The end of the quarter is here already! That’s right, it’s finals time. In-class finals seem to be a rarity in grad school, but lucky me – I have two (Complex Analysis and Chemical Oceanography)! Both on Monday. The figure above is just to give you a little taste of what my weekend will be like. It is a portion of my formula sheet for the complex analysis exam. We’re allowed one 5″x7″ index card with any formulas or notes we can fit on it.
Just for fun, here’s Mr. Bean taking an exam.
This week, the entire lab group (except for me) went to the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Fransicso. Dax presented his seismology work, and also presented Will’s poster which was a summary of the fin whale research we’ve been doing. One of the writers for the AGU Geospace blog found the fin whale studies interesting, and interviewed Dax on Wednesday. Check out the article on Singing Whales!
I met with my advisor after we got back from the Bioacoustics workshop last week. I was really excited about all of the techniques and methods that I had learned about and wanted to try them all. Well, my plans weren’t exactly dismissed, but they were mostly relegated to back-burner status. After momentarily indulging in a little self-pity, I realized that, as usual, he was giving me useful advice and guidance. Given free reign, I will invariably get caught up in the excitement of writing code and solving immediate puzzles (fun for a nerd like me!). Rarely do I step back and ponder the bigger picture – which is exactly what I’m now being asked to do.
I like developing techniques. I like working out problems, and finding the best solution that I can. And the satisfaction of getting the code to work after hours of debugging has got to be one of the greatest feelings. But it turns out that in a PhD program (at least in oceanography) you’re actually supposed to answer SCIENCE QUESTIONS (dun-dun).
So, WHAT IS A SCIENE/RESEARCH QUESTION? And how do you find the right ones? I’m clueless here, so I thought I’d make a list (I like lists). So here’s my list of things to consider when formulating a Science Question:
WHAT IS NOT A RESEARCH QUESTION? (for me. In other programs the techniques themselves may be the question and the goal)
Here’s to dedicating at least a portion of my limited brainpower to reading, writing, and thinking about possible research questions.
Advice is welcome!
A comment from Mark on Facebook:
“Well, Michelle, what would YOU like to answer in your field of choice using the techniques you have available?”
He makes a good point. I forgot to add to the list the requirement that I find something that I’m actually interested in investigating. Because I can likely find several possible paths to follow, but I need to choose one that I can stomach for several years.
I always liked the Goodreader iPad app. It was one of the first ones I ever got, and is the best for reading journal articles. It’s always been great, but over time, the few issues that I had have been resolved, and the new updates always have something unexpected, but awesome. A few updates ago they added Dropbox access. I was onboard immediately.
One thing that bugged me until just today was that I found it a bit tedious to make annotations. Getting to the annotation/notes menu took a couple of steps, and it just seemed like it was not quite as good as paper and a pen and highlighter. I think I can now say that the app has finally reached the point where it’s just as easy for me as paper. I finally just grabbed the latest update, and it’s fantastic. There are now file tabs, a new and improved page slider, and my favorite – the new side menu! It makes highlighting and taking notes so fast.
Here’s an example of an annotated page from GoodReader:
Exciting times, my friends! That’s right. Hold on to your hats, it’s database building time. (Mom, you don’t have to read this one, I won’t be offended).
I have recently downloaded a pretty big dataset from Neptune Canada ocean bottom seismometers. After a bit of discussion with (and guidance from) my advisor and with Kate S., I’ve decided to bite the bullet and just put the data into a Datascope database. With the help of the internets, and a few man pages (for non-unix readers – man pages are basically help files), I’ve managed to hack together a sort of test database. And since I forget such things easily, I am going to try to document exactly what I’ve done so far.
[I should probably add in at this point that Datascope is a relational database system that is part of Antelope, and these instructions assume you have already installed Antelope and Datascope, and are just interested in starting up a brand new database from some fresh data.]
As usual, when I’m doing something that is WAY over my head, I like to make a little test directory: it’s called dbsandbox. In a Terminal window, I navigated to my new sandbox directory, and typed the command:
dbbuild dbtest
Where dbtest is the name of my database. This brings up a gui display – btw, you can also just create a configuration file and run a batch command, I just like GUIs, particularly if I have no idea what I’m doing.
I used the Iris entry for my first station to get the basic information. I had to guess at some fields, but it did manage to not crash when I filled it in as follows:
I had to guess on the serial numbers and also on the Datalogger type. I got a message telling me which records were added, and now I had an empty database! Woo hoo!
The next step was actually adding data. This is done using the following command:
miniseed2db -v ../pathtodata/* dbtest
Where dbtest is still the name of my database, pathtodata is (duh) the path to my data, and the -v is to request verbose output (tell me what’s happening, please!).
So there it is. I know I made a mistake somewhere because I added all channels together. But I can sort that out later – details, right? To test my shiny new database:
dbe dbtest
and
dbpick dbtest.
And hey, presto! There it is. Now I just need to figure out an efficient way to add all of that miniseed data that is organized into hundreds of folders by year and julian day.
** Update: Will just gave me a hint – if I use miniseed2db /path/* where path is the upper-most folder, it will look into all subfolders and grab any miniseed files. It seems to be working!
Here’s the drawing I made two days ago after the COSEE Broader Impacts workshop. Believe it or not, I’ve been keeping up with my daily drawings, but have been to tired/lazy to scan and post them. Sorry!
At our advisor’s suggestion, our lab group attended the COSEE Broader Impacts workshop yesterday. I’m glad I went – it was really interesting. Reviewers at NSF or NOAA or Sea Grant consider a couple of main things when examining a proposal. Well, obviously the intellectual merit of the proposal is of the utmost importance, but it’s not also important to demonstrate the broader impacts of the proposed research as well. There were a variety of different sessions in the workshop covering topics like teaching and outreach, communicating with policy-makers, the use of visual data, social media tools, and diversity in science and research. (and more!)
I’m really interested in teaching and outreach (although I have almost no experience in either, if we’re being honest…). Philip Bell, from the UW College of Education, and also Directory of the Institute for Science and Math Education, gave an interesting talk – a lot about policy and standards stuff that I was unfamiliar with, but he also highlighted the vast amount of literature available on science education that is available for free on the National Academies Press website. Very cool! I can’t wait to download some onto my iPad. He passed several of the books around the room during his talk, and I thought there were a lot of interesting things that I’d want to delve into more deeply. There are consensus studies that compile the results of hundreds of studies, and also practitioner’s guides.
Here’s a one of the practitioners guides that got passed around:
I’m curious about what kids are learning, how science is taught at K-12 levels. Apparently new studies show that young children (even kindergarten age) have far more advanced reasoning skills than what was previously thought.
One other talk that I found to be really interesting and useful was the one given by Rick Keil that was specifically about Broader Impacts, and on recognizing broader impacts that your lab group is already doing. It was surprising to see it like that, there were several things that I hadn’t considered before. Here is Rick’s overview on the COSEE website.
