Lecturing with google Slides (Post 3: academia and chromebooks)

I'm sorry for the delay in the next instalment for my series on science and academic uses of google chromebooks. A close friend of mine passed away, and that's taken up most of my thought processes for the last week or so. Thank you very much for the response to the last post on google docs and paperpile, it was great to hear from a bunch of you via the comments, google+, and the chromeos sub-reddit. In particular, I'd like to thank the person who pointed me towards GetDataJoy as a method of coding in Python on the chromebook. I'll be doing a full write-up of that in the future. However, today's post is fairly simple and will discuss the use of google Slides for lecturing in the class room.

Preparing lectures

If you are familiar with Powerpoint and the many derivatives, then there's not really a whole lot to say about google Slides. It is simple to use for creating clean slides, with enough animations and transitions to keep the audience happy/pissed-off. I used to be an OpenOffice Impress user for all my lecturing and conference presentations, but I have been converted to google Slides for a number of reasons.

Firstly, there are helpful guides for placement of objects when you are arranging the slides. These are simple red lines which, intelligently, appear when you drag or re-size an object and let you know if you are centred or aligned with the other objects on the page.

Secondly, things just look better than compared with OpenOffice. I don't know if this is just because it's new, but I genuinely believe that the fonts and shapes are rendered better in Slides. The available transitions look great when used in moderation, although I tend to only use the 'cube' transition for section changes and leave transitions turned off for every other slide.

Thirdly, and this isn't something that I use particularly often, but I like the ability to turn up at a lecture theatre empty handed, safe in the knowledge that I can use the browser on the theatre's computer to give me my slides. Should I suffer a catastrophic loss of my laptop and/or chromebook, then this will be very useful in the future!

Student feedback and collaboration

A theme that runs through my love of using google chromebooks for my academic life is the ability to collaborate with other users. When it comes to lectures, this acts more as a feedback channel for students. Students, who opt-in, are given sharing access to my lecture slides and are then allowed to view the content in their own time.

Figure 1. For better or worse, students can add comments

If they have any questions about specific slides, they can leave comments on the side bar. At the next lecture, I am able to pull up the previous lecture's slides and work through any comments that have been left before continuing with the material. These comments also serve to help me improve the lectures for the next year's cohort. Let's call it formative assessment of my lecturing.

I am currently working on a series of lectures with another colleague, and by using Slides, we are able to directly work on the material together. This allows us to focus on what parts of the course we are giving to the students, and lowers the risk of missing parts out because we thought the other person had it covered.

Figure 2: Planning content for the students to suit all parties

Keeping the screen turned on!

During the first lecture which I presented with my chromebook, I came across a really annoying feature: chromebooks don't have an in-built feature to keep the screen on, nor do they have the ability to change the amount of time it would allow before turning off the screen. I would spend 10-15 minutes lecturing via Slides before heading over to the whiteboard to expand on an item, or work through an example. I'd get half way through the example and the chromebook would be in sleep mode, turning off the HDMI output and all. It would then take a small amount of time to come back to full working mode. Our University uses eduroam for WiFi and this is the main slow point when working on the cloud (and is currently causing me annoyance by dropping out while typing this!).

Figure 3: Keep awake button on
the button bar.

I found, through an internet search, that I was not alone in feeling this annoyance. I found a plug-in for chrome which has three settings: Default, Screen Always On, and Never Sleep. I would advise that people who want to use their chromebook to install this plug-in immediately. However, don't do as I did and leave it on "Never Sleep" when they put their chromebook back in their bag for travelling home. That didn't end well. 

Always leave them wanting more

As ever, there are things missing from Slides that I'd expect from a presentation package. Particularly, I would love to have a proper slide organiser viewpoint. Currently, slides are presented down the left hand side of the screen and are able to be organised here. This gets pretty awkward with 20+ slides that need to be re-arranged.

After writing about how much I loved Paperpile, I would love for paperpile to be available for Slides. However, this would require Slides to have Add-On's in the same way that Docs does. I find it strange that they haven't made Slides as extensible as Docs in this respect. 

