Villainy I

Your results: You are Riddler

Riddle me that, riddle me this, who is obsessed with having a battle of wits??

Riddler		75%
Dark Phoenix		69%
Apocalypse		68%
The Joker		65%
Poison Ivy		65%
Magneto		64%
Mr. Freeze		61%
Dr. Doom		61%
Venom		55%
Catwoman		54%
Juggernaut		53%
Lex Luthor		51%
Mystique		45%
Green Goblin		33%
Kingpin		33%
Two-Face		29%

Click here to take the "Which Super Villain am I?" quiz...

And it's The Riddler, thank you.

Did I miss my calling?

Careers I would apparently like...

1. Taxidermist (What?!)
2. Desktop Publisher (Kind of did that)
3. Veterinary Technician
4. Industrial Designer
5. Cartoonist / Comic Illustrator (Done a bit of that)
6. Animator
7. Fashion Designer
8. Costume Designer
9. Set Designer
10. Botanist (Getting close)
11. Artist
12. Graphic Designer
13. Paleontologist
14. Critic (Sort of did that)
15. Writer (Does blogging count?)
16. Computer Animator
17. Biologist
18. Political Aide
19. Activist
20. Communications Specialist
21. Market Research Analyst
22. Public Policy Analyst
23. Print Journalist
24. Website Designer
25. Interior Designer (Could you picture me on Trading Spaces?)
26. Translator
27. Medical Illustrator
28. Technical Writer
29. Animal Breeder
30. Craftsperson
31. Potter
32. Marine Biologist
33. Public Relations Specialist
34. Veterinarian
35. Zoologist
36. Criminologist
37. Anthropologist
38. Professor
39. Biological Tech
40. Optometrist

This meme courtesy of John Wick.

Lights out

A few minutes before five o'clock, the power went out in my office. My building. And I soon learned the power was off on the entire campus. It took a while to find out a transformer had gone out, and power wasn't coming back on in a few minutes.

At least this was at the end of the day. If it had been earlier, it would have been very disruptive to the site visit of the regional director for Beta Beta Beta. Students are trying to establish a chapter – they need a faculty advisor – and I said, “Okay.” So part of establishing a chapter is the visit, and I think that went well.

In other emergencies...

Our president had to go through major heart surgery unexpectedly. And we also just found out that one of our scheduled Science Symposium speakers for HESTEC has to cancel because he has to go in for major heart surgery (triple bypass). And our Beta Beta Beta visitor was the recipient of quadruple bypass surgery not too long ago.

Another sad day

Some become so famous that one one name is needed. Elvis. Madonna.

In the field of animal behaviour and psychology, most people knew about Alex.

Poor Alex died unexpectedly last week. When I saw a new story about a "famous parrot" dying, my heart sunk, because I knew there was only one parrot that it could be.

Alex was the African grey parrot that Irene Pepperberg had worked with for 30 years in her classic studies of comparative cognition. People had always known parrots were clever, but started to show just how clever. Categorization, counting, concepts... Work with Alex really started to undo a lot of the thinking that had permeated animal behaviour since the Clever Hans affair and the radical behaviourism of American psychology in the mid-20^th century. For decades, anything that remotely smelled of "thinking" was exiled from scientific study in animals, and sometimes even humans.

Irene Pepperberg's work can be seen at the Alex Foundation.

Classic graphics #2: Crayfish tailflips

This particular picture is not famous outside of my own field. But it has been reproduced many times, and as such, I think warrants the classic designation.

Crayfish tailflipping was one of the first natural animal behaviours that neuroethology really cracked. It was one of the first cases where we could explain how the connections between the neurons explained a lot about how the behaviour of the animal worked.

One of the little oddities in the story of understanding the escape response of crayfish was that the major neurons involved were recognized back in the 1920s. These huge neurons became known as the lateral giant (LG) and medial giant (MG) neurons, but even in the flapper era, there was pretty strong evidence then these giant neurons were involved in tailflipping.

But it took over 40 years for people to explain why there were two sets of neurons involved in tailflipping. And they can be forgiven for not figuring this out quickly, because this behaviour is so blindingly fast, you can't make it out with the naked eye.

When people finally got around to using high speed film, the answer became clear. There wasn't one behaviour. There were two. There were two different kinds of tailflips, each triggered by a different set of neurons. (Actually, it turned out that there were three kinds of tailflips, but that's another story.)

What fascinates me about this particular figure (from Wine and Krasne, 1972) is that it was not the first to make this point. Priority is huge in science. Normally, the first to show anything gets priority, and hold a very strong sway on our imaginations. Ask someone who was the second person to climb Mount Everest, or the second person to fly solo across the Atlantic. Heck, I don't know.

Just a few months earlier, in the same journal, another group of researchers led by Jim Larimer (which included my intellectual predecessor, Don Kennedy) published a picture that shows the same thing: that stimulating the different neurons generates different movements.

In this case, I think it's pretty clear why the later picture became the canonical representation of crayfish escape behaviour: context. You see the stick tapping animal, and you see the whole animal, moving through space, rather than an isolated part of an animal being held static. The advantages of this are huge.

The top diagram makes it forcefully clear what advantage there is to having two tailflips: both tailflips take the animal away from the source of the offending stimulus, but do so by throwing the animal in different directions. The crayfish jackknifes into the water when the LGs fire, but heads straight back when the MGs fire. You can sort of extrapolate that from what's shown in the earlier figure, but since you can't see where the stimulus would be, you don't have that immediate "Aha!" insight.

Sometimes, it isn't better to be first. It's better to be better.

References

Larimer, J. L., Eggleston, A. C., Masukawa, L. M. and Kennedy, D. (1971). The different connections and motor outputs of lateral and medial giant fibres in the crayfish. The Journal of Experimental Biology 54, 391-404.

Wine, J. J. and Krasne, F. B. (1972). The organization of escape behaviour in the crayfish. The Journal of Experimental Biology 56, 1-18.

Classic graphics#1: The Cartesian reflex

One of my side interests is in graphics. And I'm curious about what makes an image famous. Particularly scientific images. So I'm going to try exploring that from time to time, focusing on my own field of interest, neurobiology.

Over at the left is an image that I've seen reproduced many times. So often, in fact, that I'm having a hard time finding exactly the original source, to my embarrassment. It's from the work of René Descartes, 17^th century French intellectual. I think it's from Treatise on Man, published around 1662 after Descartes' death.

I do not know if Descartes drew his own figures. I doubt it, because preparing woodcuts is a pretty specialized talent. And Descartes, I've heard, loved a life of luxury. I don't think he was the sort to handle woodcutting tools. Be that as it may...

What the figure is showing is Descartes' conception of how behaviour worked. It looks fairly modern. Even if you understand only a bit of modern biology, you might think, "You have a sensory stimulus, impulses travel up the spinal cord to the brain, are processed, and you get a withdrawal from the painful stimulus."

I think that's one reason why this particular diagram is famous: because it is almost eerily prescient.

And indeed, in broad strokes, that's what this is showing. Descartes was the first to develop a reflexive theory of behaviour, although I don't think he used the term "reflex." Because Descartes is so famous for his ideas on the soul, his arguments that much of behaviour -- even in humans -- is purely "push pull" sorts of automatic, reflexive responses is often overlooked.

That the picture looks quite modern in some ways actually sort of overshadows some important problems. Descartes had what I consider to be a pre-scientific concept of behaviour. The discovery of biological electricity was centuries away, so Descartes followed the ancients in thinking that behaviour was controlled through the movements of "animal spirits."

Is the picture at top famous because of the idea that it shows? I don't think it's just that. Over to the left is another picture showing the same basic idea, again from Descartes, and I think even from the same book. Regardless, you see the same basic elements: a fire, an outstretched limb, and "animal spirit vessels" leading to the brain.

Yet this one I have not reproduced seen over and over again like the top one. I would say the top one is a classic, but the bottom one not. And here, the actual rendering of the diagram might be important in why this one isn't reproduced that often.

I find the second one is kind of disturbing. The figure has sort of babyish proportions. The torso sort of floats out of a cloak, which no obvious indications of a bottom half. Plus, the "animal spirit vessels" don't go right out to the fingers, making the idea that there's a connection between the stimulus and the person's brain harder to understand.

Or maybe the reason the top one is more famous is that editors are always looking for excuses to put in more nudes in their books.

Oh, no.

I was just looking for something for another post I was writing, and boom, learned Barry Beyerstein was dead.

Geez.

I can't say I knew him well, but he was someone who did me some favours. When I was a grad student, he invited me over from UVic to SFU to give a talk to the BC Skeptics after reading an article I published in The Skeptical Inquirer. It was my first invited talk. Later, he was a special science guest at I-Con 2, a SF convention I helped organize in Victoria.

He was wonderfully friendly guy. I'm sorry I'll never get a chance to run into him again.

Additional, 20 March 2014: Here’s someone who heard Barry Beyerstein at I-Con 2, which, as I said, I was involved in organizing and inviting Barry to. He calls hearing Beyerstein speak, “a life-altering shock to me, a road to Damascus moment.”

If only it were that easy to get rid of a cold

I have a cold. And being a guy, I am a crybaby about it. But even a simple cold gives a chance for some thinking about science.

Someone who stuck her head into my office said, "Drink some orange juice." While I like orange juice, the advice is wrong on two counts.

As far as I can tell, the idea that orange juice does anything for a cold can be traced back to Linus Pauling. Pauling was no doubt a clever person, judging by his measure in the world's universally recognized international cleverness unit, the Nobel Prize. Pauling won the prize for chemistry in 1954 and again for peace in 1962. But winning a Nobel prize is no guarantee against going off the rails, which Pauling did on at least one point in the 1970s or so.

For some reason, Pauling became convinced that megadoses of vitamin C could prevent colds. Apparently he was quite obsessive about taking vitamin C, particularly when there was the slightest symptom of a cold.

And what's a good source of vitamin C? Orange juice, of course.

But it doesn't work. There was no evidence that Vitamin C did anything for a cold that a kleenex or off the shelf cough suppressant couldn't do.

So that's the first way the advice is wrong.

The second thing is, even if Pauling was right (which he wasn't), orange juice still wouldn't be the way to go. Pauling didn't advocate just having vitamin C in your diet, the way that you might get from orange juice. No, he advocated megadoses: amounts many, many times over the recommended daily amount. And sometimes, you got to admit monks are onto something with that whole moderation thing. Huge doses of vitamins are not without their risks; it is possible to overdose on some. High vitamin c amounts are associated with diarrhea -- perhaps not life endangering, but still.

And that's how the advice is wrong twice.

We can't even get our wrong bits right.

You know you're having a tough week when...

...You get halfway through the day with your shirt on backwards.

And nobody tells you!

Time to prep a lecture. Or my tenure folder. Or research. Or administer the grad program. Or clean the seawater tank. Or...

Right. No more blogging.

Most fun of the day

The most fun of the day was when I had a couple of faculty from the art department in my office and a bunch of art grad students asking how they could make glue from natural sources.

I was especially pleased because I was able to find a book in my office (and I did have to hunt for it), look in the index, and find an answer. Bones, hides, hoofs, and the ever popular "fish remains." And I learned that "collagen" and "collage" are basically similar words, collagen was the major material in some kinds of early glue. Thank you, Steve Vogel, for writing Life's Devices, which is where I got the answer.

Paying dues

I finally joined the National Center for Science Education. I probably should have joined a long time ago. What finally pushed me to join was a couple of recent stories about individuals on the Texas Board of Education talking about how school textbooks should address "weaknesses" in evolutionary theory.

