss levels of user engagement with graphics, common issues when…

Emily Robinson, Heike Hofmann, Susan Vanderplas

Can You See The Change? Visual Perception in Change Point Analysis

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Detecting change points is crucial in analyzing time series data and single-subject designs. This study investigates factors influencing change point detection through…

Miguel Antonio Fudolig, Emily A. Robinson, Susan Vanderplas

Perception and Cognitive Implications of Logarithmic Scales for Exponentially Increasing Data: Perceptual Sensitivity Tested with Statistical Lineups

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[1] E. A. Robinson, R. Howard, and S. Vanderplas. “Perception and Cognitive Implications of Logarithmic Scales for Exponentially Increasing Data: Perceptual Sensitivity…

Emily A. Robinson, Reka Howard, Susan Vanderplas

Methodological problems in every black-box study of forensic firearm comparisons

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[1] M. Cuellar, S. Vanderplas, A. Luby, et al. “Methodological problems in every black-box study of forensic firearm comparisons”. In: Law, Probability and Risk 23.1…

Maria Cuellar, Susan Vanderplas, Amanda Luby, Michael Rosenblum

Creating Effective Graphics

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How do we create effective charts and graphs for scientific presentations? What are the elements of effective charts and graphics? Which charts should be used for different…

Susan Vanderplas

Incorrect statistical reasoning in Guyll et al. leads to biased claims about strength of forensic evidence

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[1] M. Rosenblum, E. T. Chin, E. L. Ogburn, et al. “Incorrect statistical reasoning in Guyll et al. leads to biased claims about strength of forensic evidence”. In: Proceedin…

Michael Rosenblum, Elizabeth T. Chin, Elizabeth L. Ogburn, Akihiko Nishimura, Daniel Westreich, Abhirup Datta, Susan Vanderplas, Maria Cuellar, William C. Thompson

Web Scraping Olympics: Python

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A comparison of Python, Julia, and R for web-scraping Olympic athlete names, events, and birthdays. I represented python. See the full narrative here…

Susan Vanderplas

A Plot is Worth a Thousand Tests: Assessing Residual Diagnostics with the Lineup Protocol

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Regression experts consistently recommend plotting residuals for model diagnosis, despite the availability of many numerical hypothesis test procedures designed to use…

Weihao (Patrick) Li, Di Cook, Emi Tanaka, Klaus Ackermann, Susan Vanderplas

Escaping Flatland: Graphics, Dimensionality, andHuman Perception

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Almost 40~years ago, Cleveland and McGill published the first of 3 papers detailing experiments assessing the accuracy of numerical perception using different types of…

Susan Vanderplas, Erin Blankenship, Tyler Wiederich

Escaping Flatland: Graphics, Dimensionality, and Human Perception

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Almost 40 years ago, Cleveland & McGill published the first of 3 papers detailing experiments assessing the accuracy of numerical perception using different types of charts.…

Susan Vanderplas

Creating Good Graphics

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Let’s talk about how to create good charts and graphics!

Susan Vanderplas

Hidden Multiple Comparisons Increase Forensic Error Rates

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When wires are cut, the tool produces striations on the cut surface; as in other forms of forensic analysis, these striation marks are used to connect the evidence to the…

Susan Vanderplas, Alicia Carriquiry, Heike Hofmann

A Plot Is Worth a Thousand Tests: Assessing Residual Diagnostics with the Lineup Protocol

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Regression experts consistently recommend plotting residuals for model diagnosis, despite the availability of many numerical hypothesis test procedures designed to use…

Weihao Li, Dianne Cook, Emi Tanaka, Susan VanderPlas

Demonstrative Evidence and the Use of Algorithms in Jury Trials

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We investigate how the use of bullet comparison algorithms and demonstrative evidence may affect juror perceptions of reliability, credibility, and understanding of expert…

Rachel Rogers, Susan VanderPlas

Evaluating Perceptual Judgements on 3D Printed Bar Charts

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Graphical design principles typically recommend minimizing the dimensionality of a visualization - for instance, using only 2 dimensions for bar charts rather than providing…

Tyler Wiederich, Susan Vanderplas

Graphical Perception in a Pandemic: Log Scales, Exponential Growth, and the Importance of User Testing

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During COVID, people all over the world were consulting time-series charts on a daily basis and using these charts to make decisions. Discussions broke out among data…

Susan Vanderplas, Emily Robinson, Reka Howard

Building a CV/Blog Automatically

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This week will be the second of a 2-part workshop. On Feb 15, we talked about how to make a CV with R and a google spreadsheet (and why you might want to do so). This week…

