BIOL368/F14:Class Journal Week 3

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Isabel Gonzaga

  1. What is your comfort level when working with the online bibliographic databases and tools during the in-class activity? What would increase your comfort level?
    • I felt very comfortable using the online databases. I have used lib guides a lot in my previous classes, and the new websites (PubMed and Web of Science) were not too different than any other database I've used before. Continuing to practice using these sites throughout our next assignments and playing around with the different search options and terms will further increase my comfort level.
  2. What was the easiest aspect of reading/understanding the Markham et al. (1998) article?
    • The easiest aspect of reading through any research article, for me, is the format. The abstract and introduction really prepare you to read the bulk of the article. In knowing the purpose of the experiment and it's end results beforehand, it's easy to understand the smaller details. I also found most of the methods section easy to read and understand, as they were fairly simple methods that I've become familiar with in my other biology classes.
  3. What was the most difficult aspect of reading/understanding the Markham et al. (1998) article?
    • Some of the statistical analyses (e.g. correlation analysis, dS/dN ratios) were difficult for me to understand because I was unfamiliar with them. Overall, I found the article to be very dense and packed with loaded vocabulary terms. Every few paragraphs or so, I would have to stop and dissect sentences and try to recall the meaning of words, and their implications. The article also really forced me to tie together a number of biological concepts all at once (virus replication, evolution, immunological systems, etc.). As I did not take any UD Biology courses last year, I am a little bit rusty on these details. However, I was able to work through the paper without any real problems, it just took a few reads over to fully understand everything.

Isabel Gonzaga 16:25, 15 September 2014 (EDT)

Weekly Assignments

Class Journals

Electronic Lab Notebook


Chloe Jones

  1. What is your comfort level when working with the online bibliographic databases and tools during the in-class activity? What would increase your comfort level?
  2. What was the easiest aspect of reading/understanding the Markham et al. (1998) article?
  3. What was the most difficult aspect of reading/understanding the Markham et al. (1998) article?


  1. I think I was comfortable working with the online databases and tools during the in-class activity because I am taking Ecology and we also just discussed in class how to utilize the Library’s eResources. To be even more comfortable I think I would just have to use the databases more.
  2. I think the easiest aspect of reading the article was the way the authors separated the three different type of participants based on CD4 T cell count. They labeled them in an easy way to understand (i.e. Rapid progressors, nonprogressor, and moderate progressors), by labeling it this way it made it easy for me to follow what was happening with each group.
  3. The difficult aspect of reading this article the fact that there wasn’t enough information provided about the ENV gene in the beginning of the article, so I went along reading the article not really having a clear understanding as to why this particular section was of importance. It wasn’t until I got to the results sections that I understood the importance of this site. Also, the results section was difficult to understand because in terms of divergence and slope there was significance between rapid progressors and nonprogressors but there wasn’t any significance among the moderate progressors and rapid progressors.

Electronic Lab Notebook

Weekly Assignments

Class Journals


Chloe Jones 03:46, 15 October 2014 (EDT)Chloe Jones

Nicole Anguiano

  1. What is your comfort level when working with the online bibliographic databases and tools during the in-class activity? What would increase your comfort level?
    • As I'd worked with online databases before, I was relatively comfortable with working with the online bibliographic databases and tools during the in-class assignment. My comofrt level will likely be increased by continuing to use the tools available.
  2. What was the easiest aspect of reading/understanding the Markham et al. (1998) article?
    • The easiest aspect, for me, was the way that the Methods were separated into several subsections. This made it very easy to know what each part was going to speak about so that there wasn't a large wall of text to read through. It made it easier to understand the methods and figure out what was going on.
  3. What was the most difficult aspect of reading/understanding the Markham et al. (1998) article?
    • The most difficult aspect of the article was the terminology. Many of the terms were not explained, and for several of them it was very difficult to find a definition on the internet for what it meant (such as the term intravisit). Due to the terminology, it took several readings of the article to fully understand what was being said, and I often found myself re-reading the same section repeatedly while trying to create the outline due to the density of the terms.

Nicole Anguiano 02:54, 17 September 2014 (EDT) Nicole Anguiano
BIOL 368, Fall 2014

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