myResearchSpace

Dance your PhD

robyn.owens — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 10:37:00 GMT

Now here's a challenge, in case you think this PhD business is getting too easy.

http://gonzolabs.org/dance/contestants/

My Life in the Clouds 2: Synchronising Files Between Computers

david.glance — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 05:08:00 GMT

Problem: I have files on one computer at work and I want to access them at home or when I am travelling.

Solution: Dropbox (there are other services): Install the software, move the files into your dropbox folder and they get automatically synchronised to the server. Set up other machines (and your iPhone/Google Phone/PDA) and they can all synchronise from the same location.

It also works as a backup - and it will version files if you add an option to the account.

Price: free for 2GB storage - money if you want more space

Reminder: Politics of Food discussion this Thursday

sky — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 04:22:00 GMT

As part of the Bluestocking Institute's Community Scholars program, there will be a dinner and discussion session on 'The Politics of Food' on the 15th of October from 6:30 until 8pm, to be held at the Edmund Rice Institute for Social Justice. The Edmund Rice Institute is at 24 High St, which is just a few minutes walk from the Fremantle train station. We will explore some of the ethical and political questions surrounding what we eat, how we eat, and how we produce food. These include:
* What is the role of food in bringing together communities, or holding them apart?
* How can we produce food ethically and sustainably?
* Can movements promoting 'slow food' and organic farming meet the needs of those on a low income?
* Can urban food production and community gardens help to feed the world?

Speakers include:
* Hon Lynn MacLaren, MLC, Member for South Metropolitan Region, Legislative Council, Parliament of Western Australia
* Louise Edmonds, Coconvenor, Fremantle Environmental Resource Network

If you don't have anything to say but would still like to listen in, please feel free to come down. There'll be no pressure to talk. Similarly, if you don't have the time to prepare anything to share, you're still very welcome - there should be plenty to go around.

APSA 2009, Day Two

sky — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 07:10:00 GMT

The morning session on the politics of the Middle East was excellent. Two of UWA's contingent, Kate Riddell and Samina Yasmeen, started off the session by looking at 'Letters to the Editor as a site of Muslim exclusion'. I found the argument about letters to the editor as a genuine and unsolicited public narrative very interesting. I'd love to see more research on selection criteria for and public evaluations of letters to the editor. Lars Berger's presentation on Egyptian public opinions of US foreign policy included some fascinating details too, including research showing that in Egypt primary identification as Muslim was inversely correlated with support for political violence.

The second session kicked off with Michelle Hackett's talk on 'Social Enterprise in a Global Financial Crisis', which looked at some of the problems with applying Western models of social entrepreneurship to groups in the Global South.

There were a few talks that I would have loved to make it to on the Tuesday, including Maddison's presentation on Indigenous parliamentarians in Australia, Shaw's on 'Australian feminism online', and Fenton's on 'Chandra Talpade Mohanty's theory of resistance'.

APSA 2009, Day One

sky — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 03:39:00 GMT

I've just got back from the Australian Political Studies Association Annual Conference, and want to put down a few notes about the presentations I attended and some of my favourite papers. It would have much more convenient to liveblog the conference, but for some unaccountable reason there was no wireless network available. Perhaps I'm being a bratty digital native here, but I do find it rather peculiar and inconvenient to be offline when I'm bursting with ideas I want to share and learn more about (danah boyd has a few thoughts along similar lines). Anyway, the frustrations of being offline aside, I had a great time and was very excited about some of the papers. I didn't get a chance to see every paper that I wanted to, so maybe later on I'll do a follow-up post about papers I wish I'd seen.

For now, a few of my favourites from Day One:

The opening panel on 'The Secret History of Democracy' was excellent, and I was pleased to find out that it's linked to book being put together by Benjamin Isakhan and Stephen Stockwell. I enjoyed the disruption of the standard history of democracy (which my grandfather always tells me sternly began with the Greeks). Stephen Stockwell talked about the history of democracy in Phoenecia and early Greek city states, Benjamin Isakhan presented on Iraqi attempts to establish democracy in the face of US resistance and occupation, and Halim Rane looked at the history of Islam's relationship with democracy. These are definitely papers I will be pointing people towards when I hear claims that Islam and democracy aren't compatible, or that Iraqis just don't want a democracy.