Susan Vanderplas

Building a CV with R and Google Sheets

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This week will be the first of a 2-part workshop. First, we’ll talk about how to make a CV with R and a google spreadsheet (and why you might want to do so). On March 7…

Susan Vanderplas

Using Git Submodules

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Sometimes, we want to have git repositories that are nested within each other, but git doesn’t allow us to do that. Instead, there are git submodules! I’ll talk about how…

Susan Vanderplas

One Model That Fits Them All: Psychometrics With Generalized Linear Mixed Effects Models

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User experiments are essential for informing researchers what an audience is seeing in a chart. User experiments are generally quite expensive in monetary value and in the…

Wangqian Ju, Susan VanderPlas, Heike Hofmann

Misuse of statistical method results in highly biased interpretation of forensic evidence in Guyll et al. 2023

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[1] M. Rosenblum, E. T. Chin, E. L. Ogburn, et al. “Misuse of statistical method results in highly biased interpretation of forensic evidence in Guyll et al. (2023)”. In: Law…

Michael Rosenblum, Elizabeth T Chin, Elizabeth L Ogburn, Akihiko Nishimura, Daniel Westreich, Abhirup Datta, Susan Vanderplas, Maria Cuellar, William C Thompson

Cultivating Insights: Harnessing the Power of Data Visualization in Agriculture

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Data visualization is an important tool for examining the results of on-farm experiments before, during, and after formal modeling. This talk shows the different types of…

Susan Vanderplas

Multimodal User Testing: Producing comprehensive, task-focused guidelines for chart design

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Susan Vanderplas, Reka Howard, Emily Robinson

How Do You Define a Circle? Perception and Computer Vision Diagnostics

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Neural Networks are very complicated and very useful models for image recognition, but they are generally used to recognize very complex and multifaceted stimuli, like cars…

Susan Vanderplas, Muxin Hua

Measuring Your Tools, for Science!

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This project is a bit of informal data collection meant to help me calibrate the likelihood of a random tool matching a wire in evidence of a given gauge/diameter.

Susan Vanderplas

Graphics and Cognition: How Do We Perceive Charts?

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In this talk, I walk through a few cognitive components that affect how we use charts: perception, attention, and memory, with a focus on the process of understanding and…

Susan Vanderplas

Eye Fitting Straight Lines in the Modern Era

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How do statistical regression results compare to intuitive, visually fitted results? Fitting lines by eye through a set of points has been explored since the 20th century.…

Emily A. Robinson, Reka Howard, Susan VanderPlas

Testing Statistical Graphics

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Susan Vanderplas

Penguins Go Parallel: a grammar of graphics framework for generalized parallel coordinate plots

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Parallel Coordinate Plots (PCP) are a valuable tool for exploratory data analysis of high-dimensional numerical data. The use of PCPs is limited when working with…

Susan VanderPlas, Yawei Ge, Antony Unwin, Heike Hofmann

What Makes a Good Graph? Graphical Testing and Principles for Graph Design

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Susan Vanderplas

Inconclusive Conclusions: Biases and Consequences

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Forensic pattern evidence is often evaluated using categorical scales, such as identification (evidence is from the same source), inconclusive, or elimination (evidence is…

Susan Vanderplas

A Study in Reproducibility: The Congruent Matching Cells Algorithm and `cmcR` package

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[1] J. Zemmels, S. Vanderplas, and H. Hofmann. “A Study in Reproducibility: The Congruent Matching Cells Algorithm and cmcR package”. In: R Journal (4 Feb. 09, 2023)…

Joseph Zemmels, Susan Vanderplas, Heike Hofmann

You Draw It: Implementation of visually fitted trends with r2d3

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[1] E. Robinson, R. Howard, and S. VanderPlas. “You Draw It: Implementation of visually fitted trends with r2d3”. In: Journal of Data Science 21 (2 Jan. 12, 2023)…

Emily Robinson, Reka Howard, Susan VanderPlas

Exploring Rural Shrink Smart Through Guided Discovery Dashboards

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[1] D. Bradford and S. VanderPlas. “Exploring Rural Shrink Smart Through Guided Discovery Dashboards”. In: Journal of Data Science (Dec. 2022), pp. 1-12. ISSN: 1680-743X.…

Denise Bradford, Susan VanderPlas

Visual Narratives of the Covid-19 pandemic

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[1] A. Wilhelm and S. VanderPlas. “Visual Narratives of the Covid-19 pandemic”. In: Journal of Data Science, Statistics, and Visualisation 2.7 (Nov. 01, 2022), pp. 84-113.…

