EGU Blogs

open science

Let the adventure begin!

The first post on this shiny new blog mentioned that I was going to offer a degree of transparency to my current role as a Palaeontology PhD student. I’ve only been going for 8 days, but already there’s plenty to talk about it seems! Here’s a few observations and thoughts about kicking off PhD life, and the activities that have stimulated these.

The number of people who’ve said ‘like Ross from Friends??’ so far is in the thousands. I’m not American.

Many of the new students to the Royal School of Mines have, somewhat unsurprisingly in my experience of Imperial College, been a little bit slow in up-taking the social aspect of PhD life. Others have been more willing to commit to the networking aspect of things, and it’s these people, I predict, who will thrive in the next 3-4 years here. For all new meat PhD students, I strongly advise biting the bullet if you’re not too good at talking/socialising, and making the additional effort to develop new friends and contcacts. 3 years is a long time to be alone. The alternative is to watch feeds like #ECRchat and #PhDchat on Twitter like a hawk. These are invaluable resources for any PhD student, containing many helpful links and personal advice. Also a nice place to go if you want to rant/scream, so I hear.

PhD students are encouraged to demonstrate (also known as being a Graduate Teaching Assistant, or GTA) for undergraduate classes. This is actually a neat way of getting some teaching experience, while refreshing material that you may not have learnt about in several years. For this, you usually have to pass some sort of course. We had to here, and for anyone else who had to suffer this tedious ‘training’, I feel your pain. There is a general scheme for training demonstrators at Imperial, which is kind of self-defeating as it neglects the explicit flexibility required for teaching in different subjects. I would not teach a student geology in the same way that I’d teach computing science. As such, the majority of the material in the seminars (yes, we were being spoken to about the theory behind teaching) was irrelevant, and clearly the whims of someone high up who spends far too much time making useless regulations. Hopefully, others who have had to undertake similar classes will have had a more workshop-style format, where you can actually practice demonstration technique and discuss how to engage students properly. I strongly recommend telling the moderators of such courses this, if that is not the case (I certainly did).

It actually wasn’t as bad as you might expect..

Nonetheless, new demonstrators were unleashed upon the helpless undergraduates earlier this week, and frankly, it was great! I had 75 or so students to co-manage, and the majority were willing to learn and listen. This is one of the cool things about geology, in that it’s really hands-on and a very practical science. And you know what? Rocks are pretty damn interesting, if you can make them tell a story. The first rocks the new students got to observe where a bit tricky though, including a flow-banded rhyolite, and a bioclastic limestone (remember, most of these students will not have done geology before!). It was great hearing the different thought processes as to what students thought they were, and rewarding after coaxing the correct answers out of them (eventually). Any PhD students who have the opportunity to demonstrate, I say give it a go!

Look at the rock. Isn’t it pretty.

Aside from this, the first week or so has been quite relaxing. I’ve installed Mendeley to help organise pdfs, a highly valuable tool for academics, and began reading into mass extinctions. I’m starting from the bottom up, to get a historical look at how the scientific understanding behind extinctions has evolved through time. There are some intriguing scientific papers out there, and if anyone is interested in learning more about mass extinctions, drop a comment here or tweet me up and I’ll whizz along a few select choices.

One thing I’m trying out is the creation of a theme matrix. Using Excel, this is a grid to extract and categorise information from papers I’ve read into various topics and sub-topics. At the moment, it’s only just getting started, but I’m hoping that it will serve as a nice basis for the literature review (a core part of the PhD write up), enable me to think more about trends within the literature, and is quite flexible in that themes can be modified. Organising the papers chronologically might help identify historical patterns, as well as first occurrences of techniques, things which are always good to provide a bit of perspective to research.

Hopefully I’ll have some more interesting things to show in the future. Preliminary plans are already in place to go and check out various fossils and modern specimens (I won’t say of what though yet!). If anyone wants to discuss the concept of opening up the PhD process a little more, check out the #OpenPhD feed on Twitter for discussion (there will be some at some point, hopefully!)

In the mean time, here’s a cool image of Deinonychus antirrhopus, and look, she’s happy to see you! Source.

