I'm Vince Buffalo, a postdoc studying evolutionary genetics in the Kern and Ralph labs at the University of Oregon. I did my PhD with Graham Coop, in the Population Biology Graduate Group at UC Davis. Before graduate school, I worked as a bioinformatician, and I wrote the O'Reilly book Bioinformatics Data Skills sharing the skills I learned. I use statistics, probability, and computers to learn about evolution. » read more
On this website, you can read my blog, read about my research, or explore my digital notes.
Each day, data scientists, computational biologists, astronomers, and other folks that spend far too much time in front of a computer screen spend hours doing somewhat horrible, monotonous tasks. Scientific programming, when done right, is supposed to prevent us from doing these monotonous tasks, and this is certainly true when we compare what we do today to what the tireless programmers and human computers of the 1950s did: inverting matrices by hand, writing code to calculate the t-statistic and corresponding p-value, and so forth. All of these monotonous tasks, thankfully, are implemented now in modern libraries like BLAS/LAPACK, GNU Scientific Library, numpy, R, eigen, etc. However, the problem has just shifted: today’s …
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