Adalbert Wilhelm, Susan VanderPlas

Reproducible Science: Statistics, Forensics, and the Law

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In science, we strive to design and create reproducible experiments that can be replicated by other researchers. We also usually require that scientists use good…

Susan Vanderplas

How to make good charts

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Data visualizations are an important component of scientific research and communication. We use charts to explore our data before we know how to model it, and we use charts…

Susan Vanderplas

Local Population Footwear Class Characteristics - An End-to-End Pipeline for Automatic Data Acquisition and Analysis

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In this workshop we demonstrate the use of a footwear scanner which can collect data about population-level tread characteristics in a local area. We discuss the scanner’s…

Susan Vanderplas, Rick Stone

From Scans to Scores

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3D microscopy has opened up ways to assess similarity between different sources of evidence. Algorithms are used to turn a pair of scans into a number. But what can these…

Susan Vanderplas, Heike Hofmann

An introduction to firearms examination for researchers in statistics

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In the United States, where firearms are readily accessible, the annual number of gun-related crimes is in the hundreds of thousands, and about two thirds of all murders are…

Susan Vanderplas, Alicia Carriquiry, Heike Hofmann, James Hamby, Xiao Hui Tai

Pandemics, Graphics, and Perception of Log Scales

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In 2020, there was suddenly worldwide interest in graphics on a level we don’t normally see - people were checking news sites daily looking for graphs, maps, and any…

Susan Vanderplas, Emily Robinson, Reka Howard

Automatic Acquisition of Footwear Class Characteristics

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Susan Vanderplas, Rick Stone

Statistical significance calculations for scenarios in visual inference

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Statistical inference provides the protocols for conducting rigorous science, but data plots provide the opportunity to discover the unexpected. These disparate endeavours…

Susan Vanderplas, Christian Röttger, Dianne Cook, Heike Hofmann

Designing Graphics Requires Useful Experimental Testing Frameworks and Graphics Derived From Empirical Results

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Hullman and Gelman (2021, this issue) have provided a very thorough discussion of the premise that interactive exploratory data analysis requires a theoretical framework for…

Susan VanderPlas

Treatment of inconclusives in the AFTE range of conclusions

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In the past decade, and in response to the recommendations set forth by the National Research Council Committee on Identifying the Needs of the Forensic Sciences Community…

Heike Hofmann, Alicia Carriquiry, Susan Vanderplas

Exploring Rural Quality of Life Using Data Science and Public Data

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In many situations, subjective assessments and objective data capture similar (but not identical) aspects of the same underlying phenomenon. In this talk, I’ll discuss how…

Susan Vanderplas, Denise Bradford

Visual Statistics: Communication and Graphical Testing

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Susan Vanderplas

Welcome to Forensic Statistics

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Susan Vanderplas

Perception and Visual Communication in a Global Pandemic

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In the early months of 2020, as the novel coronavirus spread around the globe, we all turned to graphics and data visualizations in order to make sense of the unfolding…

Susan Vanderplas

Statistical Evaluation of Firearms and Toolmark Evidence

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Susan Vanderplas

Testing Statistical Charts: What Makes a Good Graph?

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It has been approximately 100 years since the very first formal experimental evaluations of statistical charts were conducted. In that time, technological changes have…

Susan Vanderplas, Dianne Cook, Heike Hofmann

Comparison of three similarity scores for bullet LEA matching

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Recent advances in microscopy have made it possible to collect 3D topographic data, enabling more precise virtual comparisons based on the collected 3D data as a supplement…

Susan Vanderplas, Melissa Nally, Tylor Klep, Cristina Cadevall, Heike Hofmann

One of these things is not like the others: Visual Statistics and Testing in Statistical Graphics

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Susan Vanderplas, Heike Hofmann

Big Data, Big Experiments, and Big Problems

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If data creates problems, then big data creates even bigger problems. In this talk, I discuss many different ways you can ensure a study fails, and how those decisions are…

Susan Vanderplas

Statistical Lineups for Bayesians

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Graphics play a crucial role in statistical analysis and data mining. The lineup protocol for experimentally testing graphics has traditionally used p-values to identify…

Susan Vanderplas, Heike Hofmann

`ggenealogy`: An R Package for Visualizing Genealogical Data

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This paper introduces ggenealogy (Rutter, Vanderplas, and Cook 2019), a developing R software package that provides tools for searching through genealogical data, generating…