A declaration of fossiliferous intent

Welcome! The EGU have been kind enough to absorb my old blog (link) into their wonderful new blogonetwork here. I’ll be providing the fossily/palaeoy joy, along with two others who will be discussing… Well, why don’t you head over and see! Geosphere is Matt Herod’s page, where he’ll be discussing mainstream geology (I think), and Geology for Global Development by Joel Gill – kind of speaks for itself with that title!

Followers of my old blog will be aware of my style (although more it’s just the result of the angle my face smashes into the keyboard). I like shredding into science, and getting stuck into the details, as well as trying to tell a story along side. Hopefully, this will become apparent in future posts. In fact, probably the best description of my blogging style comes from Oliver Knevitt, a conodont overlord at Leicester University (UK):

“Jon eats and he tweets and he never sleeps; he slogs and he blogs and he never stops. He calls out whackjobs and bitchslaps dodgy scientists; he rhapsodizes about dinosaurs, and he ridicules science policy. All in all, he a one man paleontology machine. So you should totally check out his blog.” (source)

I’ll take that. Hopefully, this gives you some sort of idea about what to expect here. Lots of dinosaurs, other Palaeo ponderings, and occasional drifts into the murky world of geoscience policy. The idea behind all of this is to initiate discussion. It’s the unheard voices that can often be the most [beneficially] provocative, and it’s the dialogue behind concepts and ideas that can be a core driver behind the advancement and increased rigor of science. So please comment away to your hearts delight here: question, query, prod, provoke.

Strangely, today I also start my PhD. Whoop. I’ll be investigating the Jurassic-Cretaceous boundary to see if there’s a ‘hidden’ mass extinction in terrestrial vertebrates, as well as looking in detail at some groups such as atoposaurid crocodylomorphs. This is to feed into a much larger ongoing project to reconstruct the patterns and processes of vertebrate biodiversity from their origins on land to now. Neat eh!

Mass extinctions might be scientific concepts, but we might also be thinking about them a little too deeply..

With this in mind, I figured I’d try and sort of live-blog das PhD, from day 1 to day 1000, or however long it’s going to take. The idea is to open up the PhD process, by going into what exactly a vertebrate palaeontologist does nowadays, as well as occasionally the more general aspects of PhD life. This means going into the details of the processes, not just ‘I drawed you a graph’, but ‘here’s how you can replicate this analysis 100% if you wanted, and here’s why it’s awesome/I’m doing it’. I’m still expecting this PhD to be an awesome ride, as opposed to some of the more negative stories floating around the interwebz recently, and hopefully will be able to convey this and show that doing a PhD is something pretty damn awesome. Of course, it could be *expletive deleted*, and you might just read weekly posts of “added some data, computer died, beat up undergrad, ate soup made from cold water and ketchup”, and the like, but hopefully it’ll be a bit more of a dynamic insight than these delights.

I leave you with this warning in the mean time

The rationale behind this is simple: If I’m doing something I love, why wouldn’t I want to write about it, and if it’s something I think is awesome, why wouldn’t I wouldn’t to tell everyone else about it?? I wouldn’t be doing a PhD otherwise. It’s also a neat way of keeping a record of the experience.

Some of you are probably thinking, ‘but if you open up your PhD, won’t you just get scooped on the idea you’re investigating?’ This thought has crossed my mind, but frankly, I’m not going to be doing anything that isn’t theoretically beyond anyone else’s reach anyway, as the data is all openly available, as is much of the software I’ll be using too. Naturally, I might have to keep some of the conclusions slightly secret, until I publish them in an open access journal anyway. Every publication I’m first author on in future is going to be fully available, as far as it’s possible for me to make in terms of content and data. Taxes paid by you all are allowing me to conduct this research, so I’ll be damned if a single aspect of it will be paid for again.

I’ll post weekly updates on here, and using Twitter under the #OpenPhD hash tag, when the time comes. What I hope this will achieve is some sort of dialogue were people can see not just the end result of research, but query the processes, and gain some understanding of the scientific process at the same time. And of course, opening up the discussion means that I might be able to crowd-source some valuable points of view from you great peeps! Of course, along side this will be as much Palaeo I have time to write about. Hopefully this will be once a week, but if for some reason I can’t keep up, and fossils are like crack cocaine to you, then I recommend checking out Palaeocast for some awesome Palaeo-podcasts in a project I co-run. Let thy science be done!