My Day

In the tradition of my dad’s My Day posts, here’s what I did this morning:

• Burned a DVD of presentation videos recorded by the Bridges to Baccalaureate coordinator (a downstairs office neighbor). The Bridges program pairs prospective transfer students with professors and grad students to participate in a few weeks of research during the summer. The presentations were given by each participating researcher – they described their work so the students can choose which lab to work with. The DVD will be shared with a group of students who couldn’t attend the presentations due to bad weather.
• Imported my recording of yesterday’s EvoS seminar: Daniel Nettle on human behavioral ecology in the context of a British city. I think Daniel’s work raises the bar, methodologically speaking, for the neighborhood research efforts taking place locally. He did the footwork, so to speak, to construct an observational ethology of human activity on the streets of two different neighborhoods, resulting in a sort of corroboratory data you can’t get from surveys alone. Anyway, tomorrow I will combine the audio track with slides from his presentation, and the resulting video will join our archive.
• Payed the hotel bill for the keynote speaker at a recent conference held in Binghamton. Used a fax machine to receive the invoice! Spoke on the telephone and recorded the expense in a FileMaker database I set up to print the required paperwork (because filling out forms is work for robots).
• Ordered some lab materials for a funded research project from VWR International. This also involved speaking on the phone and filing forms.
• Replied to a student question about registration for next semester’s seminar series. (They have to submit a petition – an awkward solution to our program’s peculiar record-keeping status.)
• Created the poster for next week’s seminar about caterpillar chemical defenses. I make the posters in Pages and paste the new information into the previous week’s layout (it’s like using a template, but lazier). I like to include a photo of the guest speaker. Usually it’s pretty easy to find an appropriate image, but sometimes it’s a real scavenger hunt. I don’t think the posters play a terribly important role in advertising the talks, but making them is a fun way to finalize preparations.

After lunch, I accompanied a graduate student friend on a hardware store sortie to procure parts for a book scanner. We are going to build one! His research involves coding a bunch of records that exist only in printed form. It has been determined that scanning those books and bound volumes will be the most efficient way to proceed, so there is even funding for this DIY endeavor. I expect the scanner will get a lot of use beyond the scope of that project, so it will certainly be a worthy investment.

I rode to and from work in the rain on my Schwinn.

Posted on Tuesday, April 5th, 2011.