The Boulder Workshop Question Box
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ORIGINAL RESEARCH
The Boulder Workshop Question Box David M. Evans1,2 Received: 20 July 2020 / Accepted: 21 September 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract The International Statistical Genetics Workshop (commonly referred to as the “Boulder Workshop”) has been held annually in Boulder, Colorado almost every year since 1990. A staple feature of each workshop has been the presence of a “question box” (either a physical box or an online virtual one) where workshop participants are given the opportunity of asking questions to the faculty. In this manuscript, we have compiled a list of ten “classic” questions that have appeared in one form or another across multiple workshops and our attempts at answering them. Keywords Classical twin study · Structural equation modelling · Genome-wide association · Mendelian randomization The International Statistical Genetics Workshop has been held annually in Boulder, Colorado almost every year since 1990. On even years, the traditional focus of the course has been on teaching the classical twin design (Evans et al. 2002), structural equation modelling (Martin and Eaves 1977; Neale and Cardon 1992) and the software package Mx (Neale et al. 2016). On odd years, the course has tended to focus on gene-mapping (Abecasis et al. 2000, 2002; Neale et al. 2008). In recent years, this focus has included genomewide association studies, whole genome sequencing and a wide assortment of statistical genetics software and analyses that can be performed on individual level genotype data (Barrett et al. 2005; Neale et al. 2011; Purcell et al. 2007; Smith and Ebrahim 2003; Yang et al. 2011), and summary results data (Bulik-Sullivan et al. 2015a, b; de Leeuw et al. 2015; Grotzinger et al. 2019; Hemani et al. 2018; Watanabe et al. 2017; Willer et al. 2010; Zheng et al. 2017). The workshop faculty includes the authors of many of these widely used software packages. As well as the usual opportunities for questions and answers during individual lecture and practical sessions, Edited by Elizabeth Prom-Wormley.
every year workshop participants are given the opportunity of asking questions to the entire faculty more broadly (including anonymously if they wish). In the early years, this typically involved students writing questions on small blue cardboard cards and depositing them in an old wooden box at the back of the workshop where they would be answered by faculty at the end of each day, or when time permitted in the schedule. Sometimes these discussions led to animated, robust debates between faculty members with opposing viewpoints. In recent years the old wooden box has been replaced by an online forum, where workshop participants ask members of the faculty questions, and then faculty attempt to answer these online in real time. In this manuscript, we have compiled a list of ten “classic” questions that have appeared in one form or another across multiple workshops and our attempts at answering them. We have chosen questions that we feel get raised over
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