Until next time

That's about all I want to say at the moment about Slides. It's a fairly basic, but very useful, addition to the google Office environment. I think I'll write about GetDataJoy in my next article, but I am open to suggestions. 

Oh! Before I go, does anyone else notice their chromebook gets really sluggish if they don't restart it after 2-3 days, crashing individual tabs, and ultimately freezing? I thought that a selling point of a chromebook was that it wouldn't do this. I'm currently using an Acer CB3-111, and trying to work out if it is on its way out and I need an upgrade (my model only has 2GB RAM), or if this is a problem that will be persistent.

Academia and chromebooks Part 2: Collaborative writing with google Docs and Paperpile

Thank you for the response to the previous post about using Google Sheets to organise a lab group. I really didn't expect to have such a high readership or engagement on the first post! That has given me motivation to carry on the series. Today's topic is Google Docs and Paperpile for collaborative writing.

Google docs for collaborative writing

There are many reasons as to why I've made the switch to Google docs for my academic writing (including the basic "I have a chromebook and it doesn't run Microsoft Word").  The main reason being that most academic writing is collaborative and therefore Google Docs is a great solution to the revision tracking and management problem.

If you work as a researcher in a University you will be aware of the high number of collaborative documents that have to be written.  I have grown very tired of the rigmarole of sending Word documents between the writers, all using different referencing packages, different styles for naming the file after revisions, and of course, different proficiencies at editing the most up to date version of the document. If there is an easy content management system, such as github, for Word documents, I've yet to see it. Google docs allows a single document to be edited by all writers at any one moment, with changes easily visible and revisions tracked.

Figure 1: Adding comments to student reports without writing it for them.

When I have a student who has to write a report, I have them start a new Google Docs document and immediately share it with my email address. That way I can keep an eye on their progress as they write it, without having to wait for them to send the first of many Word files in the early hours of the morning, which get hidden amongst all the other spam that arrives through the night. This might sound a bit 'Big Brother', however, in this case I have found that students work more on their reports if they are aware that I am keeping an eye on it.

I have to be careful to avoid writing reports for my students, and therefore, when I have a shared document with the student, I have the sharing properties set to "Can view and comment" only. With comments, I can give the student immediate feedback on their writing (shown in figure 1), and they have the option to respond, accept or (if they are bolshie), decline.

Paperpile: A reference manager for Google chrome and Docs

For a word processor to be useful for academic writing, there needs to be an easy way to incorporate a bibliography for citing other work. Over the years I have tried many different programs, from Endnote to Mendeley via Zotero, with the Mendeley being my favourite for OpenOffice work. Unfortunately, Mendeley doesn't have a Google Docs extension and therefore I had to find another option.

Figure 2: Adding a web reference to Paperpile with the Google chrome extension.

That's when I found Paperpile. This is an on-line reference manager that operates in much the same way as Mendeley. There are three parts to paperpile, the website and the extension (shown in Figure 2) in Google chrome (it is currently only available for chrome), and the Google Doc add-on. 

The Paperpile website acts as the reference manager portion of Paperpile. You sign in with your Google account, tell it where you want to store PDFs on your drive and away you go. You can manually enter information about papers, but the real power comes from the extension.  When you come across a paper that you would like to have in your reference library, you simply press the button on your tool-bar and the document is ripped of its metadata, entered into your Paperpile library and, if available, the PDF file stored to a folder in your Google drive. 

Over the years I have amassed a large reference library (and corresponding pdf folder). Paperpile had no issues when importing this in to its own library, it even has the ability to import from Mendeley while retaining any sub-folders and organisation you had.

Figure 3: Citing a document with paperpile

It is easy to cite documents using paperpile through the Google Doc add-on (shown in Figure 3), and the references are automatically listed at the end of the document (with all the standard Harvard, Chicago, etc formats that you'd expect).  The paperpile add-on also allows you to search for papers online which you don't have in your library and cite them (behind the scenes, paperpile adds the ones you use to your library).

Another great thing about paperpile is its Shared Folders. I can create a folder for each research project in my lab to act as a repository for the researchers working in that field, then they have immediate access. This is much easier than sending them email, after email, of PDFs to read, and allows them to cite the papers immediately in their documents.

I have been very impressed with Paperpile and have purchased enough licenses for my lab-group members to use it in their work. Student's have a habit of neglecting their referencing when writing reports, but through the use of google-docs and Paperpile, I have managed to improve their grades in this area. 

Imperfections: Areas that need improving

Despite giving a glowing, google-fan-boy, review of Google Docs here and to my colleagues, there are a number of imperfections and improvements that I would like to see. Firstly, and this is a really strange omission on Google Doc's part is the absence of captions for figures inside a google Document. While writing this post in Google Blogger, I can add an image and then give it a caption which is formatted and appears under the image. This doesn't, for some reason, exist in google Docs despite the common interface.

Another omission is the ability to number headings and produce a proper table of contents. Currently, I am using a third party add-on to number my headings and subheadings, which works OK except that the table of contents doesn't show the corresponding page numbers. If anyone knows of a third party add-on that does this, please let me know. 

Finally, the only criticism I have of Paperpile is the lack of an offline mode. I have seen this addressed by Paperpile, and that it is due to the design of the back-end of the database. If an offline mode was available (alongside OpenOffice and Word plugins), I could definitely see Paperpile overtaking Mendeley as the reference manager of choice. 

Next article

Thanks for reading, I'm sorry that it turned out to be quite a long post. Perhaps I should have split this in to one post for google docs, and one for paperpile. The next post will be about preparing lectures with google Slides.

Science Labs and Teaching with chromebooks (Part 1)

A new series of posts for 2016

I've decided to start a series of blog posts about my day to day life at the University of the West of Scotland where I am Research Theme Leader for Ultrasound Imaging. The main focus of these posts will be the use of a chromebook for Academic and scientific work. The reasoning behind this is to disprove the, false, notion that chromebooks are merely devices for browsing the internet and social networking.

I currently use an Acer CB11 chromebook, it's not the most flashy of devices but it does most of everything that I require. I dabbled with crouton for a few weeks to get a full linux desktop on the chromebook, however, I didn't use it enough to justify the space it took up and therefore I powerwashed the device back to the standard chromeOS. These blog posts will try and stick as close to a standard chromebook as possible.

I have a rough idea of the topics that I will cover in upcoming posts (which will start properly after this list!), and I am open to suggestions and comments from readers regarding their use, positive or negative of chromebooks in any academic environment. Upcoming topics include:

• Running a lab-group with Google Sheets 
• Academic writing with Google Docs and Paperpile
• Presenting lectures with Google Slides
• Project planning with Gantt

Running a lab-group with Google Sheets 

I currently run a small research group which focusses on Ultrasound Imaging, and developing high resolution probes for biomedical imaging and NDT measurements. I currently have 2 PhD students and 2 undergraduates working for me. In the near future I am recruiting 3 post-docs, and will have 4 visiting students working in the laboratory. Each person working in my group has their own research project which they work on autonomously, with overlap to other projects to install a group dynamic and teamwork.

I was looking for a simple method of keeping track on the research and work carried out in the lab-spaces, preferably with a method to produce reports or summaries of outputs and issues. In the past I have designed an SQL database with front-end to gather this information, but I found that this took up too much time in the debugging and design stages. Google Sheets provided a simple solution which the lab members have found easy to adjust to.

Figure 1: Google Sheet set-up for lab recording

Instead, a google Sheet was created with five, self explanatory columns (Figure 1) and a form is used as the front-end (shown in figure 2) All lab members are advised to keep the link as a bookmark in their browsers. At the end of each day spent in the lab, the user visits the form and enters their data. This has been designed to take no more than 20 seconds, and is to be used as a shorthand summary of their formal lab-books. I have designed the form such that the member selects their name from a drop-down list, this reduces their data-entry time and formalises their name as the identifier for their data. 

Figure 2: Form presented to the user

Once their content is submitted, the spreadsheet is automatically populated. Since the spreadsheet is hosted by google-docs, I have access to this data anywhere that I have internet access (via the google Sheets app on Android, or my chromebook).

However, the main benefit of using this method is the ability to have a worksheet for each member of the lab inside the google Sheets file. In each worksheet, a pivot table is used to create a live report of their work. Some of my lab members have to fill out a monthly report for their Visa requirements, and the ability to send them a monthly PDF of their pivot worksheet as a lab progress report is a real time saver. 