Translation: "We think evolution is wrong, but we can't say that we object on religious grounds in science classes because the courts have repeatedly ruled against teaching religion in public schools in the United States, so we'll just attack it at every opportunity."

And because I live in Texas, but, as a Canadian citizen, can't vote, this seemed one way that I might be able to contribute ensuring that my research discipline isn't weakened in Texas schools.

What's the alternative?

Who killed John F. Kennedy?

Do you believe the official story that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone?

Recently, I've been posting about distinguishing a serious scientific skeptic from someone who is a crank. (Previous posts: Lying with statistics, Skeptic or denier, Science is a democratic process).

A recent article about HIV deniers in PLoS Medicine throws some valuable light on this matter.

What you often see is that the "minority view" has no consistent position apart from saying the consensus view is wrong.

Those who claim HIV doesn't cause AIDS have a zillion alternative theories about what does. From the PLoS Medicine article: "In Africa, HIV deniers attribute AIDS to a combination of malnutrition and poor sanitation, i.e., they believe that AIDS is simply a relabeling of old diseases. In America and other wealthy countries, they claim AIDS is caused by drug use and promiscuity."

Climate change critics are probably divided on many issues. Some will say there is not significant change (not many now, though, I suspect). Some say there is significant change, but propose a whole slew of alternatives for what might be causing it, with solar radiation being only one idea.

So you say evolution is a lie? So tell me, is the Earth about 4 billion years old, or about 6,000 years old? Young Earth Creationists and Old Earth Creationists have deep disagreements on this point.

Who killed JFK? Depending on who you listen to, it was the mafia, the Cubans, the Russians, the CIA... and the list goes on.

For an alternative to a consensus view to be credible in science, the alternative itself needs to establish a consensus. Credible criticisms tend to get stronger over time, because they develop more evidence and more consistency. Because nature abhors contradiction.

Incidentally, first author on the HIV article, Tara Smith is a Panda's Thumb contributer, and writes her own thoughtful blog, Aetiology.

Evidence and policy

In a previous post, I drew some parallels between scientific and democratic processes. Another thought that occurred to me is that evidence in science functions somewhat like policy in politics.

On election day, you have a chance to vote for a government with a particular set of policies. Those policies, however, are very liable to change. And people can change their minds about a policy that isn't working, or if a new policy is introduced that they disagree with.

In science, people change their minds as new evidence becomes available.

In neither case is a decision now and for ever, once and for all.

Of course, it's often much harder to show that policy is faulty than it is to show scientific evidence is faulty. To paraphrase Feynman, if your basic understanding of physics of balances and strains and stresses is bad, your building falls down.

Champions of stink

Dead things, we know, stink. Dead things that live in water stink more. Dead things that live in seawater stink more. And I think echinoderms may be the top of the list.

We have a new seawater tank, which I've been looking after. Unfortunately, had a water quality problem and a lot of animals in it died. But the sea cucumbers were really wretched things to clean. Now I can tell my student Sakshi that it's not just starfish that die horribly in an awful mess.

My hands are very itchy and dry from having been in salt water much of the day.

Mysticism in the lab

If you were to look for an exemplary case of mysticism, close to the top would have to be the out of body experience. Many people have reported this, and has been used to promote ideas such as astral projection and life after death.

Not one, but two papers in this week's Science have now created this experience in lab settings. The first is here, and the second is here. And a third article commenting on the other two is here.

There one sense, some might feel that this debunks astral projection and the like. But in another very real way, it validates those reports. Various people who had out of body experiences were not (necessarily) frauds who were just making it all up, but reporting "real," albeit illusory, experiences.

Science is a democratic process

I was listening to an interview was former New Scientist editor Nigel Calder yesterday, and he insisted a couple of times that, “Science is not a democratic process.”

The point he was making was that views that were once a minority position often become conventional wisdom. Which is fair enough. That’s a valid point. As Calder himself says, “I have in my time been criticised for saying that black holes might exist, the continents move, that an asteroidal comet wiped out the dinosaurs.”

Calder fails, however, to say what he thinks the scientific process actually is, if not democratic. It’s like saying I am not American, don’t dance the tango, don’t like pickles, and don’t own a dog. You know everything about me now, right?

If you want to use political analogies, what are the alternatives? Science is certainly not a monarchy or any other sort of authoritarian system. Everyone is allowed to engage in the scientific process. Science doesn’t care about who originates an idea or who promulgates it – it cares about evidence.

So who decides if evidence is credible? It’s a consensus developed by a community. And the views of that community can change over time, as more evidence becomes available, or as people have more time to think over an idea. After all, any real democracy worthy of its name reviews and has regular opportunities to change governments. (Even in Alberta.)

What other elements does science share with a democratic system? How about accountability? Scientists are typically for crediting sources, for allowing others to examine their findings, allowing others to replicate them.

Of course, it’s more complex than that. Earlier this week, reading Ryan Dancey’s blog, he mentioned the reputation economy, which is something I have to think about more. A similar idea crops up in today's entry in Seth Godin's blog. I think this has the potential to describe why some scientific ideas thrive and some do not in the sort term.

But as Arthur C. Clarke once noted, science tends to get to the bottom of things in about 50 years, if there is any bottom to be gotten to. The evidence will out. People will either admit they have been wrong, or relegate themselves to the fringe.

There’s also another sort of fallacy that Calder engages in: that because minority views have become majority views before, it will happen again, and specifically in this case – and he’s talking about human-induced climate change. Unfortunately, lots of fringe ideas have stayed fringe ideas.

Also, I think Calder might agree that regardless of climate change, there are other reasons to get away from the status quo of running our economies by burning fossil fuels.

“I am thinking now”

When you're an educator, it's easy to get bogged down in details. Often petty details. And it's easy to forget the big picture.

In this TED talk, Patrick Awuah talks about how universities create the educated people that can drive nations to succeed. And how the lack of such people can cause national crises.



He calls this leadership, but I'm suspicious of that word.

