Tag Archives: research

Working title

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In my living room sit several boxes of LEGOs awaiting desecration. Over the weekend, I must find a way to contain the cheerful, rainbow-colored dust that this gruesome operation yields.

I have decided to give my game the working title “Deme.” I feel the word more or less sums up what the game is about, and I felt the need to call my project something other than “the game.” It feels more real, and real is what it will have to be before terribly long.

A sticking point in the concept is how we should handle mating and aggression. My instinct is to portray these things as they are, to the best of my ability. I have a couple of reasons. First, wild animals are not subject to our cultural notions of propriety. Second, these things are kind of what the game is about. It would feel weird blotting them out.

However, Deme is going to be available to a general audience. For an age bracket that might not know the ins and outs of reproduction (so to speak), these elements will need careful presentation. Unplanned family discussions about where babies come from are not among my learning goals.

A child might play the game, with the guidance of a parent or teacher, to learn why elk are important. An adult might play to see if she can breed a super-squirrel or beat her personal record for screech owl polyamory. Both learners have different goals and perhaps very different approaches to games in general.

The experience of playing a given game differs from person to person, and from instance to instance. Players can define their own roles and experiences within the rules of the game. This may make our work easier in some ways and harder in others.

Some of these issues can’t be addressed realistically until we get into technical details, but it’s worth starting the conversation now.

Slightly once more

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Mark located an ultra-cheap compact USB video camera and microphone online. By ultra-cheap, I mean $10. Laura clipped it to her shirt and gave it a quick trial run in the Visitor Center.

It had remarkably good resolution, but muffled audio quality beyond about two feet. Also, we found that a lapel-mounted camera moves a lot, making it hard to discern what the wearer is attending to.  This new gadget may have some use if affixed to an exhibit, but it doesn’t compete with the Looxcie as a visitor-mounted camera.

My favorite aspect of the product, however, is the instruction manual.  This document stands as a heroic failed attempt to translate coherent thoughts into the awkward and confusing linguistic soup we call “English.”

Here are some highlights:
-When you charge it, blue light and red light will bright simultaneously, of which states are stillness.
-Notice: when battery power is not enough, D001 will enter into protection mode, so it cannot be turn on.  Now, please charge for it.
-If you need to continue to video, please press Record/Stop button slightly once more.

Our other projects are moving along quickly.  The wave tanks should arrive next week.  The data collection cameras should in within two weeks.  If you haven’t seen Katie’s test run of the SMI eye-tracking system, you can watch a quick video of it here.

The eyetracker is here! … well, sort of.

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Our actual eyetracker is a bit backordered, so we’ve got a rental for the moment. It’s astoundingly unassuming looking, just (as they picture on their web site) basically a small black bar at the bottom of a 22” monitor, plus the laptop to run the programs. When I took it out of the box, it fires up the operating system and there are the icons just sitting on the desktop, with a little warning that we shouldn’t mess with any settings, install a firewall or anti-virus software for risk of messing up the primary function. They have branded the screen with a little decal from their company, but otherwise, it’s just a laptop with an attached monitor.

 

The actual getting started is a bit complicated.  I’m usually the one to pooh-pooh the need for “readme” documents, but I would have liked one here to tell me which program is which. That’s the thing – the software is powerful, but it has a bit of a steep learning curve. The “quick start” guide has several steps before you even think about calibrating a subject. We got stuck on the requirement to get Ethernet hooked up since we tried to set up in a tech closet and OSU otherwise has pretty widespread wireless coverage. Harrison had to run a 50’ cable from Mark’s office down the hallway to the closet.

 

Looks like the next step is some pretty intense work understanding how to set up an experiment in a different software program. This is where a “test” experiment just to start learning how to use the system would be good. That’s the sort of icon I need in the middle of the desktop. It reminds me of my first job as a research assistant, where I was registering brain images to a standard. The researchers had written a program to rotate the images to line up and then match certain features to the standard to stretch or compact the images as necessary, but there was no manual or quick start. My supervisor had to show me all the steps, what button did what, which order, etc. It was a fairly routine process, but it was all kept in someone’s head until I wrote it down. The pdfs here are a great start, but there still seems to be a step missing. Stay tuned!

 

Marine Science Day wrap-up

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Marine Science Day was a huge hit.  Attendance far exceeded any event I’ve personally witnessed at HMSC.  Researchers and educators did a fantastic job of communicating what goes on at our strange and wonderful workplace.

A few highlights:

-Bill’s public sea turtle necropsy (with power tools!)

-A six-person life raft doubling as a bouncy castle in the Barry Fisher building

-Kids trying on a microphone-equipped full-face SCUBA mask at the Oregon Coast Aquarium‘s dive program kiosk

On a somewhat-unrelated note, if you missed last Monday’s xkcd graphic, you should probably check it out.