I also enjoyed Alana Mann's presentation on 'The politics of resistance', which looked at Via Campesina's relationship with the global justice movement and its use of human rights and global justice master frames. My notes for this are rather sketchy, but there were some interesting applications of frame theory that I'm looking forward to reading more on.

I'm glad I stuck around for the last panel, and Delphine Rabet's paper on 'Corporate power in global governance' was particularly interesting. In summary: corporate social responsibility is not as warm and fuzzy as you might, in a brief fit of optimism, be inclined to think.

Here comes science!

sky — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 23:28:00 GMT

To start off:

* They Might Be Giants are lovely,

* I am delighted that TMBG are putting out children's albums. I heartily encourage all bands to put out children's albums.

Okay. Got that out of the way. So, the latest TMBG kids album is called Here Comes Science, and it looks like a lot of fun. If I had littles, there's a pretty good chance that I would buy this album for them. I am particularly pleased by message that flows through 'Why does the sun shine?' followed by 'Why does the sun really shine?' ("Forget that song/They got it wrong/That thesis has been rendered invalid").

But of course, there's a fair bit of propaganda in there as well, as there often is with this kind of valorisation of science. It's a great idea to teach your children about science, but it might be useful to also have some discussions about the limits of the scientific method.

For example, while this is a lovely little clip about electric cars....well, honestly, if everyone swapped from regular cars to electric cars, we'd be just as screwed, environmentally. You can't solve climate change with science alone. You also need political and social change. Okay, enough stern words. Now you can go sing along.

Knowledge and power

sky — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 02:15:00 GMT

Radio National's Philosopher's Zone has a programme on this week about Power, prejudice and the murder of Stephen Lawrence. Stephen Lawrence was a young black man murdered in a hate crime in the UK in 1993. Noone has been successfully prosecuted for his death, in large part because a friend who was present at the attack wasn't taken seriously as a victim or as a key witness, again because of his race. Miranda Fricker discusses this as an issue of 'testimonial justice': the way in which we construct some people as more valid 'knowers' than others, and the silencing that this entails.

This is interesting for my research because one of my main concerns is the way in which social movement participants try to construct themselves as valid knowers. This might be by trying to find points of leverage within existing power structures, so for example getting prominent researchers or politicians (those already accepted as valid knowers) to speak for their cause. More radically, some movement participants try to shift the terms of debate by making special claims for themselves as privileged knowers. For example, some participants in the Indian movement against genetically modified crops argue that farmers have a closer relationship with nature and a more holistic understanding of agrobiodiversity, and therefore are more valid producers of knowledge than foreign researchers (particularly those employed by agrochemical companies).

Claims such as the latter have broader effects: in highlighting the importance of local, embedded, and marginalised knowledge within one arena, they open up space for similar claims in other arenas. This can shift how different individuals and groups are constructed as knowers, and the value given to their analysis, ideas, and testimony.

As was shown by the botched investigation of Stephen Lawrence's murder, this can have very real and important effects.

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Photo from malik ml williams.

Application season

talitha.santini — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 16:20:00 GMT

It feels like I have been writing applications and proposals for two weeks straight now. Probably because I nearly have. Mostly applications for project funding, but also for exciting extras like training at a synchrotron and going to international conferences. Yes, you can laugh at me for getting excited about synchrotron training. It must be application season at the moment, that magical time of year when Santas of the funding world check their applicant lists and leave presents for some, and coal for others. At least having them all due around the same time allows for a little bit of cutting and pasting between applications...good weather for it at the moment too, nothing like a bit of rain to make you stay inside and ponder why your research is important to the university/community/environment/life as we know it. The most important one, my research proposal, is finally finished and handed in, so that’s a huge job off the to do list (I really do have a to do list on my desktop – and get pretty cranky when I get to the end of a day and can’t delete anything off it yet. Jorge Cham’s comic is a spookily accurate depiction of my desktop). Next on the list is an application for a Postgraduate Teaching Internship. I gave a lecture on research proposals to a third-year class earlier this year and no-one fell asleep, which was encouraging. I’ve also tutored privately since high school so it seems like a logical progression to try teaching at a university level. Anyway, it would be great to get some more experience and be involved in improving units.

Office 2010 vs Google Docs

david.glance — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 13:20:57 GMT

In yet another procrastinative distraction, I have been trialling Office 2010 (yes, if you work or study at UWA you are probably considered pretty bleeding edge for using Office 2003). The technical preview is not drastically different from Office 2007 although apparently the ribbon is more uniform across all applications now. You have to wonder if we have come to the end of the road as far as office products go? What more can they actually do other than have a word processor that writes the documents for you?

