One of the main things you need for the challenge is a video. This made me nervous. I’ve shied away from video for this blog, but taking part in the #SciFund Challenge has forced the issue.
What I have learned from making my own video and watching other #SciFund videos is that an undervalued part of a good video is the audio.
Film schools are always telling their students, “Film is a visual medium.” But I like what director Nicholas Meyer wrote for a 1993 box set of the Star War soundtracks:
(S)ound always dominates picture. If you are in any doubt, simply drive around in a car with the radio or cassette player blasting and look out the window. The nature of the music affects the mood of what we are seeing. It is never the other way around. If you play happy music, even some fairly squalid and dispiriting surroundings seem more cheerful. If you play sad or ominous music, the most agreeable vistas assume a sinister aspect.
This shouldn’t surprise me, because I am, after all, a total soundtrack nerd. And I’ve been stuck with poor to middling audio before. But I have gained a deeper appreciation for the sound mix.
What I have learned:
Your computer microphone isn’t good enough. Sure, a lot of laptops and desktops have built-in cameras and mics for video chat and the like. But if you’re just sitting at your usual distance from your computer, your voice will sound small and tinny, and there will be a lot of hiss and background. And if you have a different mic for voice-over of pictures or videos, the difference in sound quality and intensity will be distracting and noticeable.
You can’t just talk. Normal speech is filled with hesitations and pauses. This is okay in conversation, but it’s noticeable in a short video clip. And those pauses chew up valuable time. Every second on a YouTube clip is a second that someone might leave to see what’s happening on their Twitter feed. You have to be the best version of you.
One condition which Toho insisted on was that a script of the commentary be submitted to them for approval. This turned out to be one of the best things that happened to us. ... Reviewing the first draft, I quickly understood the merits of having a script. While it would be easy to just talk about the film, it would be just as easy to overlook important subjects by getting lost in the moment and running out of time, and it was also vital that certain comments be timed to images on screen.
You need split second timing. I was constantly fiddling to get the pictures and the sound lined up the way I wanted. In some cases, tenths of a second made the difference in synchronizing the two so that the effect was cool. Being out of sync by fractions of a second made it look so much worse.
Recording voice overs in small bits helps. Short sound bytes are easier to align to particular points in the video, particularly if (like me) you’re stuck using very basic, free video software.
If you want to make a good science video, buy the best microphones you can get your hands on.
I’m actually gonna stick this one at the top because it’s probably the most common mistake. I’ve seen far too many video stories where the interview is practically inaudible, drowned out by traffic, air conditioning or something else. The cause? Not using an external microphone.
Audiences seem quite happy to tolerate poor quality pictures – they don’t mind mobile phone footage for example; but they will not tolerate crappy sound. End of. Invest in a good quality clip microphone for interviews and a Rodemic or similar for on board sound.
I’ve written about terrestrial fish, and fish the beach themselves for long times. Mosquitofish (Gambusia affinis) don’t take their air time as seriously: they seem to use land as refuges for short times, and then flip back into water. But while on land, they have to jump to get around, and eventually back into the water.
In a nice little paper, Gibb and colleagues describe the jumping behaviour of these fish on land. To test if mosquitofish have any particular behavioural specializations for this jumping behaviour, they also tested zebrafish, which nobody has ever reported routinely jumping out of the water.
To my surprise, once on land, these two fish species showed no important differences in the jumping behaviour. The mosquitofish took off at a slightly lower angle, and didn’t tumble as much as the zebrafish, but the similarities between the fish are much greater than the differences.
One possibility is that the neural circuits involved in this behaviour are the largely the same as those responsible for rapid escape responses (C-starts). These neurons are well known, and involve famous giant neurons called Mauthner neurons. It would be interesting to see if the neural circuit is perhaps a pre-adaptation for these jumps on land. This paper shows that C-starts are different in the timing of their movement than the jumps on land, but that does not completely rule out the involvement of some of the same neurons in bothe behaviours.
How widespread is this ability to move around on land, even if not much better than hit-and-miss flopping around? Mosquitofish and zebrafish have been separated for a long time, so most fish might be able to jump on land in a coordinated way.
Reference
Gibb A, Ashley-Ross M, Pace C, Long J. 2011. Fish out of water: terrestrial jumping by fully aquatic fishes. Journal of Experimental Zoology Part A: Ecological Genetics and Physiology: In press. DOI: 10.1002/jez.711
If Peter Parker does whatever a spider can... he must be one hell of a dancer. And there’s some evidence for that.
(I will admit, that is not exactly what I expected to find when I Google searched for “Spider-Man dancing.”)
This video of the peacock spider (Maratus volans) went up early in March. It blew me away.
Finally, there’s a scientific paper that starts to describe this astonishing behaviour.
If you’ve just watched the video above, you can appreciate how restrained the scientific writing style for journal articles is. Instead of, “Wow! You have got to see this!”, we get, “Research on animal courtship has demonstrated that males of many species produce elaborate multi-component signals spanning more than one sensory modality.”
