Software for screen capture on desktops:
Trying out Panopto
Handout: Getting started with Panopto
Trying out Screenflow for Mac
Trying out Camtasia for Mac or Windows
Examples of podcasts:
Level 1: Excerpt of a lecture recording
Level 2: Interview with Kate Wong from Scientific American
Level 3: Study group podcast about the integument
Level 4: Stand-alone lecture module about muscle tissue
Questions, comments, or other links? Post them and let’s build up more!
Like a new year, I think that there’s something optimistic about a new notebook. Also like a new year, a notebook is just a continuation of what’s come before, for better or for worse. Whenever I reach the end of either the year or a notebook, I keep trying to improve how I use my time in each.
I believe that good writing is editing; though the reader needs to be shown our ideas and their justification, no ones wants to see the scaffolding and other interim steps that it took to get to our conclusions. I really like using my laptop for drafting, of course, but the notebook is important for “thinking out loud” or free-writing. But not all scientific thinking is public writing.
Scientific notebooks are semi-public. We keep track of our methods and primary results in our notebooks. They are usually left in the lab, even after we leave a research group. (Technically, in labs that are funded by the National Science Foundation, the notebooks belong to NSF.) We write in pen. We date every entry, and every page. There are no empty pages. There’s always a temptation to erase or pull out pages, but a real lab notebook has a sewn binding and is a record how we did a particular protocol and what actually happened, whether it worked or not. My students often have issues with “doing it wrong” and want to write in pencil. This actually helps us to do more work—mistakes get repeated if no one every records that a reagent or protocol didn’t work. Negative results aren’t bad; they’re a part of the process of doing science.
The laboratory notebook is a standard part of the scientific process, but for some reason it was never really a part of my personal training in graduate school. At the time, it seemed, unlike my friends in molecular/cellular labs, that all my data went straight to a spreadsheet on my computer, so what was the point of the notebook? As I’ve been other places and had friends in different disciplines in science, I’ve come to realize that the notebook is partly for data collection—particularly in the field and the laboratory—but it’s also for thinking out loud.
A little freewriting and some data about the effectiveness of study podcasts on exam performance in Anatomy & Physiology.
I recommend two recent books about keeping journals. The first is the lavishly subtitled Journal Keeping: How to Use Reflective Writing for Learning, Teaching, Professional Insight and Positive Change. This includes narrative and examples about using the journal: for personal or professional writing, for maintaining a record of administrative responsibilities (as a department chair or group leader, for example), or as a tool for teaching.
It was in this book that I first came across the practice of meta-reflection, which one reads over earlier entries and then free-writes on trends seen there. For example, by doing this I realized that I wrote a lot about starting projects, but not as much about finishing them. The meta-reflection can help to quantify the wispy ideas that come out from regular free-writing, and in my case, prompt some change.
A second book I read about journaling was Michael Canfield’s fascinating Field Notes on Science and Nature, which opens up the field journals of ecologists, wildlife biologists, anthropologists, and others whose data are observations in nature. Each chapter is by a different author, who shows that their individual practices of keeping a journal vary by the kind of research they do and by personal preference. Each of the authors demonstrates how their journal fits into their workflow for doing science. The book reproduces specimens of journals that include narrative with simple sketches, more elaborate line or color sketches, photographs, and other ways to record data and impressions of observations. The volume is closed by a chapter that includes best practices of fieldwork journal-keeping.
“A typical notebook page detailing the thoughts and events of a day doing fieldwork at Olorgesailie, Kenya, with a personal note near the end of the page about the joy of being alone with rocks.”
Kay Behrensmeyer, in the chapter Linking Researchers Across Generations
A couple of ideas I found here, though intuitive, were actually new to me, and I share them with my lab members and students in my writing course. First: back those journals up! We make backups of our important computer files, and notebooks are no different. Most smartphones have cameras that are up to the task—photographing them this way allows me to have all my notebooks on my laptop, should I need to refer to older work. I also ask my lab members to back up their notebooks to our shared space on dropbox. This way they can keep their notebooks but I can still access their work that didn’t make it into posters or other presentations.
Second: the date ties all formats together. Photos on film, notebook entries, data spreadsheets, manuscript drafts…all these are tied together by the date. I don’t tend to print and tape spreadsheets into my paper notebook, but the dated journal back-ups and all the other files are all united on my laptop. And all my files are backed up online.
For me, the notebook is about discipline. It doesn’t take up much space and requires no batteries. It is the simplest way I have to keep touch with my ideas and the ideas that my students have on the projects that we work on together.
The Tampa Bay Times reported a story that missed the point about fossils and ethics. Eric Prokopi, a commercial paleontologist, pled guilty in the Southern District of New York to smuggling dinosaur fossils out of Mongolia.
“This is crazy. He was doing what he loved,” his mother, Doris Prokopi, said Friday from her Land O’Lakes home. “That’s what he told them when he was arrested. That this was like arresting Indiana Jones. He collects these bones and puts them all together.
“This was always his dream. I don’t think he wanted to do anything else.” (from the Tampa Bay Times)
Maybe my mother would say the same thing about me. We all grow up wanting to be commercial paleontologists, right? Who is a commercial paleontologist who doesn’t work for a petroleum company? The one who sells fossils.
The canonical phrasing.