Lindsay Rutter, Susan Vanderplas, Dianne Cook, Michelle Graham

Machine learning in forensic applications

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The 2009 National Academy of Sciences report found pattern-evidence disciplines to be rife with subjectivity. In the decade since, machine learning methods have been…

Alicia Carriquiry, Heike Hofmann, Xiao Hui Tai, Susan Vanderplas

Framed! Reproducing and Revisiting 150-Year-Old Charts

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AbstractThe Statistical Atlases published by the Census Bureau in the late 1800s utilized a number of novel methods for displaying data. In this paper, we examine the use of…

Susan Vanderplas, Ryan C Goluch, Heike Hofmann

Extending `ggplot2` for Linked and Animated Web Graphics

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Interactive web graphics are great for communication and knowledge sharing, but are difficult to leverage during the exploratory phase of a data science workflow. Even…

Carson Sievert, Susan Vanderplas, Jun Cai, Kevin Ferris, Faizan Uddin Fahad Khan, Toby Dylan Hocking

Framed Charts in the 1870 Statistical Atlas

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Computational Reproducibility is a fundamental aspect of the scientific method. One question that we need to therefore ask ourselves is “how reproducible are our charts?”.…

Susan Vanderplas, Heike Hofmann

Clusters Beat Trend!? Testing Feature Hierarchy in Statistical Graphics

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Graphics are very effective for communicating numerical information quickly and efficiently, but many of the design choices we make are based on subjective measures, such as…

Susan Vanderplas, Heike Hofmann

All of This Has Happened Before. All of This Will Happen Again: Data Science

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David Donoho’s “50 Years of Data Science” provides a valuable perspective on the statistics-vs-data science debate that has been raging in academic statistics departments…

Heike Hofmann, Susan Vanderplas

A Bayesian Approach to Visual Inference

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Graphics play a crucial role in statistical analysis and data mining. The lineup protocol for experimentally testing graphics has traditionally used p-values to identify…

Susan Vanderplas, Heike Hofmann

Clusters Beat Trend!? Testing Feature Hierarchy in Statistical Graphics

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Graphics are very effective for communicating numerical information quickly and efficiently, but many of the design choices we make are based on subjective measures, such as…

Susan Vanderplas, Heike Hofmann

Spatial Reasoning and Data Displays

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Graphics convey numerical information very efficiently, but rely on a different set of mental processes than tabular displays. Here, we present a study relating demographic…

Susan VanderPlas, Heike Hofmann

Signs of the Sine Illusion - why we need to care

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Graphical representations have to be true to the data they display. Computational tools ensure this on a technical level. But we also need to take “flaws” of the human…

Susan Vanderplas, Heike Hofmann

Visual Aptitude and Statistical Graphics

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Susan Vanderplas, Heike Hofmann

Animint: Interactive Web-Based Animations using Ggplot2’s Grammar of Graphics

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Animint is a high-level modification of the grammar of graphics used in ggplot2 for linked, interactive, animated plots. It builds on top of ggplot2 to create interactive…

Susan Vanderplas, Toby Hocking

The curse of three dimensions: Why your brain is lying to you

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One of the basic principles of visual graphics is that the graphic should accurately reflect the data. Tufte’s lie factor was created with the idea that graphs that do not…

Susan Vanderplas, Heike Hofmann

Do You See What I See? Using Shiny for User Testing

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Susan Vanderplas

Animint: Interactive, Web-Ready Graphics with R

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Susan Vanderplas, Heike Hofmann

Signs of the Sine Illusion – why we need to care

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Susan Vanderplas, Heike Hofmann

In tennis, do smashes win matches?

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It is summer, and Wimbledon and the French and US Opens are with us. In tennis, does the man with the fastest serve win? And can you make too few unforced errors for…

Sarah Budrus, Susan Vanderplas, Dianne Cook

Detection of gene orthology from gene co-expression and protein interaction networks

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[1] F. Towfic, S. Vanderplas, C. A. Oliver, et al. “Detection of gene orthology from gene co-expression and protein interaction networks”. In: BMC bioinformatics 11.Suppl 3…

Fadi Towfic, Susan Vanderplas, Casey A Oliver, Oliver Couture, Christopher K Tuggle, M Heather West Greenlee, Vasant Honavar

Near-infrared spectroscopy and cortical responses to speech production

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This research demonstrates near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) as a flexible methodology for measuring cortical activity during overt speech production while avoiding some…

Rachel Hull, Heather Bortfeld, Susan Koons