Look At Me Still Talking When There’s Science To Do
In Grand Rapids… thinking about Barrow (among other things)Archive for Research
You could have scared her to death… but you didn’t because she’s so brave.
When it was my turn to answer the question-of-the-hour at the circular dinner banquet table on Saturday night, I told the four pairs of Michigander eyes that I was in Lincoln so that I could avoid having to teach last Friday. This was mostly true, and though I didn’t have the compelling reasons reported by my dinner companions- “My boyfriend goes here” …. “Our friend did her undergrad at UNL- she’s over there, and she’s Asian”- I am more than content to have spent twenty hours in the car and an undisclosed number of dollars out of my own pocket to attend the Midwest Ecology and Evolution Conference on March 27-29.
I also wanted to go to a conference and leave the state and go somewhere new and get a free water bottle.
The conference, hosted by the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, was mainly for students, and I won’t pretend that I didn’t feel overwhelmed by all the science that I didn’t understand, but I felt better knowing that many of the talks I attended were given by masters or doctorate students, just like the ones that had dinner with me. Three of them were from Michigan State University, and the fourth from the University of Michigan. The MSU kids drove, too, and thanks to the ambitious member of the group, they’d left East Lansing at 4a.m. on Friday and arrived in Lincoln around 2p.m.
My own travel plans were not so extreme, and included scheduled stops in a) Davenport, Iowa, and b) Seward, Nebraska. I was joined by my mother on Thursday afternoon, and we drove to Davenport, where we accepted the hospitality of one of my three Aunt Jans, and the company of my uncle and my cousin. First-cousin-once-removed was there, too, but in an asleep sort of fashion. One of my favorite things is seeing relatives or friends out of context, in this case, context being “Christmastime.”
We enjoyed our night in Davenport and our drive to Lincoln the next morning. The afternoon included a trip to Seward, where my travel companion and an assortment of her sisters and inlaws learned to be teachers at Concordia Teachers’ College. I took a picture of the joy.
Joyful
It had been nearly thirty years since this person was on the little campus!
On Saturday, I had to give my talk. It was a success, if you choose to buy into the idea that no one asked me questions afterwards because I explained everything so well- rather than because it was a giant mess.
Fortunately, I was able to chat with the aforementioned Michigan students and some dinosaurs, since Dear Mother was spending the day not at the conference, but at a pizza place, a quilt museum, and our hotel room, which I suppose is good enough for someone who doesn’t travel to other cities for science.
In conclusion, a man and his German speaking dog chased us around the Iowa welcome center on eastbound highway 80 during Sunday’s return trip. And we didn’t leave Nebraska without one of these.
RAR! is probably not a good stegosaurus noise
Do not hesitate to contact him, you will generally find him quite friendly and receptive.
Job recently reminded me that we have a website with profiles and everything. Some video footage is available there as well, so that we can scare away entice future recruits to the program.
http://faculty.gvsu.edu/hollistr/Index.html
I didn’t write my own blurb, or to my recollection pick out my own profile photo, but I don’t reckon I could have done better.
And all this science… I don’t understand.
Being the responsible persons that we are, Rob and I not only got ourselves down to the lab on Saturday in time to rescue our posters and personal effects, we also managed to be at the conference location in time to do 14 laps around the Van Andel Institute in our efforts to find the (wrong) parking garage to park in.
I expected that the only rewarding thing about a conference was socializing with other people who you’d want to see anyway… and maybe the free food, because how bad could it be? I was then pleasantly surprised to be enjoying both presenting my poster and talking with the other students who had posters to present. Our conversations were pleasant, informative, and exciting. I was inspired to continue investigating the topic of my poster, since the preliminary data that ended up on the poster only scratched the surface.
I didn’t mean to imply, when I wrote last week, that I did not understand my own research when I confessed that I didn’t have the title committed to memory. I knew very well what I put on that poster, because I put every bit of it there (nevermind that once it was there Bob was wont to move it around and change this word for that word… in fact, the large pictures were his idea: “Put a giant picture in the middle so people will want to look at it”).
Using the Atqasuk pointframe data and zonation schemes established by other people, I labeled each species of vascular plant that we found at the site as either “high arctic” or “low arctic,” referring to latitude. High arctic plants can also be found in low arctic zones, but the low arctic species will not be present in high arctic zones.
What we expected to find was that the point frame data would indicate more cover from the low arctic plants in the OTCs. We were looking for evidence that climate change and warming would catalyse these species in spreading northward. What the data told us was that in the dry site of Atqasuk, there was less cover inside the OTCs, and at the wet site, there was actually an increase in cover for HIGH arctic species.
