One thing that I love with working in Australia, and having a campus with so much "nature" is all the animals, and especially the noisy cockatoos. Just these last few weeks I have seen my favorite yellow-tailed black cockatoos, and the good old sulphur crested cockatoos, very close, enjoying feasting on trees and grubs around the place. They are loud and make a mess, but are so adorable.
By Karin One thing that I love with working in Australia, and having a campus with so much "nature" is all the animals, and especially the noisy cockatoos. Just these last few weeks I have seen my favorite yellow-tailed black cockatoos, and the good old sulphur crested cockatoos, very close, enjoying feasting on trees and grubs around the place. They are loud and make a mess, but are so adorable.
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By Joseph
Through my earlier years, grants were just those mysterious things that your supervisors work on when they lock themselves in their offices for two weeks straight. Now I am reaching the exciting/scary stage of a scientific career, where I need develop independence in my work, both scientifically and financially. This means developing research ideas, and throwing my name in the hat to try and get some grant funding of my own. In the last month I submitted two internal research seed grants, intended to give early career researchers a budget to develop a project. Instead of doing my actual job, gathering and analysing data on the project I am paid to work on, I have to sink a month into thinking about totally new, unique projects, and sell it to someone who has probably never even heard of a hoverfly. It is a strange time, because its only now that you realise basically everything you have ever worked on is the intellectual territory of your past or present supervisors. You have to come up with an idea that you are qualified to study based on your past experiences, but that is different enough from your past experiences that your old mentors don’t get mad at you for stealing their ideas. In some bigger fields this is probably pretty easy, because there are thousands of people treading on each others toes already. People are a bit less touchy about their territory in a cancer or Alzheimers field because it is getting invaded by people all over the world every day. But in a niche field like insect vision, I find that peoples territory becomes rather large. In some insects broad neuron classes, or sometimes even entire regions of the nervous system, become the research territory of a single small lab. This makes finding your own research area pretty complicated. But in the end, this grant writing exercise is good practice for the future. And if I am lucky enough to get some funding then I will get to buy some new toys and try some new techniques.
-By Richard
A recent XKCD cartoon considered the relationship between scientists and "tech" people (by which they mean computer programmers):
Which is really a bit mean to scientists.... But it got me thinking: this idea of a tech "service" supplied from outside to help scientists in their work doesn't really apply in our lab. That's because we decided to use Matlab as our computing platform for deliversing experimental stimuli and analysing data, with everyone in the lab being encouraged to learn scripting as soon as they can. So even though I'm the only one of us who is in a full-time "computer tech" role, the result is that everyone else has enough knowledge of how computer programs work to be able to understand what my work entails, and so there's no mystical veil between the tech side and the science.
Because we're all (myself included) continually busy with learning more about programming through developing, sharing, and improving our scripts, Matlab scripting becomes just one more "language" for us to share knowledge and practice, in the same way as talking about experimental setups or study design. This is a cool aspect of our lab, and it isn't the case everywhere else, as the cartoon attests. Looking for information on how to develop computer programming expertise, the evidence seems to support the idea that a crucial ingredient is what the cognitive psychologist K Anders Ericsson calls "deliberate practice" - in this case, learning coding by practising coding, while making a conscious effort to continually improve: interrogating yourself to discover what went wrong and how you can do better, and setting yourself tasks that move you out of your comfort zone, in order to develop beyond your current abilities. And learning programming never stops: not only can you constantly aim to get better at it, but also, new programming languages keep coming. I've been dealt a big helping of humility through my efforts this last week to get up to scratch in a programming language that is new to me, just in time to be teaching it "officially" to students a few days later...! By Yuri I have slowly recovered from the great sadness that Masakazu (Mark) Konishi passed away last week at the age of 87. He was well known for studies in the field of auditory processing in birds, particularly the crucial role of acoustic feedback in bird songs and the neural mechanisms of sound localisation in barn owls. He found coincidence detector neurons in the owl brain that fire when auditory inputs from the left and the right ears arrive. This exquisite neural mechanism taught me the beauty of the organisation of the brain for the first time. It was in a lecture by my previous supervisor, Masaki Sakai, one of Masakazu's friends. After the sad news last week, Masaki sent me a picture of them with Dr. Catherine Carr, who did the coincident detector work. And he said Masakazu was always devoted, earnest, and sincere to science, and he always wanted to be like Masakazu. I am sure he is because he still does fieldwork to understand how cicadas find the way out from the soil in sweltering summer in Japan, even though he is 76 years old. While writing grant applications, I sometimes fear and wonder how I can be a good scientist. One solution must be keep learning, thinking, and being sincere to science as my heroes do. |
Hoverfly Vision
The hoverfly vision group can be found at 2 locations: At Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, and at Uppsala University in Sweden. Archives
January 2022
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