The technologies that really need developing are the web-based office tools. The main attraction of this is that the storage is all online. I can then access the documents from my computer, phone, netbook or whatever. Sharing is much easier and you get over sending documents via email, cluttering up inboxes and disks. I do use Google Docs – mainly for the spreadsheet function. The word processing is basic and if you have tried to import a word document – forget any formatting it may have had.

I wonder if anyone has written a thesis on Google Docs yet (that is physically on it rather than about it which I am sure someone in the US must have already done...)?

Occasional poetry No.4

Andrew.Rate — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 06:26:00 GMT

Pillars of Salt (excerpt)

We always look back,
attracted by that feeling
of having been there before – the roads
sinking, the soil weeping (scab on scab
lifted), fences sunk to gullies
catching the garbage of paddocks,
strainers blocked by stubble
and machinery and the rungs
of collapsed rainwater tanks / and maybe
the chimney and fireplace
of a corroded farmhouse, once
the guts of the storm, now
a salty trinket.

© 2003, John Kinsella
From: Peripheral Light: Selected and New Poems
Publisher: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Fremantle, 2003
ISBN: 1 86368362 3

Read the entire poem at http://australia.poetryinternationalweb.org/

Image from www.agric.wa.gov.au

Perth Barcamp 3

sky — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 23:50:00 GMT

BarCamps are informal "unconferences" with an open format: rather than having a pre-arranged list of speakers and sessions, they're organised during the conference itself and are flexible enough to accomodate someone suddenly deciding to present (or not to). They've come out of geek communities, so they're often fairly technology-focused, but they don't have to be. It just depends on who turns up.

Perth BarCamp 3 was fairly tech-focused, and quite often I was completely mystified by what was going on*. Still, there were a couple of sessions that I could get something out of. One was Trent Lloyd's presentation on hardware hacking with Arduinos. I've been curious about Arduinos for a while now, especially the Lilypad, which is designed for use with 'wearables and textiles'. Lloyd's presentation was interesting, but pitched a bit above the 'how to use Arduino boards for absolute beginners' session that I need.

I also ran into David Cake of Electronic Frontiers Australia, which I'm very glad of. We were both thinking of doing a presentation on similar issues, so we ended up co-presenting a session on digital liberties activism. EFA has been active on the Internet filtering issue I've written a bit about, and is keeping its eyes on the proposed '3 strikes' legislation that has popped up as a possibility.

As with Bangalore Barcamp, this BarCamp set me off thinking about the links between more left-oriented activism and geek communities. I would love to start seeing more of a crossover between events like this and others happening around Perth, including Perth Praxis. There's a cultural gap that it might be a challenge to bridge, and I think some dialogue about what each community wanted out of the interaction might be useful...but despite (possible) difficulties I would be delighted to see it, and help make it happen. This kind of bridging is happening elsewere, and I'd love to see more of it in Perth.

-------

* I actually found this very soothing. After spending a lot of time grappling with new bodies of literature and trying to fit arguments together after the last few months, it was a restful experience to think, 'I have no idea what that means. And it's not at all necessary for me to know.'

Photo from Bekathwia.

The ASSCR in its second year

Susan Hawes — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 22:26:00 GMT

It has been a long time since the last blog. Since, the Australasian Society for Stem Cell Research has become more structured, with an elected organizing committee and Executive members. The ASSCR offers members a lot of opportunities to become involved. We welcome more members as well as active interaction. We have a temporary website with information (www.asscr.org) and will have our new website on-line soon.

The ASSCR 2nd Annual Meeting will be held at the Shine Dome in Canberra, Australia from Sunday 22nd November to Tuesday 24th November.

This meeting will be a great chance for stem cell researchers and professionals working with stem cells to meet and discuss the latest research.

The speakers are diverse, covering different aspects of stem cell research.

Huck Ng (A*STAR Genomics Institute, Singapore) and Huseyin Sumer (Monash University) work on ips cells. A session on stem cell regulation and differentiation includes Sean Grimmond (IMB), Stephen Wood (NCASCR), Andrew Elefanty (Monash University) and Stephanie Hughes (Otago University).

