Cannibalism, Kuru, and Mad Cows: Prion Disease As a "Choose-Your-Own-Experiment" Case Study to Simulate Scientific Inquiry in Large Lectures.

Despite significant efforts to reform undergraduate science education, students often perform worse on assessments of perceptions of science after introductory courses, demonstrating a need for new educational interventions to reverse this trend. To address this need, we created An Inexplicable Disease, an engaging, active-learning case study that is unusual because it aims to simulate scientific inquiry by allowing students to iteratively investigate the Kuru epidemic of 1957 in a choose-your-own-experiment format in large lectures. The case emphasizes the importance of specialization and communication in science and is broadly applicable to courses of any size and sub-discipline of the life sciences.

An Implementation of Bayesian Adaptive Regression Splines (BARS) in C with S and R Wrappers.

BARS (DiMatteo, Genovese, and Kass 2001) uses the powerful reversible-jump MCMC engine to perform spline-based generalized nonparametric regression. It has been shown to work well in terms of having small mean-squared error in many examples (smaller than known competitors), as well as producing visually-appealing fits that are smooth (filtering out high-frequency noise) while adapting to sudden changes (retaining high-frequency signal). However, BARS is computationally intensive. The original implementation in S was too slow to be practical in certain situations, and was found to handle some data sets incorrectly. We have implemented BARS in C for the normal and Poisson cases, the latter being important in neurophysiological and other point-process applications. The C implementation includes all needed subroutines for fitting Poisson regression, manipulating B-splines (using code created by Bates and Venables), and finding starting values for Poisson regression (using code for density estimation created by Kooperberg). The code utilizes only freely-available external libraries (LAPACK and BLAS) and is otherwise self-contained. We have also provided wrappers so that BARS can be used easily within S or R.