greg – Page 17 – Greg's Teaching & Researchblog

A little crazy …

Things are pretty tight at the moment – so not much time for blogging. The lecture is taking up most of my time; I am quite a bit ahead with my preparation, but I have to keep up. On the other hand, I constantly tweak my notes – firstly for the evening class (adding my experience from the day class, which gets the first reading), secondly adding things I have to stress again or provide more examples at the request of students.

The rest of my time is spent with the preparation of job and grant applications. After 3 1/2 years my contract is about to finish and I am looking for some more teaching experience after years of research. I intend to build a teaching portfolio to be in a better position, when new faculty jobs will be advertised. I guess it will also lighten my load a little, should I ever be offered one that I decide to take on (many implicit ifs here). But I do enjoy teaching and would like to do a little more on a university level.

I have also applied for a networking grant for my planned trips to Vienna and Newfoundland. I have made contact with research groups working in a similar field and I am looking forward to meeting them and exchange ideas and discuss experiments.

Teaching Week 3

… and it is going well. Both sections – day and evening – are fun to teach with slightly different challenges. The day class is quite full with 60+ students and interaction is more limited compared to the evening section, although I try keeping students involved. The evening class with < 30 students feels more cozy and it is easier to ask somebody out to the board to present in class assignment results.About 80% of the time I work on calculations on the board or explain fundamental equations with examples and exercises. That is quite new to me and I am more and more comfortable writing on the board, although I still have trouble sometimes in locating an orthographic error, especially if a student’s comment was rather vague.I now use the slides as a framework with the most important information presented in condensed form. After this initial presentation I go into the details with sample calculations and examples. A parallel presentation as initially planned does not work, because the canvas covers most of the board and I cannot switch between the two without turning off the projector and removing the canvas. The solution that I use now works fine anyway and slides play a minor role anyway, mostly reducing the number of complex drawings.The first graded assignment is out and due next Wednesday – a lot of work ahead with 110 corrections to do.

Some more thoughts from AGU: Science & the Media

There were quite a few issues at this year’s AGU meeting, which kept me thinking. “Science & General Public” was one of them. Selling the science you are doing seems to have become a hot-button issue – especially with climate change (not) finding its way into government policies.

Sessions were held, on how to lobby policy makers on $Capitol_Hill (insert the location of your law-making body here) and on how to communicate findings to the general public, your friends and neighbors. The objective is clear: “Get your message out & secure future funding”. And communicate to the public, where the real science is done! More and more (the less honest) policy makers and lobbyists support their “opinion” with people claiming to be scientists – some of them even having some sort of scientific education/background – to push their agenda. These advisors send out over-simplified messages without giving evidence and large parts of the public believe them, because their ideas and conclusions sound plausible and are easy to understand.

So making real scientific findings understandable and plausible for the public is a growing concern and I have to say that for me this is not an easy task. I find it difficult to reduce the complexity of certain issues without sacrificing some of the results – the line between oversimplification and a concise, reduced (but true!) picture easy enough to understand for the general public is a very fine one. Even finer, if it is about advising policy makers.

Something to keep in mind and to work on for me! It is not always easy to leave the Ivory Tower 😉

Teaching has started …

… and I am utterly enjoying it!Day and evening classes are usually quite full (60 students during the day, 30 in the evening class), but teaching is enjoyable and not too strenuous (now that I have a cold a bit more, but still ok). I try to keep students involved and switch frequently between projector, board and in-class assignments as a help to keep them awake and interested – depending on the content to be taught. E.g. I do all calculations step-by-step on the board in order to be not too fast: I am quite a slow writer on the board, but picking up speed and using the board more efficiently with every new class. Things also got livelier and questions are being asked.I have settled nicely into my schedule, spending Wednesdays and a half-day Friday at Concordia. Getting there is not too bad, although the Metro and the bus are always full. I have finally obtained my key and access to the network/web so that I can be productive during the break between my lectures.

CHEM-218 Teaching Preparations

After a short break, Jan 3 is drawing closer and so is my start date for “Analytical Chemistry II” at Concordia University. I have been quite busy preparing – things are going well and also on the administrative side, it has been going surprisingly smooth with a lot of help from a lot of friendly Concordia staff.The only thing missing is access to my Moodle course website, which I hope to set-up in the first days of January. Otherwise I am ready for the first chapters and I am in for a first long day on Jan 3 with lectures in the morning (1hr 15min) and the evening (2hrs).Titrations are first with a look behind the scences (theory) as well as lots of calculations to prepare students for the lab course starting a week after. I would also like to link things to current applications to illustrate to importance of the classical, but not outdated methods. Things that will follow are electrochemistry and spectroscopic methods.A midterm and final exams as well as assignments are also part of the deal and I will be busy with approximately 120 students attending. Most of all, though – I am looking forward to teaching in a really friendly environment!

