Podcasts and Missing PP
The podcasts for BIO220 and BIO131 are up in the respective media archives. I have also uploaded the missing PP file for BIO220.
Presentation Project Assignments – BIO220
The following is a list of the Assignments for the Presentation. I assign these by random number so that I don’t have a million people wanting the same topic. All of the topics are interesting microbes, with plenty of information to work from. You should start getting your materials together so that you can contemplate the materials in light of what we learn through the term.
One the course page is the PDF of the presentation rubric and outline. On the last page you find the list of organisms by number. Match your assigned number to the list and that is your organism.
Podcast of First Lecture
Here is the podcast of the first lecture in 220. I will add them to the media archive on a weekly basis, typically over the weekend.
First Day
Today is the first day of classes. Good luck and I will try to help you as much as you help yourself. Please remember that all static information is archived on the course website (docireland.org) and all the dynamic announcements and such are listed here in the blog. While it is not necessary to access the online material at all, it may be more timely for you.
Website 4.0 online
The new web site design is now live. There has been a significant redesign of the general visual style for the site and a number of tweaks behind the scenes. I have switched from a table/object design (which had problems with IE) to a CSS/javascript approach. All the major pages can be accessed from the drop-down menu at the top, and if you have problems with Javascript (though most browsers should be fine by now) there is a link to the site map at the bottom. To access the main website, where I store the static information for the course, you can go to the following address.
Website Outages
Over the remainder of this week I will be uploading materials for the new semester. This update includes an entire refresh of the core website design and will result in a number of the old static addresses no longer being valid. Please excuse the mess as the new site comes on line. The transition should be complete by Monday August 30th.
Website Going Dark
I will be taking the website down for Summer updates within the next week. The website will return by the start of Fall term.
Synthetic Life
Venter’s recent accomplishment of transferring a synthetic chromosome into an emptied cell and then achieving subsequent replication is much more philosophically profound than most reporters have noted. While the biology of the experiment was not terribly earth-shattering, the chromosome is an identical copy of the template, the impact is more in what this isn’t. For the first time in human history there is an organism that has not arisen from the unbroken chain of common descent that all extant life shares. The chromosome, though a copy, is totally synthetic in nature. This represents our first step towards a truly synthetic life-form, eventually based on something other than the current paradigm of life.
BIO131 Final Grades
The final is graded. The average score was a 60% and the high score was a 90%, this gives a normalization of 10%. The grades are all entered in the spreadsheet and I ask you to look them over before Thursday morning, when I will be entering them into the JCC system.
BIO220 Final Grades
The final grades for BIO220 are attached. The added points for attendance of the presentations is added as a column and the final letter grade is also assigned. Please look over the grades for errors and report back to me any problems by Wednesday morning, when I will post them to the JCC servers.