Proteins

Hi, fellow Wikibookians!

I'm a professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Michigan State University (MSU). My laboratory uses computational and experimental methods to study protein structure, and to investigate the molecular forces and events involved in folding and self-assembly.

I'm a relative newbie to Wikibooks, so I hope you'll forgive any accidental lapses on my part. I'm doing my best. I've collected a lot of material for textbooks over the years, which I'll gradually begin to add. Having several young nieces, nephew and a godchild, I'm also interested in producing books for Wikijunior.

My e-mail address is given on my MSU faculty webpage linked above. It's basically the same as my user name here. Anyone who wishes to verify that I am a professor is cordially invited to send me an e-mail, to which I'll be happy to reply. Since professors are notorious for missing e-mails, please make sure that your subject heading has something attention-grabbing in it. Thanks!

Thoughts for textbooks

In general, I like the idea of producing sets of graded books, with each one building on its predecessors. However, I also like the idea of keeping materials modular, so that different people can mix and match modules to make their own textbooks. In the latter case, however, it would be convenient if we could mark the modules with the preliminary knowledge needed.

General physics
Electronics
Geometry
Protein science
Structural biology
Mathematical methods
Bioinformatics
Planetary motion
Classical mechanics
Learning the stars
Craft books
Naval architecture
Music composition
New Testament Greek
Medieval Latin
Rules of games
Localized collections of rocks, plants, animals, etc.
- Have users enter their position and generate the book on the fly from the nearby modules.

Reading level

Think about how to score books for reading level using the word-frequency ranking of Zipf's law. Also think about ways of using a controlled vocabulary, how to list it, and how to flag violations.

Common types of pre-schooler books

Type	Wikibook category	Description	Ideas
Abecedaries	Category:Alphabet books	Illustrations of the alphabet	Greek gods, parts of the body, etc. Make templates for easy production, consistent but also customizable.
Syllabaries	none	Illustrations of syllables in English words	make massively rhyming couplets similar to "cat in the hat"; organize by frequency of occurrence
Word-picture books	none	illustrations to introduce beginning readers (not necessarily children!) to whole words; similar to Richard Scary books
Counting books	none	Illustrations of the numbers 1-10, 1-20 or other small subsets; place in cool symmetric patterns
Simple arithmetic books	none	single digit arithmetic, then up to 20; remember "casting out of nines" trick, and of 99's for addition; get that going early
Color books	none	Illustrations of the basic colors
Parts of the body	none
Telling time	none
Clothing	none
Occupations and daily life	none
Spatial stuff: shapes, sizes, orientations and distance relations	none
Opposites, change and motion	none
Vocabulary books	none

Cool things for kids: farms and farm animals, faraway countries and peoples, dinosaurs, space, stories and myths,...

Remember that many adults would benefit from books to help them learn to read.

Dissemination

Random thoughts

Dealing with subpages, navigation and searching

Special:PrefixIndex (and possibly DPL) can be used to list all the modules in a book. Write a template to list those modules and perhaps their categories; there's no need to have a separate category. That spares us the confusion between books and true categories. Write an extension to the Media software to automatically generate a table of contents template from those modules. Need to work out new method for Subjects and to avoid clutter in Categories; perhaps include an option on Category pages to suppress the display of subpages.

Textbook ideas

Make similarity (same angles) one of the first topics in a beginning geometrical course; exploit symmetries as well. These are more intuitive to beginners. It's important that people get some exposure to actual geometry before launching into Euclid and proofs. Those serve the justify why the methods work. Then move to spherical geometry and see what fails. Also consider using examples from architecture, building construction and ship lofting.