Just another day in the lab

Courtesy of the Simpsonizer.

Cloudburst!

Lots of lightning and raucous thunder late this afternoon. Internet access at uni dropped out. The usual flood points were, as expected, flooded. I can make it almost home with only the souls of my feet getting wet... but there's a couple of ankle deep spots near the end of my trek. Alas.

Meanwhile, spent a good chunk of the afternoon – before everyone started to worry about being smitten with Thor's hammer – troubleshooting some DNA sequencing. It looks like we simply had too much DNA. Yes, for our delicate sequencer, it is possible to have too much of a good thing.

The sequencer is broken again, though, and so we won't have a chance to test our suspicions until Wednesday, probably.

Revision of a figure

Yesterday, I did a quick revamp on our Neuroethology poster for HESTEC. Previously, I wrote about the design of one of the data figures for that poster. Interestingly, I found out at the meeting that I was too clever for my own good in designing the Neuroethology poster. The problem was that I used the bars coming from the boxes to represent the minimum and maximum. Several people interpreted these as error bars (standard deviation or standard error). Because overlapping error bars usually indicate that groups are not significantly different, and error bars are smaller than minimums and maximums, this led some viewers to momentarily question the results.

Consequently, I went back to a more standard bar graph in the revised HESTEC poster. It's similar to this one, except it shows transformed data rather than the raw data, and the colour is not bright red.

The size of the HESTEC poster was also smaller, so a lot of cutting text and general simplification occurred. It's probably a better poster as a result.

I also started work on my annual compilation of everything I've done in the last year. It's a dreary process, although sometimes it can be nice to see how much you've done.

Getting closer...

It may not look like much. And it isn't. Nevertheless, it's my first little steps into a new area of research: DNA analysis.

The traces above show a small snippet of an attempt to sequence a bit of DNA. Ideally, there should be a nice sequence of evenly distributed peaks of about the same height. Each peak indicates a single nucleotide. Unfortunately, our sample is not ideal and there's a lot of noise in the measurement. My student Unnam and I need to do some troubleshooting and try again.

Another indication of our problems is that DNA is made of a sequence of four letters: A, T, C, and G (nucleotides, really, but the names need not concern us here, and the letter symbols are universally used). The sequencer gave us A, T, C, G... and N. "N" is a symbol for "any nucleotide," which basically means that the machine couldn't figure out what it was and spit out a "I dunno."

We were very excited to be sequencing -- finally -- yesterday, so that it was really not all that usable was disappointing. Or, as Unnam wrote, "THAT SUCKS. A lot."

Still, after my buddy Virginia was always bugging me... "Zen, you have to get into molecular biology to show the world that you're a modern biologist," I do feel the need to point out that I'm moving in that direction.

Omit needless words

Lately, I've been seeing a lot of headlines that say things like, “10 places to visit before you die.”

Is there really any other time to visit those places? Does anyone think, “Oh, that's okay, I'll get to that after I die...”?

A rule

Nature doesn't abhor a vacuum.

Nature abhors a contradiction.

Busted

DNA sequencer: $100,000.

Electron microscope: Tens of thousands of dollars.

Floor centrifuge: Tens of thousands of dollars.

The feeling you get when all of them break in the space of a week or so: Priceless.

I swear, this place was built on an ancient Indian burial ground. Sometimes I think a curse is the only explanation.

One of my students has been working for over a month to get DNA samples ready to sequence, and came in this morning only to learn the sequence broke Wednesday night.

Art and science

I was talking to an artist yesterday who wanted to incorporate some microscopic images into a new pork she is preparing. This got me thinking about the similarities between art and science. Here's a few.

Both are profoundly creative endeavors.

“The overriding message of all art... is ‘Pay attention.’” - Harlan Ellison. You could say the same thing about science: the message is, “Pay attention!”

Both are hand crafted, not mass produced. At least, in their original form.

Both, at their best, transform the way you see your world.

Headspace

I was sick on Saturday, had an uncomfortable overnight flight back to Texas on Sunday, have had the south Texas heat kicking my ass every time I walk out the door, and am still sleeping in way too late.

My head is not yet back in the game.

Some of the routine paperwork is done now, but that's about it.

Champions never quit

Brian May, of the legendary band Queen, has finished writing his doctoral thesis. Thirty years after he started it.

Now that would be a graduation ceremony to see...

Scene at customs

"Edinburg," says our customs officer in the Vancouver airport. "Who lives there?"

"There's a university there," I say.

"Pan Am," he says, which makes my eyebrows crawl up my forehead. Nobody knows where Pan Am is...

"I'm from McAllen," he says.

"What?!"

Much better, though, than the flight attendant on the flight from LAX who kept calling McAllen, "McLean."

ICN 8 continued

Museum of Anthropology rocks.

So many delegates leaving on Thursday night when the conference ends Friday afternoon sucks.

ICN8 (with news on 9)

Vancouver Aquarium rocks. The beluga whales really are hypnotic. And sea otters are pretty darn cute. And so much more.

Fireworks rock. Went on a dinner cruise and stayed in Vancouver harbour to watch Spain's entry in an international fireworks competition. Nice big explosions.

ICN9 will be in Spain in 2010.

ICN8

I am blogging (if this works) from my Pocket PC in Vancouver, BC, where I'm at the 8th International Congress for Neuroethology. The sun came out, the science is good, and I gave a short "ad hoc" talk.

And I have unlimited access to Canadian chocolate.

Oh yeah. Lovin' ICN8.

ICN8

Is in Vancouver.

_________________________________________________________________
http://liveearth.msn.com

See ya later, south Texas

Tomorrow morning I get on a plane for the Eighth International Congress of Neuroethology. One of my favourite meetings, but only held every three years, and I've missed the last two. 2001: Moving to start new job in south Texas. 2004: Had world-class experts down in region to help with research.

Right. Time to sleep to be awake enough to catch the morning flight.