 

What are you all doing over there?

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Mark and I did some guerrilla filmmaking this morning.   Despite some hiccups and an uncooperative Sun, we got some good footage.  As I type this, Mark is preparing these and other videos for the Sea Grant all-hands meeting tomorrow and Friday.

Communicating what we do is a big part of what we do.  This is ethically necessary for human-subjects research (see Katie’s post from Monday), and it’s also a great way to teach science as a process.  It’s a somewhat recursive approach that can be, oddly enough, difficult to communicate.  I like to think we do a decent job of it.

I think the key point, as always, is that we’re all in this together.  Visitors, researchers, students and educators each have a role to play in this thing we call “Science.”  Researchers can learn about natural phenomena from the observations of the general public, while the general public can learn about research and natural phenomena from our Visitor Center exhibits and outreach products.  It’s a two-way street—nay, a busy four-way, multi-lane intersection—and our job is to facilitate the flow of information in any direction.

Much of what we do is familiar and time-tested—Bill, resplendent in his bloodstained white lab coat, holding aloft the entrails of a found shark before a crowd of excited children.  Such childhood experiences with classic museum interpretation are what drew many of us into this field.

Hopefully, the new strategies and technologies we’re in the process of introducing will come to be equally accepted and enjoyed by visitors.

Rejection OR How I learned to stop worrying and love the research process

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Rejection. It’s an inevitable part of recruiting human subjects to fill out your survey or try out your exhibit prototype. It’s also hard not to take it personally, but visitors have often paid to attend your venue today and may or may not be willing to sacrifice some of their leisure time to improve your exhibit.

 

[Full disclosure: this blog post is 745 words long and will take you approximately 5-10 minutes to read. You might get tired as you read it, or feel your eyes strain from reading on the computer screen, but we won’t inject you with any medications. You might learn something, but we can’t pay you.]

 

First, you have to decide beforehand which visitors you’re going to ask – is it every third visitor? What if they’re in a group? Which direction will they approach from? Then you have to get their attention. You’re standing there in your uniform, and they may not make eye contact, figuring you’re just there to answer questions. Sometimes rejection is as simple as a visitor not meeting your eye or not stopping when you greet them.

You don’t want to interrupt them while they’re looking at an exhibit, but they may turn and go a different direction before you get a chance to invite them to help you. How far do you chase them once you’ve identified them as your target group? What if they’re going to the restrooms, or leaving the museum from there? When I was asking people to complete surveys about our global data display exhibit, they were basically on their way out the door of the Visitor Center, and I was standing in their way.

 

If you get their attention, then you have to explain the study and not scare them off by making it sound like a test, with right or wrong answers, even when you have right and wrong answers. You also have to make sure that you don’t take too much of their time.

 

Then there are the visitors who leave in the middle of the experiment, deciding they didn’t know what they were getting into, or being drawn away by another group member.

 

Oh, you’re still there? This isn’t too long? It’s not lunchtime, planetarium show time or time to leave for the day? I’ll continue.

 

If you have an IRB or other informed consent document, this can be another hurdle. If you’re not careful about what you emphasize, visitors could focus on the “Risks” section that you must tell them about. In exhibit evaluation and research, this is often only fatigue or discomfort when someone feels they don’t know the right answer (despite assurances that no one is judging them). But of course, you have to be thorough and make sure they do understand the risks and benefits, who will see the information they give and how it will be used. Luckily, we don’t often need to collect personal information, even signatures, if we’re not using audio or video recording.

 

Then there is the problem of children. We want to assess the visit with the true types of groups that we see, that is, mostly families or mixed adult-child groups. However, anyone under 18 needs to have consent given by a parent. Unfortunately, a grandparent, aunt, uncle, sister or brother doesn’t count, so you have to throw out those groups as well. Even if a parent is present, you have to make sure that you can explain the research to the youngest visitor you have permission to study (usually about 8 years old) and even worse, explain the assent process to him or her without scaring them off. As our IRB office puts it, consent is a process, a conversation, not just a form.

 

So who knows if we’re really truly getting a representative sample of our visitors? That’s definitely a question about sampling theory. Luckily for us at Hatfield, we’re working with our campus IRB office to try and create less-restrictive consent situations, as when we don’t have to get a signed consent form if that’s the only identifying information we ask visitors to provide. Maybe we’ll be able to craft a situation where over-18 family members will be able to provide consent for their younger relatives if a parent didn’t travel with them that day. Luckily, as this progresses, you’ll be able to follow it on our blog.

 

Wow, you’ve read this far? Thank you so much, and enjoy the rest of your visit.