I believe that four principles are essential to success in science, and I encourage all students to practice these principles when they’re in the Steen Lab. I have also established some specific rules and expectations that are in line with those principles.
Principles Be creative Read the literature: papers that you’re assigned to read, and papers that you find on your own. Discuss ideas whenever possible: with your lab mates, with Drew, with other students and faculty inside and outside of our department.
The SteenLab server is named marie for Marie Tharp, a pioneering oceanographer who used sounding data collected by others to create the first high-quality bathymetric map of the world’s oceans. In that spirit, we hope that you will use marie to gain a new understanding of how the planet and the microbial world work.
Getting an account To access marie, you will need the following:
A University of Tennessee email account.
Understanding vectorization One of the real advantages of R is vectorization: the ability of R to do the same operation on each element of a vector.
Think of it this way: in R, we can add two objects using simple syntax like this: y <- a + b. This works if each of a and b are single numbers:
a <- 2 b <- 3 y <- a + b y [1] 5 …but it works just as well if we add two vectors: