Spring2013_Lab13

=Lab 13 - Yeastie boys.=

For your presentations, keep this stuff in mind:
Email me your presentations by 5pm on Monday.

Follow your rubrics in your lab notebooks. Here are some other tips:


 * **Background**: Before you present your hypothesis, you should present some background material. Give your audience some sort of framework so that they can understand why your hypothesis is so cool. And it is cool. Also, remember, your hypothesis tells the audience what you will expect to see. You'll revisit this later in the conclusion, when you explain why your results did or did not match your expectations.
 * **Procedure** (also called "Methods"): This is the things that you did in order to set up and run your experiment. If you do a good job, then someone else will be able to listen to your presentation and be able to replicate your experiment. If you leave something out, then they can't replicate it and that's a science fail.
 * **Results**: Here you present your audience with the actual data, but you don't just vomit the data at them, present it in a nice way. The best way is to figure out what kind of variables your experiment manipulated, figure out what you measured, and present a figure or graph or plot or table which easily and intuitively shows the relationship in your results. Be mindful, though, that the relationship that you see in your results may not be what you expected. Try not to manipulate your data to get the results that you expect. The data is what it is. It's safer to just say what you found, and state it in the simplist form possible. Then, step back and ask "why"? That bring us to the next section...
 * **Conclusion**: Why the heck did you get the results that you did? What biological processes were involved? What effect do you think the variables had on your dependent variable? Here you can get creative, but most of all you should present a scientific rational to explain what happened. It's not proper to say that "it was quantum physics" and leave it at that. You should go back to your introduction, think about the background material that frames your hypothesis, and then go deeper into the science and let inspiration strike you. There is no wrong answer, only un-thought-out answers. I will only grade you on the fact that you attempted a scientific answer that related to the background material you present or was presented in the lab manual.

If you have any questions, please email me, or stop by my office on Monday. I will be around on the 2nd floor of Tucker all day, except for lunch. It might be best to set up an appointment before the weekend or early Monday, and then I'll be sure to be around. Good luck!

Other things of note:
Explain your controls -- why did you choose these controls?

Analysis -- explain how you did your analysis. Did you use a mean or median? Why did you choose that measure?

Problems -- It's also a good idea to talk about what went wrong. Something always goes fubar. But it's best not to hide it (even though that would be nice), but just face it head on and explain how you would do things differently, so if someone wants to replicate your experiment, you can save them the headache.

Avoid saying "we proved..." -- In science, you can only disprove at truth, you can't prove something to be true. When you want to say "we proved that..." it's better to say "Our evidence supports ...." or "This evidence suggests that..."

Other stuff -- The presentation should be about 2-3 minutes per person. That comes to 8-12 minutes or so per presentation.