Paper Accepted – Merry Christmas

Just before the Christmas break a manuscript written by me in collaboration with previous co-workers and my PhD supervisor was accepted by Food Additives and Contaminants. As the name of the journal indicates, it deals with work done on the detection of fungal contaminants on grain – my PhD research domain.

So watch out for the publication of the …

“Optimisation of a sample preparation procedure for the screening of fungal infection and assessment of deoxynivalenol content on maize using mid-infrared attenuated total reflection spectroscopy”

The title is rather bulky, but justified as it deals with the sample preparation aspect of my earlier work and is quite specific (although an important aspect of emerging rapid methods as one of the reviewers remarked). If you are interested in the big picture, check out my publication list.

AGU in the rearview mirror

I am back from AGU in San Francisco and once again it has been an excellent opportunity to see what is going on in the Earth Sciences. Apart from the experience with my own presentations – here are some additional impressions.

What was Hot at AGU (in my research domain)?

IPY is coming up – it is everywhere
Mexico City as a location for research
Organic compounds in the atmosphere (more and more)
Snow related stuff (parameters measured are mostly inorganic or snow properties related, some big transects reported
Satellite and aircraft measurements are dominating for data acquisition, localized measurements are mostly used for validation purposes
Error assessment, measurement limitations due to the technique used is not much of an issue
Mass spectrometry with soft ionization techniques

Apart from the scientific topics, educational issues dominated the meeting. Projects, how scientists can contribute to high school education, teaching tools were very much a la mode, although I am not sure, how some of these very spectacular projects hosted in some remote corner of the globe can actually contribute to scientific knowledge of high-school students, but they sure are a possibility to present a hands-on approach to science.

AGU 2006 Fall Meeting

Up to 13 000 Earth scientists come to San Francisco each year to hold a meeting that covers all areas of the Earth Sciences – Atmosphere, Ocean, Vulcanology,… and for the past 3 years I have been part of it! It is quite fascinating to see the diversity of research that is being done and good to broaden one’s horizon by attending interesting sessions in different fields (“You want a little Martian atmosphere with that?”), something that cannot be easily done at other meetings.

But you better come well prepared: 3 books contain all session information and I usually need a full day to prepare the meeting and decide, where and when I want to go to which session. There are oodles of parallel sessions and one or the other sacrifice has to be made.

In addtion to my own poster and oral presentation, a colleague and myself carry 6 more posters of co-workers to present. It has been a busy week so far, but fun. Lots of good discussions, questions and input for current and future research. My oral presentation went well this morning (with a couple of dozen people attending) and just after that I went to see Al Gore giving a lecture to thousands of people 😉

His lecture was motivating and extremely well delivered, if a bit orchestrated, but I guess this is the “American touch”! Anyway, one more poster tomorrow and tonight I am off for seafood. I am in San Francisco after all and better enjoy it!

Deadline approaching quickly

… and I am still working. My flight to San Francisco is on Dec 9 and until then my poster and oral presentation for the AGU Fall Meeting have to be ready. The poster, which I have put together with a co-worker went to the printer today and should be ready by Friday.

We will present VOC data and bacteria/fungi data for urban and Arctic sites – an exciting topic, because we are in the process of identifying micro-organisms from snow and air that I have collected in the Arctic in Alert.

After days and days and more evenings of data analysis, I am also getting close to finish my talk. The framework is done – only suitble plots of the results have to be included. The data looks good – all that has to be done is to put it in a a presentable format. For a while now I have been using plot, which makes nice and easy to configure 2D graphs. I can easily add, remove and merge data and decide, which data is best to include.

I prepared my presentation in LaTeX Beamer, which is so much more convenient than Powerpoint. The output file is in pdf format, so there is no hassle with different platforms.

It has been a bit stressful in the past couple of weeks, but finally I see the fruit of all the work that I have done and I am looking forward to a good meeting.

Data, data, data!

Now that all measurements are done – at least those that I will need for my conference presentation – I am busy with data analysis. So far things have been going well and I have set up quite good calibration curves for snow and air data.

I focus on canister data obtained with the cryo-system and SPME data, both of which were used in connection with a GC-FID. So I am still concentrating on my 20 compounds that I have originally chosen for analysis before I went on the field trip to Alert.

But, when I am done I will have snow surface data, snow depth profile data and air data for 20 common VOC from Alert, which will make a nice package to present at this year’s AGU Fall Meeting in San Francisco.