User talk:Yaniv Maddahi

Week 2 Feedback

• Thank you for submitting your assignment on time. Here is the feedback on your assignment.
• You wrote something in the summary field for 50 out of 61 saves (100%) since Week 1, which is very good, remember, we are aiming for 100%.
• As we discovered in office hours, your individual journal page originally had the incorrect name (Week 1 instead of Week 2).
• The purpose that you wrote was more of a "learning" purpose instead of a "scientific" purpose.
  • You wrote: The objectives of this exercise are to interact with models and to discover new ways in which models can be used and implemented in an academic environment.
  • I would revise it to be: The purpose of this assignment is to explore the SIR model of infectious disease transmission by altering the model parameters and interpreting the results. The results will be related to the current COVID-19 pandemic
• With regard to your questions from the video:
  • If the area under the curve is the same whether it is a sharp peak or flattened curve, why flatten the curve in the first place? Aren’t the same amount of people getting sick either way?
    • Yes, the same number of people getting sick, but by flattening the curve, we won't overwhelm hospital resources. If too many people get sick at the same time, there may not be enough hospital beds for them. If the infections are spread out over time, the people can be cared for better, preventing deaths.
  • How do the equations account for external factors/variables?
    • I'm not sure what you mean by this.
• Besides answering the questions posed in the protocol, you need to explain what you did. You can copy the assignment and then modify the instructions to be in the past tense and be specific to what you did.
• Your interpretations of the model graphs after you manipulated the parameters were a little short. You could have gone into a little more detail about what each of the lines on the graph was showing.
• Your explanation of the Giordano et al. (2020) article and XKCD comic were good.
• Your conclusion needs to also be more specific. Restate in more detail some of the main findings that you made from manipulating the model parameters.
• Make sure to acknowledge your partner. If you did not work together, make a statement to that effect.
• You are missing citations in your references list to the Giordano et al. (2020) paper, the SIR model website (for the initial questions you answered), the video webinar, and to the Epstein article you read for the shared journal.
• To answer your questions that you posted in the class journal:
  • What is the way in which it attacks the body? By what mechanism?
    • Some of this was covered in the video we watched in Week 3.
  • Why has the virus continued to be so prevalent? Why does it seem to only be increasing and not decreasing?
    • It is the exponential nature of infections that the disease is being transmitted from infected to susceptible. The only measures we have so far to slow the spread are face masks, social distancing, limiting crowds, hand washing.
  • What do scientists know so far about a vaccine? How would the vaccine work?
    • There are several vaccine trials underway around the world. A vaccine works by triggering the body to mount an immune response in the absence of infection.

— Kam D. Dahlquist (talk) 12:49, 1 October 2020 (PDT)

Week 1 Feedback

I will be posting the feedback on your weekly assignments on your talk page. You will be able to earn back the points you lost on the Week 1 assignment by making the changes listed below by the Week 3 deadline on 12:01 am, Thursday, September 24. Here is the feedback for Week 1.

• Thank you for submitting your assignment on time.
• You completed all of the tasks except for the following:
  • You wrote something in the summary field 40 out of 55 saves (73%). That is pretty good, but remember, we are aiming for 100%.
  • Please include your full name at the top of the page, instead of just the "User:" page name.
  • For your snail mail address, use "Department of Biology" instead of LSB 101 (building and room numbers aren't used on the official postal mail addresses.
  • In your list of courses, say the full name of the course "Bioinformatics Laboratory" instead of just "Bioinformatics". It may matter to others to see which courses are labs.
  • You need to have three levels of headers, "==", "===", and "====". You are missing the "====" level.
  • Please include a link to your User page on your template.
  • For your list of assignments and class journals on your template, go back and add labels to the links. For example, instead of [[BIOL368/F20:Week 1]], use [[BIOL368/F20:Week 1 | Week 1 Assignment]].
  • Note that there is no Week 13 assignment, so you can remove that link from your list of assignments, individual journal, and class journal links. There is no Week 1 individual journal, the user page takes the place of the Week 1 individual journal page. The individual pages start with Week 2.
  • Put your Academic Honesty statement and wiki signature at the bottom of your Acknowledgments section instead of at the bottom of the page.
  • Please cite the Denning and Janovy readings in your References section.
• It's interesting to me that you saw yourself as more of a biologist before reading the Janovy chapter than after. If you find yourself taking the initiative to learn more biology on your own, that qualifies for me! While I do have more experience in the field, I consider all of us in this class to be biologists. Hopefully that identity will become stronger over the course of the semester.

— Kam D. Dahlquist (talk) 11:19, 17 September 2020 (PDT)