Yes, I have finally surrendered to the inevitable. After seven days straight sitting at my desk welded to ImageJ, the public domain, Java-based image processing program, my chronic repetitive strain disorder is starting to seriously impair my ability to use a computer. (I’ve long since lost the battle with both a right- and left-handed mouse, so when even the trusty tappable trackpad starts to hurt me, I know I’m in trouble. It’s the computer equivalent of vancomycin-resistent tuberculosis.) ImageJ is free, and lovely, and damned good at turning even the most proprietary of evil corporate image formats into tiffs, but it’s very laborious and click-intensive to zap your photos into anything you’d feel proud exposing to your boss, let alone a referee or two.
So after a long day doing the same 27 actions over and over again, joints throbbing in protest, I started to think about making a macro. Now, we used to be able to sweet-talk our dearly departed French post-doc into crafting these for us, mostly I think because he enjoyed the challenge more than some of the things he had to do in the lab. When my bioinformaticist collaborator was visiting and I started complaining about my hands, he suggested we take a bash at one ourselves. Recording the 27 actions was the easy part – ImageJ is great for that; the difficult bit was working out how to ask the macro to visit every file in a given folder and, most importantly, to give the output file an intelligent name. I got some advice from our microscope guy, who suggested pillaging other pre-existing macros for ideas, which got me a long way. Then the bioinformaticist added a few more touches. But I couldn’t get the damned thing to run. I was quickly frightened off the few geeky forums I tried to scan – like most of that ilk, they seemed ludicrously scathing and quite happy to wipe the floor with any newbie who might have missed something while RTFMing. Finally, I showed it to Richard and he immediately saw that I was missing a few braces at the end, thereby failing to close the subroutine. One hour later, while I was drinking tea in the common room, the brand-new, shiny macro had unpacked all 7000-odd tiffs, tidy as you like.
For want of a brace, the battle was almost lost. (Well, at least that’s what we Americans call them; the British prefer the lovely phrase “curly brackets”.) And it all reminded me of how much I used to love programming. I’ve never been formally trained, but I taught myself a bit of C during a summer stint at the NIH in the Waste Management Services. Desperate to work in a lab but unable to secure a research position, I fell into a sort of weird troubleshooting internship, just doing whatever needed to be done at a moment’s notice. Looking back, it was one of the most interesting jobs I’ve ever had, for sheer variety. I remember having to learn how to program a bar-code reader, to set up and train people in an ingenious new toxic waste biosensor employing fluorescent micro-organisms, and essentially teaching myself C from the Kernighan and Ritchie bible so that I could set up a database of all the chemicals on campus and what you had to do to neutralize them in case of emergency.
Not one day after my database was up and running in beta version, our WMS headquarters got the call: there’d been a massive chemical spill on campus, and the emergency services wanted to know what to do. I could hear sirens in the background, and everyone was staring at me. I asked someone to phone in the names of the chemicals, and I looked them up in my database and called the guys in moonsuits and told them what the recommended containing procedure was.
Disaster averted, faster than you can type ‘grep’. Looking back, it seems ludicrous: did they really base their actions on the advice of a 20-year-old intern? It doesn’t seem possible, but that’s actually how it happened. Since then, I haven’t done any more programming, but having inspected my 7000 tiffs, and seeing immediately that each is going to need an additional 5 actions to make them perfect…well, brace yourselves.
I’m groaning at your awful puns. Just so you know.
Don’t get yourself into a tiff.
Um. There seems to be an awk-ward silence.
Beware of geeks bearing gifs.
That’s exactly why I didn’t png any of them on those fora.
Oh, dear. Does this mean we aren’t going to have a normal thread again?
my chronic repetitive strain disorder is starting to seriously impair my ability to use a computer
I have both a mouse and a simple drawing pad next to my computer. Since I started to use the drawing pad as a replacement for the mouse my wrists have stopped hurting. It’s basically just like holding a pen. You need to get used to it, but after you do it is quite nice.
Actually my mouse is one of those cordless thingies and I haven’t switched it on for months now.
Thanks for the tip – I was thinking of buying one of those. I write with a (real) pen for long periods in my journal every day, and have done since I was about six years old. So I have high hopes that the pen pointing device won’t cause me pain.
The problem with RSI is that once there is a flare-up, everything hurts, even typing. Usually the best solution is to go on holiday for at least a week.
Hmmm.
MarkCC has a weird keyboard at work, in Google, which he reckons helps his hands, so would that be worth looking at?
Hm. One way or another, I think this post needs a postscript. He sed.
Tantalizing – couldn’t find amy details in that link. Is it as obscure as my nameless grabby contraption?
You’d have to ask him about it – I saw it when I visited him, but we weren’t allowed to take photos.
A quick google, and it looked like this one.
There seem to be a lot of ergonomic keyboards out there, all capable of deforming your hands in different ways.
Wow, if Dali had had RSI, he would have loved that.
Unfortunately it’s not typing that tends to initiate a flare-up — it’s the motions associated with pointing devices — clicking and tapping, and having to do lots of fine movements (like pushing, resizing and cropping shapes in PowerPoint for hours on end). We were chatting in the lab yesterday, speculating that preparing talks and presentations these days might be hindering scientific progress. Because the tools exist to make these slick presentations, we all feel we have to do it to a certain standard – and it can take days. When I was a PhD student it didn’t take too long to scribble stuff down on acetate for overhead projections, and no time at all just to slap your x-ray film onto the box for all to see — unmassaged and raw.
I used to grumble about students doing slick presentations for group meetings. It was only a twenty minute slot, you were supposed to be showing data , and spending a week preparing is not the best use of time.
Except that they will need these skills to survive in science – one could argue.
Sure, which is why we have (had) proper seminars too.
I miss the upside-down-and-inverted-ness of overhead projectors early in the morning.
“No, don’t flip it, just turn it! Now it’s mirrored. Flip it back. Flip! Not like that!”
I miss standing up in front of 500+ people, asking for the first slide — and then realizing that I had managed to load all 45 of them into the carousel the wrong way round.
These days my biggest problems are with movies that won’t play — no matter how many times I test them on the podium just before. Something to do with the PowerPoint Event Horizon.
I miss standing up in front of 500+ people, asking for the first slide — and then realizing that I had managed to load all 45 of them into the carousel the wrong way round.
These days my biggest problems are with movies that won’t play — no matter how many times I test them on the podium just before. Something to do with the PowerPoint Event Horizon.
I never use AV. Ever. These days I don’t even give a presentation. I just turn up and ask the audience to ask me questions. The time slot is filled to everyone’s satisfaction and nobody’s time is wasted.
Just like they did it in the paleolithic — except for those few slick guys who always insisted on painting the walls with mammoth blood to make their points.
Now there’s a thought… What if all that remains from our civilization are a bunch of PowerPoint presentations?
bq. I never use AV. Ever.
Except for posters…
What if all that remains from our civilization are a bunch of PowerPoint presentations?
They’re going to think we were all a bunch of useless w*nkers, I’m afraid.
Poster iz difrint.
Oh! my god, Henry, your english is very bad (-iz- poor
azas mine)Flag is inappropiate (punished)
bq. They’re going to think we were all a bunch of useless w*nkers, I’m afraid.
And the mistake is…?
Speak for yourself, honey.
And no waving of inappropriate flags in my salon.:-)
Well Jenny.
But I think Henry is a lovable person, tries to speak in Spanish, but has not yet learned well. Wanted to say in Spanish: Los afiches son diferentes.
I would argue that posters are a bigger waste if time than are talks. They take longer to prepare and the number of people who actually bother to look at them is proportionally much smaller.
¿Me excusa, señora, este autobús va a la estación?
I would argue that posters are a bigger waste if time than are talks. They take longer to prepare and the number of people who actually bother to look at them is proportionally much smaller
I respectfully beg to differ, especially as I have just presented a poster .
Posters, if done correctly, are a concise way of making a small point which would not be worth the investment in time (for presenter and audience) of a platform presentation (thinks: how many times have you sat through 15-20 mins of a presentation which wasn’t as interesting as it promised, thought that the same material might be better presented as a poster, and yet were unable to make a polite exit?)
Sure, not many people actually look at any one poster, but that’s just the point. A poster will appeal to that small segment of the audience that is interested, without wasting everyone else’s time. Even more time is saved as the posters are presented all at once, rather than one after the other.
Of course, posters should be designed to communicate a simple message without a lot of extraneous clutter. Ours had a very simple message and was printed in big, black letters on a white background, with lots of white space. Posters are not printouts of a powerpoint presentation.
Of course, posters should be designed to communicate a simple message
And that message is
Henry, if a hundred people hear you talk and only two read your poster, the extra few days’ work you have to put into a poster to make it effect are, in my opinion, a waste of time. It could be a difference in disciplines – for cell/molec biology, there seems to be a waning interest in poster presentations which many people simply avoid altogether.
@Richard: my coauthor and I already have jobs, and have no desire to return to academia. My coauthor is a successful businesswoman running her own archaeological consultancy and has a staff of 25. And me, you know about. We’re doing it for the simple pleasure of communicating new knowledge.
@Jenny: If a hundred people hear my talk but only two have any practical interest in the topic, then that’s 98 peoples’ time wasted. If I do a poster and the two interested people come and see it and chat, that’s worthwhile. My coathor and I met a very useful contact through that poster session, a scientist who wants to share some interesting data with us, data which we might never have discovered.
Again, it could be discipline-specific. At our vertebrate paleontology conference, there were three poster sessions and all were packed. Posters are great for presentations with titles such as New Specimens of Obscurosaurus erectus from the Lovecraft Formation of Innsmouth County, Rhode Island a.k.a. What We Did In Our Summer Holidays_ – useful to specialists, but not important enough for a platform presentation.
I’d never attend a talk in which I had no practical interest, but that’s just me. I guess my point was that most people will probably be bored at talks and poster sessions alike – those same few people will be turned on, but you’ve invested far less time in the presentation so for you as a presenter, talks make more sense.
Given the choice between giving a talk and giving a poster, every single person in the fields I’ve worked in would prefer the talk. Less work, you reach more people, and far more kudos. More stress, sure.