As part of the running of the lab group, I hold weekly meetings with the whole group to keep track of what is happening. Using a chromebook to have immediate access to these pivot tables for each lab member has been very useful for engaging with the quieter members of the group.

Inside the main spreadsheet, I have my own private columns where I can add notes and tags (project names, other supervisors etc) to expand the usefulness of the data. With this supplementary data, I have my own set of pivot tables that allows me to pull out entries relating to a body of work or project (or indeed, time period), allowing me to keep better track of what is happening in my lab group.

This method doesn't use any special software or add-ons (indeed it would work on any computer with access to google docs), and I would recommend it as a free method of logging your lab member's work. The benefit of using a chromebook is the 10 hour battery life for when I am in the lab all day and away from my office, with the spreadsheet available as an offline file for where the WiFi is patchy (hello 1970's architecture!).

In the next post, I'll talk about how I engage with my student's academic writing with Google Docs, and the use of the wonderful Paperpile app as a reference manager and citation tool.

Faith in open source software tested to the limit.

I'm a big supporter of open source software, I've used linux as my main operating system for the last 10 years (if not more). At work, as a scientist, I've made use of the large catalogue of scientific software and tools on offer to Linux users. I've always been a staunch supporter of open source over propriety software, recommending people seek out the alternatives before parting with cash for mainstream solutions.

However, over the last few years I've been noticing an increasing problem that I think needs addressed before there is mainstream adoption of Linux as a desktop solution. Namely: Brilliant software ruined by less than optimal upgrade cycles. More regularly than I would like, I update my system and then find that software that I base my work (and hobby) life on no longer works.

Scilab

Scilab is a mathematical software package. I've used it since I was an undergraduate physics student (graduating in 2005) as an alternative to Matlab. It formed the basis of my PhD thesis work in to signal processing and analysis, and I even delved in to controlling hardware with it's SciCos modules. Now however, I need to find an alternative because, after updating my system, Scilab's push to a new underlying API has been at the expense of being able to plot data on intel hardware!

No longer can I read simple data in and plot graphs. This is the simplest use of Scilab, and one that formed the basis of many images in my thesis and papers. I could understand if it was obscure hardware that the graphical library didn't work with, but seriously, Intel!??!? 

Mendeley

Mendeley is a wonderful tool for sorting out academic papers and keeping a track of citations. In a lot of ways, I would still recommend it. However, today, while trying to make headway in writing a few articles, I have found a very serious bug that makes it all but useless for its task: Mendeley is unable to insert citations in to OpenOffice. 

The developers have known about this bug since April, other updates and bugfixes have been issues, but this seems to be less than urgent from their point of view. From an academic point of view, I am no longer able to keep a dynamically updated bibliography section at the bottom of my paper as I write it. I can't even edit the existing reference list.

JackD

Ah Jack, the godsend for Linux Audio, which worked brilliantly for a good number of ages before some bright spark decided that it should go the same was as Pulse Audio (ugh), and upgrade to JackD2. Without warning, the wonderful multitrack studio software studio Ardour is unable to export audio without disabling all audio plugins (EQ, reverb, compressers etc). Fine if you want to render dull, unmixed studio audio, but that then misses the whole point of what a Studio environment is for.

Why?

It seems that developers of high profile open source software want to be seen to be staying ahead of competition, and by making use of the free nature of the upgrade cycles afforded by open source, rush out these upgrades without any proper testing. "The audience will test it" seems to be the mantra, forgetting that there is a reason that the community should make use of Nightly Builds (new stuff, not tested), and Stable builds (more stable than nightly, but needs more testing), and Release Candidate (stable as fuck, as good as the existing sofware but with new and WORKING features). 

Unfortunately, we are unwittingly being upgraded to Stable builds rather than Release Candidates and these problems arise.

Right, I'm away to find alternatives, until they break too.

Six months on.

Last post here was when I wrote about getting my new job. I'm now 6 months in to the position and things are going really well. I've been given a lot of independence on my research, responsibility for a laboratory area, students and confidence to apply for funding and seek out collaborations.

