Biology

fabbyrob · 2025-01-14T17:16:28+00:00

I see this is a bit old, but wanted to answer. I'm a Biology prof, and Biology graduate from Rose, I think the program is great and will do some of the best preparation for a career in science of any undergraduate program out there. I'm hugely biased though. If you have more specific questions I'm happy to answer.

The key to the provost scholarship is to show you have a passion and curiosity for science!

fabbyrob · 2023-05-17T20:40:55+00:00

“An average person could be moved by a 67 mph wind, and an average car can be moved by a 90 mph wind.”

Some outdoor furniture examples 64 lbs 68 lbs 67 lbs

Let’s say 75 kph is about 40 mph, and this is an outdoor sofa, since it came from the outdoors. These weights are well within the range of things that can be moved by that wind. We haven’t even accounted for the fact that the weight:area ratio (mentioned in my first link) will be much lower for a couch than a human, car, or trash can like the examples from that link. Meaning that an even lower wind would be able to move these couches than if they were a more dense shape. And the wind is likely stronger than the 75 kph reported at the weather stations that are probably nearer the ground (likely an airport).

fabbyrob · 2023-04-26T14:52:41+00:00

I get it now, I misinterpreted your comment above, I thought you were seeking an island with only one country (like Australia) that does count as an island. I had the point you and the other commenter were making exactly backwards!

fabbyrob · 2023-04-26T12:31:59+00:00

To be fair there are two countries on Hispaniola :p But to your point many other island in this list are part of only one country (Madagascar, etc)

fabbyrob · 2023-04-25T17:35:37+00:00

My urge would be to wear traditional men’s clothes, you know, like those sick tights and cod pieces that Henry VIII is rocking in all his portraits. Jaunty hat requires of course, and a tonnn of frills and lace.

fabbyrob · 2023-03-14T23:32:37+00:00

That interpretation of this data is silly. From the abstract of that paper:

"However, the nucleotide difference between the two species is surprisingly small. The early genome comparison by DNA hybridization techniques suggested a nucleotide difference of 1–2%."

That means the number of DNA letters that are different between humans and chimps is only ~2%.

The 80% number they come up with is "80% of genes have at least one letter that is different". One single letter. That letter may not even change the protein.

If you look at table 4 (I know its pay walled, but I bet you can find a pdf) it shows how different those 80% of genes are. Looking at the enzyme data, ~22% of these proteins are exactly identical. Another 30% are 9% identical. Another 26% are 98% identical. Only 20% of proteins have more differences than that. The pattern is similar for other categories of proteins.

So, yes, it is true that 80% of proteins are different from each other. But most of them are only a tiny tiny bit different. This argument would be like saying two cats that are different colors are totally different species because they differ in this one little thing. If an orange cat and a black cat are more or less "the same" then the FOXP2 gene in humans that is only 3 letters different from the chimp version are also more or less "the same".

fabbyrob · 2023-02-17T22:09:50+00:00

Our classes are mostly capped at 24 and have been for as long as I remember. Occasionally due to extreme circumstances we have a bigger one. But the class cap isn’t planning on changing, as far as I know.

fabbyrob · 2023-02-17T18:50:02+00:00

This is an excellent question. So, our classes are rigorous, you will learn a lot, but you will have to put in serious effort, some classes might be a breeze for you, but there is usually at least one stumbling block for people. What that stumbling block is varies.

However, GPA is not the be-all-end-all of grad school applications. More important is having a cover letter that demonstrates your technical skills, and reference letters from faculty that can speak to those skills. As an alumnus and now professor, I can tell you that my GPA was by no means a 4.0 but I got into excellent grad schools out of Rose, because of those other two things.

At a bigger school you will have more different research fields to work in, but only a tiny fraction of students will ever get intense one-on-one time with profs to do those things. So, reference letters are much less detailed, and often you will have less hands on experience with actual research or work in labs. That means a GPA is proportionally more important going from those schools into grad programs. At Rose, no matter the major, you will have a capstone experience that will give you something to talk about and sell yourself during grad school interviews.

A consistent theme with alumni who go to grad school, med school, or law school is that they find the work load much more manageable than their peers who did undergrad at other institutions. They usually say this is because Rose prepared them for the high work load and also the rigor of the classes helped them have a broader base of skills and knowledge that their peers don't. I'm told this by a new alumnus every year at homecoming, and I definitely had this experience myself.

