Last Friday we went to an afternoon session organized by Southern Cultural Immersion. It was an extremely confronting, but educational session about the history of South Australia, and how the aboriginal people were treated by the colonizers.
By Karin
Last Friday we went to an afternoon session organized by Southern Cultural Immersion. It was an extremely confronting, but educational session about the history of South Australia, and how the aboriginal people were treated by the colonizers.
0 Comments
By Joseph
Last week I was asked to review a paper for the first time. It is an interesting experience which I have wanted to try for a while. The paper itself is a bit of a tricky one with a lot of maths, but I am starting to get my head around it and hopefully I can do a decent job. By Sarah
There has been some ongoing debate lately about the importance of professional development. The reasons I have heard for not doing professional development activities include;
Like most reasons for not doing something, there is some validity to all of these excuses. Very few people have spare time for professional development, not all courses will suit every individual and certainly some individuals are told to complete professional development activities to address a deficiency in their performance. However, professional development is about so much more than simply addressing deficits and attending a few courses. Professional development done in the right way is about enhancing your strengths as much as it is about improving on your weaknesses and when planned for correctly it doesn’t need to be a huge time burden. Given the multitude of arguments for and against professional development I thought I would compile a few lists of why I think professional development is vitally important. What does encouraging staff to do professional development activities achieve?
How can professional development activities improve at the bench research?
What constitutes professional development?
What has professional development done for me personally in the last 2-3 years?
I am sure I have not mentioned every benefit or even every excuse, for or against professional development, but hopefully I have demonstrated that time invested in professional development is not time lost to research. That gains in efficiency, interpersonal skills, networking opportunities etc. outweigh any time expenditure afforded to professional development. By Karin
This week the lab has been joined by two new software development engineers, who will help with implementing our virtual reality arena for flies. It is very exciting to have new people on board (welcome Raymond and Chris!), and get some much needed software expertise after Rickard left. By Luke
It is a busy time of year with semester one of the university year underway. Compared to last year, many more classes are taking place back on campus. So far it has been great to see familiar faces that I remember from pre-covid times. Interacting with fellow students and teaching staff in a face-to-face format has been much more enjoyable than online classes exclusively. I would also like to welcome our new lab members Raymond (who has recently started) and Chris (starting very soon). They will be working on a virtual reality setup for experiments. This is an exciting time for the lab, and I am sure there will be further updates on this as things progress.
By Yuri
My first ARC grant writing season is over, and I have felt somehow accomplished (!), even the fact is that I just placed a seed on the soil, strictly speaking, the hard surface of a rock. After the submission, I was drained out and could not be functional for two days, although I was super excited to work on real data. I then realised how hard this process was, how much I have learnt from my excellent supervisor and collaborators, and what I need to improve in the next few months. While spending time in my back yard to elaborate plant collections for my office and in my workshop shed to make small things, I recharged energy to wrap up my current project, which still requires profound analysis. I aim to share the outcomes here in the near future. By Sarah
My youngest child is learning to read with much frustration and reluctance. The allure of a bright sunny afternoon over homework is almost always too much for her active nature to resist, especially when the words on the page in front of her are yet to make any sense. As I try to read a scientific research paper for our Lab’s upcoming journal club, I feel a lot more sympathy for her cause. This week’s paper is a well-written review article, by far not the hardest paper we have chosen for journal club, but the topic isn’t one I am particularly passionate about. (Perhaps my daughter holds an equal amount of disinterest in her current reader, ‘How I drew a bunny’?) For previous journal clubs, the papers often contain huge amounts of field specific jargon and acronyms; leaving me with the feeling I’m staring at words on a page that hold no meaning. When the words don’t make sense and reading feels like a chore, the advice of my daughter’s reception teacher seem equally relevant to scientific articles. If all else fails try to understand the story from the pictures and leave deciphering the words until later. By Karin About a month ago Martyna Grabowska came and visited and helped us set-up the Tucker Davis multichannel system. I am now recording, using Bruno van Swinderen's "skewer prep" idea, from 16 sites across the brain, from the peripheral optic lobes to more central brain regions. I am currently trying to understand what part of the screen the different parts see, if this is identical across brain regions, or varies depending on depth from the periphery. My first pilot data shows that channel 16 (probably photoreceptors/lamina) picks up signals from a large part of the screen, whereas channel 11 (probably lobula) responds better to a smaller part of the visual display. I'll try to work out what this means and if it is interesting after the weekend. By Joseph
Today I got the news that my new paper has been accepted for publication, it should be available soon. This paper started as a hunch at the end of my PhD, where I noticed a strange pattern in some data on a fellow lab members poster. I did some digging through my old data and found the same pattern, and it turned out to be caused by an undiscovered, fundamentally important spiking feature of a neuron that has been studied in detail for more than 25 years. Target detection in insects is a small field, and there are still relatively few identified target-detecting neurons in the literature. Perhaps the most well studied target detecting neuron in any insect is the dragonfly Centrifugal Small Target Motion Detector (CSTMD1), which David O'Carroll first recorded and dye filled in the early 1990s. As with most electrophysiological studies, almost every study of target-detecting neurons in insects quantifies responses by computing spike rates - where spikes are counted over a window of time and the mean spike frequency over that time is calculated. However many neurons do not communicate via spike rates, and some controversial neuroscientists even argue that no neurons communicate via spike rates. When presented with an appropriate stimulus, the spike rate of a neuron will change. This means that if our goal is to determine how certain stimulus parameters effect a neurons activity, comparing spike rates across different conditions makes a lot of sense. However we often overlook the fact that there can be a huge difference between neuronal activity and neuronal coding - quantifying neuronal activity is not synonymous with quantifying neuronal coding. Spike rates alone are only directly informative about neuronal coding if we assume that the neuron studied is using a rate code, and in my opinion, that assumption is often made with absolutely zero justification. In my paper we investigated the spike trains of dragonfly visual neurons in detail, focussing on CSTMD1. We found that unlike other neurons studied, CSTMD1 produces unique spike trains, consisting of periodic spike bursts rather than a steady pattern of spikes. This finding implies that CSTMD1 might use a burst code instead of a rate code. Burst codes are very rarely mentioned in insect vision, but they have several significant advantages over rate codes, and some of these would be extremely useful in a highly dynamic scenario such as target pursuit. We analyse responses of CSTMD1 through both spike rate-based and spike burst-based coding schemes in a simplified target detection task, and found that bursting results in a much faster and more accurate representation of target movement. |
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
Categories |