Because this was unexpected, there are now a hundred more questions to ask, and there are always more data to analyse. We only used the point fram data from Atqasuk 2007, so the Barrow data that Papasaurus and I collected (and that I entered into spreadsheets!) wasn’t used yet, nor was the data from past years. Once those spreadsheets are run, we can compare them individually and to each other. I might start looking at specific plots and their change over time, rather than lumping all the hits for all high arctic species in all dry control plots together, for example.
Besides THAT, I have been getting more of the books and articles I requested from the library, and I will use them to find other zonation schemes that I can use to classify our species. The classification system we used is relative and somewhat subjective, so it could be that a different zonation scheme will yield different results!
The West Michigan Regional Undergraduate Science Research Conference has the worst acronym of all time, apart maybe from any acronyms that spell out unfortuate words. However, clumsy acronym or no clumsy acronym, I thought it a great success.
Well, she used the big printer, I’ll give her that.
I hate waiting. Rob and I are in the computer lab patiently watching the big printer spit out our posters inch by inch.
Earlier today, so long ago and yet not so long, we waited patiently at the copy machine as it turned fourteen pages into fourteen times fourteen pages, and we ended up with a neat stack of 210 to run, literally, to the post office by 4:59 for guaranteed overnight shipping to New York*.
We’re going to a conference tomorrow and I haven’t slept since Wednesday night! Not entirely true, but close enough to declare it on the internet.
My conference isn’t nearly so exciting as those of the the jet-setters I know who travel across countries and oceans in the name of patting each other on the back for doing science. My conference, according to Google Maps (the best?) is fifteen minutes from my house. Though I will be forced to leave before proper Saturday breakfast time, I will be home ’round brillig**.
Home ’round brillig, that is, unless Tundra Riot rides again and sets forth on an overdue reunion tour into the great beyond. All four original members of Tundra Riot will be the presenting authors of posters tomorrow. The one with the most and largest pictures best one is entitled “High Arctic and Low Arctic Vegetation Response to Climate Change,” by yours truly***, and no, I unfortunately couldn’t have told you that without peeking. I blame it on the fatigue.
I blame it on the fatigue and the anxiety. The big printer is naturally located two flights of stairs and three computer labs away from the cozy home lab where we’ve been postering all day, so naturally Our Heroes**** did not choose to schelp all their things with them when they went to print. Also naturally, they, after carefully pocketing both sets of lab keys, shut the automatically locking door behind them to protect things like their laptops… and all the contents, minus keys, of Jenny’s purse, if she had one, which she doesn’t, so the things were in the pink backpack*****.
The obvious punchline here is that Our Heroes get locked out of the lab, but how could they when they had both sets of lab keys? If you think a thrilling twist is coming and keeping Our Heroes out of the lab, you’d be wrong, right, because, NATURALLY, the lab keys stop working after 10 pm, when no respectable person is anywhere near a biology lab!
Oh and Jean and Jeremy printed their posters ages ago, around 6 or 7 pm, so they’ve nothing to worry about! Their nice posters are safe and sound in…. the cardboard traveling tube…. in… the…. l-l-l-a-a-a-a-a-bbbbbbb. Oh.
For the record, I did NOT know when I began writing this post that I was locked out of the lab… rats.
*I’ll explain later, for goodness sake!
**Four o’clock in the afternoon: the time when you begin broiling things for dinner.
***Co-authored by Bob and Papasaurus!
****Jenny and Jobby, naturally!
*****From Miss Cindy at Teddy Bear Junction.
It honestly was beautifully done.
“So,” Bob said. Those acquainted with our illustrious leader will be able to see this word in their minds’ eyes and hear it in their minds’ ears. Those who are not will be satisfied to know that “so,” from Bob, is packed with potential caricature.
“So. What some… colleagues will do is enter the data twice and run the spreadsheets against each other so you can fix the places where they don’t match.”
I squeaked. “Oh.” Pause. “Should…”
He was staring at my laptop with his formidable critical eye, the completed point frame data spreadsheet displayed on the screen. “No, you’re just going to do quality checks. For at least an hour. Go.”
