I got to do an experiment!

And any day you do an experiment is a good day.

The story is as follows: I got up and drove out to the Coastal Studies lab on South Padre Island. I thought it would be an uneventful drive, but to my surprise, ran into a couple of massive cloudbursts. The sheeting down, "Can't-I-make-the-windshield-wipers-go-any-faster?" kind of cloudbursts that slow even normally aggressive Texas drivers down to 30 miles an hour. I'm sure there are other places in the world that matches the southern U.S. for the ferocity of cloudbursts, but I haven't been there yet.

Fortunately, while the burst is intense, it's quite small, and I'm out of it fairly quickly. I get to the Coastal Studies Lab to pick up a juvenile spiny lobster that they had been showing off to the public. They had two small lobsters, so I left one behind, so that the public wouldn't be deprived of the viewing pleasure of seeing Palinurus argus. (Couldn't find a link to a decent picture of the beast, sorry.)

Then I scampered back to the lab to look at this beastie's nervous system. This gave me the first real chance to test out my nifty microscope (that cause so much trouble to order... but I won't rehash old details). It worked well, although I may have to see if I can do something to get a slightly larger field of view. Sometimes, even the lowest power magnification is still a teensy bit too high.

The exciting bit is tomorrow, though. Some preparations have to sit before you get to see the results, and this is one. Tomorrow I get to see if it gives me a definite answer to my question... or not.

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Irrelevent recommendation: Down With Love with Ewan McGregor and Rene Zellweger.

Posted

I'm surprised. Revamping a manuscript for submission to a new journal didn't take as long as I thought. I now have four copies of the manuscript in two envelopes (three to an editor and one to an associate editor) waiting to be taken out with the morning mail.

It feels good to have a manuscript in the works again. I have to push and get one or two more out in the coming months.

But first, I have a symposium to organize (today) and make a trip to pick up an animal from the Coastal Studies Lab (tomorrow).

Tedium!

One of the most annoying things about preparing a scientific manuscript is the references. They are fiddly. They are long. And every journal wants them a different way.

For example, I'm revising a paper that I had originally written for one journal for submission to another. The first journal wanted the list of references to look like this:

Paul DH, Then AM, Magnuson DS. 1985.

Very clean, very "Europoean" in its approach to punctuation. Now, however, the journal I'd like to submit this paper to wants the references to look like this:

Paul, D.H., Then, A.M., and Magnuson, D.S., 1985.

The same, you think? Oh no. 10 periods and commas and the word "and" have to go in the latter version that weren't required in the former. One journal wants abbreviated titles for journals and the other wants all titles spelled out in full. One wants colons separating the volume number from the pages, the other wants a comma.

There is software to do some of this stuff automatically, but it's rather expensive. So, back to my word processor I go, putting in periods and commas...

It's noon now. I'll let you know how long it takes.

;;;;;

About an hour! Lot less than I thought, thankfully.

The grant gauntlet

I'm starting work on a pre-proposal for something called the Advanced Research Program grants, which are put up by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. Feeling masochistic, I looked up their funding rate, and discovered that my field, Biology, is the most competetive of anything they fund. Less than 7% of applications get funded.

Why do I do that to myself?

Enough wallowing. Back to writing the proposal...

Replies

Here’s what I sent to the letters section of The Age in response to the article mentioned in the last entry of this journal:

“It’s unfortunate that over a century of high quality scientific research has escaped notice, judging by the article, ‘Pain test to rock lobster fishermen’ (16 May 2003). I was stunned by the statement, ‘Aquatic scientists have now begun examining lobster tails for evidence of nerve tissue.’

“I can save someone a lot of time by saying that not only do lobsters, yabbies, and their kin have nerve tissue in their tails, that nerve tissue has been well studied by neurobiologists. Crustacean nervous systems have been and still are important models for understanding how nervous systems work in all sorts of animals, including humans.

“The question of pain in other animals is an important one, and deserves a higher level of scholarship.”

Doubtful that it’ll see print, but there's no point in letting errors stand uncorrected.

Fighting the forces of ignorance...

