Ramón Díaz-Uriarte
I am a researcher at the Spanish National Cancer Center (CNIO); until recently, I was at the Bioinformatics Unit, and now I lead the "Computational Statistics Team" at the Structural Biology and Biocomputing Programme at CNIO. My background is a mix of biology (BSc. in Biology, PhD Zoology) and statistics (MSc. Biometry, MSc. Statistics). After finishing my PhD and before coming to the CNIO I worked as statistician in a company that developed artifical intelligence software and in a marketing research company, and I have also done some "for-hire" private statistical consulting. I have been at the CNIO since May 2002. Since late 2006, I am also a part-time assistant professor at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.
A more formal CV (publications, education, etc).
PGP public key: 0xE89B3462 (download key).
If you send me attachments, please do not use proprietary and non-standard formats. In particular, since I do not use a certain Operating System, do not send Microsoft Word or Excel files. It is painful for me to open, read, modify, or print those files. You can use many of the great and open ways to exchange editable text (including format) such as LaTeX, rST, rtf, or even plain ASCII for documents, and plain ASCII for data (or you can send data as binary R RData files -).). Documents not intended to be modified by me can be sent as postscript or PDF. You can read more about why sending word attachments is a bad idea, and what we can do to end it: We Can Put an End to Word Attachments, by R. Stallman.
Statistical consulting at CNIO
An important part of my job is to provide statistical support at CNIO. You can check the CNIO Stats Consulting Guidelines. I also maintain a CNIO Stats FAQ. (This is actually outdated; should probably move it out of here.)
A few miscellaneous and unstructured links
The R statistical computing project. R is a mature, flexible and extensible language for statistical analysis and graphics. It provides "out-of-the-box" access to a wide variety of statistical techniques, and is widely used for statistical research and bioinformatics (see the Bioconductor project). R is Free Software, released under the GNU GPL license.
The directory of Open Access Journals and the Public Library of Science, which provide access to free, full text, peer-reviewed scientific journals. Because readers and instituions do not have to pay for access, scientific results can be more widely disseminated, and are accessible to all (with an internet connection). Related projects are Samizdat Press, Creative Commons, Project Gutemberg and Eldritch Press; Creative Commons is a wide ranging project that intends to make creative work (of any kind, including of course science) available to others, so that it can be built upon and shared, and they offer (at no charge) a set of licenses that "(...) intends to help people express this preference for sharing" (from their FAQ); the later two sites are focused on making general literature, not necessarily science, available to all. I have some related notes and comments under this link.
Why settle for any lesser operating system when there is GNU/Linux? (You might want to give Debian GNU/Linux a try.)
The GNU project.
The Spanish section of Amnesty International, Amnistía Internacional.
Like "The hunger site" for children in Argentina
Medicos sin fronteras (doctors without borders)
Statistics and human rights. This site contains bibliography and links to other sites. The American Statistical Association has a Committeee on Scientific Freedom and Human Rights. Interesting enough, what used to be the AAAS Science and Human Rights Program has a short article titled Human rights, human values, and technology: why human rights advocates need to use free software.
Todos contra el canon. Here you can read about the outrageous attempts (some successful) by the SGAE, the Spanish equivalent of the RIAA, to force you to pay for "crimes" in advance ("el canon"), or to severely curtail internet freedom by allowing them (the SGAE and friends) to censor internet contents. In that page you'll also learn about ongoing campaigns to stop these abuses.
Atheism and secularism. Richard Dawkins's page contains a lot of links and resources to start with. His book "The God Delusion" is excellent, by the way.
Some notes on revision control systems (or version control systems, or code control systems). A brief and biased set of notes I took while searching for a revision control system.
Using idutils and others with R and Python: notes on systems for indexing and tagging, in particular with R and Python in mind, and an R scanner for IDutils.
LaTeX bst files
LaTeX bst (bibliography styles) files for
Public Library of Science, Biology
and Genome Biology.
The PLoS one I use with the natbib package (with
\usepackage[authoryear, round, sort]{natbib}
in the preamble. The GB one does not use natbib.
To use either, include
\bibliography{the.name.of.the.bib.file}
\bibliographystyle{GenomeBiology} %% or PLoS
where you want the bibliography to appear. I prepared these bst files using makebst.tex, with a little manual editing. (makebst.tex is available, I think, as standard in all LaTeX installations for GNU/Linux, and also from CTAN). If you find any errors, I'd appreciate if you can let me know.
More on LaTeX, with very useful links, bibliography style files, etc, at BiBTeX Bibliography and LaTeX Style Formats for Molecular Biologists.
This page and, unless explicitly stated, all other pages in this web site, are copyright, ©, by Ramón Díaz-Uriarte, and are licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Ramón Díaz-Uriarte Last modified: January 2008
