Thursday, March 8, 2007
JV Ch. 6
I found this chapter to be a little more enigmatic than previous ones. There seemed to be a lot of emphasis on trying to do exercises that supported the Central Limit Theorem. This exercise was less practical and a little too redundantly didactic. What can we actually use from this chapter? I guess the most useful thing to me was learning to do the loop. I figure that this will come in handy in the future. I guess I would like to see this course take a step towards practically applying the information in JV to a biological study. Is there anyway that we could use a different biological data set and manipulate it with what we learned in each JV chapter? I think that I would learn a lot more from this and be more motivated in doing the exercises. After all, the purpose of this course is to learn how to use statistics in our projects and studies, and as of now I don't think I am anywhere close. Let's put JV in a different context!! I don't want to learn about R for the sake of doing just that. I want to use R as a tool in my own studies, and the examples in the book have so far been too theoretical.
This sounds like a rebel cry!
ReplyDeleteTo some degree, I can see the value in illustratively using "canned" data in the beginning of the course since real ecological data can be SO MESSY!
It does feel like it's time to start applying this stuff to meaningful data sets, though.
Lead us to revolution, Carmella!
You're right, I hope we get to running some "real" analyses pretty soon. Even if we continue to use their canned data sets, just seeing how to run practical tests (t-tests, chi-square, yadda yadda) would be helpful. I can see the logic - we have to learn the basics of coding in R and programming languages in general before we can do more complex analyses. But I also feel like we've been dragging along w/ the theory for too long, and doing things that are rarely, if ever, useful (qqplots anyone?)
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