Uncrowning trees

Oh, yes, it's that time of year when having lots of big trees makes for quite a bit of work because of their uncrowning (leaf fall).  Two really large sugar maples and two really large burr oaks are the primary leaf biomass producers, and today's image shows a sculptural bird bath that weighs a couple of tons catching the first of the maple leaves. The hardest part is to keep as many leaves as possible out of the lily pond. And still the drought persists, so some new trees and shrubs must be watered, and the bird bath filled, as the xeric conditions of winter approach. It also means that the fall color season will be brief because leaf fall should be fast given a bit of water stress all around. Good to see that some of the plants that were new last year handling this dry period pretty well meaning that they are now have well established root systems. If anything were still wilting before everything else it would indicate the opposite and be worrisome. Tomorrow will be the start of field work, so research will be competing with garden work, cut it is a nice time of year to be outside. Some graduate students are just now figuring out how much time they'll be spending during this data gathering stage. It'll eat their lunch. TPP will try to be a good guy and help out. 

Citation index going up, a little

This really doesn't mean a whole lot, but TPP has a sort of weird fascination with seeing where and how his publications are cited.  You don't want to be an example of "couldn't grab his butt with both hands", and so far so good, but it's interesting to find out what other people see in your publications, how they are used.  Now a number of indexes have been proposed that allow you to make all sorts of bogus comparisons.  Understand that you do some research, and then you write a paper in an attempt to publish it, and when that occurs, other people find out about your research and its results and conclusions with the result that they cite your work to show the background or rationale or similarities or differences to their work, but that takes time.  The longer you publish the more your publications can be cited or ignored.  The more you publish, the more your publications can be cited or ignored, and there is a domino effect because getting cited alerts other people to your publications.  TPP published his 1st scientific paper nearly 40 years ago and has published regularly if not prolifically ever since.  For the longest time my h-index was 17, meaning that 17 of my publications had at least 17 citations; some have more than a hundred.  Really important papers get thousands of citations.  Just recently my h-index went up to 18!  To get a really high h-index you have to have a lot of papers with a lot of citations.  That can be easier in some fields than in others depending on how much and how many people work in that field, and this does not count selfies (self-citation).  People with 2 or 3 times as many publications may not have an h-index any higher than mine, and this then is why this could be used as a gauge of your impact on a field scientifically.  A colleague and friend is in ornithology, and he's been prolific and important, and his h-index is 23.  A couple of my super-star colleagues have h-indexes of 28 and 35.  Both are in big fields, but both do very good research and are more prolific publishers.  A really low index would suggest you have either few publications or lots of publications that only make a very minimal impact.  My h-index may go up another notch or two ultimately as some newer publications begin to get into the literature, but not the stuff of a power-house.   

No idle hands around here!

Part of TPP's job is to keep students from being idle.  Students learn about science and how to do it, how to become a biologist, by basically apprenticing with masters, the faculty.  Fortunately, my research is rather non-technical in the sense of instrumentation and techniques, so there are lots of questions and jobs for students to pursue.  Let's see what they're up to.
Oh, this is really almost unfair, but you never know.  A hort/botany student is working with environmental parameters and plant hormones to see if he can get a particularly stubborn seed to germinate on cue so to speak.  This problem is keeping us from doing several experiments.
A student is interning in the herbarium to learn the basics of curation.  This is not something very many students get interested in, so at times you worry where the next generation of curators is going to come from.  Joining this student are about a dozen mostly retirees who have become master naturalists and are embarking on project to conduct a floristic inventory of local conservation areas, a quite worthy task.  A group of students are doing a live plant growth assay of soil fertility collected from different areas of a prairie dominated by different plants.  Another pair are setting up an experiment to determine if an invasive plant chemically inhibits the growth of other plants. TPP has students interning at a science museum, a zoo, and a nature center.  Now if only there were more of me to go around.  Oh, and then we have people, especially legislators, who think we are only teaching when we are in the classroom and that research plays no educational role.  One does get weary of clueless critics.  

Mistreating household appliances in the name of science

Setting up an experiment today using soil (remember the recent lesson?) and plant samples collected last fall.  The plant samples are to provide a bit of chopped vegetation, litter, to the top of the soil.  So there is a paper bag of big bluestem, a 2 meter tall prairie grass and not a bison in sight. So if you want more or less uniformly small pieces, you put your dry grass into - well, let's see what's on hand?  There are quite a number of household-kitchen appliances that are designed for chopping plant material so this shouldn't be a problem!  Ah, a blender!  Wonder why it's getting hot and smelling a bit like toasty insulation and ozone?  Let TPP be the first to report that blenders do a very poor job of chopping a big, dried grass.  Something closer to a bison is required, and happily a paper cutter chopped this grass up rather nicely, and proudly he still has all 10 fingers. Where do you get paper cutters sharpened?  It's something to think about.  Maybe next time we'll have to try a food processor.  Fortunately the other litter had much less fibrous leaves and the blender performed much better at chopping them into satisfactory sized pieces.  If any manufacturers what to see what their products are capable of withstanding, we'd be happy to put them to misuse in the name of science.  If they survive, we give them our seal of approval - safe for botanical research.  What a selling point!

TGIF Big Time - Introducting students to research

Today is the last class day of the semester; how appropriate it's a Friday.  It always seems to work out that way.  One of my classes was an introduction to research, a seminar with the goal of introducing 2nd year biology majors to real science, a new class.  Firstly 18 students is too many for a good seminar because it lets the passive students be passive no matter how hard you try to force class participation.  So the class dealt with misconceptions and definitions of science, and things like science denialism, opinions versus reality, and science news and the media.  When asked about their opinion on fracking, and what they'd heard and where they heard it and how their opinion was formed, none of the 18 knew what fracking was.  One fellow who opposed it said, "Fracking, it just sounds wrong."  Does that make you feel good about the future of our country and world?  How many earned extra credit for attending a public forum on fracking held immediately adjacent to campus two days later?  None.  They had a hard time wrapping their brains around denialism.  "How can you deny facts," asked one?  Indeed.  However, some of them did a quite credible job of critiquing research posters and research seminars often showing some real insight into the strengths and weaknesses of the presentations.  Wonder if my colleagues will want to read them?  They did a good job when conducting an interrogative interview of a professional scientist, yours truly, TPP.  They really liked looking for cartoons that made fun of science, and explaining why they were funny.  But best of all, most of the class now thinks getting involved in research while an undergrad is a good idea.  They have a better idea of what types of research their "teachers" do, and what it takes to be a successful researcher.  On the whole the class was pretty satisfactory, pretty successful, from the instructor's perspective.  Now to see what the students think.

Caffeine gives brain a jolt

Without doubt this is good research, but really, you needed rats to document that caffeine gives your brain a jolt? All you have to do is observe everyone participating in the five-day rat race, and almost everyone of them jump starts their cranium with caffeine. Wish the Phactor could apply to the Juan Valdez Foundation for coffee research. But that's science for you. It's not enough that it works, science has to find the caffeine receptor sites deep within the brain, invent a cranial coffee port, and then pour the stuff straight into the brain! And the best part is that it's still legal.

Hot prairie research

Yesterday was a beautiful November day here in the upper midwest. On Monday last our prairie study site was burned, a fall rather than a spring burn. The reason for this hinges on observed differences in time of seed dispersal for two species, a native and an invasive bush clover. The invasive bush clover tends to hang onto its seed very late in the season, so how much of its reproductive potential will get damaged by a fall burn? The answer to this question will probably be not enough, but you never know until to try it and determine the answer for certain. So yesterday we collected seed from scortched clovers and from the litter that tends to accumulate under dense stands of the invasive clover, and in another month or so, after a cold treatment, germination trials will be set up. No matter how toasty the whole place looks, none of these herbaceous perennials are damaged by these fires, so the parent plants will not be harmed. Now in a side story the Phactor was driving the F1's slick silver coupe because it was making a "noise". It's a very nice late model ride, but not exactly cut out for field work. Please understand that after spending a couple of hours out on a recently burned prairie, you get pretty blackened from the knees down, rather smoky flavored, although not as smoky as doing the actual burn, and you have dirty bags of plant material. The good news is that this particular sport coupe has good traction in the mud and made nary a wayward sound. The smoky odor should fade in a few days, but too bad about the floor mats. Shhh! Don't tell!

Deans, provosts, and presidents, oh my!

