Uncategorized « The Free-Choice Learning Laboratory at HMSC

If you haven’t seen the SETI Institute‘s “Earth Speaks” project, you might want to do so. You can log in to post or record a message you would like to send to an extraterrestrial intelligence, or submit your message via Twitter. The outcome of this has been a large collection of questions, dire predictions, jokes, Star Trek references and the to-be-expected indictments of humanity. Gary Stix of Scientific American recently posted some examples of the discourse, along with some commentary.

Can we gain something from this reflexive exercise? I’m intrigued by the frequent Othering of humanity in the messages. Many bemoan our species’ history of war and hatred, but this fixation on human flaws often apes the very misanthropy that it pretends to oppose. As of this posting, the words “peace” and “hello” dominate the message section’s rotatable tag cloud.

What do you want to say, and who do you think should hear it?

No, it’s not the George Clooney movie sequel. It’s a chance for us to blog near-real-time about our experiences at getting the word out about what we do to the scientists we’re trying to work with. Several of the lab members are attending the Oceans 2012 meeting in Salt Lake City this week. The meeting is a joint offering of The Oceanography Society, Americal Geophysical Union, and the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography.

The meeting is a typical science conference: many many many presentations in all sorts of subdisciplines of ocean sciences, and about one session on education, outreach, communication, evaluation, and student engagement. So, we still have an uphill battle to reach those folks who need to do “broader impacts” for their grants or just as part of the greater good. That is, like recycling, there isn’t always a personal gain, but when you consider the bigger picture, the argument is that it’s the right thing to do (thanks, Jude).

In listening to the first set of education and evlauation presentations this morning, it struck me that the evaluations almost all noted that the majority of their participants in delivering outreach were graduate students. The good news is, the graduate students were very enthusiastic about the programs and found it rewarding both by learning new ways of doing teaching and outreach and also by improving their own research at some times. This bodes well for exciting this new generation of scientists to get involved in outreach.

The bad news, though, is by and large, the practicing scientists were still missing. Are they thinking that their grad students will “take care of it” for them? Do they still find it a hassle, unrewarding, time-consuming, and an activity that basically takes away from their own research? Are they afraid of kids? Have they tried it and had a bad response (probably because they got little guidance on how to do it in the first place)? This is a large cadre of professionals that we can’t afford to ignore, no matter how excited the next generation is. We can’t let them, or ourselves as outreach and education professionals and researchers, cop out.

So, the question remains, how do we reach this population? I’m hoping to talk up our program and work as the week progresses, but this venue is challenging, to say the least, with only a few general mixers and the sheer number of simultaneous presentations.

Dare we hope in 2014 for a plenary talk about education and outreach for *all* scientists? Or educational presentations that aren’t competing with the scientific ones? Or scientists that start to attend education and outreach conferences? A woman can dream …

Wow, I thought I had seen lousy customer service, but Nuance is taking the cake. I have tried to contact the audio mining software company for the last two weeks, through their Enterprise sales web site (no response to my email), and on the phone to about 4 different phone numbers (no response to my voice messages). Tuesday the 7th I spent about 3 hours on hold waiting for their Enterprise sales departments (including multiple calls where I’d been hung up on while on hold, and voice messages on this line asking them to contact me), after trying other departments and complaining. Their other departments, however, don’t even know that the product I’m interested in exists. They did try to contact the Enterprise sales department themselves, however, but even customer service couldn’t get through! The hold “music” ironically talks about how customers go online to complain about poor customer service, and how their products can help you keyword search those web sites. And their website tag line: “As a speech company, we put a premium on listening – get in touch with Nuance today!” Uh, no you don’t.

I finally got ahold of someone in the Enterprise sales Thursday the 9th after a similar hold experience and at least 30 minutes on hold that time. Claudia told me they needed to know my budget, which I didn’t actually know. She said they wouldn’t call us back if we didn’t have at least 5-10K. I told her sure, then we’d have that if that’s what we needed. She took my name, phone number, and email, as well as Mark’s. Now, another week later, no response.

I’ve been hung up on 3 times this morning. I tried the customer service department again, and now I’m on hold while they try to contact the Enterprise sales people for me. The hold music has switched back from the stuff that customer service plays to that of the Enterprise line, so I’m suspecting customer service is not getting back to me, either. (One hour later, no response). By the way, Nuance, this does not bode well for our confidence in your technical support or customer service in general.

So, I’m putting it out to the web: if anyone has an audio mining software solution to search several camera audio feeds for keywords (basically something that competes with Nuance’s Dragon Audio Mining SDK), please contact us through this blog. Let’s talk. It’s more than your competition is willing to do.

[Specifically, we need something speaker-independent and that processes files automatically].

Left to right: Harrison, Bill and Laura discuss wave tank placement and accessibility.

With new tools and exhibits on the way, we’ve had plenty to keep us busy. We’ve come up with a new wave tank layout. We’ve been working with our new Open Exhibits Kinect system. We’ve tested the limits of face-recognition demo software. We’ve laughed. We’ve cried. We’ve waved our arms around in closets.

Mark tries out the Kinect interface from Open Exhibits

For a brief overview of the research camera placement process (boldly undertaken by McKenzie), take a look at this video.

This is a video of Pearl’s relocation Friday. I always enjoy seeing staff, students, volunteers and visitors united in enthusiasm and concern for an individual.

Note what Sid says to Pearl at 0:21. The animals in our care help bring the world to our visitors. Our debt is deeply felt.