It’s not until the third paragraph in that Girard and colleagues let a little wonder slip in, calling the peacock spider, “an exceptional example” of spider courtship.
The paper contains a very detailed verbal display of the behaviour, and I don’t envy the task the authors had. Describing behaviour with just words is terrifically hard. Things start getting more interesting scientifically when they start to get to the parts of the courtship display that can’t be seen: vibration. I particularly love some of the names they give these signals. They call one kind of vibration signal... rumble-rumps.
Rumble-rumps! How can you not smile at that? And another kind is called crunch-rolls.
The vibrational seems to be a very important part of the courtship display, as these start when the male is still a long way away from the female. The authors note that this is very different from some North American spiders in this group, where the vibrational signals seem to ramp up when the males and females are quite close to each other.
Given the opening of this paper, I was rather expecting that there would be some suggestion about which of all these cues the females are important for the females. Unfortunately, there is not found in this paper. To get the best filming condition of the male courtship, the experimenters resorted to pulling a dirty trick on the males: they weren’t courting live females, but rather dead females, mounted into a life-life posture. I know it sounds slightly creepy, but animal behaviour scientists have been resorting to such tricks for many decades. Imagine the poor little male spider’s thoughts: “I’m dancing my fan off here! Sheesh, what more do females want?”
This is such a rich behaviour that it’s no doubt going to take years and years of research before we begin to understand it.
Reference
Girard M, Kasumovic M, Elias D (2011). Multi-modal courtship in the peacock spider, Maratus volans (O.P.-Cambridge, 1874). PLoS ONE6(9): e25390. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0025390
(The creator of the YouTube videos, Jürgen Otto, is not an author on this paper, but is thanked for helping to collect specimens.)
Breakin’ Spider-Man from here; balletic Spider-Man from here.
The idea is that the natural interactions between the creatures - or performers - will create a story for viewers. While I sat watching the scene, I did see what looked like a brief tussle between two arrow crabs - a struggle for alien territory, perhaps? Or maybe an attempt to impress the regal, art-adorned crab king?
Learn more at this article at New Scientist (may require registration).
People are often advised that it’s important to have a plan, particularly in scientific careers. In my career, though, I have been more impressed at how much it has been shaped by events that I never could have predicted.
As an undergraduate, I got started in research because I walked through a door, was having a discussion with Jennifer Mather (who I was talking a class with), she mentioned a research project she wanted to do, and I said, “That sounds interesting.” I was recruited practically on the spot to work on the project! So my research career got kickstarted by walking through Jennifer’s door.
Meeting with my doctoral and post-doctoral supervisors had a similar feel. I never could have planned to have worked with the people I did. I didn’t plan to work with crustaceans for my Ph.D., or crickets for a post-doc. I didn’t know the people I worked with extremely well before traipsing off to their lab; I took a bit of a leap of faith in deciding to work in someone’s lab.
I published two papers on tunicates entirely because I met Virginia Scofield in the hallway outside my office, and we got on well.
More recently, I talked about how I ended up co-authoring an ecological modeling paper and a parasite paper. Neither of those papers would ever have happened if there wasn’t the right person down the hall whose door I could walk into.
My career is not completely wu wei. I sought out opportunities like scholarships and awards, and made plans, too. I did have a plan for my post-docs: I wanted to a post-doc outside of
Canada, then a second one in Canada. I got the Canadian and
international experience, but in the reverse order. But I had to be open and flexible enough to read the signs and follow them where they led.
You never know who’s going to walk through your door next. They might change everything.
(“Planning is essential; plans are useless” is a paraphrase of a U.S. army saying, popularized by Dwight Eisenhower. A variation of it is, “No plan survives contact with the enemy.”)
Photo by Jeff_Werner on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.
Kevin is also the overlord of Circus of the Spineless. Circus of the Spineless #66 is hosted by Wanderin' Weeta. Kevin is looking for hosts for future editions of the Circus; email him.
Isn’t that, like, a conflict of interest or something...?
I say this not because of any great love for “for profit” publishers, but because I don’t think it will hurt them.
If I don’t review an article, who do I hurt? I hurt the scientist(s) who submitted the paper. A journal editor is going to keep looking for reviewers until they have them. Indeed, they have to. I want you to imagine what you would think and feel if you got back a reply from a journal saying, “I’m sorry, but we cannot publish your paper, not because we find any fault with your science, but because we cannot find a willing reviewer.”
If I don’t review a paper I could review, all I am doing is needlessly dragging out the review process, making it more difficult for the scientists submitting their results.
For whatever reason, they picked that journal to publish in. They don’t deserve to become pawns in someone else’s game.
If you don’t think a journal deserves your support, don’t submit papers to it. Submit your paper elsewhere, especially if it’s good. Encourage others to submit their papers elsewhere, especially their best papers. The glamour magazines like Science, Nature, and Cell thrive on the high-profile articles that drive up their impact factors, keep their brand in the eyes of both scientists and journalists.
