Introduction to Biostatistics at William and Mary

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Lecture  Slides

Lecture  Slides

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For most of the history of organized scientific research, the limitations of technology made print journals the chief means of disseminating scientific results. But some #ASAPbio advocates argue that since the rise of the Internet, biologists have been abdicating their duty to the public — which pays for most academic research — by not sharing results as quickly and openly as possible.

News article

Lecture  Slides

One of the greatest minds in 20th Century statistics was not a scholar. He brewed beer.

Guinness brewer William S. Gosset’s work is responsible for inspiring the concept of statistical significance, industrial quality control, efficient design of experiments and, not least of all, consistently great tasting beer.

Blog post

Ultimately, the best way to live a life by science is to ignore most of what you read in science news and instead take a little time to grasp high quality resources...In the end, it is up to you to be skeptical when hearing new claims. A simple rule of thumb is to never change your behavior because of a single study in the news.

Blog post

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Misuse of the P value — a common test for judging the strength of scientific evidence — is contributing to the number of research findings that cannot be reproduced, the American Statistical Association (ASA) warns... The group has taken the unusual step of issuing principles to guide use of the P value, which it says cannot determine whether a hypothesis is true or whether results are important.

Nature News

ASA News

ASA Statement on P-values

Learning objective:  To understand the concepts of ‘long’ and ‘wide’ data formats and be able to convert between them with tidyr.

Part of a software carpentry online course R for reproducible scientific analysis.

Dataframe manipulation with tidyr

R for reproducible scientific analysis

Software Carpentry

Data:

Gapminder dataset

Gapminder dataset (wide format)

Learning objective:  To be able to use the 6 main dataframe manipulation ‘verbs’ with pipes in dplyr.

Part of a software carpentry online course R for reproducible scientific analysis.

Dataframe manipulation with dplyr

R for reproducible scientific analysis

Software Carpentry

Data:

Gapminder dataset

In this interactive course from DataCamp, you will learn how to to perform sophisticated data manipulation tasks using dplyr. Master the five verbs of data manipulation, and complementing techniques to chain your operations, perform group-wise calculations and access data stored in a database outside R.

Outline:

• Introduction to dplyr and tbls
• Select and mutate 
• Filter and arrange 
• Summarise and the pipe operator 
• Group_by and working with databases 

Online course  DataCamp
 

...Toxoplasma infection alters rat behavior with surgical precision, making them lose their fear of (and even become sexually aroused by!) the smell of cats by hijacking neurochemical pathways in the rat's brain.

News article

The Zika virus damages many fetuses carried by infected and symptomatic mothers, regardless of when in pregnancy the infection occurs, according to a small but frightening study released on Friday by Brazilian and American researchers.

News article

Research article  Research article

Lecture  Slides

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This is a great case-study on experimental design and bias.

News  Original paper

Lecture  Slides