A Fish Eye View » Random stuff

Best student comment ever

Mason Posner — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 01:34:59 +0000

It speaks for itself:

Thanks to a colleague for tacking this up in their office.

A new look for A Fish Eye View

Mason Posner — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 19:17:41 +0000

I thought it was time liven up this space a bit.

But the changes are more than skin deep. I have added a list in the right sidebar of my favorite posts spanning some of the different topics that I write about. And lower down in the right sidebar I have a section for Ashland science blogs. These will include blogs by student authors from our science departments, most of whom started blogging as part of my senior capstone course on science communication.

I keep reading that bloggers need a niche, a focus that sets them apart from the many wonderful science blogs that are out there. As an integrative biologist my interests span from visual ecology, vertebrate evolution and systematics to protein biochemistry and lens development. But I am also deeply involved in mentoring undergraduate research, trying various technologies in my teaching (both new and old) and have developed an interest in exciting students about their ability to communicate science on the web through blogging. Does this all equal a niche? We will see.

I hope you keep reading.

Facebook at your own risk

Mason Posner — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 03:37:06 +0000

I pulled my head out of a grant proposal writing daze long enough this past week to notice a fellow professor having some trouble with their Facebook privacy settings. Seems that a religion professor at Dartmouth thought it would be funny to point out the verbosity of some of her colleagues. Even better, she worried aloud:

“I feel like such a fraud,” she wrote on her profile. “Do you think dartmouth parents would be upset about paying $40,000 a year for their children to go here if they knew that certain professors were looking up stuff on Wikipedia and asking for advice from their Facebook friends on the night before the lecture?”

Unfortunately, said professor was not careful enough with her privacy settings and a screenshot of her profile with the above quote wound up on the student newspaper’s blog. She probably joined the Dartmouth network and didn’t realize that everyone on that network could see her page.

The Chronicle article points out that its readers would be scurrying to Facebook to check their privacy settings, which is of course exactly what I did. I’d like to think that I am way too savvy to make a mistake like this, but then I googled myself, found that my Facebook page was the second hit, and realized that my profile picture is totally public. I’m not having a Phelpsian moment, but it is a particularly goofy shot of me and my 3 1/2 year old daughter, and not what I want to put out there as my professional face. So I made the picture private and blocked my Facebook page from Google.

One other sticky point in using Facebook as an academic. Do you friend students? I came up with some personal rules on the fly as friend requests started to come in. I decided to only friend students after they graduate (or leave my University for other reasons). I feel bad ignoring friend requests from people that I like, but decided to set that barrier between my work and home life. I have accumulated a lot of former students as friends, and hope current students won’t be so offended by the put off that they will not friend me later. And I don’t send friend requests to former students myself. I wouldn’t want to hang out at the creepy treehouse either. However, I have made an exception for former research students, and they have not been too creeped out to accept.

If you are a prof, leave me comments on how you manage your Facebook page. I know you have one.

Darwin 150 years later

Mason Posner — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 15:37:00 +0000

My friend Tom Hayden has a great new piece in Smithsonian magazine on how Charles Darwin’s work remains relevant 150 years after the publication of The Origin. It includes a nice brief history of Darwin’s early years, the development of his thinking on common descent and natural selection, and most interestingly how new findings extend, but do not refute, Darwin’s work from a century and a half ago. Even when new findings in epigenetic inheritance are redeeming Jean-Baptiste Lamarck.

While biologists are sometimes criticized for turning Darwin into an icon, we do owe our fundamental understanding of life to his (and Alfred Wallace’s) once revolutionary ideas. Perhaps no one experiences that fact as much as the practicing biologist.

