September 2025.
Mike’s Biostatistics Book additions of late:
/MD
22 July — updated instructions — just four steps — in Mike’s Biostatistics Book for starting an R session and linking to Google Drive with Google Colaboratory (Google Colab) cloud service.
Here’s a qrcode with the url to start an R notebook.
qrcode generated with R package qrcode.
Bread making crackling sound while cooling.
King Arthur bread flour, overnight rise in the refrigerator. Almost no kneading, just a little shaping. Baked in a Dutch oven with a parchment paper sling at 475 °F. For steam, two ice cubes into the Dutch oven, outside of the sling.
Mike’s Biostatistics Book, my open textbook I use to support my biostatistics course at Chaminade University, was adopted (September 2024) by the folks at LibreTexts and is now available as part of their open educational resource library in the Applied Statistics. The link is https://stats.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Applied_Statistics/Mike%E2%80%99s_Biostatistics_Book_(Dohm)
The primary version of Mike’s Biostatistics Book will remain here at my letgen.org website, but the LibreTexts version will also be maintained, and may well be a more attractive vehicle for others to use, or if instructors, even adopt for their courses. Future plans include moving homework and related tutorial resources, which are primarily the purpose of my companion site, Mike’s Workbook for Biostatistics, to the LibreText open homework system.
Because of the copy right license under which I’ve released my textbook, end users are also free to correct typos, any content errors, or even edit the text to suit their own needs, provided that that my name remains attached to the text.
Wikipedia has a nice summary about LibreTexts.A nice writeup about Open Access textbooks and LibreTexts by E. Wexler (2017) is available at EdSurge.
Suggested light reading for undergraduate and graduate biology students
| 1491 (Second Edition): New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus | Charles C. Mann |
| A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes | Adam Rutherford |
| A Crack In Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution | Jennifer A. Doudna and Samuel H. Sternberg |
| Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup | John Carreyrou |
| Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History | Stephen Jay Gould |
| Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty | Patrick Radden Keefe |
| Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and progress | Steven Pinker |
| Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution | Kenneth R. Miller |
| Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and One Scholar’s Search for Justice | Alice Dreger |
| Herding Hemingway’s Cats: Understanding how our genes work | Kat Arney |
| Is Science Racist? (Debating Race) | Jonathan Marks |
| Life’s Greatest Secret: The Story of the Race to Crack the Genetic Code | Matthew Cobb |
| Simply Complexity: A Clear Guide to Complexity Theory | Neil Johnson |
| The Art and Politics of Science | Harold E. Varmus |
| The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer | Siddhartha Mukherjee |
| The Genome War: How Craig Venter Tried to Capture the Code of Life and Save the World | James Shreeve |
| The Mismeasure of Man | Stephen Jay Gould |
| The Philadelphia Chromosome: A Genetic Mystery, a Lethal Cancer, and the Improbable Invention of a Lifesaving Treatment | Jessica Wapner |
| The Selfish Gene | Richard Dawkins |
| The Society of Genes | Itai Yanai and Martin Lercher |
| What’s in your genome?: 90% of your genome is junk | Lawrence Moran |
| Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy | Cathy O’Neil |
| Why Big Fierce Animals Are Rare: An Ecologist’s Perspective | Paul A. Colinvaux |
| Why Evolution is True | Jerry A. Coyne |
Notes activating Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) and installing Ubuntu (ver 20.04 LTS) on my Windows 10 Home (21H1) PC.
Modified from
Note also includes instructions to install Homebrew
dism.exe /online /enable-feature /featurename:Microsoft-Windows-Subsystem-Linux /all /norestart
dism.exe /online /enable-feature /featurename:VirtualMachinePlatform /all /norestart
wsl --set-default-version 2
#download package information sudo apt update #install packages from sources listed in /etc/apt/sources.list. sudo apt upgrade
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"
test install
test -d ~/.linuxbrew && eval $(~/.linuxbrew/bin/brew shellenv)
test -d /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew && eval $(/home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/bin/brew shellenv)
test -r ~/.bash_profile && echo "eval \$($(brew --prefix)/bin/brew shellenv)" >>~/.bash_profile
echo "eval \$($(brew --prefix)/bin/brew shellenv)" >>~/.profileUpdate gcc
brew install gcc
Charles’s Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was first published 24 November 1859
Add an eBook to your to do reading list: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/charles-darwin/the-origin-of-species
I’ve been teaching a biostatistics class since 2003, first at UH-Hilo, and at Chaminade University since 2010. I’ve tried a number of textbooks, but in the last couple of years have elected to go with my own notes. I’m now releasing the ePub into the wild as Mike’s Biostatistics Book.
30-Sep-2020: 11 of 20 chapters posted
Google Data Studio report of “Aloha” as part of trademark. Data collected from TESS, United States Patent and Trademark Office.
Following the Aloha poke and Salesforce ohana controversies, I wanted to present a data view of how much of Hawaii is incorporated into trademarks of business products and services. I don’t claim that all non-Hawaiian registrations represent appropriation (as opposed to honoring) culture, but offer the work only as a means to track. Please visit other sites better positioned to discuss appropriation of Hawaii culture. For example:
7 June 2020, M. Dohm, Chaminade University
I’ve cobbled together a glossary page to support genetic and bioinformatics student learning. Where possible, links to original sources are provided.
GGGB: Glossary of Genetics, Genomics, & Bioinformatics
The page is a work in progress and will be completed by summer 2020.