There will be a good session on cancer and stem cells with Jane Visvader (WEHI), Peter Dallas (Telethon Institute), Albert Melick (Griffith University), Andreas Strasser (WEHI) speaking. Gary Brooke (MMRI), Nick Fisk (University of Queensland) and Sally Dunwoodie (Victor Chang Institute) will speak in a session titled 'mesenchymal stem cells'. Chunyi Li from AgResearch in New Zealand will discuss regeneration and Edna Hardeman (University of NSW) aspects of transplantation and muscle stem cells.

In order to encourage participation of all delegates there are many slots for oral presentations from submitted abstracts. One session is solely dedicated to ‘late-breaking’ research from abstract submissions, including novel results or new perspectives, discussion of methods, questioning of dogma or translational research. Although not limited to Junior Investigators they are encouraged to participate.

The Poster Session will allow for all presenters to discuss their research and be eligible for a Poster Prize. Presenters will be given time to discuss the research described in their poster.

The Junior Investigator Group meeting, a Pub Event and dinner at the Boathouse restaurant in Canberra offers ample opportunities for networking.

EARLY BIRD REGISTRATION 21 AUGUST
ORAL ABSTRACT SUBMISSION 21 AUGUST
POSTER SUBMISSION 23rd OCTOBER

Please see the ASSCR website (www.asscr.org) for registration and abstract submission details. To become an ASSCR member or for further enquiries email info@asscr.org.

AUSTRALASIAN SOCIETY FOR STEM CELL RESEARCH
PO Box 8159, Monash University LPO
Wellington Rd, Clayton, Victoria 3800, Australia
www.ascr,org

What does feminism mean to you?

sky — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 08:30:00 GMT

My 15 year old cousin asked me on the weekend 'How come you knit and sew and cook and stuff even though you're a feminist?' I would love to live in a world where that was a surprising and naive question. Instead, I've come across the same assumption over and over again: being a feminist means eschewing anything to do with traditional femininity. Someone told me recently: "I'm not a feminist because I enjoy being able to stay at home with my children". I wish I'd been shocked. I came across a similar assumption today in a new and unexpected place: in Wired.com's critique of Ridiculous Life Lessons From New Girl Games. While I entirely agree with the author's complaints that most of these games teach girls to focus on fashion and adventures, it seems that games can only win approval for teaching girls to engage in "non-stereotypically female activities" or to have "masculine qualities". For me, feminism is about valuing qualities and activities that have traditionally been associated with both masculinity and femininity. I love having a place in academia, being able to teach and present my research. A hundred years ago, that would have been hard for a woman. I also love being able to make and fix things with my hands, whether it's crocheting a scarf or adjusting my bicycle gears. I want a world in which men and women (and those who don't fit our gender binaries) can choose to engage in 'caring work', where people have the same opportunities in the workplace and in the rest of their lives, no matter what gender they are. Women in the West have it relatively easy, compared to women (and men) in the rest of the world, but we're not there yet. Women get paid less than men, mothers are less likely to be hired and are paid less, and a myriad of subtle gender structures shape and limit the possibilities that both men and women have available. For me, feminism is about changing this while connecting with and supporting other struggles throughout the world, including those in the Global South. What does feminism mean for you?

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Picture from Cross-stitch ninja.

Cross-posted from the Bluestocking Blog, since it's as close to a feminist manifesto as I'll get, not being much for manifestos.

Darwin, science, and morality

sky — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 02:23:00 GMT

There's a fascinating podcast over on Against the Grain about Darwin, Evolution, and Slavery. James Moore argues that Darwin's research into natural selection was motivated by his abhorrence of slavery. I won't blog about it at length as I'm grappling with chapter rewrites and a long to-do list, but it raised a few thoughts fI wanted to note:

No research comes from a disinterested standpoint, and no research should. As Darwin said, "all observation must be for or against some view to be of any service."
Darwin's ideas about slavery didn't come from nowhere - they were built on the work of other researchers, writers, thinkers. Political philosophers and others in the arts and humanities shape the direction of scientific research by framing and contributing to debates, which may be taken up in unexpected ways. Does reading 'the science' on a particular question give an adequate basis for deciding on the ethical and political implications of research in the area? (I suspect not.)
Darwin was also inspired to act by political events, especially the Jamaican slave revolt of 1865. Social movements, uprisings, and other rebellions affect the path of scientific research (and often react to it).

The podcast is definitely worth a listen if you have any interest in the history of science, or in Darwin's work and life.

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Image from *clairity*. Phillis Wheatley was a slave, and America's first black poet.

