Jul 2015

1. 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...

2. 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...

3. 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...

4. 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...

5. 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...

6. 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...

7. 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,...