Author: greg

Atmospheric chemistry researcher and university teacher. Data analysis/chemometrics specialist (PCA, PCR, Cluster analysis, SOM)

ICASS 2008

ICASS 2008
ICASS 2008

I was on the programme committee for a conference that took place last week and I chaired 2 sessions together with a colleague. Session 1 on ‘Environmental Analysis’ and session 2 on ‘Medical Applications’. It’s been a lot of fun and an interesting meeting. Participants were mostly from and around Montreal, i.e. regional with quite a few from Sudbury (so this is, what regional means in Canada ;). A few came from France, Vietnam and even Japan. Sadly, quite a few could not make it due to Visa problems!

Here is the link to the scientific programme!

Number crunching (again!)

An error in some of the plots of my data has forced me to do review all my data from scratch again. Somewhere in the process of transposing, copying & formatting my data an error occurred and some of my snow data ended up as air data.

I do not have tons of data, but enough to make things difficult, when it gets messed up. Since numbers are similar (though units are not) I did not easily recognise my mistake. Now everything should be fine again, but it took a while to re-calculate all concentrations (18 compounds, 7 days of monitoring, air & snow) and plot them again.

Here is, how things look like: Toluene concentrations in snow and air at Alert in May/June 2006! Note the depletion in snow and air on May 30, which I also observed for quite a few other compounds (though not for all). I currently investigate this event using my other data and model calculations.

Back from vacation

After a month of vacation in Europe I am well rested (?) and ready for new adventures. Quite a few things are about to change – first my full time contract at Concordia has expired. People I replaced are back from their respective sabbaticals and I am back to research.

For the next couple of months I will be doing research at McGill University in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences again. I have one more paper to finish, two are currently under review, so things are looking good. This does, however, not mean that I will be giving up teaching, since I will sign a part-time contract at Concordia and teach two lectures in the fall term (General Chemistry – a new lecture and Analytical Chemistry I again).

And of course my job search is on again … exciting times ahead!

Alert manuscript rolling

After finishing my outline I now work on the details of my Alert manuscript. Still not sure, if it is going to be one or two papers (or a series) since there is a lot of ground to cover. On the other hand I do not want to duplicate any information, so for the moment I work on a single manuscript. With the structure and most figures done – the content tested at conferences, writing is pretty smooth with an established framework.

I typeset the manuscript with LaTeX, using a simple text editor, which is now my favourite way of writing long texts. I draw figures in Plot a drawing program for the Mac – both are open source tools and excellent for scientific writing. For image editing (e.g. map preparation and sampling location marking) I use The Gimp (again, a port for the Mac).

Outlining the next manuscript

With 2 manuscripts under review I started outlining the next manuscript about my field trip to Alert. After several oral presentations and 2 posters one some aspects of my results the material has been under enough scrutiny that it can be written up.

Apart from the new data and a broad range of compounds (aromatic, oxygenated, halogenated) that I detected in Arctic air and snow I would like to focus on the transfer of species between air and snow by comparing my results with calculations using sorption coefficients. I would also like to use back-trajectory calculations again to assess the influence of the movement of air masses on VOC concentrations.

For presentation of the material I will use a few new plots that I tried for a few compounds on the posters, since they illustrate well the change of concentrations in both matrices (for a single compound at a time). With the wealth of data that I have available selecting suitable plots is a crucial task.

Course Design Workshop

I attended a course design workshop this week (5 days all day) and it’s been a fantastic experience. The goal was to set up a framework of an existing or new course; defining course goal and content and breaking it down into different learning objectives. Starting off with a graphical course map I laid out a Quality Assurance Course including the requirements by the Ordre des chimistes du Quebec.

The workshop was extremely well facilitated with inputs ranging from assessment design, Bloom’s taxonomy on learning to “Generation Me” presentations – the latter by a Concordia student counsellor and psychologist. Feedback and sharing ideas, examples of best practice as well as some of our frustrations among participants made it an extremely pleasant experience. It was hard work, but I now have a clear idea, where this course is going with lots of ideas about student participation, assessment criteria, learning objectives,…

Best of all – I have finally begun to close the gap between my previous work as a trainer outside university and inside university; adult learning is a single concept after all!

Maps for publications

Since I do fieldwork all my publications contain some kind of map that identify sampling locations. Getting good maps and being allowed to publish them is not a trivial task. But now, after contacting Natural Resources Canada and obtaining permission to use their maps and after a session with the extremely helpful librarian at the Walter Hitschfeld Geographic Information Centre at McGill I am now able to use digitally reproduced maps in my articles!

Topographic maps are available – for free – at Natural Resources Canada using the CanMatrix set. Search by mapsheet and other criteria and off you go. Maps are in tiff format and meta-information is included for the corrdinate system! Nice! Also nifty, if you want to head out into the woods!

CHEM-218 Final Exam

Final exam, yesterday – 19h00 to 22h00; it was held in the gym together with several other exams and the temperature was something between 25 and 30 degrees Celsius. I do not understand, why they cant get the AC going?! Exam time is stressful enough for students! Quite a few questions from students, but no omissions on my part – all constants and formulas were there. The alternate final exam will be held next Sunday morning 9h00-12h00 and I plan to be there to support students. Not the best time either, but better than the late night slot.

Lectures done!

… and all there is left to do are the final exam corrections – well that will be quite a bit of work, but that will not start until April 18 (or a few days later, when I will be receiving the exams from the exam’s office). Until then: Students dropping in, checking their midterms and assignments and asking questions. Panic mode is still a few days away for most, but I will brace myself for the day of the exam. I put the solutions to the try-out final exam online!

I gave a talk at Carleton University at the beginning of the week, which was part of an interesting visit indeed! Apart from that – nice campus with minutes into the city of Ottawa! I took the train from Montreal and back; it is a pleasant ride through Quebec and Ontario countryside. WiFi on board was down, so a few student questions had to wait until my return.