In general, my field is high frequency ultrasound. I find myself doing a lot of imaging  with the probes we're developing and fabricating, mainly of dental samples with a view to detecting and measuring acid erosion at high frequency. I still do a little bit of manipulation of cells, but not as much as I would like to.

Career changes

A couple of weeks ago I visited my PhD supervisor, and informal mentor during my last Post-doc position, to have a chat about work and how things have panned out for me since leaving Dundee. We both agree that leaving was the best thing I could have done for my career (and mental well being, but more about that at a later date).

The research group I now work in is a very small group, with two PhD students, myself as a Post-doc RF, a deputy Group leader/lecturer and my line manager who is also the group leader. The recession hasn't been kind to non-red-brick universities in the UK, and as such there has been a lull over the last few years for research funding at UWS. Ultimately, my position was created to re-start biomedical ultrasound imaging at UWS with a view to bring in funding to increase the group. No pressure then.

Suffice to say, the last year at Dundee University was the worst period of my adult life, and one that I'm in no rush to repeat. However, I did meet a few new friends who got me through it and kept me sane/alive. I owe them more than I could possibly say.

NYC

The major event in my work calendar, and one that has been looming since April, is a two and a half month visit to New York to do research with a leading Ultrasound group. In the first month of this new job, my boss recommended that I apply through SUPA for a travel grant to collaborate. In my last position, these opportunities were never brought forward. While I was allowed to travel a bit, my boss was of the opinion that he would deal with grants and funding, we do the work. His work. Looking back, this is not a healthy way to train young scientists who want a career in Research.

Writing a grant application for the first time is a daunting experience. Project costs, times, aims, goals, outcomes, targets have to be designed and, most importantly, sold to the judging committee. I'm not that good at 'blowing my own trumpet', something that comes from my Scottish genetics, and also from three years of having my confidence in my academic abilities pummelled in to the ground as an RA at Dundee.

Anyway's, it turns out that my application was better than I thought it was and I leave in a couple of weeks. I will be staying in Brooklyn and working in Mid-town Manhattan. I'm equal part excited and terrified.

Excitement versus terror

Excitement comes from working in a highly regarded laboratory, in one of the busiest cities in the world, meeting new people, and living in a different country for the first time in my life. Terror comes from much the same places, and the added fear that comes with being separated from my family and support network for a prolonged period of time. My wife is able to visit for 3 weeks in September, but for the other 8 weeks, I'll be flying solo in to the unknown.

I promise to post regular updates here during my visit, hopefully using it as an academic travelogue.

A new beginning

I really that I seem to start every blog post here with an apology for not posting recently. The last 8 months at work hasn't been the most positive time of my life, and while I have written plenty posts, I haven't felt able to publish them.In short, things fell apart on a personal and professional level in the lab group where I work. That is a whole blog post on its own, but one that has to wait a month or so before I can make it public.

Then, my wife and I changed our living arrangements somewhat to try and stabilise our finances, with me living and working in Dundee through the week then going home to Paisley at the weekends where she was living full time. To go from living with someone for 7 years to sleeping in a single bed and only seeing them at the weekends is, to quote a friend of mine, a "shitty situation".

But, now, it's all over. Three weeks ago I was informed that I had been offered a Research Fellow position at the University of West of Scotland in Paisley. This means: I'm going home. I can live with my wife. I will only need to have one flat to pay for. I can see my close friends more often again. I can be closer to my sister, brother in law and nephew.

And, of relevance to this blog, I can do my own research. While I still have a boss to report to, the brief of the research position is so very wide/vague/general that I can explore things that interest me. Quantitative high frequency ultrasound for biomedical and life sciences applications, but over on the engineering/physics side of that interface. I'm returning to work that I did during my PhD in to teeth and tooth decay detection, but also expanding in to the world of breast cancer. Hell, it looks like I might even be setting up my own dictyostelium lab.

The group I'm moving to work with is the same group I started my ultrasound 'career' in for the first year of my Phd, before my supervisor left to go to Dundee. This means there's lots of friendly faces there for when I start in January.

I am currently equal parts excitement and sheer terror, but all in all, this is a good thing.