Don’t tear down the castle. Build a more livable city instead.
It’s unusual that I can pick exactly how long a project took from beginning to end. This time, I can: 823 days.
Day 1: 4 July 2009
Since 2006, I’d been examining the nervous system of shrimp (for a project that is still ongoing – sigh). When I looked at the nerve cords under the microscope, I kept seeing odd little bits that I thought were caused by some problem with the fixation or clearing process. I realized that was wrong when on 4 July 2009, I took this video:
Okay, those slight odd looking bits in the nerve cord didn’t have anything to do with staining. They were moving. They were something alive inside the nerve cord.
Well. That was unexpected. Also, slightly freaky.
Here’s my notebook entry for the day:
(And yes, I am well aware of my terrible handwriting and other problems, thank you very much.)
Soon after, I went down the hall and showed this stuff to the man on the right in the photo below.
This is my co-author Brian Fredensborg, who is a real parasitologist. He had joined our department a couple of years previously. I showed him what I had. He didn’t immediately say, “Oh, yes, that’s a [name], and it’s well known that they live in the nervous systems of crustaceans. Not very interesting at all.” This was a good sign. We were both interested, for different reasons, in what the heck was going on here.
Day 4: 7 July 2009
Brian gives me a tentative ID of the beasts we’re dealing with: larval tapeworms. I record in my notebooks, “Possibly PROCHRISTIANELLA PENAEI or PARACHRISTIANELLA or POLYPOCEPHALUS.” Brian seeks out some help in narrowing down the possibilities from a colleague, and he hears from one of his colleagues that the last guess is the right one.
But the project had to wait. Neither of us had the time to follow it up immediately, and all our students at the time were already deep in working on projects of their own.
Enter the woman on the left.
Day 59: 31 August 2009
The last day of August in 2009 is the first day of class for the Fall semester. I am teaching my neurobiology class, and though I didn’t know it at the time, one of the students registered for the class is Nadia Carreon. We had some good conversations in that semester. This good relationship in class helps paves the way...
Day 200-317: Spring 2010
After the semester is over and neurobiology is done, Nadia comes into my office and asks about the possibility of doing a research project before she graduates. We sit down in my office, and I throw out a whole whack of half-baked ideas that could be turned into research projects, including the mystery shrimp parasites. Nadia thinks the parasite project is cool, so we walk down to Brian’s office and I introduce them to each other.
Everything looks good, so we start to plan a project that Nadia can complete over the summer that will, we hope, be publishable.
Days 318-422: Summer, 2010
And we are go for data collection! We plot, we plan, and we set up a way to gather data at the Coastal Studies Lab. We fiddle with webcams. We figure out ways to tag the animals so we can track them individually. I pull out a big honkin’ heavy mechanical cell counter – made of metal and that makes a very satisfying click every time you press one of the keys – to aid in the counting of all those parasites.
(For the record, I wish to apologize to Nadia publicly: I had no idea just how many parasites were going to be in those shrimp. I never expected that one shrimp alone might have 500 parasites infecting it.)
Proving the old adage, “If it weren’t for the last minute, nothing would get done,” much of the planning takes place in May and June, while a lot of the actual data collection happens late in August.
Day 451: 27 September 2010
We do get a first pass at data gathered over the summer, and get it together in time for a poster at the HESTEC science symposium. The poster wins third place in the undergraduate poster competition.
The analysis and writing continues at a slow but steady pace through the fall semester.
One moment I particularly liked was when I finally got the big, massive spreadsheet of all the behavioural data. For whatever reason, in my research, there are very few “Aha!” moments. There’s a lot more sneaking suspicions followed by a long period of trying to convince myself that what I think I’m seeing is actually what I’m seeing.
As it happened, we had a little bit of data destruction problem. Some of the last video shot was unusable. Brian and Nadia and I had talked about whether we might need to run some more behavioural tests on shrimp, but we still had a decent sized number of animals. We decided that if we didn’t see significant differences, we might run some more. But if it was significant, but it saw significant differences with the smaller sample, we could start writing up in earnest.
There was so much data here, there was no way to get a sense of whether there were going to be any trends associated with infection rates. So I was quite excited to run the first analysis, because I had no idea how it was going to turn out. ... and see significant differences in behaviour!
Day 533: 18 December 2010
Nadia graduates with her bachelor’s degree in biology!
Brian and I are committed to writing and finishing this manuscript before the year is out. The main reason is that Brian is expecting to become a father for the first time in very early January. This gave us very strong incentive to finish, because, as I said to several people, “I don’t know of anyone who has ever said, ‘Yes, we just had a baby. And my productivity has gone through the roof!’”
The manuscript is accepted. On the first submission, without any revisions. This has never happened to me before. Holy cow. And the pre-print goes up the same day!
Day 704: 7 June 2011
I present an updated version of the Texas Academy of Science poster at The Crustacean Society meeting in Honolulu. The new data makes this poster 33% bigger than its predecessor.