And Darwin was a nice guy too (from Tom’s article):

As towering historical figures go, Charles Darwin does not provide much by way of posthumous scandals. The liberty-extolling Thomas Jefferson was slave master to his longtime mistress, Sally Hemings; Albert Einstein had his adulterous affairs and shockingly remote parenting style; James Watson and Francis Crick minimized their debt to colleague Rosalind Franklin’s crucial DNA data. But Darwin, who wrote more than a dozen scientific books, an autobiography and thousands of letters, notebooks, logs and other informal writings, seems to have loved his ten children (three of whom did not survive childhood), been faithful to his wife, done his own work and given fair, if not exuberant, credit to his competitors.

In another take on the man, Desmond and Moore’s new book, Darwin’s Sacred Cause, argues that Darwin’s abhorrence of slavery was an important driving factor in his work. Critics of evolution try to argue that Darwin’s ideas about human origins support the racist view that some “races” are “higher” than others. But on the contrary, Desmond and Moore argue that Darwin’s view of shared ancestry meant that all human populations are equal tips on the branch of life. Furthermore, Darwin’s abolitionism helped give him the moral courage to publish what he know would be socially controversial and uncomfortable ideas in Victorian England.

Sea kittens . . . really?

Mason Posner — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 04:00:25 +0000

Next time you’re reeling in that fish, picture Whiskers or Fluffy hooked through the mouth on the end of your line. At least that is what PETA would like you to do. In a new PR campaign the animal rights group is attempting to rebrand “fish” as “sea kitten”. The rationale:

When your name can also be used as a verb that means driving a hook through your head, it’s time for a serious image makeover. And who could possibly want to put a hook through a sea kitten?

Point well taken. But I am not sure how I feel about my subject of study (I am an ichthyologist that does research on the fish eye) being renamed. PETA argues that:

People don’t seem to like fish. They’re slithery and slimy, and they have eyes on either side of their pointy little heads—which is weird, to say the least.

But I love fish, and I know legions of other ichthyologists that love fish too. And yes, I occasionally meet people, tell them I am an ichthyologist, then explain what that means, find out that they think that is cool, but am then asked: then you don’t eat fish, do you? But I also love eating fish, as do most ichthyologists I know. Is it weird to like eating the group that you study. I have a mycologist friend (studies fungi) who doesn’t like to eat mushrooms. But I think that’s an exception. And yes, many of you study organisms that you probably don’t want to eat. I am talking to you, entomologists and parasitologists. But I bet you malacologists out there love your oysters and scallops. Admit it, you ornithologists eat chicken.

While our love for eating fish, and the need for this important source of protein in the diets of many humans, is leading to the collapse of fisheries and marine ecosystems, making fish seem cute is not the solution. Ironically, the economic importance of fish and other marine organisms as food will play an important role in turning back the decay of our oceans, if that is possible. Whether it is restoration of the Chesapeake Bay to bring back the oysters and crabs, research in the Gulf of Mexico to maintain red snapper populations (check out that mahi my ichthyologist friend Will caught) or limits on trawling in the North Atlantic.

But I did have fun making my custom “sea kitten” (see the top of this post). Although it was labeled a flounder, but clearly has only one eye on the side of its head. What’s up with that?

The NPR story on the new PETA campaign attracted a money comment:

This story evokes a wonderful memory of a recent trip I had back to my mountain cabin. I had a nice hike and spotted a wonderful Sky Origami (falcon) crushing a Stuart Little (mouse) in its razor sharp talons. When I got back to the cabin I made sure the House Bunny (dog) was in so it wouldn’t get mauled by a Forest Angel (bear) that night.

Creepy Friday videos

Mason Posner — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 02:45:04 +0000

That is if you find spiders creepy. And if you do, maybe your fears are well founded.

This shark video is only creepy if you were in the submarine, and the sharks actually posed a threat. Which they probably didn’t. But it is still worth checking out.

Holiday debauchery ain’t so bad

Mason Posner — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 13:00:43 +0000

If the holidays and New Years has left you feeling that you took some years off your life, you’ll feel better reading this.

And if last night’s party got a bit out of hand and today you can’t smell the difference between lemons and vanilla, this may help you find out why.