We crustacean neurobiologists are frequently asked the question, "Do lobsters feel pain?" (Usually the context seems to be, "Am I a bad person for tossing them live into a pot of boiling water?") The question is being revived in Australia, according to this article in The Age, spurred on by recent research that suggests fish may feel pain (which is sure to be hotly debated for some time yet).

It's not that I don't think the question of invertebrate pain is unimportant -- on the contrary. But I was utterly gobsmacked by this sentence in the story:

"Aquatic scientists have now begun examining lobster tails for evidence of nerve tissue."

What?

We've known the answer to that question for well over a century. There's been about a zillion papers on the neural tissue in the lobster tail (I've had a hand in writing a couple).

I don't know whether to laugh or cry. All I can say is: Nobody better be getting a grant for that research!

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I've handed in my final marks for my classes this afternoon. Have started to receive the usual contacts from students who just missed making a particular grade. Their transcripts don't show percentages. Two students with different letter grades (e.g., a C at 79% and a B at 80%) can actually be closer in performance than two students with the same letter grade (80% and 89.4% are both B students).

I always feel crummy for them. The disappointment that I know I'm inevitably handing over to some students always tempers what an otherwise happy day of completion.

Transitions

This is always a tricky time of year for me, because I'm going from an established routine to a situation where my schedule is totally total free form. I always find those sorts of switches to be quite difficult. Unfortunately, I tend to sputter and not use my time very well for a few days before I get reorganized.

Considering how tight things have been for the last couple of months, though... I think a bit of sputtering around to reorganize might not be entirely unwarranted.

Among the mess of things on my plate are writing grant applications, organizing a symposium at this summer's Animal Behavior Society meeting, finishing manuscripts from my Melbourne work, and, of course, doing entirely new research.

Scary thing? Based on some conversations I've had Friday with our College Dean and today with our Department Chair, it looks like they're interested in getting me involved in preparing a Howard Hughes Medical Institution grant application. It's worth many hundreds of thousands of dollars... if you can get it. I'm a little nervous, because if I get involved in what's really a grant for the college... when will I find time to do the stuff I need for me?

The end is near... end of semester, that is

Haven't been blogging much because there hasn't been a lot of movement on the research front. That should change soon, because today is the last day for this semester that I have to give lectures. Hoo... ray. (You can’t quite see the slight look of exhaustion in my eyes when I see that. I’m sure there's been dark circles under them more than a couple of mornings this month.)

In other news, our Department is putting in requests for new faculty positions. I got tapped to write up the justification for a position I had suggested (which is only fair, I reckon). I suggested we hire a developmental biologist.

In justifying the position, though, I was instructed to play up any possible “biomedical” aspect to the work. I didn’t suggest the position because I thought it was biomedical – quite the opposite, in fact. But in a few short paragraphs, I was able to work in a whole slew of buzz words. I started off mentioning last year’s Nobel Prize for Medicine was for developmental biology. Then I got on a roll.

“Cancer research!” “Spinal cord injury!” “Aging!” And I even brought in the big ace-in-the-hole new bite star: “stem cells.” OooooOOOoooh. AaaaAAAAaaah.

Writing it all made me feel like such a sell-out.

Last big boxes

Got two boxes yesterday, which contained one of my last major equipment purchases (for a while). It was the second of two stereo microscopes that I had ordered. Now all I have to do is get through the rest of the semester, and hopefull in less than a month, I'll actually have a chance to use all this equipment that I've been accumulating over the last year.!

Happy anniversary, Major Gagarin, wherever you are...

Quirks and Quarks informed me that today is the 42 anniversary of the first manned space flight, by Major Yuri Gagarin. Major Gagarin died in 1968.

Being reminded of the early days of the space age makes me a little sad. I don't think any other enterprise in my memory has ever captured the exhilarating feeling of "Ever upwards!" (literally) than the space program. I wrote to NASA as a kid and got a big stack of goodies -- posters, pictures, articles -- back. Visited the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral on a family vacation. I can't think of any sort of equivalent science/technology program today that is as accessible and appealing, especially to kids. I just can't see a kid sitting down and writing, "I am interested in the Human Genome Project and would like to know if you have any pictures to spare to hang in my room..."

