Welcome back!

I hope everyone had a safe and enjoyable Thanksgiving. I had a lot of work to do over the last several days, but my holiday was quite pleasant nonetheless. Of course I'm not posting this message just to give you an update on my Thanksgiving. I want to point out a couple of changes concerning the remaining assignments before I see you in lecture tomorrow. (Don't worry. It means less work, not more.)

You'll see on the Overview page of the course website, I've eliminated one of the short projects I was originally planning to assign, and I've adjusted the weight assigned to each project and problem a little to compensate for the missing eleven points.

You'll also see on the course schedule page that I've changed the date when I plan to assign the final project to Monday, 4 December (from Wednesday, 6 December). The final project will still be due on Wednesday, 13 December.

It's also possible that the final project will be a bit different from those you've done so far. In particular, I'm thinking that I may ask you to read and evaluate a paper on molecular phylogeography or on analysis of selection at the molecular level. If I can, I'll get at a copy of at least some of the original data so that you can reanalyze it if you want to, but the emphasis will be on evaluating work that others have done rather than doing a problem yourself. If you're interested, you can refer to Project #3 from Spring 2004 for an example of what you might be in for.