BIO Assignment Week 1
Assignment for Week 1
Wiki editing, Chimera and R
Concepts and activities (and reading, if applicable) for this assignment will be topics on next week's quiz.
Contents
The Assignment
In this assignment you will:
- familiarize yourself with basic Wiki editing on the Student Wiki;
- install the statistics workbench R, and work through selected parts of an introductory tutorial.
Caution: this is a lengthy assignment and can't be done in one day. Work on it every day, or better every morning and evening. A lot of this has to do with learning the R programming language and you need constant repetition to bring this material into active memory. Cramming everything in a single, desperate effort makes you forget things quickly and is a waste of your time.
Wiki
Collaboration is a common theme for modern lab work and a Wiki is a great way to share and seamlessly update information in groups - or just for yourself. Probably the most sophisticated Wiki software is MediaWiki, a set of PHP scripts that is under continuous development by the Wikimedia foundation; it is the same software that runs Wikipedia. This is open source, free software that is easy to install, is well documented and requires very little resources other than a machine that runs a MySQL database server and an Apache Webserver. Numerous extensions exist (and extensions are not hard to write); they enhance the already rich functionality. But let's start with small steps. I will create an account for you on the Student Wiki, and I have configured the Wiki so that
- only logged in users can view the pages;
- all logged in users can create and edit pages at will.
This means you could edit pages that don't "belong" to you. Respect the "House Rules" and don't edit other's things without permission, even if you can think of a particularly witty comment or hilarious prank. If you want to comment on a page: every page has an associated "Discussion" page that you can freely edit. Remember to "sign your name" to discussion entries.
Task:
- Access the Student Wiki;
- log in and navigate to your user page;
- open the "Help" link in the left-hand sidebar in a separate tab;
- follow the link to the "Editing" page on the Student Wiki;
- try and learn basic editing syntax by editing your User Page:
- enter your name,
- your major(s), specialist program, year of study - or your lab and thesis theme if you are a graduate student;
- and your eMail address.
- Add a category tag to your User page for this year's BCH441 course. All pages with this tag are accessible via the link in the sidebar.
Feel free to look at my User Page for code examples: clicking on the edit link will show you the source text. How do you find my User Page? Good question ...
- Create a subpage to your User Page; call it "Resources" or something similar. Note: the link MUST be in your "User space". If you don't add the prefix
User:yourname/...before your page name, the new page will end up in the main "namespace". I'll then have to delete it. That's not good because you have then failed this part of the assignment. Make sure you know what you are doing, for example by looking at the code on my User Page, asking someone who knows, or asking on the mailing list. - Put some text on your new page - perhaps a link to a Wikipedia article, or to PubMed, or to the NCBI. Make sure you understand the difference between an internal link and an external link (they have slightly different formats), and you understand the concept of namespace and categories. Also add a category link to that page.
- Play around some more. Feel free to ask how to go about achieving a particular effect that you may have seen elsewhere.
For next week, you should be comfortable with the following mark-up conventions and concepts:
- Login and accessing your user page;
- viewing a page's history;
- basic text formatting;
- "signing" your name;
- creating internal and external links;
- creating section headers on a page on multiple levels;
- reverting a changed page to an earlier version;
- creating a new page (as a subpage of an existing page);
- the concept of namespaces - especially the default ("main") and
User:namespace; - the concept of categories.
I expect that there may be aspects of the Wiki you find puzzling, it is after all a complex piece of software that supports the world's largest collaborative project and one of the busiest sites on the Internet. Do ask about these things on the mailing list. My first encounter with Wikis is a while back and I can't remember everything I was initially confused about.
R
The R statistics environment and programming language is an exceptionally well engineered, free (as in free speech) and free (as in free beer) platform for data manipulation and analysis. The number of functions that are included by default is large, there is a very large number of additional, community-generated analysis modules that can be simply imported from dedicated sites (e.g. the Bioconductor project for molecular biology data), or via the CRAN network, and whatever function is not available can be easily programmed. The ability to filter and manipulate data to prepare it for analysis is an absolute requirement in research-centric fields such as ours, where the strategies for analysis are constantly shifting and prepackaged solutions become obsolete almost faster than they can be developed. Besides numerical analysis, R has very powerful and flexible functions for plotting graphical output.
Programming in R is a main focus of the course.
If any of this material is confusing, discuss it on the mailing list. At the end of this assignment you should be competent to read expressions in basic R syntax, able to predict their result and spot syntax errors, familiar with the concepts in the tutorial, and able to write your own expressions.
Links and resources
Notes and references
Ask, if things don't work for you!
- If anything about the assignment is not clear to you, please ask on the mailing list. You can be certain that others will have had similar problems. Please remember that "participation" is a significant part of your course mark.
