User talk:Blitvak

Week 6 Feedback

I’ve chosen to issue partial feedback sooner than complete feedback later, in case it will help you address issues with Week 8.

Individual and shared work were both submitted on time, although your link template was added to the individual page after the due date.
Requisite links to and from the user page as well as page categories are all present.
Electronic notebook was maintained.
Work was submitted in appropriate frequencies with corresponding summaries.

Work in progress.

—Dondi (talk) 19:20, 25 October 2015 (PDT)

Work was submitted on time, with a small fix applied the next day.
All good-habit items are mostly fulfilled:
- All expected links and categories were noted.
- Electronic notebook content was seen.
- Summaries were consistently provided over a good number of edits, with the lone exception of an uncommented file upload. Even for these, a message is useful because it conveys the purpose or content of the uploaded file.
For the exercises, the following issues were seen; all others were correct:
- You were off by one nucleotide on the transcription start site.
- This off-by-one issue thus made the mRNA strand off-by-one as well, although the sequence was otherwise correct.
- The translation command was generally right, except mis-transcribed: there is a cat info-E.coli-K12.txt sequence that is unnecessarily repeated in the bullet starting with “The final chain of commands is:”. Once the duplicated section was discovered and eliminated, the remaining command sequence was correct.
Shared responses were provided and they came in on time.

—Dondi (talk) 12:52, 7 October 2015 (PDT)

Work was submitted on time, with a few hours to spare. That is some decent wiggle room in case you experience unexpected delays.
All good-habit items are largely fulfilled:
- All expected links and categories were noted.
- The way you phased your work can use some improvement—7 submissions for 11 individual questions and 3 shared questions means that you wrote out multiple answers for some of your submitted edits—but at least you consistently supplied a change summary with all of them.
- You accompanied your work with electronic notes and processes.
All exercises were performed or answered correctly.
Your epiphany about code as symbols requiring interpretation is spot-on. Even outside of a computer science degree, I think this understanding will lead you to some insights as you progress in biology. Get yourself as much practice as you can on the command line to reinforce this view of code.

—Dondi (talk) 00:43, 26 September 2015 (PDT)

Although, the Week 2 scores have not yet been posted, I want to give you feedback on the assignment that you can incorporate to your your Week 3 submission.
First, thank you for submitting your assignment on time.
Your translations are correct.
As for your electronic notebook, you did include some general notes on the procedure. However, your notebook needs to be a little more "personal" describing your exact thought process in how you arrived at the answers. Please be sure to do this for your Week 3 submission.
You wrote something in the Summary field for 4/4 contributions between the Week 1 and Week 2 deadlines, keep up the good work! However, you completed the assignment with just 3 edits to the wiki. This suggests that you are doing the work outside the wiki and then pasting it in. Ideally, you should do the work natively in the wiki environment. Even if this is not the case, you will want to consider saving your changes more frequently so that the granularity of the changes is smaller.
You have completed all of the links requested via your template.
With regards to your comments on your shared journal entry, I knew that the Nirenberg article would be difficult for folks without a biology background and even folks with a biology background. However, I also think it's a good exercise to go back to the original source sometimes and read about discoveries from "the horse's mouth" so to speak.

— Kdahlquist (talk) 23:36, 20 September 2015 (PDT)

I answered your question on my User talk page.
The scores have not been posted yet, but I wanted to give you feedback on your Week 1 Assignment.
You did everything on time—with almost a full day to spare, in fact. Good job, keep it up!
Your assignment is complete except for one small detail: you only used 2 heading levels and not 3. Based on your overall submission I don’t think it’s a question of whether you can do it; but in general it is a good habit to treat homework instructions like specifications or a lab protocol to fulfill precisely. Everything else came in great, and you remembered to summarize your wiki changes all but twice (out of 23). Well done!

—Dondi (talk) 00:39, 10 September 2015 (PDT)

I also answered your question on my user talk page. — Kdahlquist (talk) 23:09, 10 September 2015 (PDT)