What I do for a living (Part Two)

In the last post, I wrote about the biological aspect of my work and now I'm going to get more physic(al?). I trained as a physicist, and see myself more as an engineer (which is really just applied physics). My salary comes from a large EPSRC (that's the government research council for engineering and physical sciences) grant  for a project known as Sonotweezers. The grant was worth roughly £2m and split between four universities (Dundee, Glasgow, Southampton and Bristol), but being a lowly post-doc, I don't see much of that £2m - so don't get the wrong idea!

The aim of the Sonotweezers project is to research and develop electronically controlled devices which use ultrasound waves to manipulate particles and objects. Before explaining what I do with them, I'll tell you a bit about how it works. All sound, from the stuff you can hear to the higher frequencies that bother dogs and above (say, for looking at your unborn baby), is just pressure. And, by definition, pressure is just force divided by an area of surface. So, if you have pressure, you have force.

Clear as mud? Ok, consider a deep sea diver. The pressure of the sea down below is much higher than at the surface, and can result in a crushing of the diver, hence James Cameron, while commercialising human tragedy, had a specially created submarine that could withstand large pressure. This pressure on the diver is uniform all around him, pushing him to his core.

Pressures on a deep-sea diver giving rise to forces.

Now, consider what would happen if on his right hand side the pressure was higher than the left. He'd still be getting crushed, but more so on his right hand side. Provided that he's floating down there, he'd find himself being pushed more on his right hand side. This is an unbalanced force,and by Newton's equation of Force being mass times acceleration, he'd accelerate away from the higher pressure on his right.

So, in our laboratory we create non-uniform pressure fields around objects to move them. We do this with ultrasound because the higher frequencies mean the objects we can move are much smaller than if we did it with audible sounds. People have used lower frequencies to levitate objects in the past, useful research like floating ants and fish.

Ultrasound standing waves giving rises to forces on cells

I use ultrasound quite like that picture there, to push cells around when they want to move somewhere else. This allows us to get a measurement of how much force the cell is able to produce, and that helps us better understand the motions that I spoke about last time. It's mainly an engineering job, since the physics are understood, but getting them to work with biology is the main problem.

Ok, this was a bit longer than I thought, so there's going to be a third (and possibly final) part of this where I'll tell you about the computing that I do. There will be some more pretty pictures (perhaps prettier as a computer will have drawn them...)

Hope you're enjoying reading these, and again, happy to answer questions.

\0/ SCIENCE.

What I do for a living... (part one)

I have decided that this blog has been under utilised, and have therefore set a weekly alarm on my phone to write a post. I'm going to try and keep them strictly non-my-music related and hopefully more science, tech and life related.

To get started, I thought I'd answer a question that I get asked a lot when I'm on tour: "what is it that you do for a living?".  In short, I am a post doctoral Research assistant at the University of Dundee. I have a degree in Physics, and am a Doctor of Engineering in Medical Devices (that's just a fancy PhD).

The long version, and I'm going to do this in two parts, is that I am investigating the motility forces that arise during early embryo development. We use the chicken as our model system, which is cool as you can remove it from the egg when it's only 10,000 cells or so and actually watch it develop up until the heart starts beating.

Before I started this job, I didn't really think about embryology. I mean, I knew the mechanics of mummy and daddy having special hugs because they are very much in love etc, but hadn't thought of it in smaller terms. When the egg (talking cells now, not calcium chicken containers) is fertilized it subsequently divides in to two identical cells, then four, then eight etc. After a while you have many thousands of identical cells in a small blob and something strange happens. The cells start to, for some unknown reason, differentiate in to different cell types and some even move in to specific locations. Very soon a body axis (giving a left and right hand side) is formed and the Embryo develops in to a living thing.

Dave's handy guide to embryogenesis

It is this transition from randomly placed cells to ordered body morphology that I am interested in. There are many questions that we want to answer, and many more to be asked. How do the cells generate forces to move? How do they know/learn where to move to? How and why does it go wrong?

An embryo is a very complex system, and therefore to research these questions we use a simpler model system called Dictyostelium discoideum, dicty for short. Dicty is what is known as a slime mould. Under normal conditions, they exist as single cell amoebas in the soil feeding off bacteria and going about their day.

