An Adventure with Scientists

I will be out of the virtual office for a few days–I have to travel off to the West Coast.

I am hoping I can pick up the latest movie from Aardman Studios while I am out there.  Sadly, the original title, shown in this PR photo, has been changed for the US to remove the word “Scientists.”

“By downplaying the presence of a plasticine Charles Darwin (voiced by David Tennant) in the film’s marketing, the studio probably figures it has more of a chance of getting box office numbers in the Bible belt. The mere mention of ‘Science’ or ‘Charles Darwin’ is enough to make some extreme Creationists flip out, call forth hellfire and brimstone and lynch a chimpanzee by the highway.”

Le Sigh.

But it’s always an adventure with scientists, even if you don’t label it that way.  Sometimes you have an adventure even before you get to the science part–I’m thinking here of the time I was pulled over at a rural traffic stop and had to explain why the following items were in the back of my car:

• Axe
• Shovel
• Machete
• Large black plastic garbage bags
• Rubber gloves
• A jar with cyanide in it
• Air filtering face mask
• 2 old and dirty white sheets

It took quite a while for them to be convinced that I wasn’t up to anything other than a collecting trip for insects in dead logs.  ”Really, Officer! These are standard tools for entomologists!”

What’s YOUR favorite science adventure? 

Teaching advice: what to do when a student loses it

Quite a few people, including PZ, have posted this video of a student completely loosing it in a classroom.  From the school paper:

“Associate Professor Stephen M. Kajiura was reviewing with his evolution class in GS 120 for a midterm when FAU student Jonatha Carr interrupted him: “How does evolution kill black people?” she asked. Kajiura attempted to explain that evolution doesn’t kill anyone.…..The classmate reported that Kajiura was discussing attraction between peacocks when Carr raised her hand to ask her question about evolution. She asked it four times, and became increasingly upset each time Kajiura’s answer failed to satisfy her.

A video taken by Bustamante shows Carr ranting and threatening to kill the professor and several students.”

I’ve discussed violence before that is motivated by anti-evolution, both directed against me and others.

Honestly, I don’t think this outburst had that much to do with evolution, although it’s certainly scary that evolution seems to be the topic that triggered the student’s outburst.   What I was struck by, watching that video as someone who’s been teaching for over 25 years, is the behavior of the instructor and the other students:

• They tried to engage in dialog with a person that is clearly in severe mental distress
• They did not clear the classroom
• It took way too long before anyone called 911
• The students were more interested in filming the student’s meltdown than getting to safety

That? Honestly? Bothers me far more than what the woman was yelling.

If there is anything that needs to be discussed and post-processed about this, it’s that the area was not secured, not that she was angry about evolution.

Do you teach?
Do you have a plan for what you would do in your class if something like this happened?
Have you thought about how you might get all your students to safety in case of an emergency?
Have you recieved training–or at least instructions–about what to do with a distressed student?

If someone is this out of control, your best bet is to GTFO.  Get the distressed person in a quiet room, or make the room quiet by getting everyone else out. But don’t expect rational discourse to work.

If you are going to watch this video, do it with an eye to how you would have handled this situation as an instructor.
And learn from it.

Example University Student Risk and Review Referral Guide

A cranky old lady reviews Pinterest (for SCIENCE)

Pinterest keeps popping up in the news, and I’m constantly getting notifications that “Jane Schmo pinned something!”  As someone who bills herself as a social media goddess, I clearly needed to check this Pinterest thing out.  Some background:

“Pinterest is a pinboard-style social photo sharing website. The service allows users to create and manage theme-based image collections….In January 2012, Pinterest drove more referral traffic to retailers than LinkedIn, YouTube, and Google+ combined (source)….Pinterest is definitely worth taking a look at, particularly if your audience is female, likes pretty things and likes buying online.”

Wel, 2 out of 3 ain’t bad. *cough*

Essentially, it’s online shopping in a million stores.  The Pinterest mission is to “connect everyone through the “things“ they find interesting.” And it is, certainly, about THINGS.

