Author Archives: Katie Stofer

About Katie Stofer

Research Assistant Professor, STEM Education and Outreach, University of Florida PhD, Oregon State University Free-Choice Learning Lab

A comment on GMOs and perception of Risk

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Well, I tried to post this as a response to Jen Wyld’s post on her recent Science Pub experience,

but the blog’s comments section isn’t working for me at the moment. So, I’m back to make an unscheduled guest post. I guess that means I should make it a little more substantial than it was. Here’s the original comment text:

“Hi Jen, I’m hoping to get more into research around these types of events. We recently had a forum for the students in the College of Agriculture around GMOs, too, and I heard many of the same arguments for (suppressing bad genes, golden rice) and then a little bit of advocacy at the end for GMOs.

The interesting thing I’ve learned lately is that GMOs aren’t really a big risk in the public’s mind, according to Dan Kahan of the Cultural Cognition Project:
http://www.culturalcognition.net/blog/2014/1/21/mapkia-episode-31-answer-culturally-programmed-risk-predispo.html

At the very least, it’s not a left-right split like some contorversial issues (climate change) are.

Anyway, I have a question about the event itself; was there facilitated discussion amongst the attendees, or was it more of a “lecture in public” with traditional Q&A? The ones here in Gainesville are super popular with a certain crowd; the RSVP list fills fast and often with the same folks regularly!”

 

Blog readers may know I’m now at the University of Florida building my research program around science communication and public engagement with science. The ideas of risk perception and cultural cognition are ones I’ve been exploring lately as I get to expand beyond my dissertation work. Dan Kahan has recently made a couple of really important methodological points for those of us working in these areas, which I think also point to the importance of the work the Free-Choice Learning Lab does in particular with users in the real world:

1. Trust but verify, aka check your assumptions – the example of GMOs is an important lesson about transfer; just because we think that GMOs are a controversial issue, doing real work with real people shows their ideas may not stack up to media hype:

http://www.culturalcognition.net/blog/2014/3/10/who-fears-what-why-trust-but-verify.html

2. Just out: we need to get out of the lab and study real people, getting empirical data about the models we’ve developed of how communication happens:

http://www.culturalcognition.net/blog/2014/4/18/want-to-improve-climate-science-communication-i-mean-really.html

I’ve been enjoying the positive reception I have been getting about my work from my new colleagues. Here’s to even more work with real people, messy and frustrating as it may be. Case in point: when you plan data collection on the one day the museum doesn’t have an event and you can get your schedule and your volunteer researchers’ schedules to match, then show up to campus only to find out a) your men’s basketball team is playing in the Sweet Sixteen at noon, b) there is another event at the Stadium as you start your drive to the museum on the other side of campus, c) there is a softball game just across the street from the museum, and d) there is also an event at the Performing Arts Center RIGHT NEXT DOOR to the museum. We couldn’t even park ourselves, let alone leave space for our potential research participants. Sheesh.

 

Summer, when a young researcher’s fancy turns to …

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Having more time to do research, of course! With the pressures and schedules of classes over, students everywhere are turning to a dedicated stretch of research work, either on their own theses and dissertations, or for paid research jobs, or internships. That means, with Laura and I graduating, there should be a new student taking over the Cyberlab duties soon. However, the other thing that summer means is the final push to nail down funding for the fall, and thus, our replacement is not yet actually identified.

In the meantime, though, Laura and I have managed to do a pretty thorough soup-t0-nuts inventory of the lab’s progress over the last couple years for the next researchers to hopefully pick up and run with:

Technology: Cameras are pretty much in and running smoothly. Laura and I have worked a lot of the glitches out, and I think we have the installation down  to a relatively smooth system of placing a camera, aligning it, and installing it physically, then setting it up on the servers and getting it set for everyone’s use. I’ve got a manual down that I think spells out the process start to finish. We’ve also got expanded network capability coming in the form of our own switch, which should help traffic.

Microphones, however, are a different story. We are still torn between installing mics in our lovely stone exhibitry around the touch tanks or just going with what the cameras pick up with built-in mics. The tradeoff is between damaging the rock enclosure or having clearer audio not garbled by the running water of the exhibit. We may be able to hang mics from the ceiling, but that testing will be left to those who follow. It’s less of a crucial point right now, however, as we don’t have any way to automate audio processing.

Software development for facial recognition is progressing as our Media Macros contractors are heading to training on the new system they are building into our overall video analysis package. Hopefully we’ll have that in testing this next school year.

Eye-tracking is really ironed out, too. We have a couple more issues to figure out around tracking on the Magic Planet in particular, but otherwise even the stand-alone tracking is ready to go, and I have trained a couple folks on how to run studies. Between that and the manuals I compiled, hopefully that’s work that can continue without much lag and certainly without as much learning time as it took me to work out a lot of kinks.