Next journal club meeting - carbon in China

Andrew.Rate — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 05:41:00 GMT

The next meeting (already notified by Talitha) is on Tuesday 7 July, 1pm, second-floor lunch area, Soil Science building, UWA.

The article to be mused upon is :
Piao S, Fang J, Ciais P, Peylin P, Huang Y, Sitch S, Wang T. 2009. Carbon balance of terrestrial ecosystems in China. Nature, 458:1009-1014.

Winter break

talitha.santini — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 14:23:00 GMT

Winter's always a nice time of year to be at uni. The weather outside actually makes you want to be inside, doing something productive, or drinking coffee and discussing ideas with people. Plus being able to park in student bays without a permit, go and get lunch at Broadway without huge crowds, talk to lecture-free supervisors about your project, and have free run of labs and libraries are all additional bonuses. Starting field work in a few weeks' time may be a little less enjoyable, but hopefully we can pick out the right days to tackle it.

Lab experiments at the moment are mainly focussed on simulating weathering, using pressure vessels to speed up attainment of chemical equilibrium, and Soxhlet extractors to simulate the effects of leaching at elevated temperatures which should also make things reach equilibrium a little more rapidly than in the field. A lot of work at the moment is also based around getting techniques right: optimising experimental setups, comparing analytical methods, figuring out how to get the most information out of the least number of samples and analyses. It can be pretty frustrating as it feels like you're not really getting anywhere - there's no numbers on a page or graphs to draw. But it is worth the time spent as it saves you repeating entire sets of analyses later on when you realise that, oh, great, X interferes with the measurement of Y, so all those analyses are invalid. Now that's frustrating.

I'm also working on editing an article (together with my supervisors) based on a third-year project looking at harnessing the activity of sulfate reducing bacteria for treating the acidity in acidic saline drainage waters from deep drains in the Wheatbelt. One reviewer's comments were positive, and the other's not so positive. But they did both agree that with revision, it would be suitable for publication, so I guess you've got to go with that and work on making it better. And at least we can be assured that it has been rigorously reviewed - it'll be a better article for it.

Friday drinks are attracting about 12-15 people now - numbers are going up week by week - and this Friday, the name of our 'pub' will be selected from the entries in the inventively-made entry box. This week will also see the commencement of the 'door prize', with one lucky winner receiving a free drink of their choice. The only thing cheaper than cheap beer is free beer! Journal Club will be on next Tuesday at 1, and this month's article (selected by Bree) is:

Carbon balance of terrestrial ecosystems in China. Shilong Piao, Jingyun Fang, Philippe Ciais, Philippe Peylin, Yao Huang, Stephen Sitch & Tao Wang. Nature, 458:1009-1014 (2009).

Fair use: Buffy and Twilight remix

sky — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 00:17:00 GMT

I've finally got around to watching the Buffy vs Edward Remix that half the Internet seems to have linked to. I found the last few seconds the most interesting, because it states that "This is a transformative work and constitutes a fair-use of any copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US copyright law." The combination of movie industry demands that such remixes be taken off YouTube and other sites, combined with increasing activism around copyright, seems to be having an effect.

Copyfight activists are making a valuable political contribution by arguing that the creations of amateurs are worth protecting. While much of the illegal copying going on around the place happens purely for viewing purposes, successfully cracking down on 'piracy' by introducing copy-protection technology would make it impossible to produce remixes like this one. Admittedly, the idea of copy-protection technology even being 100% effective is laughable...but why should only those with technical skills be able to produce remixes like this? The harder we make it, the fewer people can do it.

I love the thought of living in a world where my teenage cousins could produce remixes that take the pop culture that surrounds them and mash it up to reimagine and critique it. Sure, plenty of people have written blog posts and articles that critique Twilight's gender relations...but the impact and accessibility of a critique that repositions the material itself is something else. I want people to be able to be able to take images, news footage, movie clips, music, and remix them into anarcha-feminist critiques of the anarchist movement, critiques of the racism in 300 (warning: swears!) and Disney movies, even fan-edits.

There are also some remixes that look at copyright and fair use, including A Fair(y) Use Tale and Keir Smith's oh so criminal, meant to stimulate thought about Australia's copyright system. Australia currently has no fair use provision, although we do have something similar, "fair dealing" (more here). As far as I can tell, since 2006 it has been illegal for Australians to circumvent copy-protection technology, and it doesn't seem that there is a provision to waive this for fair dealing.