Day 823: 4 October 2011
The paper finally moves from “pre-print” to published status! And now, I have a paper in a parasitology journal, which was never something I expected to happen. Hooray for collaboration and academic freedom.
Day 824: 5 October 2011
“And on the eight-hundredth and twenty-fourth day, he blogged.”
But wait! We’re not quite done yet! Nadia continued working on this project a bit on a volunteer basis through 2011 after she graduated. We have more data, that we hope will eventually become part of the first follow-up paper.
Day 864: 14 November 2011
Come meet Nadia and myself at the poster session for the Faculty for Undergraduate Neuroscience at the Neuroscience meeting! 6:45-8:45 pm in the Grand Ballroom Central and North in the Renaissance Hotel.
There you have it. The long, winding road from an initial observation to a final, pretty, published article, with brushes along the way of both the thrill of victory (“No revisions?!”) and the agony of defeat (“The video’s gone?!”). It’s also fairly typical of research at undergraduate universities, I think, in that things can wait for a long time because you’re just waiting for a student to pick up the project. And I was surprised in writing up this retrospective to be reminded that stuff gathered even early in the project can be useful:
I took the picture in Figure 1a on Day 1.
Reference
Carreon N, Faulkes Z, Fredensborg BL. 2011. Polypocephalus sp. infects the nervous system and increases activity of commercially harvested white shrimp (Litopenaeus setiferus). Journal of Parasitology97(5): 755-759. DOI: 10.1645/GE-2749.1
Faulkes Z. 2007. Motor neurons involved in escape responses in white shrimp, Litopenaeus setiferus. Integrative and Comparative Biology47(Supplement 1): e178. DOI: 10.1093/icb/icm105
Last week, I showed Michael Bok’s winning picture of Louisiana red swamp crayfish (Procambarus clarkii).
Same species, but a rather different view...
These are neurons that connect to the big muscles in the tail that the crayfish use to swim with – and that so many people and predators find so tasty. The staining technique is called cobalt backfilling. This is many pictures compiled into one. It’s a “stack” of photos merged into one using Helicon Focus, which I wrote about here.
Why do I have all the stuff defacing the image? Because I want people to see the full sized, pristine image in the calendar!
This picture is going to be featured in a fundraising calendar for the J.B. Johnston Club. The J.B. Johnston Club is an organization that meets right before the Neuroscience meeting. They have a student travel award that they are raising money for. Kara Yopak had the idea of creating a calendar with twelve months of images of neurons, brains, and organisms. This is such a great idea, because neurons are always beautiful.
The calendar will be on sale at this year’s J.B Johnston Club meeting. Thirteen images, 8½ × 11" on glossy paper, all for $20!
You want one, don’t you? Email Kara Yopak to inquire about how you can get a copy! If you won’t be in Washington, DC for the J.B. Johnston Club meeting or Neuroscience, tell her were you are located so she can work out the posting details.
I don’t know what month this image will be. I’m kind of hoping for February.
Almost a year ago, I wrote a post about the Science Cheerleaders. It was one of the first of many posts around the science blogosphere about the team, and one of my more widely read posts, I think.
Little did I know that less than a year later, I would be sharing the stage with them.
I was so pleased to work with the Science Cheerleaders at HESTEC Community Day. The weather was cooler than normal - rain for the first time in a long time! - but there were still consistently good crowds to see the Science Cheerleaders’ show.
I was able to surprise them when they learned that even though none of them had been to UTPA before, they had a connection with us. The cameraman on their popular YouTube video, Brandon Garcia, was a UTPA alumnus.
After each show, I talked a little bit about the Craywatch citizen science project that I have at the Science for Citizens website. I did it a little differently each time, but the last time I said something like, “You know what cheerleading has in common with science? You have to work hard at it to get good. I went to school a long time to become a professional scientist, and you might think you can’t do science if you don’t have fancy degrees. No! All you need is an inquiring mind and a willingness to learn. If you don’t like crayfish, there are hundreds of other real research projects that you can help with.”
The Cheerleaders got asked to be part of a lot of photographs, and signed almost as many autographs.
This tiara’d women is Laura Eilers, the choreographer.
Ringleader Darlene Cavalier takes a picture.
Thanks so much to Darlene, Laura, Melissa, Heidi, Sammi Jo, Sandra, Ada (making her Science Cheerleading debut, if I remember right) for letting me be part of the act.
Because you don’t have until the end of November as in years past! You have until Monday, 3 October 2011 to find your favourite science writing online and submit it for consideration in this annual anthology!
Bora Zivcovic, the mastermind behind The Open Laboratory anthology series, announced that the deadline has moved up because they have a new publisher for the book.
Of course, please feel free to browse the archive at the right to see if there is anything you like.
Discussion around the report of neutrinos travelling faster than light continue apace. Everyone is talking about it in the scientific community and most media outlets have also covered it.
But one thing that has not been often commented upon is that this finding hasn’t been peer-reviewed. It’s a pre-print in ArXiv.
One of the first questions I try to get my students to ask in evaluating claims is, “Was that finding in a peer-reviewed journal?” I try to instill more sophisticated evaluation strategies as we go on, but that question alone can sort out a lot of rubbish in a first pass.
But in this case, nobody seems to care. This made me ask a lot of questions.
Does it mean that peer review is adding no value for the physics community? Everyone is talking about it and trying to think of ways to explain the result and replicate it. Nobody is waiting for the peer-reviewed paper to come out. Is there any incentive for these authors to submit this manuscript to a peer reviewed journal?
Does it mean that this group of scientists built up an unusually sold track record for careful and meticulous work? As an outsider to the field, I have no way of assessing that. Is this why people don’t care that this is not peer reviewed?
Does this mean that there something special about the high-energy particle physics community that makes the reporting practices different than other fields? Would a similarly contrary claim in other fields be treated as openly and as with as much enthusiasm in the scientific press? I’m having hard time thinking of a claim in biology that could be as contradictory as the notion that something could travel faster than light. Maybe someone claiming that DNA was not the hereditary material in cells would be on that level.
If someone in another field tried to make a similarly big claim outside a peer-reviewed journal, would they be laughed out of the room? Would journalists be tougher on them?
The letter “X” is not a multiplication symbol. Not in its uppercase form, and not in its lowercase form, either. The multiplication sign looks like this: ×
A superscript letter “O” is not a degree sign. A degree looks like this: °
A lowercase “u” is not lowercase Greek letter mu, better known as the metric symbol for “micro-”. The micro- symbol looks like this: µ
And we can tell the difference.
If you use Microsoft Office, here’s the part of the ribbon you’re looking for:
Windows users can also open up the Character Map for even more symbols.
One major technical symbol that is missing, and which scientists often want to use, is the mean symbol. It looks like an x with a bar over the top. For some reason, the mean symbol is not in Unicode character sets, or in HTML, as far as I can find.
I have seen these kinds of mistakes in documents, and slides, and posters, many times.
These mistakes show that you don’t know how to use your tools. That is the definition of amateur. And wouldn’t you rather look like a professional than an amateur?
This is the tenth anniversary of HESTEC. HESTEC is a campus and community event, and the name is an acronym for “Hispanic Engineering, Science, and Technology.” I was involved again this year in organizing the Science Symposium on day 1, where we were fortunate to have the biggest “name” speaker we’ve ever had.
Steve Niemeyer (Texas Commission on Environmental Quality) talked about his particular path into a scientific career. His three big pieces of advice: Work hard. Learn how to communicate. And don't quit (it took him 7½ years to complete his bachelor’s degree). Niemeyer gave his talk without slides, incidentally.
Jose Bravo, a lead scientist at Shell Oil, was the second speaker, talking about efforts to develop new energy sources. There were two one liners that I appreciated.
“There is a misconception that innovation is an instant,” he said, citing the common “lightbulb” image that is used to signify a flash of inspiration. Bravo stressed the long time needed to develop ideas alll the way through to the final working industrial-level product.
Bravo also talked about how, as he moved through his career, his job transitioned from providing answers to asking questions. He said that at Shell, “People with answers always work for people with questions.” I think that is a great line, and very true for all sorts of organizations, including academia. Grad students and post-docs have the answers. They work for people who ask the questions. (Dr. Karl is very fond of saying, “It’s not the answer that gets you the Nobel prize; it’s asking the right question.”
I was disappointed – though perhaps not surprised – that in answering one question, he washed his hands on whether climate change was happening or not. He said that Shell saw reducing its carbon output as simply good business. But for any scientist to be speaking in a prominent public forum and to pussyfoot around the reality of human climate change, and the effects of continued unrelenting burning of fossil fuels is irresponsible.
I thought about pressing hm on that, but decided against it, to give students the opportunity to ask questions.
The room continued filling up through the symposium...
One student seemed to have wandered out of ComicCon.
Bill Nye arrived to lots of cheers and applause, and palpable excitement.
Nye gave a talk laced with his trademark humour, touching on many topics, such as the changes in society and science that had happened through the lifetimes of his immediate family. Similar to Jose Bravo, energy was very much on the mind of Nye. “I want one of you to go into the solar hot water business! Will one of you do that?!” In response to a student’s question, he later talked about how he cut his electric bill to $10 for two months in summertime.
During the questions, Nye also talked about his new role as executive director of the Planetary Society. He asked people to estimate how many people have now flow in space, and most underestimated the number: it’s now over 500! He noted that space exploration is no longer the Star Trek ideal of boldly going where no one has gone before.
“Now it’s, ‘To timidly go where 538 have gone before.’”
He challenged students to develop materials that would make lighter rockets and space travel more feasible, because, “I want to go someplace new and cool.” Nye was also quite bullish on the prospects of finding fossil microbes on Mars, which he proposed be called “Marscrobes” (if they exist!).
