Category Archives: Artsy

The Biophysical Effects of Heavy Water – My Defense Presentation

An icon for open science

Some of you may have seen this picture I created in 2010.

I’m quite fond of it. I originally created it for a Science Commons t-shirt contest, which I did not win (but was told it was close, but probably not with this image). Regardless I’ve been using it ever since as my go to open science icon. I even put it in my #Scifund challenge proposal on Rockethub.

Well I realized that I haven’t been very sharing or caring with regards to this picture. That’s not intentional of course, as I don’t think there is anything that I wouldn’t be willing to share with someone unless I am eating. So here is the .png. Unfortunately I can’t upload the original .ai file, but I can upload that to figshare or something. So if you are interested in playing around with the original, I’ll upload it.

Feel free to use this image as you see fit regardless but just add a “Thanks Ant,” “Thanks IheartAnthony,” “IheartAnthony’s image. Do you?” or “Thanks @thescienceofant” to your remix or your distribution. I’ll be just fine with that! Oh and do send me a link to your remixed work. I’d love to see where you are using this or what you’ve done with it!

#juniorlab Lecture 5 #sciencescribe RC circuits

imageI’m really enjoying taking lecture notes as a sketch note. Steve actually thinks it is better than regular notes and I’m starting to agree. Actually several people have expressed interest in learning how to sketch note for class notes, and have commented that it looks like it is better for absorbing information. My only concern would be is it useful when you have to come back to it later?

Anyways today’s lecture was about RC Circuits and the notes are above. There is a small error:

f_{c}=RC/2\pi should be f_{c}=2\pi/RC

#juniorlab Lecture 4: @labview part 2 #sciencescribe

image
Lecture by Steve Koch, illustrated by Anthony Salvagno (me!).

I need to take better pictures of these sketch notes. Today I had to use my phone to take the picture and I guess it’s alright, but not optimal.

Anyway it should be noted that this isn’t the entire lecture. The class began with a recap of the last homework assignment which was to live tweet a colloquium. I lead the discussion so I was not able to sketchnote the first half of the class, but the discussion led to some labview coding and I was able to sketch that. We talked about data acquisition today and how to improve data acquisition.

So the content is a little less, but I think the note is better because of it.

Aside: I really like using tweet notation in my titles because my notebook posts autopublish to twitter. However, for some reason I find it really strange that I do this. I don’t really know why. Maybe because to my visitors not from twitter (and there are a lot) it must seem like a foreign language.

#sciencescribe via Twitter! Lightning: Physics and Protection systems by Marvin E Morris

If you can’t guess what happened by the title then here it is: I sketch noted a seminar that was explained over twitter. That means I wasn’t present for the talk, but there was such a flood of information that I was able to effectively organize a sketch note from the experience. I was quite amazed and I decided to do this just minutes before the talk began!

In the junior lab that I’m teaching, I assigned the students to all sign up for twitter and then go to the Friday Physics colloquium and tweet the seminar. Of course they all groaned, but I get the feeling they liked the talk and appreciated the experience.

The point was to show them first hand how useful collaborative learning can be. Each person will only be able to remember certain aspects of the discussion and will automatically be tuned into whatever their interests are. Through Twitter, their collective knowledge can be assembled and they can all learn from each other.

The experience was quite valuable. They actively engaged in the conversation, with each other, with me, and frequently tweeted the things they were most interested in. If you are interested in learning about lightning you can see the feed for a few days here: Lightning at PandA. (I’ll need to figure out how to save tweets long term somewhere, again any help is appreciated.)

And now without further ado, the sketch note you all came to this post for:

Lightning: Physics and Protection Systems by Marvin E Morris and illustrated by Anthony Salvagno (me!).

#sciencescribe Time-lapse chemical microscopy using intracellular chemical nanosensors

Talk by Kirk Rector, illustration by Anthony Salvagno (me!).

This sketch note was almost disastrous. I had ambitiously decided I was ready to begin sketch noting scientific talks that were more than just conceptual. I actually thought about how I could capture this over the entire talk, because I knew at some point there would be data and analysis and I didn’t think I could capture those concepts visually.

Then the talk began and things started flowing. But I hit a snag when the speaker blew through the introduction rather quickly and I started missing key concepts. Then eventually I hit a mental block and couldn’t properly translate what was being said into images.

But I powered through it and created this masterpiece full of subtle mistakes. Hope you are able to learn from this talk, which was kinda interesting. The speaker had developed a technique to use fluorophores as a pH sensor which I found quite intriguing. Oddly enough, the design of this sketch note is light years more advanced than the design technology they used for their detection. Some of the pictures they used looked poorly photoshopped and these were images they were acquiring from their own camera!

It was interesting nonetheless.

#sciencescribe Junior Lab Lecture 2: Intro to Labview

Lecture #2 Intro to Labview by Steve Koch, illustration by Anthony Salvagno (me!).

Steve gave a lecture to the students of Physics 308-L about Labview basics and showed them how to set up an exponential random number generator. This was the basis for their lab assignment. Here are my sketch notes about the lecture, which I think turned out surprisingly well.

#sciencescribe Scientists and Wikipedia at #scio12

Illustrated by Anthony Salvagno (me!) and session hosted by Dario Taraborelli and Greta Munger.

This was a super interesting session. It was so interesting that I had to stop scribing so I could get involved in the conversation. The bulk of the conversation discussed how to get others involved in collaborating on Wikipedia.

Many people are afraid to contribute and the interesting thing is that, their fears are kinda justified as the moderators on Wikipedia can be kinda harsh when it comes to accepting edits. Not only this, but the people who should contribute (leaders in the field) frequently don’t and it’s obvious the world could greatly benefit from their contributions. The moderators described keys to getting over this barrier and presented an interesting case study: a class assignment that involved creating articles on Wikipedia!

Some of those principles from that case study I’m actually applying in my own lab this semester, but more geared towards open notebook science (instead of creating wikipedia content). The goal is the same though, to get the students used to contributing to collective knowledge and to encourage them to communicate with their community (each other).

#sciencescribe Altmetrics session at #scio12

Illustrated by Anthony Salvagno (me), session hosted by Euan Adie and Martin Fenner.

Altmetrics are web analytics tools designed to accurately measure the true impact of modern scientific publications. The biggest criticism with peer review is a lot of the process is slow and dated and the major way to gauge usefulness of a publication is to measure impact factor which is just as skewed as the perception of peer review being critical today. I have a lot of interesting views on this that I won’t go into now, but you can read all about altmetrics here and find some cool modern tools that attempt to properly gauge impact here.

This session introduced the idea of alternative metrics and displayed the various tools that attempt to collect various data scattered throughout the web to gauge impact in a modern, insightful way. And above are my sketch notes from that session. Enjoy!