(By the way: Indiana Jones is a fictional archaeologist (not a paleontologist)—and everyone who has seen those movies knows that when Indy faces down the bad guys over an artifact, he says, “That belongs in a museum!” He doesn’t say “I’ll need my cut!”)
Officially, Prokopi, 38, admitted making false statements to customs officials and illegally transporting dinosaur bones from Mongolia to his Gainesville home. As part of his plea agreement, he has surrendered a dinosaur collection potentially worth millions. [My emphasis]
Being excited by fossils isn’t a crime, but stealing the natural resources of a developing nation and lying to US Customs about their import is.
A screen grab from everything-earth.com, Prokopi’s commercial website (taken 12/30/12).
Here’s my issue with the ethics of selling fossils. Fossils are valuable because of what they can tell us about the history of life, not because someone will pay us money for them. Vertebrate fossils, particularly those found on land, are relatively rare. Putting a price tag on them prioritizes their speedy exhumation, usually with the loss of contextual information.
By selling fossils to “anyone that wants one,” as he wrote online, potentially valuable fossils are taken from people who want to learn about the history of life and brought to those who want a trophy.
In 2005, Charles Repenning, a paleontologist retired from USGS and Denver Museum of Nature and Science, was murdered in is home by burglars. Why? A few guys overheard him talking in a bar about “priceless” fossils that he was working on at his home. Fossils of desmostylians are important, but not the kind of thing that private trophy-collectors are likely to shell out for.
When natural and cultural resources are monitized, the cultural resources of nations are lost. Science loses data irretrievably. The public loses the opportunity to see these inspiring animals. And rarely, honorable people lose their lives.
People deserve to earn a living by pursuing their interests, but Mr. Prokopi isn’t entitled to flout the law so that he can make a buck. A childhood fascination with dinosaurs (that so many of us share) is not an excuse to do whatever you want.
Science generates knowledge. Knowledge must be communicated in order for new ideas to be evaluated, modified, or spread around. Some people approach meetings as the place to present the brief versions of the papers that have already been submitted. Others (like me) think that it’s a place to bring ideas to other interested people to get some feedback before it’s committed to print.
Since I’ve started advising student projects, I’ve been going to more undergraduate research conferences. Most of these are local and pretty low-key, like the Eastern New England Biology Conference and the Northeast Undergraduate Research and Development Symposium. These are great experiences for undergrads because they get to see other scientists are their level presenting their ideas. Sometimes their projects are technically sophisticated but uncreative, low-tech but creative, elaborated class projects, highly collaborative or not all intro and methods and no results…and more. They’re often a pretty diverse group of presentations, and my students get better at seeing where their work falls within possibilities.
I like being involved in meetings as a participant and a reviewer of abstracts (the proposals that participants submit before the meeting). Groups like the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology also sponsor annual meetings with work by students as well as more established, even “famous” researchers. These are as much a social event as a scientific one—it’s a chance to reconnect with friends from school or Facebook and to meet up with new people who share interests. Science is a social enterprise that is done by humans, so it’s only natural that we meet face-to-face now and then.
(Original post from Feb. 12, 2009)
A scientific lab can be a couple of different things—either a physical space or a group. You know the paper lab exercises you had in to your instructor after working through the protocol in the manual? That’s not it.
A laboratory is first a place for work. It is outfitted with benches (i.e. workbenches), not tables. Sure, they might look like tables, but they’re benches. Many students and lab members get territorial about “their” bench. It is where they sit in the room. Their bench has their reagents, their microscope, their calipers, their computer, their notebook, their favored color of lab tape…whatever they use to get their work done. Most labs have a board, or lots of them. Most labs have sinks, but not all of them. Most of those sinks you would not want to use to make your coffee. Most labs have messy, messy storage space that will get cleaned up someday. ”Someday” comes when their projects are done and people graduate. Or not.
The other way that scientists talk about the lab is as the group of people who work there. ”Running something by the lab” means getting the consensus of the people who work together on related projects. The “members of my lab” are one’s student apprentices and other collaborators. I like to listen to people talk about their lab and think about whether they’re talking about a room or about a group of collaborators.
I think that in colleges the physical space is less important. Yes, it’s where work happens, but without a group to start putting things together, what’s the point of doing research with students?
(Original post from January 5, 2009)
The scientific poster is a way to communicate new observations or ideas to interested peers at a conference. Ever seen a posterboard in a hallway with glitter, hand-drawn lettering, and cutouts from magazines? That’s not it.
For most scientists, the poster (or even the conference platform talk) is a rough draft of recent work. It’s a way for interested people—who work on related things—to check out your data and ideas and comment on them. Not all comments will be positive. Not all comments will be helpful. Most comments will give an idea if what the reception of your work is going to be.
When I presented my first poster at a meeting a decade ago, a friend said, “Looks good; when’s the paper coming out?” I didn’t get what the point of a poster was until then. When that first paper came put later, I realized that those ideas in the paper had been vetted by more people and were more, well, permanent. In a paper, your name gets stamped on those ideas (for better or worse) permanently. A talk or poster is more ephemeral—more like a draft—with maybe only its abstract living on.
A poster has still gotta be good, but it’s only a part of the life cycle of ideas: first you make the observations and interpret them, kick the ideas around the lab, then unleash them on others who can critique them, and then submit them to the larger community as a paper. At each stop along the way, and even after publication, your ideas can get evaluated, strengthened, altered, or jettisoned altogether.
(Original post from January 1, 2009)
