Olin College is Hiring   Tuesday, February 5, 2013  Belly Button
Biodiversity: Part One  This post is a excerpt from Think Bayes:
Bayesian Statistics Made Simple, the book I am working on now.
 You can read the entire current draft at http://thinkbayes.com.
Belly button bacteria  Belly Button Biodiversity 2.0 (BBB2) is a
nation-wide citizen science project with the goal of identifying
bacterial species that can be found in human navels
(http://bbdata.yourwildlife.org).  The project might seem
whimsical, but it is part of an increasing interest in the human
microbiome, the set of microorganisms that live on human skin
and other surfaces that contact the environment.  In their pilot
study, BBB2 researchers collected swabs from the navels of 60
volunteers, used multiplex pyrosequencing to extract and
sequence fragments of 16S rDNA, then identified the species or
genus the fragments came from. Each identified fragment is
called a “read.”  We can use these data to answer several
related questions:   • Based on th