Taming the backchannel beast

Over at Speaking About Presenting, Olivia Mitchell has written a free ebook about working with Twitter and similar online tools during presentations. It’s a great snapshot of a fairly fast-moving aspect of presentations, and has many good, practical ideas. And it documents some of the harshtag horror shows that have been happening in the last few months.

Extinction through fornication

Normally, we think of extinction happening because organisms fail to reproduce. In the case of Canadian sticklebacks, some incipient species are going extinct because they are reproducing all too well.

Three-spined stickleback have many populations around the world. The main population lives in marine systems most of their lives. But over and over, small pockets of animals have been caught in freshwater lakes, and started to go off on their own evolutionary trajectory, separating from their marine ancestors.

Within the individual lakes, the sticklebacks can continue to branch off further from each other. Some specialize in lake bottoms; some on the surfaces. In my old stomping grounds of Vancouver Island, this has been going on in Enos Lake. Back in the early 1990s, the bottom- and surface dwellers were said to be separate species, as they were very morphologically distinct and didn’t interbreed with each other. That said, they were never formally described as separate species and given new species names, as far as I can tell.

This may turn out to be a good thing, because when Behm and colleagues sampled the stickleback populations in 2005, thet two distinct groups were gone. To be clear, there were still stickleback – but instead of two clearly distinct clusters with no interbreeding, there was one cluster with lots of interbreeding.

Previously, the two different body shapes had different diets, as measured both by direct observation of the prey types in stomach, and by carbon isotopes found in the fish. You’ll forgive me, I hope, if I skip the details of how lake food webs influence the ration of different carbon types the fish ingest. in any case, that difference between body shape and food type had also vanished.

It’s possible that there are a lot of intermediate shaped fish, but maybe they’re not doing so well. Turns out that as of right now, there’s no evidence of that. The intermediates don’t seem to be small, seem to be growing fine, and so on.

All of this raises the question: What the heck has suddenly caused these two distinct groups to start merging back together?

The authors’ surprising suggestion is that it’s because of crayfish. Signal crayfish (Pacifastacus leniusculus) were introduced into Enos Lake around 1990. Behm and company don’t have a clear reason why having crayfish in the lake should have this dramatic impact on the stickleback populations, but the timing of the two events is mighty suspicious. There’s clearly some interesting ecology to track down in this system.

In the last few decades, we’ve really come to appreciate how dynamic and quick evolutionary processes, like speciation, can be. This research shows that speciation, at least in the early stages, can also be a fairly fragile thing, easily falling apart for reasons that are not entirely clear at first glance.

Reference

Behm, J., Ives, A., & Boughman, J. (2009). Breakdown in Postmating Isolation and the Collapse of a Species Pair through Hybridization The American Naturalist DOI: 10.1086/648559

Stickleback picture by user SuperIDR on Flickr, and used under a Creative Commons license.

Overqualified

Sincere question, not rhetorical.

How and when and, for goodness’ sake, why did “overqualified” become a reason to turn someone away from employment?

This is starting to bother me a lot. I mean, I help run a Masters program, and am advisor on a major grant to create graduate opportunities for Hispanics, am the lead on one undergraduate research program and participate in another.

But I have my doubts. Reading things like this or this... don’t help.

The concept of “overqualified” just gnaws away at the whole reason for those programs. Not just ours, but nationally. Internationally.

How are you going to create a technically skilled work force in a society when there’s a threat that that very training can be held against them?

I understand that when there are too many applications too read, you’ve got to cut something somewhere. But it seems to me that, “Oh, they’ll just leave when the economy is better” is short-sighted. This is a fantastic opportunity to get amazingly smart people in your company. Imagine the energy and talent a hiring business could recruit today if it said, “nobody is overqualified.” Even if they do leave, you’ll probably have a better company at the end than when you started.

Somehow, I can’t help but think that what’s really leading to the concept of “overqualified” is that an employer doesn’t want an employee smarter than they are. Too likely to upset delicate workplace power relationships. Or something.

I clearly don’t get it.