Poster done

I just finished printing off my poster on the printer so big, they call it "Tank." Fortunately, as it was printing, I only saw about 3 things that I would change. One was a colour issue: some data I had printed in blue came out a bit darker on print than it does on screen, so the data points were not as distinct as I would have liked. A second was that I probably could have used some colour in the graph I described in my last post to make the mean diamond stand out a bit more. Third, some of the spacing between text and heading could be improved.

But if those are all I'd tweak at this point, I'm doing better than average, I reckon.

Making of a figure

It's late. Stupid late. But I just finished up a poster for a meeting. The last thing I was doing were some statistics. I had to do them by hand, because they're specialized enough that most computer stats programs don't calculate automatically.

But I thought I would share the evolution of one of the figures that went into the poster.

First thing I do is just plot the raw data, shown below. This is just for myself, not for presentation (besides this "behind the scenes" post in my blog, naturally), which is why it looks pretty poor. I don't like the bars in red stripes.

This is a useful step just to get a sense of what you've got, and sometimes helps detect errors. I found one of my students misplaced a decimal this way, so one of his data points was out by a factor of ten, which wasn't good. But we caught it.



That's the data from one experimental treatment. Now I want to see all the experimental treatments side by side. This one I was thinking I might end up using in a presentation at some point, so I cleaned it up a little more.



The good news is that it looks like there might be an effect. The bad news is, that from looking at the plot above, the data are not normally distributed -- most are piled up over on the left hand side -- and they differ in how much they vary. Both of these things are bad statistically.

The plot below shows how I transformed the data to try to fix those issues.



Not perfect, but certainly not as skewed toward the right as before. Again, this is just for my own exploration, so it's just the default red stripes. I could change the default, but I've been too lazy.

The next step is to run some stats. Here, I have to switch to a real stats program, which does all the test right -- but leaves a lot to be desired in terms of graphs.



The above was the default plot of averages I got when I ran the statistical test -- which confirmed that there was a significant effect! Still, the plot leaves much to be desired. I want the data points in different order, and I don't want them joined by lines, and I want to show some measure of the variation.

The stats program gave me this when I asked it to show mean and standard error.



Still not great. And the above two pictures are both screen grabs. I want an image in a form that will scale up and not get all jaggy when I put in on a big poster. The WMF format scales up, but when I try to export the graph in WMF, I get this:



Proof that the stats software is about the numbers, not the pictures.

So now I go back to my graphing program. I try using it to plot averages and error bars, and get a a basic bar graph.



Not bad, but because one of the issues with this was initially the skew and variation, I want something that might show a little more detail than that. I try a box plot of the raw (i.e., non-transformed) data.



Getting closer now, but the fiddling over details gets more intense. The lines are too thin for a poster, so I thicken them. The little square in the middle, which shows the average, tends to get lost when I thicken the lines; I turn that into a diamond to make it more distinct. The top and bottom whiskers are supposed to represent the 95% confidence intervals, but the sample size is small enough that it ends up being in the same position as the minimum and maximum, which are shown as the top and bottom Xs. So I get rid of the Xs while I'm at it.



Now I also want to show the transformed data, so I make a similar plot and change it much like I changed the graph of the raw data.



I add the letters above each box to show which condition is statistically different from the others. (Boxes that have the same letter above them do not differ.) But the plotting program doesn't allow me to line up the letters as precisely to the boxes as I want, so I import that into a real graphics program for final tweaking.



And that's the end result on the poster!

To make this one figure, I used four different software packages. Microsoft Excel 2003 for data manipulation, Origin 7 for graphing, SPSS 12 for statistics, and CorelDRAW 12 for final touch-up. I'm showing almost a dozen graphs, although there are a few more steps in the process that I didn't show here.

And this is the easy figure on the poster.

Skeptic or denier?

In my earlier post about lying with statistics, I mentioned scientific skeptics. Part of what I was thinking of was a recent (30 June 2007) edition of The Science Show about climate change (again), which included comments by Ian Plimer, which is documented in more detail in a following In Conversation episode (5 July 2007). It looks like climate is also on the agenda for this week's episode, which I haven't listened to yet.

Also saw a recent TED talk by economist Emily Oster about AIDS in Africa that challenges a lot of ideas about the disease.

That got me thinking about what's the difference between a researcher taking a minority view compared to someone who is just in denial? Who's a thoughtful doubting scientist who is thinking seriously about evidence versus someone the flat earther? (Setting myself up for hate mail from the flat earthers... yes, there really are still people out there who believe the earth is flat.)

I think there are a few guidelines.

First, is the skeptic willing to admit that he or she could be wrong? What would it take to convince you that you are wrong? If you're concerned about evidence, what evidence do you want? Is there an experiment you'd suggest should be done? What numbers do you need to see? (Plimer, for instance, expresses doubt that humans are causing climate change, but he doesn't really say what he get him to be convinced. Is there anything that would convince him or not? I don't know.)

Second, is the skeptic actually doing active research on the topic? It's one thing to read a lot of papers. Reading a lot of papers is surely important. Nevertheless, it's another to actually do it. And when you look at a lot of cases of prominent scientists who take minority views, they are often on matters outside their actual research. Lynn Margulis and Kary Mullis, for instance, are both well known scientists who expressed doubt that HIV causes AIDS, but neither of them practising virologists or epidemiologists.

And of course, the third is just how small is that minority view? This one is often really hard for outsiders to judge, particularly because media coverage is notorious for presenting opposing views as though each has equal claim to legitimacy. Someone sees a show with one person saying X and the other saying Y. There's often no easy way to tell if position X is pretty much subscribed to by researchers in every university in every country of the world who are funded through competitive grants, while position Y is backed by advocates numbering in the single digits who are backed by a private foundation.