Pinterest is basically Delicious with pretty pictures. Delicious is/was a useful bookmarking site to help you re-find cool stuff that you saw on the web.  The need to save links somewhere other than your browser tool bar is a common one; Pinterest has figured out how to turn that into traffic-driving merch.

A couple of features Pinterest has that might be interesting to scientists:

• You can allow friends to share and pin onto your boards–so I could crowdsource my insect music collection, for example, for a more comprehensive list of resources.
• The board discovery feature allows people who might not traditionally be connected to the science community (i.e, women that like pretty things and shopping) to see that there are scientists that share their interests, or that have interesting things to offer
• You can create unexpected resources–a board of insect recipes, for example, might be a good way to expose people to the concept of entomophagy; a collection of plans for building native bee boxes might help people find them more easily.

There are also a lot of things that don’t work at all on Pinterest, or that are poorly designed. If you want to re-arrange your pins on a board so that your favorites are at the top, or related things are together–you can’t do that.  Things are stuck in the order you pinned them in.   Which, if your purpose for using the site is to save and organize your bookmarks, destroys some of its usefulness.

I have tried several times to pin things (like insect recipes!) that I wasn’t able to pin because there were no images on the web page.  That makes the bookmark utility of the site moot.

The toggles for privacy levels are confusing, and I constantly have to stop and do a search (on an external site, since Pinterest Help documentation is minimal) to figure out how to make it STOP subscribing me to people, or to unsubscribe from the automatic connections Pinterest creates.

This screen is a good example of some of the strange interface choices.  If I want to unsubscribe to the person, the Unfollow button is faded out.  But…that is actually the active button.  And red usually means stop.  Eh?

I freely admit to being a curmudgeon, so you may find Pinterest more interesting than I did.  I don’t feel a need for something like Pinterest.  I don’t shop a lot, and I find the way that it’s difficult to see the original source of the image a bit problematic (as, apparently, do a lot of other people).

I’m pretty much with Abraham Lincoln on this one:  ”People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like.”

On the other hand, I really, really want these tights with ants on them.

UPDATE 3/19/12: Symbiartic has an alarming look at the terms of service for Pinterest, from the standpoint of an artist. Rather disturbing!

iSad

This is the 512K (kilobytes) computer that I typed my Masters thesis on in 1988.  It was the latest thing, and a substantial upgrade from the 128K macs with an 8 MHz  CPU.  I still have all the 3 inch floppies that both my thesis and PhD dissertation are on.  (It’s about 20 floppy disks, total, including the data files).

In case you are curious, 512K is 0.5 Megabytes, or 0.00049 Gigabytes.

I am typing this on a 2.4 GHz Intel Core Macbook, with a Terabyte of memory if you include my second hard drive.

Things change.

I’m thankful that Steve Jobs had the vision to imagine a world where usability was important.  It’s not enough for software or hardware to be good at computation; it should also be easy to use, intuitive, and beautiful.  That is what Mr. Jobs brought to the table.

He was only a few years older than me, but had a tremendous impact on the daily lives of Americans. I really liked what Wired had to say:

A visionary inventor and entrepreneur, it would be impossible to overstate Steve Jobs’ impact on technology and how we use it. Apple’s mercurial, mysterious leader did more than reshape his entire industry: he completely changed how we interact with technology. He made gadgets easy to use, gorgeous to behold and essential to own. He made things we absolutely wanted, long before we even knew we wanted them. 

He may not have been an easy person to work for; some of the stories I’ve heard suggest a bit of micromanaging. But damn, did he get results.

You will be missed Mr. Jobs, and my thoughts are with your friends and family.
From a 2005 commencement address at Stanford University:

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life,” Jobs said. “Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

Bug Girl Explains it all for you

I was away last week having an awesome time at a conference last week–saw some amazing birds, some marine mammals, had a hellish but cool boat ride, and got to talk to a lot of scientists.  I did a presentation there on social media for scientists and research stations, and it was really well recieved.