A student also asked if Nye still got to do original research, or if he was just doing television and education. Nye replied that he continued to use his engineering skills every day in his job in the Planetary Society, saying, “Scientific skills allow you to evaluate if someone’s crazy.”
Nye said much more besides, and we could have gone another hour. But it was great to see the enthusiasm people had for him. You cannot underestimate the impact that people on television, like Nye, have on the imaginations of people.
In the afternoon, I moderated a career roundtable with my colleague, Robin Fuchs-Young and Heather Reddick. It went quite well, and was again better attended than it had been in previous years.
After that, I walked back into the lobby and watched some of the posters fall from their frames. Some frames had corkboard mounted on metal, and I guess the adhesive on the cork was getting old... I could see several of them sagging before they gave up and snapped.
I’ve had the Louisiana red swamp crayfish (Procambarus clarkii) in this feature before, but I just have to share this winning entry from an Encyclopedia of Life photo competition for the category, “Stream life.” It’s by fellow blogger Michael Bok!
Photo on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.
Last week, The Current had a segment called, “Entitled University Students.” It was a feature related to a new book on Canadian universities, but generally, large social trends in the Canada are often very similar to those in the United States. But the overarching student attitude described by the panel participants – entitled, pampered, immature, unprepared, unwilling to take criticism – is not at all what I see in my students.
I get two dominant vibes off my students.
The first is fear.
Fear of speaking out, fear of the professor, fear of getting a bad grade, fear of not getting a job after they finish their degree. Students rarely dispute marks, for instance, except in very obvious errors.
The second is fatigue. What others have described as laziness to me just feels like the weariness of being into year fourteen of being given more seemingly arbitrary homework. An attitude of, “Here we go again...” That does, I think, translate into what other professors see as “laziness” or “minimalism.”
Most of my students don’t act entitled. They act beaten. They act cowed. They act like a big boot is going to come down and squish them like a little ant at any second.
I suspect some of this might be because of the particular institution that I am working at, and the particular majors I am usually working with. Maybe I am just terrifying. Faculty elsewhere, your thoughts?
I got these jobs mailed to me in an envelope. On paper! And they might be the sort of job that a reader of this blog might want. Should said reader be, you know, an unemployed bum. Or a post-doc.
Animal Behavior (Assistant professor) - Research focus is open, but could include observational and experimental approaches that clarify the molecular and physiological bases of behavioural traits, their functional ecology and evolution, their consequences for multispecies interactions and social integration, and related areas. Teaching requirements will include an undergrad course in animal behavior. For more info, contact Robert Marquis, chair of search committee: robert_marquis@umsl.edu.
Animal Physiology (Assistant or associate professor) - Research focus is open, but could include comparative physiology, immunology, endocrinology, metabolism, functional ecology, host-pathogen interactions, adaptation to extreme environments, and related areas. Teaching requirements will include an undergrad course in vertebrate physiology. For more info, contact Robert E Ricklefs, chair of search committee: ricklefs@umsl.edu.
Evolution and ecology (Assistant or associate professor) - Research focus is open, but could include genetics of adaptation, phylogenetic aspects of diversification, population abundance and distribution, or community interactions and co-evolution. We are particularly seeking applicants with strong analytical, computational, phylogenetic, and/or statistical skills. Teaching requirements may include undergrad courses evolution, biometry, or GIS. For more info, contact Elizabeth Kellogg, chair of search committee: tkellogg@umsl.edu.
Send cover letter, CV, concise outline of research plans, statement of teaching interest and philosophy, in a single PDF. Provide PDF or up to 5 publicayions and request letters from 3 references. Send all application documents to Maryann Hempen (hempen@umsl.edu).
It might be tricky to keep mangrove rivulus in your typical aquarium. Mangrove rivulus are rather found of jumping out of water – and staying there.
Being out of water is a rather different place from being in the water, and so this fish obviously have some evolutionary adaptations that allow it to pull off this stunt. But a new paper asks a different, possibly more subtle: do mangrove rivulus adapt to being in or out of water in the short term?
Mangrove rivulus have an advantage for studying these sorts of short-term physiological changes, as many of them are genetically identical, because they are hermaphrodites - not all that unusual among animals, but that they are self-fertilizing hermaphrodites is a rare and exceptional feature among vertebrates.
Turko and colleagues first did a simple correlative study, allowing the fish to jump out of their tanks as often as they want. Most stayed in the water most of the time, but a few appeared to have what would have been a death wish in most other fish: they were out of the water almost two thirds of the time (64%). The authors saw differences in the gill shape that were correlated with the amount of time fish spent in or out of water.
But because correlation does not mean causation, the authors sensibly went back and did an experiment. They monitored animals for a week, then prevented them all from leaving the water, sacrificed half to check on their gills, and then left the remaining half go back to being free to leave the water if they chose.
