Power in Trees

Following up after yesterday’s meeting, I am working on implementing the confidence interval analysis and quantifying information in trees. This second point I will develop by comparing the Felsenstein example tree (information-rich) to the star tree (uninformative), and develop this discussion in the context of assessing the importance of phylogenetic corrections and phylogenetic intertia (my original theme again: noise or data??).

Primate Brain Morphometry

Daniel Mietchen contacted me through openwetware 11 days ago with interest in applying phylogenetic comparative methods to Primate Brain Morphometry data. The initial data spreadsheet includes 2 continuous traits for 61 Primate species. To get rolling on this in the comparative methods framework, I’ll first need to create or find a decent ultrametric tree and then will be up and running. This should both help Dan and be a good experimental dataset for me, which I’ll be exploring more during my time at the Bodega Phylogenetics Workshop March 6-13.