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?

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.