S366: TMA-4

TMA-4 - the project.

In this TMA you have to write up two reports, in the style of a scientific paper. Its a little weird as there is a limit of 2500 words split how you like between the two papers. This is not too bad, as there is a lot of basic stuff to write about in the first paper, that you can then reference in the second. Calculations and meaning of variables etc.

I did mine on the computer project, which was the analysis of a virtual populations of the Adonis blue butterfly. It was a lot of analysis of data. Analysing virtual gels of DNA of the microsatellite markers. Then there were lots of calculations to see how related populations are, and what this might mean. This meant quite a lot of quality time with excel. The calculations aren't hard, but there are a lot of them, and its easy to get so of the steps the wrong way around.

Then there are references to find, and conclusions to write. I got a little confused about some of the statistical texts, not sure how to see if they were significant or not,  but in the end I did something that seemed to sort of read ok, and got not too bad a mark.

After many reads, I got a friend to also ready it, and based on comments I had, I went back and explained a lot more what the variables were and what they meant, which in turn made me understand them a lot better. So that was useful, but I did miss out a few key things in the report.

So - one TMA left.

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