AGU Wrap-Up

Wow! What a great session. All of our speakers were wonderful and attendance was better than we could have dreamed. I wanted to let everyone know that just because AGU is over, it doesn't mean that pop-ups are over. Our speakers are writing up their talks and some will even provide slides. Keep an eye out for these guest posts and start thinking about what you would like to talk about next year!

We also wanted to thank those of you that filled out the surveys during the session. Your feedback is very helpful and we already are working on ways to make next year's pop-up sessions an even bigger success. Thank you for your support!

Girls Science Day

As graduate students, many of us are always seeking ways of getting involved with outreach opportunities, particularly ones that give us teaching experience (for those of us who are interested in pursuing careers in academia or teaching).  As a woman, I am also always looking for ways of getting young girls excited about science.  I think that it's important for girls to see that science can be fun and that there are people like them who are making a career of it.  Because of this, I was really excited when I heard about an annual event at Columbia called Girls Science Day.

Girls Science Day is an event run by graduate students at Columbia where over 100 middle school aged girls come to participate in hands-on experiments in a range of sciences.  Experiments range from extracting DNA from strawberries to learning how acoustic signals travel in water and are used for active source seismic imaging.  You can see a couple of examples of experiments that we have organized for this event on this blog!

While organizing this event for the last couple of years, the importance of incorporating hands-on learning into science education for young students has become very clear to me.  I hope that everyone will take advantage of the opportunity that we have during this AGU Student Pop-up session to try to learn about new and exciting ways of engaging the broader public, and particularly children.  Through science education and outreach, we are hopefully able to inspire kids, particularly kids who might grow up thinking that they will never be able to be a scientist because of their gender, race, or socioeconomic background, to get excited about all that a career in science has to offer.

While this is a pretty large-scale event to organize, it has been a wonderful opportunity to bring graduate students from a range of fields together.  Events like this can be the perfect forum to implement some of the ideas that we'll be learning about during the AGU session, Teaching and Career Challenges in the Geosciences.

Share your content - How and Why

Hello everyone! It's just over a week until we meet in San Francisco to have our session. We want to help you get your content out there and available. Here I'll quickly outline why you may want to do this and how we can help.

Why Share?

Initially it seems obvious to share your slides and content. Maybe someone in the audience didn't catch everything that you said, wants to review, or really admires a figure you made. Sometimes I hear academics say that they are scared to share their content though. Common comments are "someone will take it and present it as theirs," "I'll get scooped if I show my data," or "this breaks anonymous peer review." 

While this is a decision everyone has to make for themselves, I personally prefer to make anything that I present in a public setting fully available. I do this for several reasons:

1) Putting your work out there establishes a concrete date of record for you showing results. If someone tries to scoop your work, you can easily show your dated content. 

2) It encourages crowd source review and verification. If I present model results, then make the model easily available, it is likely that others will use/test drive the model. This helps find bugs and encourage improvement!

3) Funding agency compliance. Many funding agencies demand that work they fund (especially government funded) be in the public domain.

4) Good will. In the end, we are all here to try to solve geoscience problems. If you have made progress on the problem, why keep the solution private! 

While many of the comments above are directed at scientific research instead of education topics, they can be adapted to meet topics like open course-ware. 

How to Share

We hope that you will want to make the content of your presentations and any associated media available for everyone in the session! You can write a post on your blog, post content to GitHub or SlideShare, or share from cloud hosts like Dropbox. No matter how you do it, let us know. We'll build up a page with links to everyone's content. If you are interested in writing a blog, but don't know where to start, check out the AGU Bloggers Forum on Tuesday at 5 PM!

Until Next Week,

John Leeman

How I Design a Talk

Hello everyone! While I was preparing my talk, I thought I would share my process in the hope that maybe someone will find a useful nugget or two. There are lots of great resources out there. Books like Pitch Perfect, Talk Like TED, and the MacSparky Presentations Field Guide are great places to start. With AGU only a couple of weeks away, I wanted to highlight a few ideas on presentation planning.

First, close PowerPoint or Keynote. The presentation software is not the place to start preparing a presentation. I like to sit down in a comfortable spot with a stack of index cards and a mug of coffee. While I love technology as a tool, it's just too early. I write out one major thought on the top of each card and put supporting material on as a list. For a short talk, like the pop-ups, this is just a few cards, but I've had stacks over 2 cm high for longer talks. I put everything I might want to bring up on these, pruning the content comes later.  After my cards are made, I lay them out on a big table (or the floor) and play with the ordering. I'll ad-lib sections of a fake talk and see if two thoughts can flow smoothly into each other. Once I'm happy with the general layout, then I'm ready to move on.

After playing with index cards, I'll let technology in. I like using OmniOutliner to help here. I put my index cards into a digital outline. Lots of people start here, which is fine. I like starting on paper because I can sketch things out and feel less constrained. Index cards also don't have email notifications that interrupt your thinking. In OmniOutliner, I break out my thoughts into short bullets. I can drag in content such as a photo of a sketch I think may turn into a graphic, sound bytes of an idea, or quotes I want to include.