Peter Tuddenham, 1918-2007

Peter Tuddenham was a British actor, who, among other things, provided a huge number of voices for the SF TV series Blake's 7... including my namesake, Zen, the Liberator computer (shown below – doesn't work as a still, since this computer was all flashing lights). He just died earlier this week.

I feel like a small piece of me has died, weirdly.

How to lie with statistics, 2007 edition

The title of this post comes from a well known, short little book about statistics. It's been some time since I read it, but I recall a lot of tricks that could be used to make something look one way when it wasn't. The book was aimed at declawing what has since become known as "spin."

When I lived in Australia, oddly, I didn't really listen to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. I really only started listening through internet broadcasts and podcasts after I moved to Texas. And one of the things I've found is that their science journalism is second to none. The Science Show, All in the Mind, Dr. Karl... these people are really, really good at what they do: explaining science in an accessible, literate, thoughtful, and often fun way.

Another excellent example is this feature. The article is about a film (I hesitate to call it a documentary) that's aired in Britain and Australia called The Great Global Warming Swindle. I don't think it has aired in America yet. I am having a cynical moment and thinking it's because so few Americans are convinced of global warming that the makers of the Swindle film feel no need to convince Americans of their position.

Be that as it may, whatever your position on climate change, this article is worth examining for the "before" and "after" pictures of the graphs: those in the film, and those from other sources. The major trick seems to be a selective use of timelines: ignoring early stuff or very late stuff, even if there is more recent data. The graph I have in the upper right stops at 1975, for instance -- and a lot's happened since then. We have data for those last 32 years, so why aren't they shown?

There are, of course, some skeptics of climate change who are legitimate and thoughtful scientists. They serve a useful role -- they ask, probe, and make the science better. What I've heard from the Swindle film indicates it is not representative of that sort of scientific skepticism. Looks much more like a political hatchet job.

This is all a nice example of Edward Tufte's arguments that making graphs, and interpreting them, are fundamentally moral acts. Elements of responsibility? Attributing original sources, for one...

Package arrives, productivity declines

I was pleased to have two packages arrive today that were ordered earlier this week -- Tuesday and Thursday, to be exact. Of course, I fully expect there to be a long period of pain when I try to pay for those packages, but at least I can get on with the research they're needed for.

And productivity went down when the second of these arrived, because it was shipped in dry ice.

And dry ice is just too much fun. It bubbles! It creates mist and fog and makes you look like you're doing right proper mad science!

Whenever I get packages shipped in dry ice, I must spend a quarter to half an hour screwing around with the dry ice. Yet another flaw in my character.

The full Feynman quote

“For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.” – Richard Feynman, conclusion to report on space shuttle Challenger explosion. Quoted here.

The Zen of Presentations, Part 10

In preparing the previous post, I happened upon Chris Mooney's blog. Chris is a journalist, not a scientist. After attending a conference and seeing how miserably many top researchers communicate their ideas, he offers advice.

I am still a lazy blogger.

Not so much news as confirmation

Sigh.

There have been entire books written about politicians telling scientists to shut up. So this article is just more confirmation of a disturbing and apparently increasing trend.

The American Surgeon General was told not to talk about about stem cells; emergency contraception, but had to mention President Bush three times on every page of his speeches. Although the Surgeon General is a distinctly medical post, it wouldn't have surprised me if he was told not to talk about evolution, either.

In many cases, such spin seems completely pointless because, as Richard Feynman once said, "Nature cannot be fooled." But most politicians think in time frames of years at best, whereas scientists typically think much longer time frames.

Rated

Rating courtesy of Mingle².

Can you guess?

...What the picture at the right is?

It's the top view of part of the abdominal nerve cord of a white shrimp, Litopenaeus setiferus.

I have dissected out many nerve cords of many different species of crustaceans, and they are usually a slightly translucent white. So I was tickled by finding this unexpected leopard-like dotted pattern in this shrimp. I'd never seen anything like it before. I have no idea why it's coloured in this shrimp but not other species.

Lovely...!

Under the big top

I was listening to a very interesting interview with David Sloan Wilson on Quirks and Quarks. Dr. Wilson wrote a book called Evolution for Everyone -- a sentiment with which I agree. That said, I did find some of his comments a little odd.

When asked about the continuing conflicts (real or imagined) between evolution and religion, Wilson described creationism and intelligent design as a "sideshow." He also described books like The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins as a "sideshow." The "main event," Wilson argues, will be the scientific study of evolution as a natural phenomenon. (An article exploring similar ground can be found in the July 2007 American Scientist: "Evolution, religion, and free will" by Graffin and Provine.)

Now, it is no doubt true that there is much very interesting research to be done on religion. Philosopher Dan Dennett has argued that nobody has really tested the contention that more religious people are more virtuous, more giving, more charitable, etc., than less religious people. And that is definitely an important question.

Wilson seems to be arguing that when viewed from an evolutionary perspective, there may be empirical evidence that religion beneficial for some reason or another. Contrast this to the subtitle of Christopher Hitchen's recent book, "How religion poisons everything." Or compare it to Dawkins' suggestion that religions are sorts of intellectual parasites that ride along because of other ways that we think (e.g., a tendency to obey elders).

Wilson seems to think that by bringing religion into the fold of evolution, and by saying that it might -- indeed, probably -- had some evolutionary benefit, there is no longer any conflict between the two.

This misses the mark. What both creationists and atheists care about and are arguing about is not whether religion is beneficial, but whether it is true.

For a lot of people, the question of whether shared worship generates societal cohesion that increases the fitness levels of a group is one of two things.

For some, it's not a question they're interested in. They're much more interested if there is a being who intervenes in human affairs on a regular basis, answers prayers, and has selected certain territories for particular people to live in (say).

For others, the question is interesting but irrelevant. Many people are interested in what society ought to do rather than what society has done. Religion may have been adaptive in the past, and perhaps remains so in the present, but that doesn't mean that other non-religious systems might not be as adaptive, if not more.