I checked it, by golly. Did I find even one mistake? No I did not. My work has fewer mistakes than most.*
The rush, you see, was because of the ITEX conference that is going on this week… in ICELAND. GV will be represented by Rob, Bob, and Papasaurus, and I was meant to prepare this information for them- well, for Jeremy, mostly. There isn’t sufficient time to analyze the information in order to present it, but they wanted to be able to “play with the numbers” before they left. I felt bad accepting their thanks for impressively finishing on Friday afternoon, because even though last year this same task wasn’t completed until January, I cannot with good conscience characterize the early part of September by any sort of self-destructive fervor and industry on my part, though the last week and a half certainly was. I was at the point that I felt guilty taking 10 minutes to heat up something to eat.
More than one observer has brought up the point that if the data was just entered as we collected it this summer, then I wouldn’t have had this headache now. It’s true that a couple hours per evening could have knocked out the data entry over the summer, but I would challenge anyone to be able to find those two hours in the schedule we kept. Between the endless biomass sorting and the small amount of non-negotiable socialization and movie watching time, I put in probably only half a dozen solid nights of sleep for the entire 70 days. I will not ever complain about this.
I don’t mean to complain about the data entry I just finished, either. I LIKE having tasks like that: making lesson plans and writing @&^%$ discussion board posts most emphatically do NOT fall into that category of “pleasant tasks.” Take Marathon Atqasuk Weekend, for example. Though I admittedly would have preferred to spend those 48 hours in Barrow, I was smugly pleased with both the impossibility of the undertaking and with our stellar performance.
Happily, my work isn’t over. Now I have the 24 plots of biomass data to enter, and biomass data is incredibly similar to point frame data, so it should take me roughly a quarter of the time the 96 point frame plots took. Then I have to consult the Important Textbook lent to me by Bob as a starting point on my own presentation that I will, in theory, be giving on the first of November right here in Grand Rapids.
The flight leaves tomorrow at 2:30, and the three of them will get back on Monday. I trust that they will have a marvelous time… and they better say hi to Paulo and Craig for me, because I said so.
*Bob’s words, not mine. This is not to say that there were no mistakes, for I did not and could not examine every cell in the spreadsheet, but Bob’s good faith and my reasonable confidence proved to be satisfactorily accurate.
I didn’t want to say anything, but it kind of freaked me out.
Warm-and-enthusiastic girl is in my Thursday seminar, of course, and no one is surprised when it is her turn to finish the sentence “If you really knew me, you’d know that…” and she says, in her Tour Guide Barbie voice “…I just love teaching. I love it. I mean, I know that’s why we’re all here [... ] but I really really love it. And I don’t even care what I teach! I’d teach anything.”
When it was my turn I said something trivial that I’ve forgotten already, but it was not “If you really knew me, you would not ask me to complete this statement, and if you did, you wouldn’t want me to share it with you or the class. The statement would be snarky and uncomplying with the cheerful expectaion that I enjoy my classes and this environment. This exercise is prepared for people who are willing to participate, share, and maybe even cry- students who have been anxiously anticipating their first week of student teaching all summer. And if you expected and were prepared for me to answer truthfully and candidly, you would find out, to our mutual detriment, that if you really knew me, you’d know that I do not want to be a teacher, even for a minute,” which is what I wrote in my notes when he first introduced the activity.
My classes continue to progress about as well as one would expect (see above), but I did finish my data entry for everything but point framing, which is the binder that Jeremy handed to me when I showed up with the other completed files.
Despite the work that it is going to be, I love holding the point frame binder- but of course it only made me miss Barrow some more. Papasaurus and I had some time wallowing in nostalgia in the lab yesterday, which is probably unhealthy. I also made him a little ill at ease, since I didn’t take time to change out of teacher clothes before I went to campus. Yesterday, teacher clothes was a skirt. This does not comply with the image I created for myself in Alaska, and Jeremy only knows Alaska Jenny.
Of course, Michigan Jenny doesn’t really wear skirts, either, but sometimes things have to change.
There’s no sense of ha-ha there.
I spent the whole morning trying to memorize the face I was making so that I could return to my cluttered new apartment and recreate the face accurately in the mirror. Sitting in a 10th and 11th grade English classroom of Unnamed Local High School, I couldn’t tell if the face reflected bemusement, indifference, distracted annoyance, rapt attention, enthusiasm, or my typical standby face…… tired. Who knows what kind of first impression I made on seventy-three students and my teacher? (The latter I had met before, but that didn’t stop her from being 85% befuddled by my presence.)
Since my program requires that I return to this classroom every school day until early December, I will have to work on both my face and my social skills. It occurred to me, as my teacher was manipulating the students into liking her, that I do not care what the students think of me, and I have no interest in beginning a career that requires validation from teenagers. (Therefore I’ve also called Simon Cowell to say that even though I’d spectacularly nailed the audition, I just can’t be a part of American Idol this year. Thanks, but no thanks.)
