Category Archives: Research

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.

Interviewee selection criteria

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With IRB approval “just around the corner” (ha!), I’ve been making sure everything is in place so I can hit the ground running once I get the final approval.  That means checking back over my selection criteria for potential interviewees.  For anyone who doesn’t remember, I’m doing phone interviews with COASST citizen science volunteers to see how they describe science, resource management, and their role in each.

 

I had originally hoped to do some fancy cluster analyses to group people using the big pile of volunteer survey data I have.  How were people answering survey questions?  Does it depend on how long people are involved in the program, or how many birds they’ve identified?  … Nope. As far as I could tell, there were no patterns relevant to my research interests.

 

After a lot of digging through the survey data, I felt like I was back at square 1.  Shawn asked me, “Based on what you’re interested in, what information would you NEED to be able to sort people?”  My interview questions focus on people’s definitions of science and resource management, and their description of their role in COASST, science, and resource management.  I expect their responses have a lot to do with their world view, their experience with science, and what they think about the role of science in society.  Unfortunately, these questions were not included in the 2012 COASST volunteer survey.

 

As so often is the case, what I need and what I have are two different things.  When I looked through what I do have, there were several survey questions that are at least somewhat related to my research interest.  I’ve struggled with determining which questions are the most relevant.  Or I should say, I’ve struggled with making sure I’m not creating arbitrary groupings of volunteers and expecting those to hold through the analysis phase of my project.

 

This process of selecting interviewees off survey responses makes me excited to create my own surveys in the future!  That way I could specifically ask questions to help me create groupings.  Until then, I’m trying to make do with what I have!

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.

We Got Punked

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Yes, we failed to change the default password on the cameras we installed. Someone managed to get ahold of the IP addresses, and guess the login and password. We escaped with only minor headaches, as all that happened was that they uploaded a few “overlay” images that appeared on some of the camera feeds, and a few text messages that seemed to be mostly warning messages to us about cybersecurity.

The hacker did change a few of our passwords for the cameras, so there were some from which we could not just delete the images. This has meant various levels of hassle to reset the cameras to default. For the white brick cameras, 30 seconds of holding a control button while the power cycles was sufficient. I didn’t even have to reset the IP address. For the dome cameras, it’s a bit more complex, as the IP address has to be reset, and I wasn’t around for that part originally so I’ll have to consult IT.

However, it makes us wonder about the wisdom of having even the camera views available without a password on the web, which we hadn’t considered was available before. You’d have to have the IP address to go to the view, but once you were there, our IP addresses are mostly sequential (depending on the day and which cameras are installed), so you could go visit each of them if you liked. There seems to be an option to turn this off, however, which I have also gone through and switched so that now you need not only the IP address, but the username and password in order to even view the feed.

Moral of this part of the story? Explore the default settings and consider what they truly mean. Be a Nervous Nellie and a bit of a cynic, assume the worst so you can plan for it.

UPDATE 5/16/13: I couldn’t get the 3301 dome cameras reset despite following the unplug, hold control button, re-plug power sequence. Our IT specialist thinks the hacker may have actually reset the default password via the firmware, since they should have automatically reset themselves to the same IP addresses using DHCP. So those two cameras have been pulled and replaced while the hacked ones are off to the IT hospital for some sleuthing and probably a firmware reset as well. I’ll let you know what the resolution is.