Now it is time to decide on supporting graphics. I have an idea of what I'm going to say, so what visual aides will help tell the story? Your slides are not an outline and are not meant to guide you through the content. You and the slides together will guide an audience through your work in a logical way. Graphics can be photos, graphs of data, schematic diagrams, anything! Personally, I like make my graphics using an assortment of applications like Python, Adobe Illustrator, or OmniGraffle. Making graphics is a whole other series of books that you could dive into, including the great books by Nathan Yau: Visualize This and Data Points.

Finally, it's time to make your slides. I follow the Michael Alley approach of a slide with a (nearly) complete sentence at the top, followed by graphics. The fewer things that the audience has to read, the closer they will be listening to what you have to say. If you need to document your material to hand-out, produce a small one or two page text document with the necessary graphics (an idea from Edward Tufte). Again, the slides should not be the presentation, but support for it.  If you are stuck for ideas on slide design, head over to Garr Reynold's blog Presentation Zen. Garr has some great examples, as well as his own books.

My last tip regards the ends of your presentation. The beginning and the ending are incredibly important. The beginning is where you gain or loose the audience, and the end is where you make sure that their time was well spent. Nail these. I don't script presentations, it sounds too robotic, but the first and last 30 seconds are written down and well thought out.

I can't wait to hear what everyone has to share and I hope that some of these tips and resources are useful in your preparation!

Improving Your Presentations

One goal of the new student pop-up sessions at the AGU Fall Meeting is to give students an opportunity to practice their presentation skills in a low-pressure environment. I think we all know, however, that presentations and presentation skills don't just improve themselves. While any practice can certainly be helpful, practicing with an audience that's willing to give you constructive criticism and feedback is even more worth your time.

The week before major conferences, our department replaces the weekly seminar with practice presentations for students (and sometimes professors) to test out their presentations. This can be very helpful since not only do we have a small department with diverse research, but we also have everyone from undergraduates to professors attend the practice talks. This allows for a wider range of comments and perspectives. Perhaps the best comment I received last year was from an undergraduate. She liked the summary sentence that I put at the end of each slide because it allowed her to get the main points and follow along even if she didn't understand the details.

Here are a couple of my favorite presentation tips:

1) Keep it simple! - Science is already complex, try not to make it even more difficult by using unnecessarily complex words or long explanations. Of course, some of these are unavoidable - that's the nature of science. Also, keep in mind that your ability to explain concepts to someone who doesn't know them is a good measure of how well you understand those concepts yourself.

2) Less is more - When considering time limits, it's not the number of slides that matter but the amount of information contained in those slides. Instead of having 5 slides crammed with information and figures, spread it out over 10 slides (or as many as necessary). This is analogous to paragraphs in writing - they break up large amounts of text into smaller pieces, each with its own main point. Unlike writing, however, good presentation slides should have minimal text.


If you want some more tips on how to improve your presentations, take a look at this great IRIS webinar by Scott St. George at the University of Minnesota:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V10W_PZVCos&index=14&list=PLD4D607C2FA317E6D

I look forward to seeing your presentations at AGU!

Session Time and Location

Hello all. We wanted to let you know the time and location of the session. Recently we were moved around in the schedule, but this should be the final iteration. In addition to being moved, we merged to be bigger and better! Originally we were two separate sessions:

1) Keeping Geology Alive: Interactive Demonstrations in Earth Sciences
2) The Challenges Faced and Strategies Used When Switching Disciplines

Our new official title is "Teaching and Career Challenges in Geoscience (ED34C)." To help you plan your AGU schedule, we've kept the session submissions mostly sectioned in time. Be sure to checkout our exciting schedule of talks at https://agu.confex.com/agu/fm14/meetingapp.cgi#Session/2518!

Session Time and Location

Wednesday, December 17, 2014

3:00 - 5:00 PM

Marriott Marquis 

Pacific H

Research as Art

Research as Art is fundamentally an art gallery exhibit where all of the pieces are figures or images from active research.  The captions include a (not so technical!) description of the scientific relevance of the image in order to place the art in its scientific context.  This event aims to present current, cutting-edge Earth Science research in an accessible and exciting way to the general public (or to your broader department or institution).  In the case at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, the event was designed to alert people to the interesting research going on across the institution from areas as diverse as seismology and marine biology.

To arrange a Research as Art event, we sent out a broad request for submissions to members of our institution.  We purchased framing supplies and printed submissions using a poster plotter.  We also printed the Title, Author, and "Abstract" or caption and mounted that on black paper to be hung adjacent to the framed images.  We chose to host the event during the department's weekly social hour and provided refreshments for people to enjoy while perusing the art.

This event would be equally successful in a less scientific community.  The one thing that we'd suggest, however, is to be explicit in the instructions for the captions.  People are sometimes tempted to submit a caption from a figure that they had in a paper as is.  However, these types of captions tend to be too technical for a lay audience and (in our case) even a scientific audience without the context of the whole paper.  Perhaps this could be avoided by requesting a non-technical caption and setting a word limit.

