Revisions and wow

It has taken more days than it should, because I have been lazy with no excuses, but I finally resubmitted a rejected manuscript to a new journal today. I am happy to have something in the hands of an editor again. Now, I just have one more manuscript to revise and resubmit, and then I can start real data collection again.

From the always intriguing TED talks, this one about Photosynth is amazing. There is a demo. You must try it to believe it. Very, very cool.

There must be ways to start stitching biological information about species together the way that these guys have stitched together photographic information. Hm. I must think on this some more.

I am officially a supervillain

From a little opening fiction in OtherWorld Creations' Forbidden Knowledge Master Codex:


I wish I'd known about this earlier, but it's never to late to say:

John, my friend, you are the best.

You will be treated mercifully when my plans come to fruition.

Same ol’ story

Another week. Another grant rejection.

Meanwhile, I'm starting to seriously work on the one grant I do have, and looking at the money. And right away, once I started to look at how the money was divided into all the different categories (operating, travel, scholarships, etc.), I found a $6,000 mistake. Money got stuck in the wrong category. Should be fixed now, but this is why I've been telling people, "The fun and easy part (selecting the students) is over now. Now we actually have to spend the money."

And in another meanwhile, a recent email from a journal I submitted to boasted of an average time of 35 days from submission to decision. I am sorry to be running the average up, since my manuscript is still waiting on a decision at about 100 days and counting.

The Zen of Presentations, Part 8

This blog entry is a total cheat, because all I wish to do is to direct you to this excellent post on the subject of presentations in Escape from Cubicle Nation.

Almost missed this

So I'm walking into a faculty senate meeting a little late, and they're showing off the university's researcher database. And because I'm just walking in, they decide to use me as an example and pull up my research profile. And down at the bottom, I notice this article. I'd talked to the reporter, but it had completely slipped past my notice that the story had come out...

Meanwhile, proofs were sent back yesterday on my commentary article with my colleague Anita. Another thing in press. Hooray!

Worth a trip to the library

Formenti F, Minetti, AE. 2007. Human locomotion on ice: the evolution of ice-skating energetics through history. The Journal of Experimental Biology 210: 1825-1833.

You can get the abstract here.

The question is, why are two people in the UK doing this research instead of Canadians?

Making comment

I got the page proofs back on a book review I wrote with my colleague Anita back in March. It'll be coming out in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. It's fun, because that's where I published one on my first articles, a short commentary. I can't wait to sit down and check through it next week.

Now, if the reviewers for my other article in review would get the lead out...

Only one day left in this week...

And the weekend can't come a second too soon. I am often busy, but this week has been the most highly scheduled and structured and filled with places I must be than any week in recent memory. Heck, in distant memory. Normally, I can be busy busy, but it consists of me sitting at my desk working through tasks on my computer. This time around -- whee. Lectures, faculty senate meetings, HHMI program interviews, Sponsored Projects workshop. Coastal Studies Lab Advisory Group, student meeting for Tri Beta, Honors thesis pounding out... and those are just the planned things. Toss in the number of people who walk in the door and want to ask about graduate school, which results in a long conversation (for instance)...

The best software I have now is the calendar software on my desktop computer. No doubt.

Tough choices

Check out the New 7 Wonders website and vote. This was brought to my attention through Sounds Like Canada interview with Bernard Weber.

What does this have to do with science? Um... archaeology is a science...

Schools

I spent part of the day talk to some local K-12 school administrators looking for ways to tie their stuff into my stuff, with research experiences, graduate studies, and so on. Looked promising. But even if nothing were to come of it, there were free danishes in the meeting room.

And, as it happens, I run across this article about some comments by Don Kennedy, with whom I have an indirect relationship. He's talking about K-12 education and evolution, which is an amazingly twitchy topic in this country.

A little quick money

I've been spending most of my time recruiting for the REU program, but I did get some good news a couple of days back. I got a little internal money for my student Sakshi to do some summer research with me. Hooray.

Now, we just have to actually do what we said we would do...

Defence

My student Alan successfully defended his undergraduate Honor's thesis today, and this is good. There may be a publication coming out it it, I hope.

Meanwhile, I am slowly digging my way through the pile of stuff that I cannot seem to tame. One of these is working up some posters for the REU program, which is now officially one week later than I was hoping to have them done by. But I think I will get a couple printed tomorrow.

“If you wanted monogamy...”

“...you should have married a swan,” is how the old joke goes.

Except it isn’t true. Swans are not strictly monogamous.

This story also falls into the “Hey, I know that guy” category, as I got to know Raoul Mulder during my time at Uni Melbourne. Nice work, Raoul – good on ya!

Namesakes

Was looking at TV listings, scrolling down to Bravo, and read:

Work Out (Reality) Jackie sees a therapist; Zen considers cosmetic surgery; Jackie throws a sexy slumber party. TV-14 CC

I'm considering what?!

