BME280b Spring 2007 Schedule

Class time and location:

Thursdays, 12:00 noon - 1:45pm (max) - in PSB305 unless announced otherwise.

First class meeting:

Thursday April 5

Instructor/Coordinator:

Dietlind Gerloff (office: PSB320 - send email)

Refereeing Exercise (May 23-end of quarter):

This quarter, BME280B consists of a mix of invited talks by bioinformatics researchers, and paper discussions - in which you will get more familiar with refereeing papers. As you know the judgment, and input, of referees is vital to scientific publishing. More and more refereeing is done by junior scientists (grad students and postdocs) - one of the learning goals for this run of 280B is to provide you with a bit of practice in this area... alongside hearing about recent relevant research in our field.

FORMS etc:

* Referee form (.doc)

Notes:

Unfortunately there is still a small problem with accessing the large version of the figures in Paper1 - at present this is probably only possible from campus-computers (I hope it is possible from there?). For accessing both papers' figures you will currently be taken directly to the journal's copy of these figures. I will try to fix this partly by the weekend, never mind for the moment, the anonymization is primarily trying to prevent the authors from finding their papers being discussed as potentially flawed (those we will discuss in this regard) at our site :-)
Don't try too hard to find a flaw, if there is one it may not be possible to find it solely from reading the paper - simply be critical and fair, and note in your reports what parts of the work you felt able to "evaluate", and which not (for example, there may be experimental-methodological insufficiencies that you cannot know about because you are not an expert; it is perfectly OK to mention areas which you felt were completely outside your depth in your report if substantive conclusions were drawn based on this, e.g. a complicated wet-lab experiment... plus there is always wikipedia to find out what a certain technique is used for regularly, of course!)

TIMELINE (see my email message from Friday May 18):

! DEADLINE for submitting ref reports 1 and 2: end of Wed May 30 (new!)

* Thu May 31 BME280B class (12-1:45pm): Discussion Papers 1 and 2

! DEADLINE for submitting ref reports 3 and 4: end of Wed June 6 (adapted DL reflecting that the papers were posted late)

* Thu June 7 BME280B class (12-1:45pm): Discussion Papers 3 and 4

BME280B Pass Requirements (see my email message from Friday May 18):

There will be four papers for which you will hand in one referee report each (report = fill a form + justify your entries in a commentary summarizing your opinion/criticism). See above for deadlines etc. In the two BME280B sessions of Thu May 31 and Thu June 7, everyone gets to discuss their commentary and defend their opinions about the papers (two papers in each session).

The class requirement is that you hand in decent referee reports for all four papers, and participate in both discussion sessions - (please get in touch asap if you foresee a problem so we can work out alternative work/timing for you, if necessary).