Hey folks! Here’s an Atta colombica leaf-cutter ant .svg I made. It’s available here: https://github.com/C-Rockenbach/images, and free for use under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license (attribution, non-commercial).

I hope it’s helpful to other folks who needed a nice .svg of lifelike ant.

In this article of academics share their methods for keeping up with the literature. 

I’ve been told by other scientists, including my advisor, this is how they do it as well: abstract, figures, discussion, then backtracking to the methods section if you don’t understand or question something.

As a student, I find myself either 1. reading and remembering nothing - the words go in and right back out again, or 2. spending a hours reading while taking detailed notes. It aids retention and searchability/review but who has time for that?? Highlighting doesn’t seem to aid my retention. 

I like the idea proposed in the article of having a reason in mind for reading the paper, such as experimental design or seeing how their results compare to your lab’s work. For the majority of papers I read, I expect it will be the broader “how do these results fit in with the body of evidence I’ve read so far”. 

Perhaps a mind map will help? I tend to look down on mind maps as a bit of a time sink, but maybe it’s a good way of organizing information in a non-linear way, which findings often are.

Update Aug 2020: Now I use MS To Do

As a graduate student I couldn’t afford the iPhones with more storage, as a dance teacher (how I’ve been supporting myself lately), I need more phone storage for music and dance recordings. I had to sell my iPhone SE (RIP), and buy an android that had more storage. This forced me to re-evaluate Things 3, which I still think is a solid task manager. I like to be able to see my task lists on my phone as well as my laptop, so I switched over to MS To Do.

The good news is that it can do everything I wrote about Wunderlist - due dates, reminder dates/times, lists and sublists (BUT - watch out for converting a task to a list, this can make you lose sub-tasks and is super frustrating). You can collapse lists you don’t need all the time (like for someday/maybe items from Getting Things Done - I’ll consider a GTD post as I’m a real convert). 

I’m very happy with it and recommend it as a full-featured, cross-platform free task organizer.

Like lists? Me too! Until now I have been maintaining my various to-do lists in Evernote, ranking them by priority and due date manually, and then transferring them to my accomplished goals page as I complete them to track my productivity. Wunderlist automates this process by archiving your completed tasks, organized by their respective lists. 

For instance, you can create several to-do list folders (I have “work” and “personal”), then organize your lists within. If you’re a fan of using Covey’s quadrant system (https://www.usgs.gov/humancapital/documents/TimeManagementGrid.pdf), you can make a Quadrant I, II, III and IV list. I do a  simplified version, where I have priorities A (urgent or important), B (less urgent, medium importance), C (low importance - stuff that I should do, but isn’t going to help me finish my PhD). What I love about Wunderlist is the productivity tracking, because of the auto-archiving of completed tasks on their respective lists, I can track if I am spending my time on important tasks (my Priority A list) or if I have fallen once again into the bottomless pit of productive procrastination (Priority C). 

Another perk is that it tracks due dates for you (with notifications!), so I don’t have to keep manually adding reminders into my google calendar/ical when things are due. Better yet, while I am seeking to maintain my focus on my “priority A” tasks, priority C tasks can get upgraded when they become urgent, (like paying bills) and the “daily” and “weekly” auto-created & updated smart lists within Wunderlist make it so I won’t drop the ball on the less important stuff either.

Wunderlist also has other features, you can include list notes (so far, I’ve added a lot of hyperlinks this way) and also share tasks with others (I haven’t used this yet, but it could make things like planning a workshop with a group of fellow grad students much easier to coordinate). There’s also mobile apps and it can work offline - handy for when you’re at the back of the grocery store with no signal or field site. Finally, there’s customizable backgrounds, which is just a really nice addition considering how often I will look at the app throughout the day. 

One feature it’s missing that would be awesome is a google-calendar/ical integration so I could visually display my project deadlines (or self-deadlines) directly from Wunderlist. When planning out my PhD projects, I usually have both open right now and look from week to week, but if I could have a Wunderlist-due dates calendar, it would save me a bit time and effort.

I’ve only been using it a week, but as a productivity and organizational nerd, I’m very happy with the product so far.

Discovered via Retraction Watch https://retractionwatch.com/

Papers you start and don’t finish wait on your “to-do someday” list and “groan at you”, secretly stealing your energy from what you are actually working on at the moment. This article advocates working on them in small bits to “keep them alive” so you don’t get stalled out. Anyone agree with the author about a time when you ended up revising when you meant to just review it to remember where you left off resume your writing? One tip from the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity to keep momentum is to take really good notes every time you’re about to leave off for the day or the weekend. Then you can jump back in more easily.

Gross syntactic errors in promotional material provide an almost infallible indicator of spamhood in a journal. Not many journals send unsolicited email to advertise themselves, but the few promotional emails I occasionally get from proper journals are always at least literate.

Geoffrey K. Pullum, http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=35002 

Planet Money/Undiscovered talk to Dr. Sheila Patek and discuss the costs and benefits of science

One colony mapped!