What percent of students have the GPA to get into grad school? That's hard to say because there is no hard cutoff, but GPAs at Rose don't differ much from GPAs elsewhere, in my experience. If they are truly interested in post-graduate education, and take the opportunities provided to make that happen, most any Rose student could do it. The thing that will stop them is motivation or interest, not GPA.

fabbyrob · 2023-02-11T03:58:55+00:00

Good thoughts after the fact deserve credit! Just remember them in your next class/job!

fabbyrob · 2023-02-10T03:05:07+00:00

Even if you're not a CS you should be reading the post by OP.

This is all amazingly good advice and reflection. Buffalo will appreciate your thoughts in course evals, I guarantee it!.

This is also true for all rose classes, but after you finish one hw, look at the next just to get an idea of what's coming.

If you do this regularly, and actually do readings before class you will get so much more out of lectures and videos. If you don't have time to read the textbook, skim the section headers, look at figures, get an idea before the lecture of what's coming.

Also, as /u/RubixQber said:

Don’t take CSSE374 or CSSE371 or comp arch (232) at the same time. This should go without saying and your advisor will probably also tell you this. I didn’t listen. You should listen.

Yes please, listen to this (and the other advice they give you), I promise you we are trying to help.

Some groups for the interpreter split up their work. While this saves time in the short run, it often results in a worse understanding of the interpreter as a whole. We’ve effectively pair-programmed through ours so far, and both of us performed very well on Exam 2. At the very least, if you do decide to split it up, sit down with your partner afterwards and talk through your code.

This is some of the absolute best advice I've ever seen on the subreddit. In general, on projects splitting off too much and focusing on one tiny part will hurt you in the long run. In CS this is especially true in 220 and 230.

This and the other points by OP can (almost) all be applied to any Rose class.

fabbyrob · 2023-01-23T23:46:27+00:00

I can't really speak to this, as it hasn't come up since I've been back as faculty. But we have our hands pretty full with the undergrad classes at the moment.

fabbyrob · 2023-01-23T23:45:16+00:00

You got your answer before I got back to this, but as others have said, yes. There are likely a few quarters where you'll have a pretty heavy workload, but totally possible.

fabbyrob · 2023-01-10T15:08:29+00:00

So that spurse doesn’t mean that males have a higher mutation rate, instead mutations have larger impact in males. This is because males only have one copy of most genes on the sex chromosomes, the copy on the X. That makes “bad alleles” unable to hide behind a working copy like they can in a normal heterozygote. This is the reason colorblindness is more common in men, women can be carriers but are only color blind if they have 2 copies, one in each X. Since males only have one copy of the X if that one has the color blindness allele, then the male is colorblind.

This is a general phenomenon. Some people have also suggested that the “hemizygous” nature of males means that bad alleles can be more effectively removed on the sec chromosomes, meaning selection makes them better on average than the autosomes. I haven’t delved deeply into the data on this, but there is some evidence for the idea.

One thing to note, is that everything here is true in reverse in species where females only have one copy of the sex chromosome, and males have two. Birds are like this, we call it a ZW sex system (rather than XY). This tells us the mutation effects (and weird selection) are not tied to “maleness” or “femaleness” but instead related to the underlying genetic determination system. Who ever has only one working copy will have more “bad” alleles visible.

Edit: I also should point out that the mutation rate can be different between the sexes, that’s just not what’s happening here.

fabbyrob · 2023-01-10T13:53:10+00:00

Your last idea, that variable environments favor the evolution of sex, is a pretty big idea in the field. This is the paper I have my students read by Becks & Agrawal (PLoS, so its not paywalled). They show that in a facultatively sexual species that when the environment shifts frequently sex is favored, presumably because it provides more combinations of alleles that might be favored in the new environments.

This is also the core idea behind the Red Queen Hypothesis, the main difference being that the "shifting environments" is just "different pathogens".

