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Blog: Engaging Science

Visualizing Science: The Lecture I Always Wanted to Give

12/11/2018

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Post by Dan Albrecht-Malinger
The outline of an Atlantic Sturgeon, titled “Information.” The types of information (categorical, nominal, ordinal, quantitative, discrete, continuous) are outlined below it.
Schematic of the hierarchy of data types (image credit: © Dan Albrecht-Malinger, 2018)

In October of 2018, I was asked to interview for a position: Professor of Conservation, Sustainability, & GIS for a university in Virginia. I am only halfway through my PhD; under the best circumstances, I can hope to submit two or three chapters of my dissertation in the next calendar year. Defending one’s doctorate and completing a postdoc (or two) is all-but mandatory for faculty positions these days, even non-tenure track teaching professorships…so this position was assuredly out of my reach.

Because I had such negligible chances of succeeding, I threw caution to the wind and decided to give the teaching lecture that I wish I’d received as an undergraduate, and that I’d always wanted to give as a graduate student. 

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Visualizing Science: Comics make the omics more accessible

11/20/2018

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Post by Jessica Rick
A draft of the final version of a comic explaining genetic demographic reconstruction methods. Full text of the comic is provided below the final version, which is at the bottom of this blog post. This version is a comic using two rows with four frames each. That layout is quite different from the final layout - see final version at the end of the post.
One of the first drafts of my comic, which was headed in the right direction, but admittedly a bit rough (Credit: © Jessica Rick, 2018).

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Visualizing Science: Ciclid Fishes in a Feeding Frenzy

11/6/2018

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Post by Jimena Golcher-Benavides
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Fig. 1. Dietary flexibility of cichlid fishes during a feeding frenzy over juvenile clupeids. On the left, the width of the flow bars represents the number of species (species richness) within functional groups feeding on juvenile fish or present during the feeding frenzy event and on the right, the width represents the relative abundance within functional groups. Light colors represent functional groups that were present but not attacking juvenile fish; bold colors represent species that were feeding on the clupeid schools (herbivorous feeding guild is color coded in green, omnivorous in yellow and carnivorous in orange). Credit: © Jimena Golcher-Benavides, 2018
I made this figure (Fig.1) for a scientific publication or to accompany a scientific talk. My main objective with this figure was to condense observational data collected underwater during an unusual feeding frenzy event in Lake Tanganyika, East Africa.

This figure was generated using the package Alluvial (Bojanowski and Edwards 2016) in R, version 3.4.2  (R Core Team 2013).

To generate this figure, I searched “plot types in r” on google images and at first something called a “chord diagram” struck me as an attractive way to represent various categorical variables. However, after some trouble-shooting, I realized that this was not appropriate for my kind of data.

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Meet the science communicators, Edition 1: Throwing a Line to our Aquatic Ecologists

9/8/2017

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​Author: Melanie Torres, PhD candidate studying amphibians
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Aquatic research at its finest! (Image provided by: Rich Walker)
PictureMeasuring fish can be vital towards understanding aquatic systems (Image provided by: Bryan Maitland).

​Hello everyone, and welcome back to the University of Wyoming's science communication blog, Engage Laramie Science!

Today, I want to introduce some of the aspiring science communicators via an assignment we completed last week. We were instructed to interview each other and produce around a 60 second sound bite about the researcher in question and their project. The goals were to practice interviewing and learning how to present scientific research to a non-scientific audience. I personally think we did a fantastic job accomplishing those objectives!

I've embedded a couple of those clips below, and I'll be slowly adding more over the next few days. For this post, I'm introducing Rich Walker and Bryan Maitland. Both Rich and Bryan are studying various aspects of aquatic ecosystems, which include human impacts and community structure. Have a listen, and feel free to comment on their research or if you have any questions!

Cheers!!

Rich Walker 

Introduction recorded and produced by Chris Petranek.

Bryan Maitland

Introduction recorded and produced by Dan Albrecht
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