2015

1. What's better than beer? BEER!

   Entry #241

   17 Dec 2015

   3:28 pm

   Alison N Hale

   1 comments

   From October 9-11, QUBES team members attended BEER - an international symposium on Biomathematics and Ecology Education and Research. This unique conference brings together biologists and mathematicians with the goal of fostering collaboration between the two fields. This year’s conference...

2. A great model to follow....

   Entry #237

   14 Dec 2015

   8:59 pm

   Jeremy M Wojdak

   0 comments

   Here at QUBES we are trying to build a community of users that are excited to contribute and add their expertise, working together to solve the big problems we all face in quantitative biology education.  Perhaps the best model one could hope to emulate (at least in some ways) is the...

3. Making instructor/student handouts in R

   Entry #225

   01 Dec 2015

   9:32 am

   Jeremy M Wojdak

   0 comments

   There was an excellent post on lukemiller.org about using R and knitr to make handouts/lab assignments/documents integrating R code, R output, and narrative text.  Click that link to learn how to control what gets shown to whom.  Besides being useful in this context, using R...

4. Help! I'm having trouble with the on-site software tools!

   Entry #109

   11 Sep 2015

   12:47 pm

   Arietta Fleming-Davies

   0 comments

   How to deal with the blank screen of death and other problems The ability to run quantitative biology software tools on site is one of the most unique features of the QUBES Hub website.  Here are some common errors and how to fix them: 1. When I open the software tool all I see is a blank...

5. Introductory statistics in R - what packages are most valuable?

   Entry #106

   10 Aug 2015

   10:11 am

   Jeremy M Wojdak

   0 comments

   There was an excellent blog post by Citizen-Statistician about teaching undergraduate statistics, and which R packages are among the top 10 or so most useful.  Balancing the steep learning curve and overwhelming complexity of R with the  desire to impress upon students the...

6. Being the turtle: agent-based modeling workshop at Humboldt State University

   Entry #105

   06 Aug 2015

   3:24 pm

   Jeremy M Wojdak

   0 comments

   What could bring ecologists, toxicologists, philosophers, and sociologists, Ph.D. students, professors, and federal agency scientists together, 300 miles from nowhere? Turtles. Yes, that's right... turtles.  Not the green, scaly kind... but the "turtles" that represent agents...

7. Eat all the chocolate you want... and lose weight? ...well, maybe eat chocolate, get fat, and teach your students about false discovery rates

   Entry #103

   16 Jul 2015

   6:41 pm

   Jeremy M Wojdak

   1 comments

   Here is an interesting blog post from John Bohannon, who made news in 2013 with his article in Science exposing the seedy underbelly of the open-access pay-as-you-publish journals.  This time Bohannon takes a crack at the junk-science diet industry. He and colleagues first conducted a real...

8. SUPPORT: Blogging about blogs (Part 1)

   Entry #99

   15 Jul 2015

   10:40 am

   Drew LaMar

   2 comments

   Now that the QUBES blog is up and running, I figured it was a great time to get a little meta and have an "all about blogs" blog post. Question:  What types of blogs are available, and where are they located? There are three types of blogs on QUBES: QUBES blog Group...

9. TEACHING: The misuse of bar graphs in science (and science education?)

   Entry #102

   14 Jul 2015

   11:38 am

   Alison N Hale

   1 comments

   The simplicity of bar graphs makes them a popular tool for data visualization in scientific publications. Indeed, a recent survey of the physiology literature found that 85.6% of papers published within a 3 month span in the field’s top journals included at least one bar graph. But does...

10. Interesting application of machine learning to understand high MOOC dropout rates

    Entry #100

    10 Jul 2015

    1:27 pm

    Jeremy M Wojdak

    0 comments

    The Data Until I Die! blog had an interesting post a few weeks ago about the KDD Cup competition to understand a very large dataset regarding MOOC course completion rates (~80,000 students' data), and the authors own attempt to compete.  The author used machine...

11. RESOURCES: Amazing course in statistical learning available freely on interwebs!

    Entry #98

    09 Jul 2015

    8:21 pm

    Jeremy M Wojdak

    1 comments

    The authors of "An Introduction to Statistical Learning: with Applications in R", (Gareth James, Daniela Witten, Trevor Hastie, and Robert Tibshirani) have graciously made available a wealth of course materials, including videos, R labs, lecture slides, exercises, and their entire...

12. CONFERENCE: QUBES preaches to the choir at the Society for Mathematical Biology in Atlanta, GA

    Entry #96

    07 Jul 2015

    12:51 pm

    Jeremy M Wojdak

    0 comments

    John Jungck, Director of the Interdisciplinary Science Learning Center at the University of Delaware and long-time advocate for mathematical biology education, was a plenary speaker at SMB 2015.  He brought his typical humanity and empathy to bear on the current challenges and opportunities...

13. CONFERENCE: QUBES Roadshow visits American Society for Parasitologists meeting in Omaha, NE and runs into Antiques Roadshow

    Entry #92

    04 Jul 2015

    11:04 am

    Jeremy M Wojdak

    0 comments

    QUBES (represented by Jeremy Wojdak) presented a case for using the compelling stories of parasites and their hosts to engage introductory biology students (and faculty) in modeling and statistics, at the annual meeting of the American Society for Parasitologists in Omaha NE,...

14. Looking back at the BioQUEST / HHMI / Science Case Net Meeting

    Entry #91

    29 Jun 2015

    9:40 pm

    Sam S Donovan

    1 comments

    We just wrapped up a week-long meeting that brought together QUBES, the BioQUEST Curriculum Consortium, Howard Hughes Medical Institute Quantitative Biology Consortium, and ScienceCaseNet for a week at the Claremont Colleges in California.  BQ Summer Workshop 2015 Participants at Harvey...

15. The Prevalence of Antibiotic-Resistance in the Environment (PARE) Project is accepting applications

    Entry #90

    29 Jun 2015

    8:59 pm

    Sam S Donovan

    0 comments

    Applications for 2015-2016 participation in the Prevalence of Antibiotic-Resistance in the Environment (PARE) Project - a low-cost, low time commitment classroom-based authentic research module - are invited.  image from the Invitation 2015/2016 pdf Students from...

16. Hello World!

    Entry #89

    29 Jun 2015

    8:39 pm

    QUBES Team

    0 comments

    Image credit - oskay CC Welcome to the QUBES Blog. We will use this blog to share project updates, opportunities, and highlights. We will also share materials that we hope are of general interest to the community.  Thanks for joining us! _______________________ This is the QUBES...