Not your typical science blog, but an 'open science' research blog. Watch me fumbling my way towards understanding how and why bacteria take up DNA, and getting distracted by other cool questions.
Are there any rules against posting the editorial process (editor comments, anonymous reviews, etc) here?
Not as far as I know, so I'll post them once we receive them.I'm soliciting comments from others in a separate post.
It's available now: arXiv:1201.6643 [q-bio]. The arXiv usually updates just after 8 PM Eastern time the evening before the nominal date of the paper. Their clocks are on GMT or something.
As I understand it, Figure 1A has error bars which represent the standard deviation of ion counts for independent purifications of the same DNA sample, characterizing the variance across purifications.Why use the standard deviation in this case where your sample size=2? Using the two actual values would make more sense to me (estimating the distribution in this case obfuscates the underlying data, as you've irreversibly "reduced" two observed values to two statistical estimates). I think it makes more sense to show the actual observations, or do (at least) three experiments...
Sorry, that should be Supplementary Figure 1.FWIW to make sure I wasn't making it up (I've seen error bars on small n estimates before), note the line:"However, if n is very small (for example n = 3), rather than showing error bars and statistics, it is better to simply plot the individual data points."Error bars in experimental biologyhttp://jcb.rupress.org/content/177/1/7.full
Or have the error bars indicate the range rather than standard deviation.
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