It's no accident that, "We can put a man on the moon" still has coin in our vocabulary as a towering achievement. (You know, as in, "We can put a man on the moon, but we can't get a cable guy to show up for an appointment on time.") Even though it's been how long...? Just over 30 years since Apollo 17 made the last moon landing.

Damn. From the first man in space to the last man on the moon in only 12 years. Was it really that short?

Maybe a research venture like the Human Genome Project is ultimately more practical. But when it comes to inspiration, real, honest-to-God space travel hasn't been topped yet. I miss it, even though I barely remember it.

Data!

Little late to report this, but on Monday I was back out at the Coastal Studies Lab, taking our second candidate for a Biology faculty position, [name deleted for legal reasons]. For once, I planned ahead.

As I mentioned last week, there were a couple of small spiny lobsters in the public display tanks. I've been very interested in the behaviour and neurobiology of spiny lobsters for a long time.

While [name deleted] was getting a tour of the lab from acting director Don Hockaday, I set up a video camera and got a bit of videotape of these lobsters behaving. It probably wouldn't make it into a finished paper, but it should be enough to give me something to use as "preliminary data" in writing grant applications.

Oh boy, here it comes...

While walking into my office this morning, I noticed that there’s heavy machinery on the future site of the Regional Academic Health Center (or RAHC – pronounced “rack" – as it’s frequently called here). It’s a little surprising to see something happening, since the groundbreaking ceremony was back in December and nothing had happened since then.

Although it’s located on Pan Am property, the RAHC is actually owned by the University of Texas Health Sciences Center at San Antonio. Unfortunately, the presence of this facility is causing tension in my department (Biology) because there is a push for us to collaborate with the research going in the RAHC. While collaborations are good things, there is a certain fear that we will suddenly be expected to do applied medicine and not biology.

The building is slated for completion in summer of 2004.

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Daylight savings time?! No! In this of all weeks, I didn't need to lose an hour!

"Debunking" a 'Net "psychic," Part 2

How does the Flash Mind Reader work? (If you haven't seen it yet, you may want to scroll down to read yesterday's entry first.)

When I read the instructions, I strongly suspected that the little procedure ("Pick any 2 digit number, add the digits, subtract the total from first number") would give a very limited range of possible answers -- not the range of 100 shown on the page. Not being a mathematician, I had to check this in a "brute force" sort of way.

Using Microsoft Excel, I randomly generated a lot of numbers: over 65,000! I ran them though the procedure asked by the web page, and plotted them all on a histogram. As I suspected, the resulting numbers were not randomly or broadly distributed.

There are only nine possible answers. 9, 18, 27, 36, 45, 54, 63, 72, and 81. All multiples of 9. In retrospect, this isn't a big surprise, as 9 was considered a "magic" number by a lot of mystic thinking types. If you multiply any one digit number by 9, and add the two numbers together, you get... 9! This funny property is also used in this gag (also here). (When I was learning multiplication in school, this trick let me remember my multiplication tables for 9 easily; only the "5 times" tables were easier to learn.)

From here, the rest is easy to decipher. All you have to do is to put up the same symbol for the nine possible answers. Because:

• The multiples of nine are widely spread,
  
• There are 91 distracting "possible" answers,
  
• There are over a dozen possible symbols, and
  
• The symbols change every time you click on the crystal ball (and the page takes you to a new screen to get your "psychic" answer),
  

...The regular, invariant pattern is well concealed. Thus, the webpage creates the powerful illusion of "knowing" your answer -- which is not as wide as you think.

There you have it, folks! Behold the power of science!

Link of the moment: If you liked this journal entry, check out the website of magician James Randi.

“Debunking” a ‘Net “psychic”

A crucial part of research is skepticism. It”s not just useful to being a practising scientist; skepticism saved me from the fake eBay email I mentioned in my last entry.

For a scientist, few things should trigger the old skeptical filter (a.k.a. the "BS detector") like the word “psychic.” So when a student mentioned the “Flash psychic,” my antennae went up.

As far as self-declared “psychics” go, the Flash Mind Reader is pretty innocuous. It presents itself only as a an entertaining diversion, and asks for no money. Something of a rarity among psychics.