Mind you, I am under no illusions that my experience is normative. I’m quite aware that the plural of anecdote isn’t ‘data’.
I’m puzzled here – why does a talk take less time than a presentation? Just curious.
Sorry – what I meant was, how to you conclude that it takes longer to create a poster than a platform presentation? Ours was, basically, one giant slide, which we emailed to a printer, who delivered it to my coauthor’s hotel room.
Because we do posters properly?
In my opinion is very interesting a poster, because it is an accurate summary of what you are going to comment. Maybe is a little uncomfortable, because you have to spend much time waiting for the interested (stand up).
I’m referring to the effort required to generate the respective files, Henry, not the post-production. A biologist will build up a set of powerpoint slides from various previous presentations and lab meetings, and when it comes time to give a talk all you need to do is choose which ones you want, copy them into one presentation and maybe tweak a few things. Takes an hour or two. By contrast, poster presentations tend to have different length and width requirements, so you have to make a fresh one for every new meeting. And it can take days work out how best to get all the information onto the poster in a way that makes sense – a talk can easily present a linear narrative, but on a 2D rectangle, it’s not always so obvious how to create a logical story. Most crucially, posters usually require explanatory text boxes so they can be understood even when the person is not there, whereas for talks, all of this is verbal and you don’t need to prepare anything.
With a beer premium logically!
All this talk of slides is giving me the heebie-jeebies. I completely avoided using (film) slides (sticking with overheads – Eva’s upside-down/reversed issues notwithstanding) and jumping directly to PowerPoint when the time was right. I’m terrified of slide projectors and carousels and things.
But, to bmp this back on topic (see what I did there?) – I am terribly impressed with anyone who can program macros and things, so well done Jenny. I often have this niggling suspicion that I could automate numerous tasks in both Excel and Photoshop if I just had a little of that mojo.
Sorry, Richard: when I say “slide” I mean a PowerPoint slide – except when I was reminiscing about being upside-down.
I’d like to make a macro that would do my washing up.
It’s called a ‘dishwasher’, luvvie.
When I was young (1986), I have presented a poster about biogeography of Chiloé’s island in the Academy of Science in Chile, particularly in specialist forest birds.
I’ve enjoyed much, because the people that asked with me and I’ve answered their questions in a pleasant way. The most were people interested in the topic. Is not important that the people are scientists or no-scientists. Is more important that they are interested, and they made intelligent questions.
Is more important that they are interested, and they made intelligent questions
Wise words.
It is a wonderful feeling when you get an interested audience at your poster – but you see very few crowds these days. I wonder if it has something to do with attention span – maybe we’re all just getting too scatty.
Are you still talking about this?
Two people went to talk to me during my last poster session. One wanted to know whether my boss was present (for networking purposes), the other was the ‘competitor’ checking if I was doing something interesting.
In contrast to my first talk ever during an international meeting, which had led to two more invitations to talk at other meetings.
I once got a job offer at a poster session – many years ago now. It was a great feeling. I’m sure this is discipline-specific, and possibly even conference-specific. Perhaps I’ve just been attending duds.
I also started wondering if I should make a different poster for each target audience. Maybe it is just a matter of being too lazy and presenting your story instead of presenting a story this particular audience wants to hear.
It’s such a funny thing – palaeontology poster sessions are always mobbed. Perhaps palaeontologists are less careerist/competitive/ secretive than molecular cell biologists, and therefore more interested in actually doing science.
(ducks)
Everyone likes dinosaurs. Must be fun pissing around at Lyme Regis while the rest of us are doing experiments.
Bloody empiricist.
Bringing us neatly back to my original point: going through the time-consuming ordeal of making a new poster for every meeting seriously cuts into my research time. Perhaps paleontologists like any excuse to skive off, drink beer and look at pretty rectangles.
(counter-ducks)
You’re just jealous. That’s what you are. There you are, in some horrid lab endlessly transferring very small quantities of liquid from one small vial to another, while we palaeontologists can enjoy healthful exercise in remote, exotic places, usually at someone else’s expense. Now who’s made the rational career choice, hmmm?
Couldn’t find a counter duck, so here’s one on a plate.
Nice duck. That reminds me, it’s lunchtime.
Like snowflakes, there are an infinite number of shades of colorless liquid.
while we palaeontologists can enjoy healthful exercise in remote, exotic places, usually at someone else’s expense
I believe you may have neglected the bits about cleaning massive rocks with toothbrushes in arid, 45 degree C conditions, no?
it can’t have been that fun and/or healthy, or Henry would still be doing it!
Actually, I must fess up. I did my Ph.D. in
some horridmuseum labs endlessly measuring what appeared to be the same bones, over and over again. I only got to do field work much later. The heat was hot, the desert wasdesertedarid, but we used dental picks, not toothbrushes. And I Loved It. I can see why people get addicted to fieldwork.They really ought to floss twice daily for best effect.
Hang on: is the dental floss for the fossils or the paleontologists?
(I remain silent on classifying Gee henrius here)
Yes.
Thank you for clearing that up.