The first that were prevented from leaving the water had different gill shapes than those that were allowed to return to the air. This strong suggests that the fishes’ behaviour drove the changes in the gill morphology.
But there is a problem in interpretation here. At the start of the second experiment, the fish were leaving water rather less than in the first correlation study. And there were no correlations between gill shape and the fish’s behaviour after the first week, as there was in the first study. The differences in gill shape emerged only after the week were the fish were forced to stay within water. The researchers suggest that there may be a minimum time the fish have to spend out of water for the gill remodeling effect to occur.
This makes me wonder if there were be a way to do the experiment were fish were forced to stay out of water for set periods of time. Here, the experimenters were at the mercy of the fish voluntarily leaving the water. It may be a little bit trickier, but the results would be much easier to interpret.
At the Ecology Society of America meeting in Austin last month, I mentioned that I had lunch with the most fab Sarcozona. She has notes from our chittin’ and chattin’ at Gravity’s Rainbow!
There are two words that have probably sabotaged many a promising academic on tenure-track.
“Still time.”
Dr. Becca described “third year syndrome” in a tenure-track orientation session. One of the more cryptic pieces of advice was to beware of I had not heard of this, although the importance of the third year is that it’s normally the halfway point in the probationary period.
The problem with the halfway point is that it’s easy to get there without doing the research that is going to get you tenure. You think, “First couple of years, I'll be preparing courses for teaching and establishing my lab. Second year, I'll probably be recruiting students and technicians, and these experiments that I need to do to get me grant money are long and sophisticated, and they'll take another year...”
Before you know it, you’ve reached the halfway point and produced no original scholarship from your new university.
You might think, “That’s okay, they only evaluate the total publications at the end, so I can have a lot the last couple of years of probation.”
The problem with that way of thinking is that your probationary period starts to look like one Zeno’s paradoxes: you get to the halfway point with no publications, but there’s still time in the second half of probation. You get halfway through the second half with no publications, but there’s still time in the last year. You get to the last year and have submit manuscripts to journals... but the review process drags out. The reviewers demand more experiments before accepting the paper.
And then you’re at the end without the publications you need to get tenured.
Make it a goal: get something out by the halfway mark.
There are certain phrases that you never plan to say during a presentation. When talking out loud, though, they can sneak out in a moment of uncontrolled honesty.
Scientists - If you have to preface your slide with “you won’t be able to see this” it shouldn't be a slide.
I have often heard some variation of, “This slide isn’t very clear, but...”. If you know that, then why are you forcing me to look at it? Apologizing for a slide might have been acceptable in the days of 35 mm film, where you couldn’t see the results until the film was actually developed. But we are living in the digital age, where high quality previews are immediate and photo editing software is everywhere.
You should always show the best image possible. Sometimes, that best image might not be so hot, but you should say, “This is the best available image.” Because that tells the audience that you respect their attention, and you put in your best effort to track down or make the clearest graphic you could.
Another phrase to listen for is, “This slide is to remind me to tell you...”
No! Slides are not for reminding yourself of what you want to say. Notes are to remind you what you want to say. Teleprompters are to remind you what you want to say. Rehearsal is to make it so you don’t need reminders at all.
If you hear phrases like these coming out of your mouth, you know it’s time to change your talk.
As I mentioned yesterday, I have been asking students to sketch things this semester. (This is inspired by a recent paper in Science about the effectiveness of drawing for teaching.)
In my biological writing class, I asked students to draw a little flowchart to show what happens between when a scientist writes a paper and someone else can read it.
About half the students mentioned “review” in some form, but only 17% used the phrase that distinguishes academic and scholarly writing: peer review.
There seemed to be great confusion about the difference between a publisher, an editor, and a reviewer. The terms were sort of used interchangeably to mean “people who handle stuff to get the paper out.”
Some students, perhaps not being aware of publishing jargon, used descriptive phrases like, “superiors” and the perhaps too honest, “someone of power.”
One person wrote about the part of the “publicist.” I liked the sound of that. Maybe more scientists should have publicists instead of publishers.
“Zen, baby! I’ve got you booked on Craig Ferguson next Tuesday! I’m still working on that Daily Show gig, but Stewart’s people won’t return my calls, the bastards...”
It’s a faux pas for any large organization to show pictures of its people and show only white men. And rightly so, since any middling sized organization is going to have women and all sorts of wonderful human diversity contained within it, and that should be represented. (Though diversity in some places is not as great as we would like it to be...)
We often make that mistake in teaching.
In my neurobiology class this semester, I asked my students on Day One to draw and label a picture of a neuron.
The pictures fell into two broad categories. About a third were unlabelled (some of them may not have heard me ask for the labels). Of the two thirds that were labelled, essentially all of them were vertebrate spinal cord motor neurons: a multipolar cell body and one long myelinated axon.
I’m puzzled as to why, of all the many types of neurons, these one have become viewed as “typical.” I know the trivial answer: they’re the ones shown in all the introductory general biology textbooks. And I understand why invertebrate neurons are not shown as examples, because neuroscience is mostly concerned with human brains.
