Archive for December, 2004

Fruit Fly Genetics

Monday, December 20th, 2004

The Genetics Laboratory Manual from the University of South Florida has plenty of detail on Drosophilia Melanogaster and the various genetic manipulations available.

You can simulate the Mendelian inheritance of a simple trait using a couple of coins and some patience – and a Chi-Squared statistic can be calculated from a table of observed and expected [...]

Statistics notes

Friday, December 17th, 2004

These are mostly first year University level but the datasets, examples and general approaches might be useful for Unit 6 on the BTEC Applied Sciences

Darren Wilkinson is making his Statistics teaching notes, PowerPoint slides and homework exercises freely downloadable as PDFs
John Matthews distributes his Biomedical Science Statistics module notes as PDFs

Professor Matthews’ Summary Measures and [...]

“From the Vault of the Heavens”

Friday, December 10th, 2004

Filippo Brunelleschi was the mathematician and artist who designed the dome of S. Maria Novella in Florence. How much maths did Brunelleschi know? Did he know about astronomy, and could he use an Astrolabe ?

I was able to find a paper mapping his friendships with local mathematicians and astronomers and astrolabe dealers using the new [...]

Lycos Fightback

Friday, December 3rd, 2004

Is the Lycos Fightback a distributed denial of service attack or not?

Either way, it looks like Lycos have suspended their attempt to hassle the spammers for now, perhaps for fear of retaliation against users.

The idea went as follows

Spammers send these daft e-mails to encourage you to visit their idiotic Web sites selling enhancement products you [...]