However, under starvation something completely different happens. The cells secrete a chemical signal through their environment which tells them all to "Assemble!", and they come together to form a multicellular organism called a slug. This is made up of around 10,000 cells, and moves around like a real slug (hence its name). The slug moves towards light in the hunt for food, and when it can go no further, it transforms in to a plant like structure. Some of the cells die to produce the stalk, while others go in to a vegetative state in the fruiting body to wait for food. When conditions become favorable, the fruiting body bursts and the cells start their single celled lives again.

This life cycle and its transitions from single cells to multicellular organisms is just one of the reasons that dicty are interesting from a developmental biology point of view. Other reasons include the ease of genetically modifying the cells for learning about the internal workings, the biological machinery the cell uses to move is very well conserved from an evolution point of view. This means that the method in which dicty cells move is the same as many, including mammals, cells. Therefore, learn about dicty movement, learn and infer about many many more. Which brings us nicely back to why I use dicty. Oh, and it naturally lives in the soil so it's happy at room temperature making it easy for a non-biologist such as myself to use.

That's the biology side of what I do, I part two I'll tell you about the physics and engineering that I do with these squishy things.

I'm happy to answer any questions and actively encourage it.

SCIENCE! \0/

That was it.

The viva was even more stressful than I could ever have imagined. The day started around 9pm the night before as I couldn't sleep at all. No amount of counting sheep, hot milk or relaxation could knock me out.

Anyways, I took the train in to Glasgow and had a latte in a cafe in order to try and relax, and also to go over my opening statement again. After this I took a walk up to the university and waited to be called in.

After a wee while the covener came out and collected me and so it began. Four hours of questioning and defense later I was back in the foyer waiting on their descision. Unfortunately by this time it was lunch time, and where I was sitting meant a steady flow of old colleagues passing by. Each mentioning that they hadn't seen me in a wee while, and asking how my viva went.

The truth at this point thoughb was that I didn't have a clue. The external examiner had done a very thorough job of going through my thesis, checking equations, figures, references and general science. This meant that while I had concentrated on knowning my own contribution, I had to be on my toes when it came to other peoples as well. Unfortunately in places I fell down, and in one instance had to admit that I just did not know the answer. This was one of the times through the viva that I felt that the examiner was just going to put down his pen and say "i think we'll just stop here".

After 40 stressful minutes I was called back in and made aware of their recommendations. This is when I was told that, yes, there is still a wee bit work to be done and a few corrections to be done, my thesis is good. And that was it.

Dr. Dave.

A nice relaxing next few days I think while I get used to not having the viva hanging over my head. Yeah, I still have some stuff to do, but everything thats been suggested is stuff that I've considered in the past, but just not expanded and put in the thesis.

And at least the dinner and drinks after the ordeal were good, with much laughter had.

Punching kittens

Apologies for not posting yesterday, I'm sure you'll survive though. The weekend was pretty fun all round. Saturday night contained a party at my bosses house, which was the first social engagement of my new job. It was pretty nerve wracking on the build up, but in the end it turned out just fine. Had a few drinks, amazing seafood (including oysters which I fucking love). Sunday involved a trip to Greenock and Glasgow to visit parents and then play a gig in the evening.

Roscoe Vacant was playing as well which is always fun to see. There were also a few folk who turned up to see me play which is always nice, even more so when it's a pretty impromptu gig with very little time to promote properly.

Anyways, I'm not going to have a full scale rant as I'm in a pretty good mood today. Instead, here's the first (probably of many) list of things that are too easy to rant about.

• Local bands singing in American Accents - You're from Barrhead/Castlemilk/etc for fucks sake
• Homeopathy - The feeling you get when you are standing in a room of people is just that, feelings, it's not fucking energy. You keep your diluted to buggery herbs, I'll keep my "unimaginative" but empirical facts and proof.
• The Sun newspaper, doesn't need that much more to be said. She's mourning, and as a result nothing will ever be enough, but you already know that and as a result are milking it for more sales of you're shite-wipe-rag.
• Bad pop-music
• Early morning starts