It only took me 1.5 field days, but I have fully mapped one colony. My original count of 9 nests blossomed into a robust 18 as I dug my way through the bracken and spent a lot of time staring at the ground and mumbling to myself. 

Mental dialogue (although sometimes aloud):

Is that just a group of ants, or is it really a trail? Ok, it’s trail and it goes into this side of the clump of bracken, but why don’t I see it coming out?! Oh, right. Another nest is tucked away in there. *Add a flag, add to map, take measurements*

OR

Eh... it’s a trail but it’s less than the threshold. *Makes note in fieldnotebook*.

OR (my personal favorite)

There was a really strong trail back there, WHERE did they GO?! *Eats another piece of chocolate to raise bloodsugar/ward off the “hangry”, maybe get some dopamine flowing and counteract frustration*

Really though, as frustrating as mapping colonies can be, digging through the bracken and seeing lots of cool spiders beats sitting at my desk staring at a screen all day. I wouldn’t trade it. That said, I’m really hoping the next colony I map will be smaller because I can’t afford to spend 15days on mapping alone.  I have to move on to pilot tests and then actual experiments. Time will tell...

(I apologize for the poor photo quality, I don’t have a macro lens this season and my iPhone isn’t great at it).

The National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity is focused on the principle that we should not only survive academia but thrive in academia. I attended their “Tenure and Time Management” workshop in January, and although I was reluctant to commit 3 hours (because that’s how badly I needed this workshop), it has had a huge impact on my productivity and outlook. I had no idea this NCFDD support system existed, much less that I already had a membership through my University. If you’re tired of the stressful cycle of promising yourself this semester will be different, that you will make progress on your research/writing in addition to teaching duties, but then break comes and you’ve got nothing to show for your efforts, and are too exhausted to get that paper out over Christmas like you said you would, then feel guilty but do that whole cycle gain the next semester, please take a look at their site. 

They send out weekly emails on Sunday evening called the Monday Motivator. This week’s (July 3rd, 2017) was called “Do you REALLY want to be a professor?” and focused on a possible self-sabotaging reason one might be lagging in publishing: because you’ve not taken the time to ensure this is the best place for you. Are you really committed to it? Or would you be happier doing something else? I found it to be really well-written and thought-provoking, and it contained helpful exercises to help you delve into your experiences that drew you to academia and re-evaluate if this is still the right choice. I especially like the discussion of “escape fantasies” in which one dreams of leaving it all behind in periods of stress or disappointment. While stressed out during exam weeks in undergrad I used to check my bank account and the cost of a plane ticket to Ireland. Just knowing that I had the money to go, but was choosing to stay reminded me that I wasn’t a stick floating down the stream of life, this wasn’t “happening to me”, I was deciding what to do with my life. I owned it, and it helped.

Their site also contains helpful webinars that you can take or re-take anytime (every semester needs a plan, the art of saying “no”, and many more),  as well as numerous other resources, like how to begin a daily writing practice to break out of the binge and bust cycle of academic productivity. If your institution doesn’t have a membership yet, why not ask them? NCFDD has a workshop available for free about “making the ask”, as well as individual pricing (although $240 a year for grad students made me exceedingly grateful to Rutgers for having an institutional membership, if it maintains your sanity, increases your productivity and costs less than a conference, maybe that’s not a bad price? https://www.facultydiversity.org/join

Dr. Robinson’s lab studies ants, with some really cool work on wood ants  - you can find their publications via the link. Dr. Robinson is incredibly knowledgeable about wood ants and is a collaborator on my wood ant projects. She recently co-edited a book about wood ants, which is an extremely good resource if you’re keen on learning more about them and how they are a vital part of the ecological community - http://www.cambridge.org/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9781107048331. Her PhD student, Dominic Burns is running some really cool experiments at the Longshaw Estate right now, you can follow his project via @Domburnsburns on twitter.

Wood ants 2017

I am at the start of the final field season of my Ph.D. Since my past plan (2015, I think it was) to blog every day was unrealistic, I plan to update this blog about once a week. For starters, I’m sharing some info in another post about the lab I’m collaborating with here in the UK, in case you want to learn more about wood ants and the studies that have been done on them, that’s a great place to start.

I’ve created flags to route folks to this blog if they happen across one of my study colonies at the Longshaw Estate. I’m a curious person and I know I would want to know more if I saw flags, feeders and trail blockages on my walk so I hope these flags lead people to my blog where they can learn about my project.

 The basic questions I’m trying to answer are:

Do wood ants clear more “important” trails within their network faster or more completely than less “important” trails? 

Do ants use formic acid and physical tugging to clear trails? 