Actually, more than one person said “that should have been a plenary session,”  which I am still really, really geeked about!

So–Since few of my readers were able to attend that conference, or the Entomological Society meeting that I’ll be presenting at in November, I thought I would break things into a series of “Social Media for Scientists” posts.  There are some very good existing resources, but they don’t seem to be detailed enough to be useful to people that I’ve recommended them to.

People seem to want instructions along the line of “How do I…” more than “Why do I….”
But you know, we’re scientists. We’re all about procedure.

So–I asked some of this in an earlier post, but to get a more detailed read, here’s a poll!

Previous Unsolicited Advice Series at the Bug Blog:

• Getting into and choosing a Graduate School
• Career advice

A brief Intermission

Wow, school has started with a bang, and I am swamped!

I will be on the road for a meeting most of next week, so posting will be a bit spotty.  I still need to write my presentation for that meeting, so I’m forcing myself to shut the internet off and write something that I’m actually supposed to be working on.

While I do have to actually work, as part of this trip I will get to go on a boat and look at sea birds, which I am very excited about.  This is the kind of science I like.

I will not, alas, be staying at this Damn Inn, or visiting their Damn bar.

While I’m away, take a look at the wonderful entries posted in the comments on the Ribald Entomology Limerick Contest.

Amazing! I have no idea how I am going to pick a winner!  If you want to suggest some ways to categorize them, please feel free to offer up suggestions.

Tell me what you want

I got the official notification of my time in the Social Media Symposium for the Entomological Society of America Annual Meeting. The official symposium:

Speak Out – Interaction and Education in a Brave New World of Social Media and Online Resources
Tuesday, November 15, 2011: 1:30 PM-5:45 PM

A lot of the symposium will focus on Extension, but there will also be some familiar names. Now that I’ve seen the lineup, I’m feeling a bit like “one of these things is not like the others.”

I’m the last person to talk, right after Eric Eaton. And honestly, I love Eric, but we could not be less alike.  The strongest language I think I’ve ever heard him use is “darn!”  (He may also have said “Blast!” once as well. But I don’t like to spread rumors.)

So, I am thinking of talking mostly about how to measure your impact, both with various social media metrics and intangibly. I hope to hit the one million mark on this blog before November, and that doesn’t even count the people who read my posts at Skepchick.   I also was thinking of talking about building a brand, or maybe the tradeoff between anonymity and a real name.

I have exactly 10 minutes to talk, so I can really only cover one topic. What do YOU want to hear about?

Insects Totally Caused Ultimate Frisbee

So, I was going to write a really important post tonight.  It was going to deal with philosophy of science, and it was going to be a shoe-in for Open Lab 2011.  It was gonna make you question how you thought about Life, The Universe, And Everything.

And then Google Labs released a new tool.

And I was all, “WOO SHINY NEW TOY!”

And.

Yeah.

That was how I found out about ultimate frisbee and insects.

“Google Correlate is an experimental new tool on Google Labs which enables you to find queries with a similar pattern to a target data series. The target can either be a real-world trend that you provide (e.g., a data set of event counts over time) or a query that you enter.”

Basically, Google takes a search term that you enter (“insects”) and examines search patterns for other search terms in its database to calculate a correlation coefficient (r).  It’s an extension of Google Trends; it’s looking to see which search terms trend together.

In case you barely remember that statistics class from your misspent youth, the correlation coefficient is a value between -1 and +1.  The closer to ±1 the r value is, the more closely correlated the patterns are.  The closer the value to zero, the less the two patterns are related.

Of course, we’ve all heard the “correlation is not causation” trope a million times. It’s especially true here; when you don’t even have a hypothesis about a relationship, the data points are just amusing.

So for your amusement and edification:

In addition to frisbee, “insects” is also strongly correlated with the search terms “snake photo” and “lizards”.

“Insect” (non-plural) is most strongly correlated with “aluminum siding,” “dunking booth,” and “frisbee” (non-ultimate).

