Readings

Assigned readings appear in the course schedule. Students are expected to complete the reading assignments in advance of discussion.

Written article summaries

Prior to each Tuesday morning class (or Thursday if there is no class on the Tuesday), write a short summary of the article or articles to be discussed that week: one paragraph summarizing the article(s), and a second paragraph describing your reaction (for example, aspects that you found surprising, interesting, or suspect). The written summary should be less than a page but more than a couple of sentences. Also include two or more discussion questions that might be used to stimulate discussion of the paper.

These article summaries should be completed at least a half-hour prior to the class meeting time. This may be accomplished in a variety of ways. For example:

• Email a PDF or text file to the instructor.
• Post documents to a Box, Google Drive, or DropBox folder that you share with the instructor.
• Post a text or markdown document to a repository at GitHub or Bitbucket.
• Post to a blog, for example with blogdown, GitHub pages, or Wordpress.

For the blog or repository approaches, they should be accessible to the instructor but may otherwise be private.

Homework assignments

There will be three written homework assignments related to the articles under discussion. These homework assignments will involve an effort to reproduce the results of an article, the use of computer simulation to investigate properties of methods discussed in an article, or application of the discussed methods to related biomedical data.

• Homework 1 due 2020-02-27
• Homework 2 likely to be assigned 2020-03-03 and due 2020-03-26