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data visualization + celebration
Genome Sciences Center 20th Anniversary Clothing, Music, Drinks and Art
On 15 November 2019, the Genome Sciences Center held its 20th anniversary celebration.
Here you can read about the design of the evening's clothing, music, drinks and other art.
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
— Aldous Huxley
Music
We commissioned Segue to create a unique ambient music landscape for the celebration.
Segue is the name used by Jordan Sauer, an electronic music producer from Vancouver, BC. He creates ambient electronic music with layers of field recordings, acoustic and electronic sounds, creating sonic soundscapes that conjure images of nature and emotions of peace and introspection. He has release numerous solo albums and collaborations with artists from around the world, and recently released a solo album “The Island” on the Silent Season record label in summer 2019. Jordan is thrilled to partner with the GSC in the production of “Gene Machines”.
gene machines
Gene machines will be available as a digital download soon. We are also planning to have a vinyl release.
An assembly of shifting soundscapes, textures and rhythmic loops produced by the laboratory machines.
In commemoration of the 20th anniversary of Canada’s Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre, Segue was comissioned to create an original composition based on audio recordings from the GSC’s laboratory equipment, robots and computers—to make “music” from the noise they produce.
Machine noise is a challenging palette of musical ingredients—sharp, abrasive and whirring sounds are typically unpleasant. For one night, these machines are repurposed as acoustical performers.
In the process of creating “Gene Machines”, recordings were analyzed for their specific frequency profiles and then used to generate melodic or percussive sounds. Together with bass from a Moog synthesizer, the sounds were then stretched, manipulated and sequenced into a series of compositions. Each composition is based on the recording from one specific laboratory machine, emphasizing its tone and timbre quality.
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news + thoughts
Graphical Abstract Design Guidelines
Clear, concise, legible and compelling.
Making a scientific graphical abstract? Refer to my practical design guidelines and redesign examples to improve organization, design and clarity of your graphical abstracts.
"This data might give you a migrane"
An in-depth look at my process of reacting to a bad figure — how I design a poster and tell data stories.
He said, he said — a word analysis of the 2020 Presidential Debates
Building on the method I used to analyze the 2008, 2012 and 2016 U.S. Presidential and Vice Presidential debates, I explore word usagein the 2020 Debates between Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
Points of Significance celebrates 50th column
We are celebrating the publication of our 50th column!
To all our coauthors — thank you and see you in the next column!
Uncertainty and the management of epidemics
When modelling epidemics, some uncertainties matter more than others.
Public health policy is always hampered by uncertainty. During a novel outbreak, nearly everything will be uncertain: the mode of transmission, the duration and population variability of latency, infection and protective immunity and, critically, whether the outbreak will fade out or turn into a major epidemic.
The uncertainty may be structural (which model?), parametric (what is `R_0`?), and/or operational (how well do masks work?).
This month, we continue our exploration of epidemiological models and look at how uncertainty affects forecasts of disease dynamics and optimization of intervention strategies.
We show how the impact of the uncertainty on any choice in strategy can be expressed using the Expected Value of Perfect Information (EVPI), which is the potential improvement in outcomes that could be obtained if the uncertainty is resolved before making a decision on the intervention strategy. In other words, by how much could we potentially increase effectiveness of our choice (e.g. lowering total disease burden) if we knew which model best reflects reality?
This column has an interactive supplemental component (download code) that allows you to explore the impact of uncertainty in `R_0` and immunity duration on timing and size of epidemic waves and the total burden of the outbreak and calculate EVPI for various outbreak models and scenarios.
Bjørnstad, O.N., Shea, K., Krzywinski, M. & Altman, N. (2020) Points of significance: Uncertainty and the management of epidemics. Nature Methods 17.
Background reading
Bjørnstad, O.N., Shea, K., Krzywinski, M. & Altman, N. (2020) Points of significance: Modeling infectious epidemics. Nature Methods 17:455–456.
Bjørnstad, O.N., Shea, K., Krzywinski, M. & Altman, N. (2020) Points of significance: The SEIRS model for infectious disease dynamics. Nature Methods 17:557–558.
Cover of Nature Genetics August 2020
Our design on the cover of Nature Genetics's August 2020 issue is “Dichotomy of Chromatin in Color” . Thanks to Dr. Andy Mungall for suggesting this terrific title.
The cover design accompanies our report in the issue Gagliardi, A., Porter, V.L., Zong, Z. et al. (2020) Analysis of Ugandan cervical carcinomas identifies human papillomavirus clade–specific epigenome and transcriptome landscapes. Nature Genetics 52:800–810.