The Emergency closing website now has the following message:
Due to the inclement weather, the University will delay opening on Wednesday, January 28th, until 10:00 am. First shift "Emergency Support Personnel" should report as scheduled. All other employees should report to work by 10:00 am.Morning classes on the Storrs Campus are canceled and will resume at 10:00 am
Drive carefully, if you go out today, and I'll see you in class on Friday.
Although the Emergency closing web page does not say anything about closing, the recorded message (10:30pm 1/27) on the emergency closing information line -- (860) 486-3768 -- indicates that the University is closed until 10:00am this morning. As a result, 8:00am and 9:00am classes are canceled. I'll be on campus shortly. Call me at my office or e-mail me if you have any questions. In any case, we won't have a lecture today. I'll revise and compress the schedule and have a new version posted later today. I still expect to hand out the first problem assignment on Friday.
Notes for tomorrow's lecture are now available.
At this time the University hasn't announced anything about closing tomorrow as a result of the snow expected tonight. I'm planning to be here tomorrow morning. But this is what the National Weather Service has to say about what's coming.
310 PM EST Tue Jan 27 2004... Winter Storm Warning continues for tonight and Wednesday...
This warning includes northern Connecticut... all of Rhode Island and Massachusetts.
The highest storm totals are expected south of the Mass Pike... including northern Connecticut... Rhode Island and southeast Massachusetts where totals of 6 to 10 inches are expected. Locally as much as 12 inches may fall in a few spots. Storm totals of 4 to 8 inches are expected along and north of the Mass Pike... with the lowest amounts near the New Hampshire and Vermont borders.
These totals are slightly lower than previously thought... due to a storm track a little farther to the south of New England.
Snow will develop early this evening in western Massachusetts and northern Connecticut... then spread north and east... reaching eastern Massachusetts around midnight.
The peak of the storm will be late tonight into Wednesday morning... from about 1 am to 8 am... when the snow will come down heavy at times.
The snow will taper off Wednesday from west to east.
Travel is expected to become difficult tonight into Wednesday morning... due to the combination of poor visibility and snow covered roads.
Stay tuned to NOAA Weather Radio or your local media for updates on this winter storm.
Be sure to check the Emergency Closings link that is available here and listen to weather reports on radio or TV. You can also e-mail me. I'll be checking in regularly, either from here or from home depending on conditions. Above all, use common sense. Don't travel if conditons are unsafe. Population genetics is wonderful, interesting, and important, but it's not
I am taping Kent's lectures, so let me know if you want to borrow any of the tapes. Being audiotapes they are obviously of limited value since you won't know what he was writing on the board. But if you have to miss a lecture, listening to the tape as you read over the notes posted on the web site will help you understand the notes, I think. My tapes will go back only about the last 5 lectures before I need to recycle them, so don't wait too long to let me know if you want to borrow one.
And speaking of notes posted on the web site, I really encourage you to read them before lecture. Yeah, yeah, I know you've heard that in every course you've ever taken, but I think his lectures really will be easier to follow if you've familiarized yourself with the material beforehand.
Robynn
Notes for the 26 January lecture are now available. If you have a chance to look over the notes for tomorrow's lecture before class, you can skip over the "Testing Hardy Weinberg" section, if you'd like to. I've decided to move things around a bit. We'll return to that topic next Wednesday after we've covered inbreeding coefficients.
I've won the battle with my automated HTML conversion. The HTML version of the notes should now be readable on line. Let me know if you notice any problems.
One of the underlying themes in this course is that Bayesian analysis has substantial advantages over traditional statistical analysis, especially when the problems are complex. Now there's evidence for my intuitive argument that the process of Bayesian inference mimics the way we learn about the world.
Playing a fast-moving tennis ball is a complex task. Tracking the ball is hard and vision provides imperfect information about its bounce location. Based on visual input a player can estimate how likely different bounce locations are (red shading on cover). In theory, it's possible to improve on this estimate using information available on a longer time scale: not all locations are a priori equally probable. During a match there will be a probability distribution, the 'prior', of possible locations (green). Bayesian theory tells us that an optimal estimate of the location (contours) is obtained by combining the prior with the visual estimate. In an abstraction of this tennis task, Körding and Wolpert provide evidence that subjects learn the prior distribution and integrate it with visual input in a way consistent with a bayesian process.
Full text from Nature.
In case you just happen to have discoverd this site before the first lecture, you'll be pleased to know (or maybe not) that notes for the first lecture on Wednesday, 21 January are now available. If you're dying for more, there's a decent chance that the lecture notes for Friday will be available before the weekend's over.
In any case, the easiest way to find the notes associated with a particular lecture is to click on the link on the "Schedule" page. That will open up a page with a brief description of the lecture and links to HTML and PDF versions of the notes (and to associated readings, if there are any).
It's also worth noting that I've added information on how the course will be graded to the :"Overview" page and that you'll now find information on when the problems and projects will be assigned and are due so that you can plan ahead, if you're so inclined.
A tentative lecture schedule, PDF copies of old versions of lecture notes for some lectures, a list of resources, and a discussion of why I'm not using a textbook have been posted. The lecture schedule is liable to change a little, but it won't change a lot.