Exhibit-wise, the wave tanks are all installed and getting put through their paces with the influx of end-of-year school groups. Maybe even starting to leak a little bit as the wear-and-tear kicks in. We are re-conceptualizing the climate change exhibit and haven’t started planning the remodeling of the remote-sensing exhibit room and Magic Planet. Those two should be up for real progress this year, too.

Beyond that, pending IRB approval due any day for the main video system, we should be very close to collecting research data. We planned a list of things that we need to look at for each of the questions in the grant, and there are pieces that the new researcher can get started on right away to start groundtruthing the use of video observations to study exhibits as well as answering questions about the build-and-test nature of the tsunami wave tank. We have also outlined a brief plan for managing the data as I mentioned a couple posts ago.

That makes this my last post as research assistant for the lab. Stay tuned; you’re guaranteed to hear from the new team soon. You might even hear from me as I go forth and test using the cameras from the other side of the country!

 

Negotiating an Equipment Sharing System

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The lab has purchased a bunch of relatively expensive equipment for use by our researchers at HMSC, students who may work mainly at the main campus in Corvallis or on their dissertations elsewhere, and our collaborators in other states and countries. Creating a system that allows for easy movement of the physical systems yet maintains the integrity is proving to be a complicated task for many reasons.

First, the equipment resides mainly at HMSC in Newport. Right now, only Shawn actually lives and works probably 75 percent of the time in Newport. Mark lives in Corvallis (about an hour away) but spends maybe half his week, roughly, in Newport, and Laura and I live in Corvallis but usually spend less than half the week in Newport.  For all of us, the schedule of Newport vs. Corvallis vs. elsewhere work time is not at all regular. This means that no one is a good go-to person for handling the check-in and -out of the equipment unless a user is enough of a planner to know they need something (and know exactly what they need) in advance to ask one of us to bring it back to Corvallis.

And in reality, we don’t really want to have to act like overlords hoarding the equipment and doling it out when we feel like it. We’d like to have a system where people can access the equipment more freely but responsibly. But our shared spaces have other people going in and out that make it difficult to restrict access enough with the limited number of keys to the cabinet we have yet work without a main gatekeeper. Plus, things have just gone walkabout over the years since no one does keep track. People forget they have something, forget where it came from, leave the school and take it with them, not maliciously, but out of lack of time to worry about it and frankly, no one with interest in keeping up with the equipment. This especially happens with Shawn’s books. Full disclosure: I’m pretty guilty of it myself, at least of having things I borrow sit on my desk far beyond the time that it might be reasonable for me to keep them. No one else may be asking to use them, but if the resources aren’t on a shelf or in a database for browsers to know they’re available, it’s not really available in my eyes.

So we’ve struggled with this system. I tried to be the one in charge for a while, but I wasn’t travelling back and forth to Newport regularly, and it was a burden for people to come to me then me to find someone who was in Newport to pick it up and bring it to me to turn over to the borrower, and basically reverse the process when stuff was returned. Technically, the school probably wants us to have people sign off on taking equipment, even things with the small dollar values of these items, but that’s another layer of hassle to deal with.

Plus, the database programs we’ve tried to use to keep track have proved annoying for one reason or another. Again, most of the database programs are linked to one computer, so one person had to be the gatekeeper. For now, we’ve settled on a paper sign-out system on the door of the cabinet holding the equipment, but that doesn’t integrate with any computerized system that would be easy to track what’s out and in at any given time and when things are due back. The school multimedia system on campus uses barcode scanners, but the cost of implementing a system for our small use case is probably prohibitive. Peer-to-peer lending systems have the owners responsible for their own stuff, but even they often use online databases to track things. Suggestions welcome!

It’s just another thing that most people don’t think about that’s behind-the-scenes in the research process. And then when you go to do research, you spend way too much time thinking about it, or stuff gets lost.

Holiday Quick Updates

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Just a few quick updates on this holiday about how lab is progressing.

-We’re re-thinking our microphone options for the touch tanks. We’re reluctant to drill into our permanent structure to run wires, so we’re back to considering whether the in-camera microphones will be sufficient or whether we can put in wireless mics. With the placement of the cameras to get a wide angle for the interactions and the loud running water, the in-camera mics will probably be too far away for clear audio pickup, but the wireless mics require their own receivers and audio channels. The number of mics we’d want to install could rapidly exceed the amount of frequency space available. Oh, and there’s the whole splashing water issue – mics are not generally waterproof.

-We finally got a lot more internet bandwidth installed, but now we have to wait for on-campus telecommunications to install a switch. We’re creeping ever closer … and once that’s done, we can hopefully re-up the frame rate on our cameras. Hopefully we’ll also be able to export footage more easily, especially remotely, as well. I’ll be testing this out myself as part of my new job and future research.

-I installed a NAS network drive of five 2 TB hard drives that will probably be our backup system. It needed about 40 hours to configure itself, so next week we should hopefully be able to get it fully in place.

-We took the whole system down for about an hour to replace the UPS as the old one was just shot.