When I was in the field in Atqasuk, the satisfaction of completing work on a single plot would often not be enough for me to be able to move on to the next plot. You know, psychologically. At times like these I would make a deliberate check mark on the page in the folder. “YES!” these check marks say. “YOU’VE DONE IT THIS TIME, JENNY! THAT PLOT IS TOAST.” There’s no spot on the paper designated for pat-on-the-back-check-marks, and they keep turning up in unexpected places as I flip through and transfer the important numbers.
From the dead mosquitoes in the data folders (and, naturally, the check marks) I get all the validation I require.
Go on until you come to the end
All those days that we were out in the field this summer we were armed with colorful folders containing pages and pages of spreadsheet printouts to fill in. All those days I recorded point framing data I was charged with the care of a two-inch three ring binder that simply could not hold any more pages if you put a gun to its head, er… spine. Our madcap total season days produced four completely new folders in the space of thirty hours, not counting the four folders that the Barrow team toiled over.
We ran all these folders through the copier before we left; one oughtn’t to leave such things to chance, and any number of scenarios could have separated the folders from the trusty research assistants who transported them in their carry-on luggage. Then what would we have to show for our ten weeks away?
What, indeed. The actual copying took forever, since weeks of tundra exposure left even the all-weather paper curled and cranky. In the case of the Atqasuk folders, the copy machine would only accept so many dead mosquitoes before it became cross and finicky. In the end, however, we had a delightful pile of shiny white data, suitable to shipping back to the lab in Michigan.
The point is that the data is more or less useless in binder form, and the computer has been hungrily accepting the efforts of the ITEX team as we try to transfer everything into the electronic versions of the spreadsheets. This takes much more time and patience than one might imagine, and is the reason that I haven’t unpacked everything in my apartment as satisfactorily as I might…
Bad guy got run over by a caribou!
Merely saying that Jeremy and I were in the field for more than 27 of the 42 hours between Friday at 6 and Sunday at noon does not quite capture the enormity of what Team Efficiency accomplished this weekend. Add on travel time and prep time and one will quickly deduce that we didn’t really sleep more than five hours a night.
Exactly what we accomplished is as follows: wet site total season (marked individuals), dry site total season (marked individuals), wet site total season (largest reproductive), dry site total season (largest reproductive), leaf collection (three leaves times two species times twelve plots times two sites), other leaf collection (fifteen leaves times two species times six plots times two sites), specific leaf area index leaf collection (ten leaves for each species we study in Atqasuk), removal of soil probes, soil sampling for two different researchers, thaw depth on all 96 plots, OTC removal and disassembly, remarking the boardwalk, taking pictures of each plot, transplant growth measures, seed collection (one species from every plot), cleaning out and taking down the tent, staking and stringing the biomass plots, cleaning up the lab, packing away the equipment… oh yeah, and we started the marathon weekend with collecting phenology data, just like we always do.
I’ve spent nearly the whole ten weeks and never even explained that last bit! For each of the plots I have at the wet site (24 control and 24 with OTCs (open-topped chambers) I have a spreadsheet printed out with spaces to fill in the general status of the vegetation in the plot. As events happen in the plots I write down the date. We record information for each species both for the plot in general and also for three marked individuals of each species in the plots. For example, I observed that in experimental plot eight, Eriophorum angustifolium individual four had green leaf on J169, inflorescence on J169, open flower on J170, withered flower on J175, seed set on J188, and seed dispersal on J201. I did not observe leaf senescence for this individual, though there were Eangs in the total plot that were in this state on J228. Making these kinds of observations is easier when you only saw the plots every ten days or so (like we did), but it is clearly more accurate to check more often (like Rob and Jean did).
While everybody and their brother was seeing polar bear after polar bear in Barrow this weekend, Jeremy and I had to be content with the company of the reincarnation of Rob’s ground squirrel and a few pesky caribou, one of which nearly ran us over and seriously interfered with the science*. It was… charming?
We never would have succeeded in our race-against-time to hop a plane that didn’t know we were coming without the help of Wondrous Bob. Of course, without Wondrous Bob to add several things to our to-do list, we might also have been a bit less stressed.
It was a pleasant kind of stress, and we were pretty happy with ourselves and our accomplishments, like the hoity-toity researchers that we are. We were also happy that the airplane, which we made with twenty minutes to spare, did not reject us.
*Tripped on a string and broke a stick.
