I am about to start formally working on my thesis, which at this stage involves a great deal of grant writing (the first one’s due tomorrow). I’m also trying to figure out which conferences I can afford to go to, both in terms of time and money, and how I can get funding for them.

My thesis focus has changed since the last time I posted about it, to answer broader ecological questions. I’m much more pleased with this direction.

It’s pretty exciting!

Girl Power! Generation Y and the New Gender Gap

I’m not sure what I think of this–there are a lot of assumptions being made on a pretty short-term trend (after all, men used to far outnumber women in higher education, and anyone who assumed that trend would continue forever was obviously wrong; not to mention that women weren’t “pets” in that time, but unpaid household laborers). I think NYC is an extreme example that is probably counterbalanced by other areas of the country. And do museums really rely that much on newspapers to reach their audiences (what about radio, guidebooks, websites, posters on subways…?)?

But the basic questions about how women (or any young, working professional who is delaying family) use their free time and discretionary income and how museums can reach that audience is interesting.

Thoughts?

This last week I attended the Geological Society of America annual meeting in Denver. It is definitely most enjoyable when not presenting. There were a lot of great presentations and posters (including a bunch about using wikis in teaching geology, and one on a NASA Second Life project). These were some of my favorites:

SUPPORTING STUDENT LEARNING OF GEOSCIENCE CONCEPTS THROUGH NON-TRADITIONAL MEANS: A PROTOTYPAL TEXTBOOK ON ART AND GEOLOGY

I love interdisciplinary courses, and I think this is an awesome concept for a course. I talked to the presenter (Denise Battles) for a while and she told me about one project, where they had students write an essay about cave painting and they wrote about how “primitive” it was and how the people had “little technology.” Then the students prepared pigments and tried to make their own paintings. Afterwards, the students wrote essays again, and this time they wrote about how impressed they were by what people did working in these poorly-lit caves, without having the animals in front of them. There’s no substitute for doing it yourself (I took a seminar once where I made egg tempera and glair paints with medieval mineral pigments, and it was a really amazing thing to do–and the colors are absolutely mindboggling compared to modern synthetic alternatives). They also had more geology-focused activities in the cave painting unit, like streaking the minerals.

PRACTICAL GUIDELINES FOR DEVELOPING A DIGITAL IMAGING DATABASE FOR FOSSIL INVERTEBRATES

Bushra Hussaini came out to Florissant today to see the park and collections, and she is incredibly nice and knowledgeable. A lot of museums are working on digital imaging projects now, and the American Museum of Natural History has an incredibly well-organized and effective program. It’s really difficult to photograph fossils well and consistently–especially when your fossil range for 1-foot-across ammonites to flat shale fossils. Bushra has developed a very consistent, effective protocol for volunteers to use in photographing fossils, and the photographs are some of the best, most consistent fossil photos I’ve seen. I took lots of notes!

CLIMATICALLY INDUCED FLORAL CHANGE ACROSS THE EOCENE-OLIGOCENE TRANSITION IN THE JOHN DAY AND CLARNO FORMATIONS, EASTERN OREGON

John Day is where I first fell in love with paleontology, aged seven, so I have a deep affection for the park. It also happens to be paleobotany heaven–the formations cover a large span of time and many different environments, right over the Eocene-Oligocene transition, a really interesting time in Earth’s history, both climatically and ecologically.

Regan Dunn has been the paleobotanist at John Day for several years now–traditionally the park has been more focused on mammals–and this project is exactly the kind of research I want to do (I wish I could with my thesis, but my chances of being able to collect such a large sample from the Antero are miniscule, alas). The abstract doesn’t really give a good description of the poster. Anyway, she has a massive, systematic collection from about seven localities (4300 specimens at one locality!) and the preliminary statistics show some pretty curious and interesting trends. I’m really excited to see where this goes.

MID-MIOCENE EXTINCTION IN ANTARCTICA

I didn’t actually see this presentation, but I heard about it later, and all I can say is AWESOME. Tundra in Antarctica from the Oligocene to Miocene? How could it get any more fantabulous?! Someday I want to be prestigious enough to go do paleobotany in Antarctica. Or become buddies with someone else who is.

All in all, I had an excellent meeting. And I bought a really cute little Baculites specimen that is so well-preserved it wiggles on the suture lines (Baculites is a straight-shelled ammonite–my specimen cost $3 and they’re common like dirt, so I don’t feel bad about buying it. I collect ammonites for aesthetic appeal).

For Katie, Bethany, and me:

Question 2:
Screenshot

Question 3:
Screenshot 1 (Katie and Bethany)
Code 1
Screenshot 2 (Mel)

Code emailed.

W3C HTML Validator (can be useful for catching errors, but it’s important to go through in order, since later errors are often caused by an initial misplaced quotation mark or colon or a dropped tag)

To make extra spaces between words (or indent a line), you can use nonbreaking spaces:  

Each time you type that code, it will make one space. For example, here’s a paragraph indented with five non-breaking spaces:

     Here is a lovely indented paragraph.

It’s kind of hackish, but it works in a pinch.

Things to remember: things our word processors have taught us to think of as in the same category, like italic, bold, and underline, fall into five CSS categories:

font-style: italic, oblique
font-variant: normal, small-caps
font-weight: bold, bolder, lighter (and numerical values)
text-decoration: underline, overline, line-through, blink (please don’t use this)
text-transform: capitalize, uppercase, lowercase

You can specify a specific font using the font-family property, but it’s a good idea to specify multiple fonts and end with a generic group (serif, sans-serif, cursive, fantasy, or monospace) because there is no universal font installed on all computers. If the font has multiple words in the name, put the punctuation go outside the quotation marks. Here’s an example font-family declaration:

font-family: “Times New Roman”, “Times”, “Palatino”, serif

Here’s a great text style generator. Note the property text-indent–that might be useful.

P.S. Remember to make your HTML tags lowercase–XHTML and CSS don’t always handle uppercase tags properly.

Using “View Source” or “View –> Page Source” on your web browser to find out how a website does something is a totally legitimate way to learn.