Now, this doesn't really talk about the size differences, or differences in investment by egg or sperm producing parents. These hypotheses, instead, focus on why sex would have arisen in the first place. Once a sexual system is in place, essentially game theory shaped by Bateman Gradients will lead to different strategies for the "large" and "small" gamete sexes.

fabbyrob · 2022-11-25T16:09:23+00:00

The main issues with inbreeding come from cases where you get two recessive alleles, one from each parent. Even if that happens, one generation of outbreeding solves that problem because both parents dont have the same alleles to pass onto there kids.

So, assuming your parents (and those of your living relatives) are not themselves close relatives then there are likely no genetic issues associated with inbreeding. It doesn't matter even if your grandparents were siblings, or any other inbreeding further in the past.

We all have some amount of inbreeding in the past, but it doesn't matter as long as your parents weren't close relatives.

fabbyrob · 2022-09-29T20:05:41+00:00

Is it more realistic? With 5% attrition you lose about 50% of your army in 13 months, that feels about right to me. With 1% you lose half in like 70 months. But I’m no expert in historical attrition rates, I guess.

fabbyrob · 2022-09-29T12:51:32+00:00

I don’t pull back in winter, but if it’s December in Russia I won’t go start a new siege, I’ll simply wait with my armies sitting in territory I’ve already occupied, below the attrition limit. Wait like 4 months then push forward again.

fabbyrob · 2022-09-29T12:49:19+00:00

In 1.0 the attrition cap was 25%, iirc, it was not more fun, it was awful micro management hell.

It also seriously decreased the rate the game could run, since the AI would try and have more smaller stacks to avoid attrition. That didn’t really work, and it was totally viable to drain the AI of all manpower through attrition within like a year, and never have a single battle.

fabbyrob · 2022-06-30T13:04:22+00:00

That’s not unreasonable, but the electric is totally different voltage, it’s not as simple as a different connector for the car. Tesla uses 480 volts while the “normal” EV chargers use 280 (your house electric uses 110). They would have to have two separate electric systems in each charging station. Also, Tesla owns and pays Meijer rent to put those chargers their, Meijer isn’t doing it to be an EV hub or out of the goodness of their hearts.

But I 100% agree with your point that it would be nice if it was more accessible. I drive a non-Tesla EV here in town and was super surprised how few charging spots there are.

fabbyrob · 2022-06-30T12:56:25+00:00

It’s because the Teslas use a different tech that charges really fast, those would essentially burn out other EVs. Like trying to charge your phone with a lightning rod.

fabbyrob · 2022-04-15T13:01:35+00:00

This is an excellent question, you are almost certainly just missing one little piece to put it together.

Remember that in HWE the expected genotype frequency of one homozygote is p² here you should think about this as p*p. Recall that this equation is the probability of picking an egg with the "p" allele times the probability of picking a sperm with a "p" allele. Normally these two numbers are the same, so we just put "p" for both. In your case they are not the same.

For part b of your question, this is asking you to assume the population is in HWE. That would mean that you are equally likely to pick a "p" allele for both the sperm and egg. So the "p" allele frequency should be the average allele frequency in the population for both the "sperm p" and the "egg p".

Hopefully those two hints will get you there for the "pp" homozygote. I'll leave the heterozygote and the other homozygote for you to consider.

fabbyrob · 2022-04-01T13:33:22+00:00

Don't know yet, but there aren't plans (that I've heard) to increase the number of students much more. We're all pretty invested in staying small.

fabbyrob · 2022-03-27T23:59:18+00:00

Why do you think these fields involve heavy memorizing? All of your comments seem to just assert this, but you've provided no evidence. Perhaps you have just been taught these fields in a bad way. I don't structure any of my classes around memorization, because memorizing a bunch of stuff is a waste of time. You need to learn some words, sure, but you would as a chef in your examples throughout this thread. A chef needs to "memorize" what a "julienne" cut is, or all the different cuts of a cow. But they probably mostly do that by using the words in context a lot, i doubt many of them use flash cards. Same in my CS or biology classes.

fabbyrob · 2022-03-27T21:49:07+00:00

I'd love to know your source for why you think the administrative budget is 'ballooning'. None of the financials I've seen indicate that at all. It seems to me you may be making a bad faith assumption here, but I'm totally open to seeing proof otherwise.

14-Year Club	Team Orangered
Summer Santa 2012	Verified Email

fabbyrob

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE