BIOL 458 Biometry |
Instructor: Ed Connor
Office: Hensill Hall 760 Phone: 338-6997 E-Mail: efc@sfsu.edu (preferred mode of communication)
Lecture: Tu TH 11:00 - 12:15 TH 327 Office Hours: M 10-11, 2-3; Tu 2-3
Lab: TH 2:10 - 4:50 pm HH 233
Text: Zar, J.H. - Biostatistical Analysis, 4th or 5th Edition.
Prerequisite: One semester of college biology
This course is designed to provide a firm grounding in hypothesis testing, experimental design, and the analysis of data. We will concentrate on hypothesis testing, the principles of experimental design, regression, and the analysis of variance. Illustrative examples will be drawn from the biological sciences.
The laboratory portion of the class will focus on data analysis and interpretation using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) on personal computers. Computers with this software are available for use by students and faculty in several computer laboratories on campus. Many of these laboratories have extensive hours and offer access to SPSS. A student version of SPSS can be purchased from the bookstore, or a one semester license directly from SPSS. Faculty may obtain a site licensed version for free. Alternatively, you may chose to use the Open Source software package "R." R is a largely command line driven package, so it is more difficult to learn than SPSS. However, R is freely downloadable, and a very comprehensive package used worldwide by statisticians. I will provide some guidance and assistance if you chose to use R, but I am by no means an expert on R.
The class website is http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~efc/classes/biol458/biol458an.htm. All class materials are posted on this website. For those of you in the online sections of the lab portion of the class, you can access the necessary data sets from links embedded in the html versions of the lab exercises.
All students including those of you in the online sections of the lab are invited to come to the in person version of the lab to ask questions or get help. The in person lab is Thursdays 2-5 in HH 233.
For those of you who might need additional training on computing topics ranging from word processing to web surfing please consider the short courses offered by Computing Services. For those of you who have not yet set up an internet account at SFSU, you can do so online from the computer labs or your colleagues computers by pointing your internet browser to the SFSU Computer Services Helpdesk (http://www.sfsu.edu/~doit/hd.htm).
The class grade will be based on the 3 exams and 7 written lab reports from computer-based exercises (labs 4-10). Each exam will comprise 20%, the combined 7 laboratory write-ups will comprise 35%, and 5% of the class grade will be subjective.
There is a $15 lab fee associated with this course.
The absolute DEADLINE to pay LAB FEES is Friday, September 23, 2011.
Students who do not pay their lab fees by this date will have a Financial Obligation Hold placed on their record until their lab fees are paid and they will not be able to register for any classes. As soon as the lab fee is paid, the hold will be released within the next 24 hours.