The Zen of Presentations, Part 29: The shirt on your back

Steve Jobs is good at presentations. Garr Reynolds has written about this a lot over on his Presentation Zen blog. Now, a whole new book has been written about him. This slideshow says:

Steve Jobs can wear a black mock turtleneck, blue jeans, and running shoes because, quite simply, he has earned the right to dress anyway he wants. For most communicators, it’s best to dress a little better than everyone in your audience.

I can’t help but find the rationalization funny. Author Carmine Gallo spends the book looking at what makes one person a great speaker, but shies away from the possibility that maybe he is great partly because of how he dresses, not in spite of how he dresses.

Maybe people are responding to seeing someone they can relate to. Maybe people are responding to someone who is not relying on artifice. Maybe people are responding to seeing someone who is genuine.

Audiences crave authenticity. It’s a driver behind the success of so-called “reality” shows or YouTube videos: people are looking for the unscripted, the immediate.

With too many presenters, you can tell their dress for their presentation is an act. A total put on. A sham. It’s not real, it’s not who they are, and they’re not comfortable.

Soon after, I spotted this post by Kathy Reiffenstein on what to wear during a presentation. This also struck me as greatly over-stressing formality and business wear, but I appreciated Chris Atherton’s response to it:

Love how much of this is really about attention (yours and audience's).

Right. Be worried not so much about how you look as whether that look will distract you or the audience.

I spelled out my own take over on dressing for presentations on Better Posters.

Tuesday Crustie: Termite of the sea

 

This squat lobster, Munida andamanica, has been in the news recently for its peculiar ability to eat wood. Picture from here.

For your consideration

I am not too proud to beg.

The nomination deadline for The Open Laboratory anthology, the annual compilation of the best science writing on blogs, is in two weeks. If there’s a post from this blog that you liked, please consider nominating it for the anthology. Posts from 1 December 2008 to 30 November 2009 are eligible.

Here are some suggestions, in roughly chronological order. If there are other posts you like, by all means, submit those.

• Muscle innervation is not a connectome
• Do male crickets shorten the lives of female crickets?
• Vestigial icons
• I’m trying here
• Explanation and evangelism
• Science publishers are agents
• Is the mimic octopus misnamed?
• Island girls: Why Hawaiian female crickets aren’t very choosy
• Jellyfish nervous system myth busted
• Truth for the hard of thinking
• The small brain of the biggest fish in the world
• Fence lizards versus fire ants: Evolutionary fail?
• Evolution back and forth, from snakes to molecules
• Face it: Being a scientist can really suck
• The birth of dragons
• The princess and the perfume, a hermit crab fairy tale
• I want to be Carl Sagan, but can’t

Click here to submit an entry. A Blog Around the Clock regularly updates the list of entries; here’s a recent one (probably out of date by the time you read this).

In case you’re wondering why I don’t just nominate myself, I think it’s better for readers to decide what’s good than writers. And because it feels gauche to nominate a bunch of your own stuff.

How to act when you might be eaten

If you don’t have to worry about reproduction, life gets a little simpler. You have to worry about eating. You have to worry about being eaten. And with that, you’re pretty close to done.

Aspidoscelis uniparens is a parthenogenetic whiptail lizard (formerly Cnemidophorus uniparens), and Eifler and colleagues tested how they allocated their time under threat. To do they, they made six large enclosures (225 square meters) and put in six of these small lizards in. In half of these, they also included two leopard lizards, which prey on the smaller one. In fact, the leopard lizards successfully caught a couple of the subjects during the experiment. Unfortunately, the authors describe the predators in much less detail than the whiptails, which make it a bit difficult to interpret their findings.

The whiptails, not surprisingly, act differently when enclosed with the leopard lizards. They spend a less time moving when housed with leopard lizards, and they’re visible less often to human observers. The whiptails also seem to shift their activity more towards the early hours of the morning (say, 7:00 am), seemingly because the leopard lizards’ activity starts to pick up around 8:00 am.

But the whiptails didn’t change their behaviour as much as much as you might think. time spent in vegetation? Time spent digging? How fast the whiptails move? No differences between the control enclosures and the predator encloses. These are small animals, only a few centimeters long, in a very big, natural enclosure with lots of places to hide. There’s not really any way to predict how “worried” the whiptails would have to be – that is, how strong the predator cues would have to be – for them to start changing their behaviour more dramatically, or to even start changing them at all.

