The classes aren't ready until early afternoon my time zone. I made it through "Computational Molecular Evolution" but I hardly started "Coding the Matrix". It didn't really help that CME quizzes had several errors. It's hard enough to learn the material without having the quizzes graded incorrectly. It lead me to question what I was doing. I've learned to take notes from the PAUP quizzes, and this really helped keep me gounded. PAUP is a bioinformatics program written by David L. Swofford. He granted our instructor the right to use the program in our lessons. Since I don't plan on purchasing the product I'll have to learn quite a bit about the methods and terminology. Rosalind seems to be teaching some of it. I don't know how much. This weeks lessons dealt with building trees from pair differences, observed differences between sets of aligned strands of DNA. The same techniques work for proteins.
The "Coding the Matrix" class also had some problems with the popup quizzes during the lectures. I wasn't feeling lucky. Still, I keep learning lots of stuff at a very quick, for me, pace. I'll probably have to spend several evenings to get through the lab.
At least I got my python FASTA format importer to work in only 15 lines of code, including some limited format validation. It looks like lots of people have implemented nearly identical code so there's nothing special here. I'll probably only do a problem every couple of days until I get the Coursera work for the week done.
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