A couple of quick URLs later, and I find only my second namesake attached to an actual person. The first person I found to share my first name is actor Zen Gesner. My new namesake is apparently a trainer, Zen Gray. Although I think she only counts as half a namesake, since her website bio shows her name as "Jennifer 'Zen' Gray." She blogs as part of the show she's on.

The Zen of Presentations, Part 7: Reading out loud

Hm. Been a while since I've done one of these. Just to save you from searching, here are the previous installments.

Part 1: *.pps
Part 2: It's all about you
Part 3: Can you do it on the radio?
Part 3.5: Lessig is more
Part 4: Title slides are a crutch
Part 5: Legalized insanity
Part 6: Failure is an option

A recent article in the Sydney Morning Herald talks about using slides, particularly those in PowerPoint format. The key quote for me is, "It is effective to speak to a diagram, because it presents information in a different form. But it is not effective to speak the same words that are written, because it is putting too much load on the mind and decreases your ability to understand what is being presented."

I think it nicely explains why so many people get so frustrated by seeing a talk where someone just reads the text on their slides, almost word for word.

Another annoyance factor in reading slides aloud that many people don't think of: the audience can read faster than you can talk. So most of the time, when you put up a slide of text, the audience will have read the text and is just waiting for you to catch up to your own text.

It is tough to get rid of text completely. I am guilty of using text slides all the time when I lecture. I console myself that sometimes, there is a legitimate teaching reason to put up text slides: because students need to be able to see the correct spelling of technical words. If I were to just say, "allele," I have little confidence that students would be able to figure out the right spelling from the pronunciation alone. (There are various pronunciations, but the mode seems to be "a-leel," not, as the spelling might lead you to think, "ah-lel-lay.")

When I do have a text slide, another thing I try to do is not to read it verbatim. I try to put the same information in a different way. Use examples. Elaborate. Often, I go on talking on a point much longer than the slide is up, so that people will get bored at the slide and their attention focuses back on me.

It is a constant challenge to presenters, including myself, to use more pictures -- perhaps only pictures. And high quality picture. Assuming, of course, that they need visual aids at all (see Part 3).

7 to 22 µg/ml

Spent yesterday working with Sakshi doing some DNA extraction and testing. It was good. We're getting the procedures down. I think we're getting better and faster at them. But it was rather tiring, for some reason. Not because it's physically strenuous, but when there are so many other things on the plate, somehow it's mentally tiring because while you're in the lab, you're thinking about all the other things that need doing.

Anyway, our two samples yielded 7 to 22 µg/ml of DNA, according to our HHMI core lab spectrophotometer.

Hey, I know her...

There's always something surprising when you come across people you know in places you don't expect.

I met Sheila Patek at a Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology meeting. She was presenting some gorgeous work on spiny lobster sounds (some are noisy; they stridulate). She endeared herself to me by mentioning that she'd read my sand crab paper. Vain, I know. But any author will attest that meeting someone that you personally do no know who has read your work is a thrill. (And by "any author," I mean Sean Stewart.).

So finding Sheila's work on crustacean biomechanics as a TED talk was a bit of a shock. While TED is about any "big idea," its initials do stand for "Technology, Entertainment and Design," and I wasn't sure how mantis shrimp attacks fit into any of those three things.

Damn cool stuff, regardless.

Leaders and followers

At this university, I see stuff posted up about "leadership" all the time. Student leadership conferences, that sort of thing. It kind of bugs me, because when I see such things, I think of an old (and hence not very culturally sensitive) saying, "Too many chiefs, not enough Indians." Leadership opportunities are limited, kind of by definition. Almost all organizations have a pyramid structure, and not everyone can fit at the top of that pyramid.

I would argue that the skills needed to be a great follower are just as important. Good underlings are just as important as the masterminds. Oddjob and Auric Goldfinger in Goldfinger. Darth Maul and the Emperor in Star Wars.

But people rarely talk about what skills make you an exceptional follower. Anticipating needs. Working within limitations. Balancing contradictory directives. Knowing when to take initiative. Meeting deadlines. Giving useful feedback. Not as sexy as a leadership skills, but so valuable.

This post over at Seth Godin's blog echoes this point in some ways.

I've certainly noticed that only takes a couple of students to set the tone in classes I teach. If there are a couple of students who are good listeners, they sort of become your "batteries," and you can play to them and get a little bit of a boost from them when you can see they're engaged and paying attention. Students with the heads on the desk in the back? I'd rather they just didn't come at all. It drags everything down.

Bad start

...For my Dees. A thumping at the hands of the Saints! Blast!

On a related note, I loved this article that catches a little bit of the passion that got me actually interested in Aussie Rules when I lived in Melbourne. Remember it the next time you're looking for a pub in southern Australia.

Other people’s impressions

I've observed an interesting phenomenon this last week and a half. Several times, people have stuck their heads into my office and said something like, “I know you're really busy with the grant...”

What the heck did people think I was doing before I got the grant? That I was just hanging out in my office, reading the latest copy of FHM? Counting the number of little perforations in the ceiling tiles? Arranging the magnetic poetry tiles above my computer?

You get money, you’re assumed to be busy. Interesting.