Have you ever needed to grab data from a published graph, perhaps to reanalyze the results? The grabit function, available on Matlab Central, does exactly this. It’s a GUI that allows the user to specify the location of axes, and then grab data by clicking on the data points. Learned about it in the Methods … More Extracting data from published graphs in Matlab
Working with 2d data defined on a grid is pretty straightforward in Matlab; you can easily visualize the data with imagesc and smooth it through convolution. Working with data sampled at non-uniform intervals is much trickier. Doing something as simple as visualizing it becomes a pain. One way of getting around this is to resample … More Smoothing a non-uniformly sampled surface
I used the Word 2007 equation editor for a recent paper. I like the editor because it supports TeX-like commands. Unfortunately some journals do not support Word 2007 equations. PLoS Biology suggest saving down as Word 2003 and recreating the equations manually. Argh, that sounds like a terrible way to spend an afternoon. Thankfully, MathType … More Converting Word 2007 equations into 2003 or MathType equations
I’ve grown increasingly frustrated with EndNote, its awkward interface and buggy Word integration. I’ve looked at a few alternate solutions: Mendeley, Papers, CiteULike. I ended up settling for Zotero, which I now love. I don’t think it makes any sense for a citation management software to use ask you to use its own internal search … More Citation management with Zotero
Adobe Illustrator is an ancient program with voodoo features that is extremely frustrating to use if you don’t know its ins and outs. Once you do know how to use it well, however, it is incredibly powerful. It’s my opinion that if you want to apply Tufte’s principles on visual information you have to know either … More Video tutorial: Adobe Illustrator for scientists