So if you break the copy-protection on your Buffy DVD to remix it, it's illegal. But please don't stop!

----

Image courtesy of Tama Leaver.

Engel was wrong - so was Atwood

Esmeralda Rocha — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 03:54:00 GMT

You know the famous Engel quote:

An ounce of action is worth a tonne of theory.

Well that's bollocks, at least for the average Ph.D. student... I propose instead that an ounce of theory is worth a tonne of action.

You spend weeks of source/data analysis, thinking, reading etc (in other words 'action'), just to come up with one idea, one key, one way into the issue at hand. Each idea is worth so much more than the individual facts. That's why writting a Ph.D. is so difficult - it not about collating facts and drawing nice parallels - it's challenging theories, and/or inventing new ones to explain the facts, to explain ideas. If it was about action I would have finished my Ph.D. months ago - instead it's about theory and thought - and these, sadly for the doctoral candidate, are so much more elusive.

I'm feeling low today, not being able to express the wordless, shapeless, embryonic inklings that are stirring in my head. I'm beginning to think that Margaret Atwood was wrong too when she intimated, in works like The Handmaid's Tale, that all thought is connected to language - that without language, the concepts cannot exist. What nonsense.

Thought is much more nebulous that language - I believe that all thought lives in the spaces between words, and language is our very inadequate way of trying to share ideas. If concepts were impossible without language then no-one would have ever struggled to write anything. Most people have tonnes of ideas, but no way to express themselves. Of course language is important, and common discourse crucial in understanding each other. But I've come to regard thought as preceding all this.

Well - these are my rambling two cents today.

Best, fellow travellers.

Astonishing reasoning on Greenland from U.S. scientists

Andrew.Rate — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 05:47:00 GMT

The good news (for some of the approximately 57,600 Greenlanders, at least): Greenland now has much more control over its destiny, following the decision from Denmark to allow self-rule for Greenlanders (see the article at the Sydney Morning Herald).

The not-so-good news: the following excerpt from this, and other, articles on this event is a real jaw-dropper:

"US scientists believe Greenland's northern tip is especially rich in oil and gas and they say global warming could help unlock the untapped wealth under the ice-cap and provide a solid foundation for an independent economy."

Let's just hope that these are the same ubiquitous and apocryphal "U.S. scientists" who seem to crop up occasionally in news articles to justify not-to-be-disputed points of view. Let's also hope they have sufficient integrity to be greenhouse sceptics.

It's hard to imagine a more cynical and blithely pragmatic approach to the issue of global warming, whether or not one has doubts about the anthropogenic hypothesis (which would be too large a can of worms ever to be opened on this blog).

Image from cartophilia.com

IE8 Sucks

nmast — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 05:04:00 GMT

Is there anything worse than upgrading your web browser and having it crash the first time you open it?

My home page (iGoogle) is taking up to 28 secs to load (yes, I counted)! IE8 keeps freezing and new windows and even tabs take ages to load up. This morning I have already had to remove add-ons, empty my history and delete cookies in an effort to get it to run faster, plus try some kind of code using the command prompt, which I found when I googled the slowness issue (it hasn't worked).

Judging by the comments I found on the net I am not the only one experiencing problems (by the way I am using Vista and I have 3 gigs of RAM so it isn't a problem with my laptop). My question is: what the hell are Microsoft doing releasing a web browser that is actually worse than the previous model? At this point I can't be bothered returning to IE7, so I am obviously going to just move full time to Firefox or play with Chrome until I get fed up with websites that it can't load properly (most of the UWA ones)! Another dissatisfied user swears once again to never again use a microsoft product (except for the ones already installed)! :-)

Censorship and surveillance

sky — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 03:37:00 GMT

I've just posted about the Iran elections over at the Bluestocking Blog. I also came across a few stories yesterday about new developments in Australia's crazy 'net censorship, including news that the blacklist now includes several sites from Wikileaks, and that ACMA will fine people who link to sites on its (secret) blacklist.

As I've said before, the whole Clean Feed is a terrible idea, and students, researchers, and academics should be particularly concerned about it. If you don't know about it already, there are plenty of ways to get informed and get active.

