The role of personality and interests in predicting academic major selection

I chose to examine if the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI; Briggs & Myers, 1993) preference types provide additional and distinct information in predicting academic major selection when compared to the Holland (1997a) model of interests. Vocational interests were measured by the General Occupational Themes of the Strong Interest Inventory (SII; Borgen & Harmon, 1996). The MBTI preference types and SII scores were obtained from 427 first semester, first year, undecided students. Discriminant analysis yielded three significant functions and demonstrated that the MBTI does provide some unique information via the Introversion/Extroversion and Thinking/Feeling dichotomies. The results also indicated that the combined scores of the MBTI and the SII correctly predicted a higher percentage of academic majors than either instrument alone. Use of the MBTI as a predictor of future academic selections be limited, but its use as a self-exploration tool should be encouraged

Reproducibility of fluorescent expression from engineered biological constructs in E. coli

We present results of the first large-scale interlaboratory study carried out in synthetic biology, as part of the 2014 and 2015 International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competitions. Participants at 88 institutions around the world measured fluorescence from three engineered constitutive constructs in E. coli. Few participants were able to measure absolute fluorescence, so data was analyzed in terms of ratios. Precision was strongly related to fluorescent strength, ranging from 1.54-fold standard deviation for the ratio between strong promoters to 5.75-fold for the ratio between the strongest and weakest promoter, and while host strain did not affect expression ratios, choice of instrument did. This result shows that high quantitative precision and reproducibility of results is possible, while at the same time indicating areas needing improved laboratory practices.Peer reviewe