The page shows a crystal ball with instructions underneath to pick any 2 digit number, add them, then subtract that from your first two digit number. On the right, you are presented with an array of numbers from 0 to 99 with associated symbols (I got to 15, then stopped counting). When you click the crystal ball, the symbol next to the number you picked is supposed to appear in the crystal ball.

It’s a clever little device. Its accuracy seems impressive. Try it.

Of course, being a scientist, I have to ask, “How does it work?” It took me a while, but I figured out the solution. (Hint! It's not really psychic!)

I’ll give you the answer... but not yet. Come back tomorrow to see how it’s done.

eBay lookalike scam

Received a sneaky email that just about caught me. It looked like it came from the well-known online auction house, eBay. But I vaguely recalled seeing something about a scam that sent people official looking emails... which was a good thing, because there are some.

Nasty, ugly piece of work. And not as well known or easily detected as the "Nigerian" scam.

Read about it here and remember to excersize skepticism for all emails in your box!

Showing off the place

Spent a good part of the day showing off our Coastal Studies Lab to a job candidate. Our department is in the market for a “Vertebrate Physiological Ecologist,” and we have two candidates who will be visiting for an on-site interview for a couple of days. (I can't mention the candidate's name, because there are laws prohibiting candidates from knowing who else is being interviewed for the position.)

I probably could have used the time at the office to mark papers or something, but what the heck. I worked all weekend, and I’m on the Search Committee.

Plus! While the major point was to show off some of our university resources to our candidate, the trip was also fortuitous. I discovered that there were some animals in the CSL’s aquaria that I want to film: young spiny lobsters. I’m hoping I can get back before something happens to them.

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Some things are just a delight. Fireflies are one.

They are fireflies in the grass around the university, and when I walk home a little late around this time of year (like tonight), there they are, quietly blinking on and off in their slow, pacifying intervals. If I ever get tired of them, buy me a coffin, ‘cause I'll have obviously lost my taste for life.

Where two cultures meet...

Being a Canadian living in the southern most tip of Texas, this makes my heart feel good as much as it makes my brain confused:

This October, the Rio Grande Valley will have its own professional hockey team: the Killer Bees. (Pro sports is all about the logo.)

I'm hoping cricket and Aussie rules football teams will soon follow, seeing how they have about as much history in southern Texas as hockey.

A look in the lab

Here's the infamous microscope that took an inordinately long time to purchase (partly due to delays in getting start-ups funds, partly due to my misunderstandings of the purchasing process, partly due to... oh, you get the idea.)

Isn't it pretty? I've joked more than once that I don't actually plan to look at anything through it, I just need a scope for show to impress the visitors.

You'll notice a camera attachment on the left; it's a nice digital camera. A camera lucida (a.k. drawing tube) is on the right. It's a device for looking at the material under the scope through one eye, and looking at a piece of paper through the other so that you can trace what you see. It's excellent for making records of material that isn't flat, which can't be easily photographed because of depth of field problems.

That's about $8K worth of microscope you're looking at there. It's probably the single most expensive thing in the lab.

Here's the runner-up in expense (would tie if you included the software asscoiated with it).

That little "bruise-coloured" box (i.e., black and blue!) on top of the silver one cost over $6K. It's an analog-digital board: it converts continuously variable electric signals into digital signals that my computer can understand.

But enough tech for now. Let's turn to a more green and pleasant thoughts...

The view out my lab window. There used to be a baseball field (right picture), which was ripped down last year. I've heard various things about what is going in there. It might be a new building. Or it might be a parking lot (I'm kind of hoping not). But at least I have some green plants and blue sky to view when I look up from my scope.

Biology myths of our time

Heard on television commercial currently playing locally:

"I can't concentrate. Could I be pregnant?"

Somehow, I doubt that an inability to concentrate is the first clue women use to detect a pregnancy. And if the makes of this pregnancy test don't know that, would you really trust them on some of the other details...?

The power of blogging

Anyone who still doubts the power of blogs (“web logs” like this journal) to be effective at reaching a wide audience will probably not be able to have those doubts for much longer. A blog from Bagdhad is now receiving international attention.