Even within humans, spinal cord motor neurons are not typical. Many of the neurons in the brain are not myelinated (the “grey matter,” as it’s sometimes called). And neurons come in many shapes, and the axon is often not easily distinguished from all the other branches coming from the cell.
In teaching, we often make the same mistake of showing one example as representative, when it’s about as representative as
the middle-aged white guy in a business photo.Which is to say, not at
all.
The moon makes a difference for predators and prey. It’s easier to see during the full moon, which might mean greater opportunities for nocturnal predators, except that nocturnal prey might adjust their behaviour accordingly. It’s a delicate balancing act.
This paper looked at the changes in behaviour of eagle owls (Bubo bubo) over the lunar cycle. Not this Bubo:
ThisBubo:
The team categorized their owls into “breeders” and “dispersers.” Over 459 nights (whew!), the team tracked the movements, predation, and calling of their radiotagged owls.
The breeders paid attention to the moon. The breeders were moving more, and calling more, on the nights of the full moon. The authors think that this is because hunting is less efficient on the darker nights of the full moon. Reasonable idea, but the discussion section describing how the reproductive status of the owls is affecting their behaviour is loaded with qualifiers like “could,” “might,” “could be interpreted,” “may be,” and “probably.” There’s more work to be done to clarify.
The dispersers, however, paid no attention to the moon. The authors argue that disperser might have the luxury of reducing their effort when there is less food to be had, which the breeding owls can’t do.
This is a slightly frustrating paper, because it is one small chunk of a long-term study. It seems like there are certain details that make lots of sense if you have read all the papers arising from this project, but that are hard to glean here. For instance, I can’t quite figure out how the team categorized breeders and dispersers. the distinction is probably spelled out in another paper in the series
Reference
Penteriani V, Kuparinen A, Delgado M, Lourenço R, Campioni L. 2011. Individual status, foraging effort and need for conspicuousness shape behavioural responses of a predator to moon phases. Animal Behaviour82(2): 413-420. DOI: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2011.05.027
Photo by FurLined on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.
Back in April, Nature had an extended podcast with David Eagleman. Eagleman has also been profiled here.
Eagleman described some of his ideas as “possibilianism,” which might be summarized as “Anything’s possible.” He said:
It’s not committing to either of these two sides (Theistic or atheism, apparently - ZF), which I think are way too limited for modern discussion.
It bugged me, and I had been meaning to write a critique of the idea since April. I blogged about other things instead, and Jerry Coyne beat me to it.
As a lover of science fiction, I love exploring possibilities. It’s a great form of intellectual play, and play can lead to serious work. But Eagleman seems think that generating possibilities is enough, and is unwilling to sort through them to determine which is the best that reflects reality. This struck me as throwing your hands in the air and refusing to make a decision. As scientists, the point of generating possibilities is to arrive at a conclusion, not just sit and ooh and aah at all the things that could be in the mind.
The state of Texas is going to send a lot of money towards education in my area, and particularly at my institution. This has been covered in the news in several places, such as here and here.
Particularly interesting are the reports of $9.5 million to recruit new faculty in science and technology. The campus paper quotes my institution’s President, Robert Nelsen:
“We’re looking for starters,” he said. “These will be people with national reputations. We need new faculty and to have the quality of high-caliber faculty such as these is really going to be marvelous.”
Details on exactly how the money will be managed have not surfaced anywhere, as far as I can see. I wonder who will be making decisions about recruiting, and what that money will be used to do (i.e., salary, start-up, something else?).
In an effort like this, the devil is surely in the details. Recruiting new faculty (particularly people with “national reputations”) is a tricky business at the best of times.
Way back when I was but a naive TT hopeful (ahh...2009), J and I had a not-that-serious conversation about which cities we'd be willing to grace with the privilege of our permanent/semi-permanent residence. In truth, it was not so much a conversation as it was me naming places, and J either accepting or vetoing, comme ça:
Me: San Francisco?
J: Probably.
Me: Chicago?
J: I could do Chicago. Me: Houston?
J: No-HO! No Texas.
Then there is physical space. Our university has been talking about a new wing on our science building for some time. The most recent capital improvement has been for a new Fine Arts center - which they got, and good for them! But it’s not clear when we’re going to see new space on a science building.
Finally, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board announced new rules for doctoral programs that take effect in October. The new rules tie requests to new doctoral programs to the undergraduate completion rate: you have to be at or above the state average (excluding the flagship universities, the University of Texas in Austin and Texas A&M University). This means that half the universities in Texas are cut out, including ours.
To sum up: we have millions of dollars to recruit new faculty with “national reputations” to come to a somewhat rural locale in a state with an anti-intellectual reputation, who will then be expected to perform their wonders with no doctoral students and no new space.
Sometimes, you have to wonder if the right hand knows what the left hand is doing.
In related news, the University of Texas system was widely praised for new plans to promote university accountability.
