jv ch. 1

today we did (as a class) our first real work in R, and my impression was that it went okay. my sense was that most people didn't get through even the problems from the text that i'd assigned, much less on to the
new project of uploading and looking at the class questionnaire data that i collected the first day. personally, though, i'm okay with that. i wonder how others feel.

maybe someone will comment and let me know... hint, hint

:)

more on the independent project

one of my students sought guidance as to what was "required" with respect to the independent project for this course, and i find that i've composed an uncharacteristically lucid (for me, anyways) reply, with which i'm quite pleased. hereby i share it with you that it may inform your thinking on the subject:

.... ultimately, i'd like you to do a project that you (1) enjoy; (2) get something out of; (3) learn from; and (4) have an opportunity to apply what you will have learned in this class.

i know that all sounds very vague and healy-feely, so, as to specifics:

(1) there should be some data involved. you can gather them yourself, borrow them from someone else, make them up (though scientists tend to frown somewhat on this last option), whatever. they should probably involve something you have at least a passing interest in... maybe?

(2) these data (probably) shouldn't have already been analyzed and published (at least in the way you plan to analyze them).

(3) you should do some analysis. test a hypothesis or two. do the right tests. do them the right way. don't violate any assumptions, or if you do, do it with panache. :)

(4) you should maybe keep a notebook, journal, big pile of paper (with a note on top that says "don't move this!), or, if you like blogging, maybe a separate blog (blogger lets one "person" (your login name) keep multiple blogs) in which you record the progress and process of your analyses. i'll show you how to do this in class.

(5) you should write it all up in some format approximating the "methods" and "results" portions of a standard scientific paper. you may or may not want to add a little "intro" and/or "discussion."

(6) you should give it all to me by the end of the course. if you're not shy, you can show me what you've got as you go along, and i will try to offer helpful advice, humor, anecdotes, and other generally irritatingly useless and vague comments.

(7) or you can ignore all that and just do something else.

how's that?

G&E ch 1

seventy-five minutes isn't nearly as much time as you think it is. which is weird, because looking at the computer screen when i finished writing my 'socratic' questions for today, i thought to myself 'i wonder if these are enough to keep us talking the whole time?' the truth is, i probably talked too much. the 'atlas complex' is a hard one to shake. (i encourage those of you who see a teaching component in your future career to follow that last link!)

anyway, today's material was a bit of (very) general background on experimental design, followed by -- in my opinion -- just enough set theory and probability calculus to get us all into trouble, but probably not enough to get us back out again. hmmm. i wondered to myself as i was reading it over again last night just how central these topics were going to be in the rest of our 'primer' of (mostly) regular old parametric stats. i started looking up the terms they chose to boldface (e.g. 'complex events,' 'proper subset,' 'conditional probability') in the index and, curiously enough, most of them don't appear there at all. and most of those few that do appear (e.g. 'venn diagram') only come back up mostly in passing in a later chapter. except 'independence,' of course.

so, given G&E's bold statements on the first page:

In this chapter, we develop basic concepts and definitions required to understand probability and sampling.... The concepts in this chapter lay the foundations for the use and understanding of statistics....

i'm curious to see how (and if) they link these back in in later chapters. (note my skeptical tone).

my own independent project

one of the main assignments for the biostatistics course i'm teaching is to devise and execute a small 'independent project' that will make use of the techniques that the students will be learning this semester. i've been deliberately vague so far about the details because i don't want to constrain anyone's thinking about what he or she might want to do, and some interesting ideas are already beginning to form. (see the blogs that this one links to).

i realize, though, that i do need to give some sort of guidance to my students (especially those who have never been involved in a research project before), but rather than a formalized checklist of things it has to include, etc., i though it would be better to model the sort of project i had in mind with my own research.

dr. david heins and i have started working on another project together that will build on his work with the effects of infection with cestode parasites on the life-histories of threespine sticklebacks (Gasterosteus aculeatus). my contribution will include gathering data on the body shapes of fish from several different lakes in alaska (and possibly from the UK) and conducting the analyses to test the hypotheses that parasitism is associated with differences in overall body shape and/or differences in the shape of the head.

i hope to begin gathering the data sometime this week.

asset or liability?

in addition to these blogs that i'm requiring my students to keep, we're also making use of a "blackboard" course-content-management-system web site, and a wiki. each of these is hosted in different places, has different access controls, and -- i'm hopeful -- provides something useful to the students.

while getting all of this set up, though, it occurs to me just how complex all of this is, and causes me to wonder if the pedagogical value of these tools actually outweighs whatever confusion might arise from all this technological complexity. and, as if almost in answer to my own question, i just now had to go back and edit the links i included above because when i first wrote them, they were in wiki format (enclosed in double brackets) rather than regular html format (a href, and all of that).

this, in turn, caused me to remember how dr. dunlap (from whom i took all of my statistics -- back in the last century!) showed up to class with a stack of notes (which i don't think he ever looked at) and a piece of chalk.

i wonder if that was the better approach.

that first yucky skipping-ballpoint line in an otherwise pristine notebook

i thought it only fair -- since i'm requiring my students in Bioststatistics and Experimental Design (EBIO 408/708) to keep a blog -- that i should start one up myself.

(actually, i believe i started one way back in the paleozoic of the blogosphere [that is, a couple of years ago], but i don't think i ever did anything with it, and i can't seem to remember what i called it, nor where it even was.)

so i'm requiring my students to record their various musings about their own voyages of statistical discovery in order to engage in what the educational psychologists call 'metacognition' -- thinking about how they think about things. of course, journal-keeping in academic disciplines is nothing new (although i suppose it is a bit unusual in a stats course), but i hadn't heard of anyone using this newfangled technology to enable students to read and respond to one another's thoughts.

i'm curious to see what they write.