CS 3114-01 / IDS 2294-07
Bioinformatic Computing

  May Term, 2011
Professor: Dr. Tylene S. Garrett Office Phone:
859-233-8170
Office: 109 Brown Science Center Home Phone:
502-829-5676
email address: tgarrett@transy.edu Fax:
859-233-8171
Office Hours: 
(and by appointment)
MON
TUE
WED
THU
FRI
2:00 - 3:00
Virtual Evening Hour
2:00 - 3:30
Virtual Evening Hour
2:00 - 3:00
Virtual Evening Hour
2:00 - 3:30
Virtual Evening Hour

2:00 - 3:00
Virtual Evening Hour

Virtual Office Hours: I will be available either in the Moodle Chat Room or monitoring Moodle Forums in the evening during the week.  I will also attempt to answer evening emails in a timely fashion, but not after 10:00 p.m.
Class Meets: Monday through Friday, Noon - 2:00 pm, in BSC/106.
Course Prerequisites:

No prior background or experience is assumed.

Textbook:

Ruby Programming for Medicine and Biology; Jules J. Berman; Jones and Bartlett; 2008

Purpose:

This course is designed for non-programmers who want to be able to function in a professional medical environment.  Most of the computational work in biology and medicine can be described as a collection of common tasks.  Those tasks include extracting subsets of data from large biomedical databases, analyzing the data contained in those databases using a variety of strategies, indexing and autocoding large texts and databases, scrubbing large datasets that contain confidential data, and merging data from various databases.  Solutions to those common computational tasks will be accomplished using the programming language Ruby, which requires no prior programming experience. 

 

Software: Ruby, available for all platforms, free, downloadable here: http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/downloads/

Attendance: You are expected to attend all classes.  Your final grade in the course will be reduced by one full letter grade for each unexcused absence beyond the first one.  Please note that if you are taking the course as CR/NC, you must have an average of 70 after any attendance deductions in order to earn credit for the course.

Projects: There will be Daily Problems assigned this semester, as well as one Discovery Project.  Each project requires a write-up (see ProblemTemplate on Moodle) and file of source code.  Dropbox will be used to submit assignments. 

Online Class Info

Some of this info will change during the course of the semester.  All pertinent class information will be available though Moodle, including very useful FAQ's, tips, hints, suggestions from other students, etc., available through the Discussion Forums.
 

Calculating Average:

Component

Percentage

Discovery Project

20%

Average of Daily Projects:

80%

 

Determining Grade:
Average Grade   Average Grade    Average  Grade
58% D -   60% D   67% D+
70% C-
72% C
77% C+
80% B-
82% B
87% B+
90% A-
92% A
97% A+