I'm completely surprised that Wilson -- and many others, according to the American Scientist article I mentioned earlier -- think that the conflict between religions and evolution can by resolved in this way.

Rethinking granting

The idea of loans is to use money to create wealth.

The idea of grants is to use money to create scientific knowledge.

People have often tried to create wealth, particularly in non-industrial nations, by loaning money for huge mega-projects (e.g., building dams, power plants).

People have often tried to create knowledge by giving money for huge mega-projects (e.g., moon shots, human genome and biomedical research).

More recently, micro-loans have been so successful at creating wealth that some of the first to use this strategy were recognized with a Nobel Peace price in 2006.

Where are the equivalent micro-grants?

Another thought on the automotive age

Not having a car in south Texas is like being under house arrest.

Competition in education

For some reason, thought yesterday about a comment from Doug, a former University staffer who ran the Center for Distance Learning. "Competition is coming to higher education," he claimed. Distance learning through the internet would make online classes and universities possible, and there would be competition for students and their tuition fees.

I don't think the internet made competition between universities possible. I think it was the car.

Think late 19^th century, early 20^th century. How long would it take you to travel 30 miles? If you lived that far from an university, you probably couldn't go to university. Now, of course, people routinely commute much farther than that on a daily basis. If someone wants to move to attend a university hundred of miles away, it's actually pretty trivial.

That said, I've seen a lot of people who have no desire to leave their region. A lot. But I haven't felt or seen any sort of sea change in the way people think about their education. I don't know if people see value in getting an online degree.

Submissions

Just submitted another manuscript to a journal for review. Cross your fingers.

Now, back to the part of research I am coming to hate the most: spending money. I know, spending money for most people is a pleasure, not a chore. But the paperwork is so obtuse, and it's so easy to do the wrong thing, it's becoming one of my least favourite tasks. It's terrible.

I have shopping to do for a little DNA barcoding project I have going this summer. Probably in an upcoming post, I'll describe a little bit more about what DNA barcoding is and why I'm going to try it.

The Zen of Presentations, Part 9

Another total cheat post directing you towards this post comparing speaking and singing. I am a lazy blogger.

Unnerving surge in lab numbers

In the last week, I've gone from having one Master's student and one undergrad in the lab to no Master's student and three undergrads.

I haven't lost my Master's student – that would smack of carelessness – but Sandra is out of state attending a neuroethology course at Friday Harbor. She arrived without incident, and all is well so far.

I also had to recruit a student to take up an undergraduate research position I was given, who came in yesterday and will officially start next week. Then, at random, out of the blue, I had an Honor's student who walked into my office interested in a research project. And they're all taking up DNA / molecular projects, where I really have very little experience. Which is starting to feel unnerving.

Go Jerry!

Jerry Coyne, co-author of an excellent book on speciation (rather unimaginatively, alas, titled Speciation), takes on the appalling demonstration of the mix of American politics and scientific literacy in this preview.

Love the opening shot:

Suppose we asked a group of Presidential candidates if they believed in the existence of atoms, and a third of them said "no"? That would be a truly appalling show of scientific illiteracy, would it not? (...) Yet something like this happened a week ago during the Republican presidential debate.

Still, as one other commentator noted, that only three of the ten Republican candidates professed not to believe in evolution has an upside of sorts. That's about 20% less than the general American public.

Don't think the question has been asked of Democrats yet.

Sayonara

My colleague Chris Little has left the building this week. He was hired one year after I was, and interviewed while he was still getting ready to defend his Ph.D. This week, he has gone off to the Plant Pathology department of Kansas State University.

Good for you, Chris. Good luck.

I will always be grateful for Chris for something he did this semester. One of his students came into his office to discuss a presentation, and the species names was wrong – not italicized, I think. Chris slammed down his hands on his desk, making collegues in the offices next door jump, and – shall we say – emphasized to the student the importance of getting species names correct. Emphasized emphatically. Okay, jumped down the student's throat.

"Are we going to have this conversation again?" he asked the student.

Meek response of "No sir..."

I am glad Chris did this. Now, when people talk about having meltdowns about student mistakes, they are less likely to mention me. I was probably the previous record holder for some rants to grad students about excessive numbers of slides in their talks.

Other favourite anecdote: Chris and Mike Persans were new hires in the same year. At a department social function in their first semester, Gloria, the Dean's secretary, was talking to them while we were sitting a table in the department hallway.

Gloria looked at Mike and Chris and asked, "Are you two married?"

"Not to each other," I deadpanned.

That would have been pretty progressive for southern Texas.

Amateur hour

A researcher is someone who commits to being an amateur forever. You're always trying to do things you've never done before.

Near miss

Only a little more than one year after the last time... The locker I was using at my fitness center was broken into. Again. The thing was padlocked, but the doors are actually pretty slim wood, so it's easy for someone to break the door in two – literally.

Luckily, brains occasionally do this wonderful thing called, “learning.” After I lost my wallet (with credit cards, green card, etc.) last year, I stopped putting it my locker. So fortunately, I lost nothing this time. Whew!

A fast answer

Too bad the answer was “No.”

So one of my current manuscripts has been kicked back from a second journal after a quick review, on the basis that it is not of sufficiently broad interest.

Will the third time be the charm? If I can figure out a third place to try...

More revisions

Another manuscript got off my desk and sent to an editor yesterday. Hooray. So now I have one thing in press and two in the hands of editors. And... well... after that, nothing else is close to ready quite yet.

What next? I hope on Monday that I can actually get some science going, maybe a little data collection. One problem that has come up with regards to summer research plans, though, is that one of my students -- who was going to receive pay for working on a project with me -- might not be eligible to work. Turns out her family are not American citizens, and are in the middle of a green card application process -- something I know a little about. So now I might have to try to scrounge a back-up student, or something. ‘Tis a problem.

I always have problems re-focusing at the end of semesters, or in transition times. I work best when I consistently have similar tasks on a daily basis.

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.