Reference

Eifler, D., Eifler, M., & Harris, B. (2007). Foraging under the risk of predation in desert grassland whiptail lizards (Aspidoscelis uniparens) Journal of Ethology, 26 (2), 219-223 DOI: 10.1007/s10164-007-0053-0

Comments for first half of November 2009

The Byte Sized Biology blog asks questions about submission fees for Open Access journals. I point out there is a distinct lack of any rules, as far as I can see, about who gets to have their fees waived.

I point out that Canadians don’t spell like either Americans or British over at Science after Sunrise.

Speaking of home, I had to express my sympathy for Canadian Girl Postdoc in Canada, who had a run-in with the American health care system.

On Deep Sea News, I correct a description of one of my blog posts. I wouldn’t have minded if it wasn’t for a contest.

At Pleiotropy, which shows an ophthalmologist who pulls out the ol’ “Evolution... just a theory” argument, I note that the journal did publish a reply.

Maniactive talks about the importance of an audience to making a great presentation, which I’ve discussed here once or thrice.

A student asks Dr. Isis about authorship over at On Becoming a Domestic and Laboratory Goddess... I point out that there are guidelines for determining who should be an author. “Because I’m the boss” or “Because I wrote the grant that pays you” are not acceptable reasons for putting your name on a scientific paper.

Neuroethology on numb3rs

Whoa! Just had a major geek out at seeing some neuroethology research I wrote about only a few months ago show up in the opening scenes of numb3rs. Video clip and everything. Good on you, Ken Catania!

Additional:  A video clip from last night’s episode with Catania’s snake research is now up.

Hitting the target

Spotted this on Facebook...

... and I was off to the races:

Philosophy argues about the target but never takes the shot.

Math assumes the target is a perfect sphere on a frictionless surface.

Science shoots at the target, misses, and says it hit the target within an order of magnitude.

Engineering tears down the old target and builds a new, larger, easier to hit target.

Religion believes in the target.

Crazy draws the target wherever the shot lands.

Sawed-off shotgun ignores the target.

Canada fires at the target, hits it perfectly, then apologizes.

Got more? There’s a comments section!

Quitting the game

Yesterday, I talked about why an instructor should care about whether students come to class. Yesterday was also the deadline for students to drop classes, which is another reason instructors should care whether students come to class or not: not coming is a warning sign that people are just going to give up.

Like so many aspects of teaching (see here, here, and here) there are important parallels with gaming. This article talks about people who don’t finish video games, and there is so much to think about in terms of teaching. For instance, replace “player” with “student” and see how it reads:

Keeping players motivated is difficult. ... The goal is to strike the right balance between difficulty and player ability, thereby always keeping the player within arm's reach of a new achievement.

Despite these attempts to balance difficulty for a wide range of people, the players will still experience failure. More importantly, many of these folks will stop playing because of these failures. It’s rare for people to leave a restaurant because they don’t like the food, and it’s not too common for people to walk out of a movie because it's bad &ndash but game players do put down the controller and leave the game all the time.

I’m not a die hard video gamer by any stretch of the imagination, but I have finished some fairly length video games, and there are a few differences between those I’ve finished, and those I haven’t finished yet.

Sudden ramp up: You’re playing the game, and then suddenly, it gets harder. Way harder. You have not opportunity to practice the skills you need to continue. If you’ve been playing a game and you need two or three tries to complete a level, then suddenly you hit a level where you’ve had at it eight times and feel no nearer success. Teaching lesson: Increase difficulty gradually.

Guides and hints: You hit a puzzle or task that is necessary to progress in the game, and you just get stuck. I loved the video game Okami because you had a guide who gave you hints. You were always pretty clear on what the task was. Teaching lesson: Give people clear goals, and give them feedback before they attempt high-stakes tasks.

Bad save points: Pointlessly replaying what you can do just to get to what you can’t do. In de Blob, to get to the final boss battle (which also has the ramp up problem), I have to start the entire level from the beginning, and it feels like it takes forever. Teaching lesson: Don’t make people keep re-proving themselves.

Also consider what both gamers and students are tempted to do when they get stuck: go online and get a walkthrough or a cheat code.