Mine is bigger than yours!
My camera is bigger than Julien’s :mrgreen: I realized that the camera I had been using to track the laser position in my flight simulator didn’t quite fit with the way everything is arranged now. I remembered I had seen an old camera in the basement, so I went there to check it out. It worked really well and it provides a fantastic picture of the fly. It’s just that it is now the largest piece of the equipment:
Testing access restrictions
If the new plugins are working, you should only be able to see this post when you are logged in. Please go and check this and reply in the comments to this post. I have also added some other new functionality, such as a larger set for formatting your posts. Let me know if there’s still something you would like to have by commenting on this post.
‘Which’ or ‘that’? Which is it?
Not only us foreign scientists struggle with the English language when we give presentations or write papers or grant proposals. The native speakers also sometimes find themselves in difficult waters with their own language. Here’s an excellent article on the use of ‘which’ and ‘that’. It starts like that:
“I have a niggle,” says a reader. “My copy of the Guardian style guide clearly explains the difference between that and which, but this advice often fails to make it to the pages of the Guardian.” She quotes an example: “An overhaul of consumer protection rights, led by the consumers’ champion, Ed Mayo, is to be announced by Labour on Monday as the party moves to confront ‘bad companies’ which cheat customers.”
Go and read the whole thing and don’t start writing that manuscript before you’ve memorized it! :-)
Error bars in experimental biology
Just came across this all-time classic paper from 2007. Every student of biology should be familiar with it!
“Beyond the PDF” workshop at Science Online London 2011
Martin Fenner demonstrated how to use his three WordPress plugins: BibTex Importer, Link to Link and KCite to introduce citations to scientific articles into a blog post. I have now installed these plugins and will insert a few citations below to see how easy this is:
This is a reference for a paper on Drosophila [cite source=’doi’ rel=’cito:cites’]10.1016/j.neuroscience.2011.06.058[/cite] and this is one on Hermissenda [cite source=’doi’ rel=’cito:cites’]10.1016/j.neuroscience.2011.06.063[/cite] or one on the leech [cite source=’doi’ rel=’cito:cites’]10.1242/jeb.057224[/cite]. If this worked, there should be a reference list at the bottom of this post.
In the afternoon part of the workshop Eva Amsen showed how to link a blog post to researchblogging.org, which is what I already demoed in our journal club, so I won’t cover it here.
Now, after two weeks, my provider is fiddeling with some settings to make the citation plugins working. Looking good so far! We have citations!
Janelia Farm learning and memory conference.
Right now I’m attending the Janelia Farm Conference “Learning and Memory: A Synthesis of Flies and Honeybees”. It covers all the latest research results relevant to our research here. Big themes, of course, are olfactory classical conditioning. In this learning paradigm the biogenic amines octopamine and dopamine are very important, so all the new tools to control and investigate these aminergic networks presented here are very relevant for Christine‘s project. I’m blogging about the meeting in more detail on my own blog, so you can follow all the action from there.
The importance of open science
I met Michael Nielsen at ScienceOnline 2009 and I think his talk here shows why we should strive to do science as openly as practically possible in our lab:
Which is precisely why I have invited him to give a talk here in Berlin while he’s on tour. Let’s hope he accepts the invitation.
WordPress migration
Started the migration of the CMS from e107 to WordPress. Should be fun to start building the site and adding functionality and content together with all the lab members. Looking forward to it!
Some content and some functionality
Slowly we’re adding some content and some functionality to the site, now that the basic design is fairly solid. I’m very pleased with the progress so far, let’s see if we can keep it up.