Research as Art Event Budget
Beverages	$101
Snacks	$20
Frames	$166
Framing supplies (glue, backing, etc)	$30
Total	$317

Tabletop Earthquakes: A Slider Block Experiment

Tabletop Earthquakes:
A Slider Block Experiment

We will set up a slider-block model to demonstrate how fluid injection can cause a fault to slip more easily.  Specifically, we will show how a heavier block has a longer time delay after applying the weight to it before it will slip.  A lighter block will represent the fault supported by fluid and slips more easily under the same weight.  We will also show that different springs (with different spring constants) cause the system to change behavior.  Specifically, a stiffer spring will lead to more frequent and smaller events.  The students will have the opportunity to test these observations by using a timer to record the times between slip events for all situations and a ruler to measure the distance (magnitude) of all slip events.

Materials:

Long piece of wood for the base

-wider than the slider block so you don’t have many derailments

Slider blocks

-blocks of wood or brick with different weights or just one block and multiple weights to put on top

String to attach slider block to spring and spring to weight

Springs with two different spring constants

Weight heavy enough to get the system moving but not too heavy to prevent the sticks

Method:

1.     Hook system up as shown in diagram with weight hanging over the table

2.     Start the block as far away from the edge of the table as allowed by the length of the base wood and let the weight go

3.     Have one student use a timer to measure the time between slip events

4.     Have another student record these times

5.     Have another student mark in pencil on the wood the position of the block at the end of each slip event (choose the front or back of the block)

6.     After several slip events, begin to fill in the following table (preferably on a board where the students can all see the results) with the mean time between slip events and the mean magnitude of each slip event :

	Heavier Block		Lighter Block
Stiffer spring	time	distance	time	distance
Less stiff spring	time	distance	time	distance

7.     Repeat the procedure with each combination of block weight/spring stiffness

Summary:

We discuss the observations and how they relate to earthquake generation.  The spring stiffness represents different rock types.  If done in conjunction with a fracking example, make sure to draw parallels between the reduced normal stress cases in the slider block example (lighter block) and fluid injection.  This offers an easily accessible explanation for induced seismicity in wastewater injection sites.  For questions, contact hannahr@ldeo.columbia.edu

Budget

Material	Use	Cost
Slider Block Model
Long piece of wood	Base of model	Borrowed from lab/professor
2 blocks of wood	Of different weights to represent the initial and reduced normal stress	Borrowed from lab/professor
Sandpaper	To have a rough fault so that the block actually sticks before slipping	Borrowed from lab/professor
Weight	To apply shear stress to the fault	Borrowed from lab/professor
String	To attach the block to the weight	Borrowed from lab/professor
Springs	To store the energy while the block is sticking	~$10

Give a TED Talk Everywhere You Go

As some inspiration to begin your abstract writing, watch Jason Teteak tell us how to draw in an audience.  His main points are:

1) Make your audience feel safe by telling them how you help them.

2) Make the audience feel good by emphasizing why they want to listen based on happiness, success, and freedom. 

3) Make your audience laugh by showing vulnerability and surprise and doing so in the style that fits you.

So think about what amazing things you've done that you want to show off and start writing an abstract!  

Jello Fracking Experiment

Jello Fracking Experiment

We will give a short PowerPoint explaining how fracking occurs.  We will also touch on where you get deposits (of natural gas or water): between different rock layers.  We will mention the applications of fluid injection (natural gas extraction, geothermal energy, stress measurements).  We will explain how the fluid is injected at high pressures and therefore can push a crack wider and support some of the stress (like how water can float things like a sponge). 

Materials:

Cup with clear gelatin (one for each student)

Pipette

Cup of grape juice or another dark fluid (can share among several students)

Plastic knife

Method:

1.       Inject grape juice to several levels of the gelatin.

a.     All the way to the bottom.

b.     Half-way through the gelatin.

2.       Make a slit in the gelatin

a.     Inject juice near the slit

3.       Try the injections at different rates (ie squeezing the juice in all at once vs. squeezing it in slowly)

Summary:

We’ll ask for their observations and discuss as they come up:

1.              Creation of a reservoir between the bottom of the cup and the bottom of the gelatin layer.

2.              Vertical cracks when you inject into the middle.  If you inject more slowly, the crack spreads out more laterally.  This shows the fluid taking advantage of the pre-existing crack edges.  You’re also injecting with less force, so the crack remains thinner and has less fluid. 

a.     Which would be more likely to have an earthquake, a fracture with more fluid or less fluid?

3.              When you inject on the pre-existing fracture, the fluid migrates along that fracture rather than creating a new fracture.

Jello-Fracking
Plastic cups	So that we can see into the gelatin	~$5
1 pound gelatin	To serve as the analogue for the rock being fracked	Borrowed from lab/professor
Grape juice	Fracking fluid	~$6
Pipettes	To inject the fracking fluid	Borrowed from lab/professor
Plastic knife	To create pre-existing fractures in gelatin	Borrowed from lab/professor
Total		~$21