“Ants” is most strongly correlated with “string trimmer.”
“Bees” is most strongly correlated with “Tool Rental.”  ”Honey Bee” is correlated with “raptor cam“.
“Roaches” is most strongly correlated with “warts,” as well as “5 year anniversary.”

“Lice” is strongly correlated with “dragon fruit“, but also “literacy stations” and “cheer routine.”  In fact, several cheerleading terms show up in the correlation list for “lice.”  ”Head Lice” is strongly correlated with “tackle football“, and “Nits“are correlated with “cheerleading bows“, so perhaps football season mirrors lice season?

And, of course, you know I had to go there.

“Crab Lice” is most strongly correlated with….”Lighthouses“?

“Pubic Lice” is most strongly correlated with….a host of civil war search terms.

I am frankly rather baffled about why these search terms should be seasonally correlated, unless Civil War Re-enactors are taking things a little too seriously in their search for authenticity.

Give it a spin–what fun correlations can you discover?

Photos, Flames, and Copyright

I got to start my Sunday morning with a really angry email:

Hey Bug Girl, practice what you preach!

[reference to my Digital Millennia Copyright Act notice on the sidebar]……I stumbled upon this text by following hits on one of copyrighted Flickr photos that I ultimately found to be displayed without permission right there on the same page of your blog. It looks like that widget you use to scrape Flickr photos and display them in the upper left column of your blog is grabbing other people’s copyrighted work. 

Basically, this photographer’s concern relates to the little Flickr Widget in the uppper left corner of this blog.  It goes and scrapes this public feed:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/insect/   and displays linked thumbnails.  He is absolutely correct that the widget doesn’t distinguish between things that are marked as copyright restricted and Creative Commons.

But.

(And here is my question to some of my friends who make money off their photos):  How is that different than what happens when I post a link to Twitter or Facebook saying “look at this great photo!”, and those web pages grab a thumbnail of the image, and display it with a link?

Essentially, the photos are “public” on Flickr, and linked, and the Terms of Service for the widget API allow me to display these photos as thumbnails (in fact, their restriction is for displaying over 30 photos, and I have 4 displayed!)

This discussion has happened before among professional photogs; there is a rather disturbing chain of communications with Flickr here discussing unauthorized re-license of photos for cell phone wallpapers.  Which could, I guess, be seen as a “thumbnail”, depending on your phone.  There is also a court case, Kelly vs. Arriba Soft Corporation, which established a precedent for showing thumbnails of copyright protected photos in search results as legally ok.

What say you?

If enough folks say I’m in the wrong here, I’ll remove the widget, since I don’t want to be a content stealer. I hate it when that happens to me.

DISCUSS.

(edited 5/22/11 to add link to Kelly court case after a tip by Sarah–thanks! Librarians FTW!)

EDITED 5/25/2011 to include link to new Opt-in Only Flickr Group:  Take my insects! Please!

Mid-Life Chrysalis

I will be offline for several days, starting this evening, as I make the trek east to my new job. I’m still frantically stuffing things in boxes, but I am getting close to finished.

It’s a big transition from a research station to a main campus student-services-oriented job, but the folks I’m going to work with seem pretty cool. They also seem to see an online presence as a plus, rather than a negative, so while I’ll still be using my pseudonym for the foreseeable future, perhaps I’ll eventually be able to have a personal opinion in public.

(For those of you that missed the 2009 drama, my boss decided an anti-lobbying law applied to me since I had budgetary power over state funds. The outcome of this was that I was ordered not to speak about any policies or politics as my real self. And, for a while, not as an anonymous teal broad with antennae on the internet either.)

Until I get past that 6 month probation period, though, don’t expect any big reveals!  I hope that when I finally emerge from this midlife chrysalis that I look like Dr. Girlfriend from the Venture Brothers.

Here’s hoping for an uneventful move, and an exciting new chapter in my career.  And, I’m really happy to have landed a full time job with benefits.

Also? OMG check out these Monarch shoes.