If you read this and think, “Gee, why would anyone care about that?”, I’d like you to take a second to think about how many networks you have used today. I know you’re using at least one right now (the internet, possibly via a mobile = 2 networks). There’s also power grids, transport networks, which you probably use frequently. Although there is a track record for bettering our models and applications by using animal behavior (check out ant colony optimization algorithms - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_colony_optimization_algorithms) I can’t say that my work is based on using ant network features to better our own networks. It’s not: I’m doing basic research, not applied. But I can say that we couldn’t have launched stuff into space or developed antibiotics without first understanding gravity and the idea that infection is spread via microorganisms, not foul odors (side note: ”The Ghost Map” about the 1854 Cholera epidemic in London by Steven Johnson was a particularly good read). Every advancement we enjoy started out because someone asked: “why?” and tested their ideas in a methodical way. Later, what they learned was turned into an application we could use. Dr. Sheila Patek outlines why basic research is so important in this <4min clip:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hb0hxuM-TeM.

I’ll be adding more about my project as I go along. Please use my questions page if you want to know something I haven’t shared yet http://field-biology.tumblr.com/ask.

Wunderlist was bought out by Microsoft and is now being discontinued to be replaced by a Microsoft app, To-do. To-do has some great features, but I decided to go a different route and invested in Things 3 (https://culturedcode.com/things/). It has all the features I loved from Wunderlist, plus a few more (an Evening subdivider to separate your later tasks from your earlier ones, as well as a freakishly awesome Reminders integration via Siri on iPhone that can add tasks to your Things inbox by speaking to Siri). I liked that it was a one-one time payment to purchase each app (Mac, ipad and iPhone each cost seperately) unlike the Todoist app (https://en.todoist.com/) which has a free and subscription-based premium version. For Things 3, the Today view is sorted manually, which I’m finding is actually quite handy because I put priority A items at the top and work my way down. One thing it doesn’t have that I wish it did (and yes, I made a feature request) is a way of including “time to complete” and having that add up within each Project and Today view, so it’d be easier to create a reasonable time plan. As someone pointed out, this won’t solve the issue of underestimation (hint: multiply your estimate by 2.5 to create a realistic one), but I still think it’d be a really useful feature. Another is that my “pending” tag doesn’t shunt them to a separate page - off of my today page. They still show up on Today’s “all” page, although you can look on a tag-based page named “pending” within Today.

Like lists? Me too! Until now I have been maintaining my various to-do lists in Evernote, ranking them by priority and due date manually, and then transferring them to my accomplished goals page as I complete them to track my productivity. Wunderlist automates this process by archiving your completed tasks, organized by their respective lists. 

For instance, you can create several to-do list folders (I have “work” and “personal”), then organize your lists within. If you’re a fan of using Covey’s quadrant system (https://www.usgs.gov/humancapital/documents/TimeManagementGrid.pdf), you can make a Quadrant I, II, III and IV list. I do a  simplified version, where I have priorities A (urgent or important), B (less urgent, medium importance), C (low importance - stuff that I should do, but isn’t going to help me finish my PhD). What I love about Wunderlist is the productivity tracking, because of the auto-archiving of completed tasks on their respective lists, I can track if I am spending my time on important tasks (my Priority A list) or if I have fallen once again into the bottomless pit of productive procrastination (Priority C). 

Another perk is that it tracks due dates for you (with notifications!), so I don’t have to keep manually adding reminders into my google calendar/ical when things are due. Better yet, while I am seeking to maintain my focus on my “priority A” tasks, priority C tasks can get upgraded when they become urgent, (like paying bills) and the “daily” and “weekly” auto-created & updated smart lists within Wunderlist make it so I won’t drop the ball on the less important stuff either.

Wunderlist also has other features, you can include list notes (so far, I’ve added a lot of hyperlinks this way) and also share tasks with others (I haven’t used this yet, but it could make things like planning a workshop with a group of fellow grad students much easier to coordinate). There’s also mobile apps and it can work offline - handy for when you’re at the back of the grocery store with no signal or field site. Finally, there’s customizable backgrounds, which is just a really nice addition considering how often I will look at the app throughout the day. 

One feature it’s missing that would be awesome is a google-calendar/ical integration so I could visually display my project deadlines (or self-deadlines) directly from Wunderlist. When planning out my PhD projects, I usually have both open right now and look from week to week, but if I could have a Wunderlist-due dates calendar, it would save me a bit time and effort.

I’ve only been using it a week, but as a productivity and organizational nerd, I’m very happy with the product so far.

Wondering what those author indexes mean on google scholar? They are ways to measure how productive the author is, and how much they are impacting their field, but why are there so many and how do they relate to each other? This site explains with some examples.

Ants on a log? Ants IN a log! A bivouac of Eciton hamatum army ants (a mobile colony they make out of their own bodies). Helen (@HelenMcCreery) and I were setting up our bridge experiment when all the ants decided it was time to return to the colony (yay!).

The scheduling headache of getting 4 academics in the same room at the same time. Laugh because it’s funny, cry because it’s true.

This book changed my outlook completely. Many graduate students are perfectionists, myself included. This book explains how perfectionism and procrastination, while seemingly at odds, often go hand-in-hand. It’s also an easy read with anecdotes that keep it from feeling preachy or accusatory.