TIME MANAGEMENT

Esmeralda Rocha — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 04:01:00 GMT

FREAKING OUT and HERE'S WHY:

List of things to do:

Finish current chapter
Start next chapter
Amend lit review
Finish abstract for 2010 Conference
Continue primary source analysis of Melbourne and Indian materials
Begin research for my T&L research project
Plan my next lectures
Plan my next tutorials
Hand in all essay marks
Read countless books
Order Nandi Bhatia's book on Indian Theatre.
and...and...and...

ARGH! It's enough to make me want to tear my hair out, hop in my car and drive continuously north until I hit some isolated paradise just shy of Broome. But instead of escaping, or facing my list of infinite things-to-do head-on, I'm here procrastinating and whinging about how much I have to do.

Or am I? Simply typing the list out made me feel better - simply seeing the things I was most concerned about accomplishing, there in black and white, made them seem more accomplishable. They came into my head in no particular order, though obviously the most pressing appeared at the top. Those are the big issues...I may as well have simply written 'Finish thesis and be perfect tutor'. So I started with the little one... I ordered the Bhatia book through GetIt. DONE.

Then I finished all my marking and handed all the essays and marks back to the School of Music. DONE!

Then I looked for the next small task.... write my abstract. Spent some time and...DONE!

Then I looked at the lecture and tute plans and decided I'd be better off doing those in July, to keep the prep fresh in my mind. So not done, but at least rationalised and planned.

Then, feeling far more relaxed, I returned to the BIG stuff. Okay - finish chapter. I made an appointment with my supervisor, saying that I'd be handing in a draft by the 22nd June. So not done, but well on the way, and now have impetus to focus on this.

A Ph.D is like a marathon, only instead of 40 miles, it's 40 months. Well - that's pithy, but it's not accurate. We all talk about having a plan for our thesis, and we separate the tasks into months or semesters...but that's not how it gets done. It gets done day to day, hour to hour. Virginia Woolf said we live in the hours. And it's true. It's all very well to have a GRS approved thesis plan, but you've got to make little lists and plans and goals along the way. Sometimes my goal is write 500 words on 'x'. Not much, but at the end of the day you get a tick, and you got you 500 words. Only then do you get the satisfaction of achievement everyday that you need. And only then can you put the next foot out to take the next step.

So feeling more relaxed and focused again, I'm going back to a discussion of opera in India -and I can't wait!

Small data set, high impact

Andrew.Rate — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 01:52:00 GMT

[Musings by Talitha Santini]

The first article for the revived Journal Club was ‘Jarosite as an indicator of water-limited chemical weathering on Mars' (Elwood Madden et al. [2004] Nature, 431:821-823), chosen by Talitha because it was a short and reasonably simple article about soils on another planet. The authors used observations of jarosite and gypsum as alteration products of the basaltic parent rock at the Meridiani Planum landing site on Mars to argue a case for chemical weathering on Mars being water-limited. Using geochemical modelling software, a basaltic mineral assemblage (using data from Rosenbauer et al. [1983]) was titrated into a fluid containing SO₄^2-, Na⁺, K⁺, Ca²⁺, Fe²⁺, Mg²⁺, Al³⁺, and dissolved SiO₂, under current Martian atmospheric O₂ and CO₂ fugacities, at 298 K and 10⁴Pa total atmospheric pressure. The authors modelled both mineral assemblages as basalt weathering progressed, and the final mineral assemblages at different water:rock ratios. Modelling indicated that jarosite could only be present as a result of basalt weathering if (a) a large quantity of water reacted completely with a small amount of rock (for example, water creating an alteration rind on rock surfaces); or (b) a small amount of water reacted only partially with a large amount of rock. It was concluded that once jarosite formed, water must have been removed quickly in order to halt chemical weathering before pH increased and jarosite was converted to an iron (oxy)hydroxide - hence the article's title.

Once we started examining the article, we realized how little data were required to have an article published in Nature. The authors used only five pieces of information about Mars (the presence of a basaltic parent rock, the presence of jarosite and gypsum, and Martian atmospheric O₂ and CO₂ fugacities and atmospheric pressure) and a geochemical model designed for Earth surface conditions. This got us thinking about having a look at some Martian soil data from NASA (presented in Rieder et al. [1997]) and publishing our own articles. It's a good example of researchers considering data critically and extracting as much information as possible with the tools they have available to them. The tools we have available aren't perfect though, and one of the criticisms of this article was the ‘Earth-centric' modelling - that is, the use of Earth surface conditions to simulate Martian weathering processes. Where possible, the authors used (current) Martian conditions; however, in the case of temperature and pressure, current Earth conditions were used.