Coming up for air for a few seconds

It was not surprising that week kicked my butt. But even when you're expecting it, the soreness is never diminished much.

The week bit at me for three reasons. First, last week was the break, and suddenly there's all the catch-up that has to happen on things I couldn't do because... nobody was around.

Second, I'm spending a lot of time trying to get the new undergrad research program up and running. Meetings, recruiting, talking to interested students, updating the webpage, and just trying to think about all the things that still have to happen for everything to start on cue.

Third, and arguably the biggest, was that I had a writing deadline to meet yesterday. I was co-authoring a book review with my colleague Anita Davelos Baines for Behavioral and Brain Sciences (which was where I'd published one of my first articles as a grad student). Due to the combination of finally receiving word on the grant plus my general lack of willpower and concentration, the review was not as far along in the writing as I was hoping for on Thursday morning. I was going a little nuts inside my office on Thursday, trying to finish this short article -- and people kept knocking on my door! Gah!

It is said that no work of art is ever finished; merely abandoned. While I don't pretend the review was a work of art, I definitely felt it was abandoned rather than finished. I am satisfied with it, although I really wish that I had more time to think about some issues, discuss them with my colleagues, and polish the writing a bit.

It was pushing close to midnight when I emailed the final review. I felt like the stereotypical student, sliding the term paper under the professor's door before midnight. Some habits die hard. Others never die at all.

Today’s new charismatic megafauna

I love new species, and this one is just gorgeous. Read all about it here
or here.

Back from NSF

Unexpected fact: The outside main floor of the National Science Foundation building has a Quiznos and a bagel shop.

Despite the ugly early start for my flight to the NSF, everything went about as smoothly as could be hoped for. I got there about on time. I got to have lunch at Ruby Tuesday (which we don't have locally, but see ads for all the time).

I got my PocketPC successfully set up for NSF wireless internet access – in fact, the staffer who help me told me she had fun doing it, because she'd never tried to set up their wireless system on a Pocket PC before. I got a tiny bit lost, because the initial poster session was not on the room written on my badge, but again, found the starting poster session in time.

The featured speaker at dinner, Elaine Seymour, was very good, very thought provoking. And just to prove that the scientific community is way too small, met someone at dinner and found we had one degree of separation between us: he knew someone in our department, my buddy Fred.

I never sleep well in hotels, particularly the first night, so I wasn't real pleased that the next day started early and went long. But heard quite a few important things, and had no shortage of things to think about. Another keynote speaker, Tyrone Hayes, was awesome. Although he said to me later he is normally a "PowerPoint maniac," he made absolutely the right choice in ditching all that and delivering a fairly personal talk about his experience being a minority in research, and some of his success in mentoring minorities in research.

After the afternoon sessions finished, I just walked around some of the stores in a nearby mall, and ran into a few workshop participants for dinner at the Rock Bottom Brewery. (They'd been told there was a Macaroni Grill in the mall, but it had shut down!), and ended up talking with several of them in the hotel bar for even longer after getting back to the hotel.

It was really a stupidly long day. But in the morning, I was able to find a place with good croissants for breakfast, which I appreciated. It's so hard to find good croissants in southern Texas...

And since getting back, I've been trying to get this undergrad research program up and ready to run. Many meetings, many emails, many things to plan. I'm quickly finding that I have to be thinking about things that are years away, which is not easy for me. So I look forward to receiving the massive wall calendar / planner I asked for.

Finally

Way back in December, I wrote about a project that I couldn't talk about and some of the excitement I felt about it.

Now I can finally talk about what all that was about.

The National Science Foundation gave us a Research Experiences for Undergraduate grant. This is getting funded in portions, but over $156,000 is set and ready. If the funding to the NSF doesn't collapse, we'll get another year and a bit and the total will be over $284,000.

Hooray.

I've been sitting on that since December. Waiting and watching, hoping that the U.S. Congress will pass a good budget for the NSF. Congress was supposed to pass the NSF budget before Christmas, but didn't. They waited until the last possible second, which was the last day the continuing resolution ran out on 15 February. Much was written about this wait in the pages of Science and elsewhere. The delay was so bad that many funding agencies had to scale back planned projects. Reading those articles was highly nerve-wracking.

But in the end, NSF got a bit of a budget increase, fortunately, when many other federal research agencies got no increase. Whew.

And another thing I mentioned cryptically: an upcoming conference? It's actually a workshop for people running NSF sponsored undergraduate research programs. My flight leaves verrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrry early tomorrow morning.

It's just a relief to go to a conference knowing that I actually have the award. I would have sucked to go to this workshop not knowing if we were getting it or not.

Playlist for the day: Finally by CeCe Peniston, New Man by Sonic Hub, Food For Songs by Del Amitri, and especially Won More Time by God Made Me Funky.

LFHCfS

What do I have to say about this?

I did not nominate myself.

And sometimes, there's just nothing else to say...

Odd instructions

From a conference I'll be going to in the near future:

“You will be expected to be present to respond to questions from delegates for half of the time during this session.”

Meaning... I can ignore questions from delegates the other half of the time?

Holy cow

That, my friends, is a heckuva lot of animal. Read more here.

“... and it's only Tuesday!”

This week is going to be ratty ugly nasty busy. There are two job candidates interviewing for positions today and Thursday. Tomorrow I'm currently slated for four meetings and office hours. Thursday I'm running out the Coastal Studies Lab for some animal collection, and Friday I teach and have Journal Club. Which reminds me... I have to pick a paper for that.

I really do feel like the punchline to the old joke: ”This has been a horrible week, and it’s only Tuesday!”

On the plus side, I was isolated all weekend so I was able to finish reading a book I'll be reviewing for a journal. Now I just have to actually think and write the review.

You can learn a lot from a game

“Kill the wounded monster first” is quickly becoming a mantra of mine after reading this post.

Another favourite quote on the subject of games: "You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation." - Plato.