Final project

The final project is a group activity. The first step will be to identify a biological question and some data to answer it with.

Tasks

by 13 March you should:

decide which data set/which questions you are going to pursue
pick a short name for your project (letters, numbers, and underscores only please) and create a new repository with this name; whoever creates it should invite the other project participant(s) as well as @bbolker and @dushoff.
upload your data (if possible)
write a README.md file for your repository that says briefly what you plan to do and says where the data is/are

by 17 March you should:

update your README with thoughts and questions about next steps
Start a file called journal.md where you record anything you do that involves looking at patterns in the data (i.e., anything but data cleaning). The journal is also a good place to record plans for how you will proceed with your analysis
- (for example, “if the diagnostic plots look OK, we will look at the summary table and use the clarity of the response to phosphorus as our main outcome”. (See Simmons, Nelson, and Simonsohn (2011).)

Presentations

We will have presentations on Tue 31 March and 7 April. Presentation slots will be assigned at random. Let us know well in advance if you have constraints or problems.

The presentation is not expected to be a finished work; you will still have three more weeks to work on your writeup. Outline your scientific question, the approaches you are taking, and outstanding questions about how to go forward. You can include one or two results (or preliminary results), if you have them.

Please plan to finish on time. Time is short, and we want to be able to comment when appropriate.

The presentation is worth two ordinary assignments.

Writeup

In the final project writeup, you should introduce a scientific question and present the results of a group of statistical analyses. that answer the question. You don’t need to write a formal paper, but you should present both the scientific and statistical background clearly. Discuss what choices you made, and if necessary what further statistical steps you should take in the future.

Your writeup should be posted to your repository as a PDF file. Please do not include R code in your writeup. All analyses should be clearly documented and reproducible; your README.md file should describe the location of code and data files, and the steps necessary to reproduce the analyses.

The writeup is due at noon on Tue 21 April. It is worth four ordinary assignments.

Simmons, Joseph P., Leif D. Nelson, and Uri Simonsohn. 2011. “False-Positive Psychology Undisclosed Flexibility in Data Collection and Analysis Allows Presenting Anything as Significant.” Psychological Science 22 (11): 1359–66. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797611417632.