-We’re looking into scheduling to accommodate school groups that don’t give permission for taping, as well as evening events. This should be possible through the Milestone Management software, but it’s not something we’ve explored yet.

-Remote desktop access to the servers is next (hopefully). This is also waiting on the campus telecom network switch.

-We’re migrating our exhibit software from Flash to HTML 5 in order to be more easily updated as well as incorporating the key/screen press logging code.

Happy Memorial Day!

P-PhD (post-PhD): Now what?

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I finished the edits and all the various fee-paying and archiving that come along with completing a dissertation. My transcript finally reflects that I completed all the requirements … so now what? I have a research position waiting for me to start in July, but as I alluded to before, what exactly do I research?

In some ways, the possibilities are wide open. I can stick with visualizations, sure, and expand on that into animations, or continue with the in situ work in the musem. I may try to do that with the new camera system at HMSC as a remote data collector, as there is not a nearby spherical system of which I am aware in my new position.

I could also start to examine modeling, a subject that I danced around a bit during the dissertation (I had to write a preliminary exam question on how it related to my dissertation topic). Modeling, simulation, and representation is big in the Next Generation Science Standards, so there’s likely money there.

Another topic of interest dovetails with Laia’s work on public trust and Katie Woollven’s work with nature of science, broader questions of what is meant by “science literacy” and just why science is pushed so hard by proponents of education. I want to know how, when, and most importantly, why, adults search for scientific information. By understanding why people seek information, we can better understand what problems exist in accessing the types of information they need and focus our efforts. A component of this research also could explore identity of non-professionals as scientists or as capable consumers of academic science information.

Finally, I want to know how all this push toward outreach and especially toward asking professional scientists to be involved in or at least fund outreach around their work impacts their professional lives. What do scientists get out of this emphasis on outreach, if anything? I imagine there are a range of responses, from sheer aggravation and resentment to pure joy at getting to share their work. Hopefully there exists a middle ground where researchers recognize the value and even want to participate to some extent in outreach but are frustrated by feeling ill-equipped to do so. That’s where my bread and butter is – in helping them out through designing experiences, training them to help, or delivering the outreach myself, while building in research questions to advance the field at the same time.

Either way, it’s exciting! I hope to be able to blog here from time to time in the future as my work and the lab allows, though I will be officially done at OSU before my next turn to post on my research work. Thanks for listening.

Lining up more ducks: data management

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Lining up these ducks is definitely not sexy research work, yet it’s often very important, as Laura mentioned last week. Ideally, this would have been done from the beginning. It was to some extent, but mostly with what was new coming in rather than taking stock also of what we already have.

The same will probably be true of the data that the lab collects, but since we haven’t really started collecting any new data, we can hopefully be proactive about how we integrate the old and the new. We’re building on previous work, such as video analysis of the touch tanks, where a corpus of data already exists. That means we have (perhaps) an existing data management structure, or not, but we need to find out.

I recently attended a great workshop from the OSU Library on data management plans. For this grant, we promised not only to share our experiences with this project as we go, but also to share our data to the extent possible, especially with our visiting scholars. Funders are also requiring plans for storing and managing data, and there is also a larger push for much federally-funded data to be shared in open-access databases. Even without these prods, managing data saves time in the long run by keeping information organized and easy-to-access. One of the tools they recommend is DMP Tool, which has many templates from different funders to create the plans for grant applications in the first place.

Once you’ve been awarded the grant, planning file names and creating meta-data up-front can ensure things are easy to find, easy to share, and easy to manage. That’s where we are. As we start to plan exactly what research questions we pursue first, we’ll figure exactly what types of data we’ll be collecting. As we are working with Media Macros to set up analytic programs to parse the video data, we will be able to designate how we want our file names to be constructed for example to indicate the date and time and type of data, such as video, transcript, or demographics, and source such as particular camera. Having all of this in the file name will make the data consistent and sortable. We also have to build a consistent file folder structure and locations for storing data, whether it’s dropbox or external hard drives or some other sharing platform for works in progress as well as ultimate archival.

The naming scheme goes beyond that, too, to the secondary data that we analyze, such as filenames in transcript analysis software, excel spreadsheets, and even presentations and writing. One more important type of data is the metadata, which is data about the data. For us, that could mean: a) descriptions of how and when the data is collected, part of which is captured in the filename but which can be expanded upon, b) descriptions of the data collection equipment, such as the type of camera (3301 or 1034 or other models), frame rate, and resolution, and c) descriptions of the larger events that may have been going on at the science center on any given day, such as Shark Day, Whale Watch Week, or Home School Days, if they were occurring.

Of course, with a number of people working on the project now, students rotating on and off the project, and visiting scholars joining, we have to make sure that this structure is communicated and most importantly, used! I have to admit I was guilty of this during my dissertation – having a plan at the beginning but not necessarily sticking to it. We’ll have to regularly re-visit the plan and make sure things are still working for everyone, but hopefully having a plan at the outset will prevent a lot of work down the road with a disorganized set of raw data, working data, meta data, and final products.