How does that song go? If you want to be happy for you academic life, never make a pretty woman your wife; no, that’s not right! For a happy academic life, never make a non-scholar your dean, provost, or president. It’s very simple, if not a scholar, they just don’t seem to get it, and in this case, the “it” they don’t get is that scholarship is both necessary and important to quality university teaching. Provost Plodder is an “educator” and seems to subscribe to the old, often criticized, characterization of universities as places where faculty research comes at the expense of teaching. This of course is often the case at big research universities, but at such institutions, no one is confused about the role of teaching and research, and prospective students would be well advised to figure out what faculty at such institutions do. However those of us who embrace the concept of an undergraduate research university would beg to differ with that characterization of research and teaching, and whenever we uppity faculty beg to differ with the provost, well, life can be difficult. At this stage of his career the Phactor has seen them come and seen them go; some just don’t go soon enough. Quality does not count with our provost, just those enrollment beans. Programs that have grabbed every warm body they can find are being rewarded with resources, and programs that have been selective and offered those students quality educational opportunities are being dunned. The cheap drives out the dear. No matter that the highest form of teaching is original investigation, and those who do not investigate themselves are in no position to teach students this skill. Do you disagree? Well, substitute “swimming” for investigate in the previous sentence to see how ridiculous your position is. It’s hard to maintain a research endeavor, it takes time and resources; it’s even harder to keep it funded, especially at smaller universities, but time spent on research just doesn’t count with our provost, although they always accept the indirect costs from research grants. The fact that our students are regularly exposed to and engage in not just little tiddles or keep-em busy projects, but participate in scientific scholarship of the highest caliber, makes little impression upon our provost. This doesn’t mean the provost is an evil person, but somewhere along the line they just lost sight, assuming they ever had it, of the fact that the highest calling of university faculty is to investigate so that they can teach not just what we know, but how we know it. So by all means, do find out what those job candidates think about the role of research in science teaching. Years ago, one dean hopeful said, “Research is encouraged, but not completely necessary at this type of university.” We all got up and headed for the door. The candidate asked, “Don’t you have any more question?” “No,” was the answer, “you got the first one wrong, so the rest don’t matter.”

Not Fair!

This is so unfair! A son of Scotland gets very depressed when he finds out these other people (link, link) have figured out how to turn his daily after work recreation into research! Maybe the Phactor just has to admit that some people are more clever, more creative. Has it ever been mentioned that the fruit of the nutmeg, of little use to most people, is made into a singularly deleterious alcoholic beverage in Grenada? Maybe they'll need my expertise some day.

Helping Students with Research

Hi! I'm a student. I need your help. I'm searching a botanist and I found you. Can you help me with my research project related to Sansevieria plant. Can you please send me the chemical components of it and can you help me what research proposal i will do in Sansevieria plant. Please. thank you.

This type of request is not at all uncommon, and while helping students has always been my focus, there are times when you can't do much. Firstly, the request was left as a comment to an old blog and there is no way to send a reply directly. Secondly, they don't even know what they are asking when they want to know the chemical components of a living organism. This is rather like asking for a list of all the people who live in your city. More likely this student is interested in knowing if Sansevieria (mother-in-law's tongue) has any medicinal uses (nothing of note). Thirdly, the way the student asks the last question suggests they are generally clueless with regard to science, and in particular because they give no indication of what type of question they wish to ask or in what area of biology.
This is not so unusual and we have to coach undergraduates through the process of generating a viable research question all the time. So you begin to wonder where the teacher is or what indeed they have done or are doing to get the process under way, or to generate an alternate hypothesis, a student wakes up on the 1st of June are realizes some sort of project is due and somehow manages to search on botany, a suitably narrow topic (not), and lands on my blogosphere doorstep wrapped in a blanket in a basket with a note pinned to them asking me to take them under my wing and do their project for them. Not a chance!
But since you get points for wanting to study a plant, here's some help. Why this plant? Are you growing it? Do you know what it looks like? Could you recognize one if you saw one? In what ways is this plant different from "typical" plants? What do these differences suggest about the type of habitat this plant is adapted to? Plants are composed of just three things, stems, leaves, and roots. How do these things each contribute to this plant's form? Can you identify these parts? How are the leaves arranged on the stem, and how do you know whether you have a leaf or a stem? When you hold up the leaves of many plants to the light you can see the veins. What do you see with this plant? What is the explanation of what you see or not see? What is the primary function of leaves and given the leaf form in this genus, what can you predict about how these leaves differ in function from typical leaves? Now how would you go about verifying it? And so on. You see, science starts with observation. And then you pose a possible explanation or prediction, and then you try to figure out a way to falsify your explanation. Yes, you must try to shoot down your own idea, and the reason is that logically speaking you cannot prove it true. However you may well get data that supports your idea giving it credibility, which is what we all hope for. Then you take your observations, your idea, and your plan for testing your idea and use them to compose a research proposal.
Let's just hope this assignment is not due tomorrow.