The ‘suppression of mineral phases...at the discretion of the operator' also raised debate about using geochemical models to simulate weathering. The problem is that models generally predict phase assemblages at thermodynamic equilibrium, which may not actually occur in the field. The authors cite the example of slow goethite formation hindering its occurrence in acid mine drainage environments despite being the thermodynamically stable iron phase. Kinetics were only included in this model ‘through the suppression of mineral phases unlikely to form in a geologically relevant time period.'

So why should we care about soils on Mars, anyway? We came up with a few answers to this: for the pure basic science objectives of understanding the properties and history of Martian surface materials and understanding how soils develop under different environmental conditions; because soil on another planet is inherently interesting; and because we may even want to annex Mars one day as a replacement Earth, in which case an understanding of its soils would be pretty important.

The next article will be chosen by Bree, with the next meeting scheduled for July 1.

Image from www.andersonfreepress.net

Zotero: lawsuit cleared, Zotero 2.0 beta

sky — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 02:23:00 GMT

I've been using Zotero a lot over the last few months as I tidy up my chapters and start putting together a bibliography, so I'm pleased to see a couple of positive developments in the project. Firstly, the lawsuit brought against Zotero by Thomson Reuters has been dismissed. Secondly, Zotero 2.0 is now is beta stage, and I finally got the chance to install it and have a bit of a look around. I'm quite taken with the ability to automatically back up your library onto their server, and to synchronise your library across more than one computer. I also like the new networking functions, like the ability to join groups and make your library public.

As usual, I've leapt first and will gradually work out how to use all of these new tools. My zotero page is up, and I've made my library public to begin with. There's an option for making it private, but I can't think of any reason to. For a while now I've been daydreaming about bibliographic software that will tell you about overlaps with other people's libraries (like my librarything does). Doing research there's always that looming fear in the back of your mind that someone out there is doing the exact same work as you, so anything that helps me feel more connected and up-to-date with research in my field is very welcome.

For those of you out there still using Endnote, or trying to decide which bibliographic software to use - take a look at Zotero. It's shiny!

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Picture courtesy of karindalziel.

Real field work...and real lab work

talitha.santini — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 01:33:00 GMT

I've been a little lazy with blogging over the last month. Getting some real field work done, reviving the Social Club and even getting started on some experimental work have taken up a fair bit of time. I've done inductions for three residue deposit sites and been out to have a look at them. The images on Google Earth don't really do justice to the actual size of the residue deposit areas. Seeing them firsthand was great motivation to get moving on my experimental work. It's not that bauxite residue is particularly hazardous or anything like that; in fact, the more I work with it, the less harmful I think it is; and managed correctly, it's completely benign. It's more to do with minimising management costs and turning it into a resource rather than a burden. Or at least being able to do something productive with the land surface area that it occupies.

The first experiment that I ran didn't work at all, trying to get aluminosilicates to precipitate from suspensions of bauxite residue mud to which I had added a sodium metasilicate solution. The nice thing about scientific research is that nothing ever 'fails' as such; it just does or doesn't work, and you move on. An article emailed around by Andrew to the postgrads in our School on behalf of Martin Fey makes the point that "One of the beautiful things about sciences is that it allows us to bumble along, getting it wrong time after time, and feel perfectly fine as long as we learn something each time.' Although I have no idea how people doing organic chemistry PhDs can spend three years trying different ways to synthesise a compound, only to conclude that well, none of the ways they tried will work... The second experiment has been far more promising and I'm quite excited to finish off the rest of the analyses (once I've finished my morning coffee and writing this post).

Finally - Social Club stuff. The first meeting of the revived Soil Science Journal Club was reasonably well attended, and we managed to persuade a few more people to join in with the offer of cupcakes. There should be a post on Andrew's blog soon about what was discussed. Bree's choosing the next article, and then Dan Murphy after that. Friday drinks (on a scale larger than three people who are still hanging around the building for some unknown reason at 5 pm on a Friday) are kicking off this week and will hopefully be well attended. Fundraising chocolates and soft drinks are also being revived, with raised funds going back into the Social Club to support events and perhaps even subsidising postgrads for writing retreats, organised by Lucy Leyland. Exciting times.

I'm now looking at the bottom of an empty coffee cup, which is telling me that either (a) I need more coffee; or (b) it's time to finish off analysing the samples from yesterday. Time to finish off the samples.