You might remember the famous salmon study by Bennett et al. (2009) (pdf), the classic demonstration of why corrections for multiple comparisons are vital in fMRI research. Yes, the one where the researchers found significant activation in parts of a salmon’s brain. Dead salmon’s brain to be exact.

Well, the trouts are back in town. This time the rainbow variety, and the study is about the good old Mozart effect.

I have absolutely no expertise in the field of fisheries and these kinds of studies, but sometimes the keyword-trawler fleet hauls in some unexpected catch: in this paper, a group of scientists in the University of Athens have studied the effects of playing music to rainbow trouts in a fish farm.

Does this sound silly? Sort of springs to mind the Fish Slapping Dance from Monty Python? It does not help that they cite papers by Fish (1972) and Bass & Ladich (2008) in their intro… But this is a serious scientific study and here’s why.

Over-fishing is one of the major threats to our environment and our future. It has been estimated that we’ve lost 80% of the marine biomass during the last century, 60% in just the last 40 years.

Fish stocks are a crucial source of nutrition for humans, and as the natural stocks are dwindling, fish farming becomes more important in feeding the world. Fish farms are far from unproblematic, though. There are ethical issues about animal well-being, and many fish farms pollute as fish feed and waste is flushed from the farm to the environment. These flow-through and net cage systems are basically huge plastic bags set up in the sea, keeping the fish inside but letting the water flow through. A newer alternative to these are the recirculating water systems (RWS). These are large fish tanks or pools that are not connected to the natural water bodies, and have a closed circulation of water, with only a little fresh water added, like a swimming pool. The ethical issues remain, but environmentally this is better as the impact to natural water bodies is limited and these can be situated closer to the consumers rather than at the coast, so this could cut down transport costs and further lower the environmental impact of fish. Also, being closed-circuit, they are ideal testbeds for research, as all variables can be controlled by the experimenters.

However, fish adapted to live in the ocean do not adapt easily to living in tanks. People have been tweaking the colour of the tanks, lighting, light cycles, feed etc. to make e.g. rainbow trouts to grow in the RWS’s, and like in any attempts to make an environment more cosy and home-like, at some point it comes to putting on some nice music. Mellow tones might alleviate the stress induced by the close quarters.

Noise pollution is a serious issue for the well-being of marine life, so it could be that a pleasant sound environment could have a positive effect on it.

The researchers have done prior research on the effects of music on fish, and the “Mozart K525″, also known as Serenade in G, “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” has been their favourite piece to do the tests on. In this study, they used the second movement (Romanze – Andante) and to see if there is some magic juice specifically in Mozart’s music, they used also another Romanza, by the most prolific composer of them all: Anon.

The rainbow trout can indeed hear sounds, although their range of hearing stops at around 400Hz, which basically leaves out much of what is “music” in the stimulus. The authors decided to utilise white noise as a control condition, “in order to determine whether the effects observed could be attributed to music per se and or merely to the presence of a novel acoustic stimulus within the experimental environment”.

I’m no expert on fish hearing, but I would not necessarily call white noise as “novel acoustic stimulus”. Perhaps just bursts of white noise to mimic the rhythm of the music would have been a control condition that would actually answer the question if there’s some specific effect that music has? A scrambled version of the music? Although, it has to be said that the music conditions are not much different from the noise if you only hear frequencies up to 400Hz. This is what a sample of Mozart K525 that was fed through a lowpass filter with a cutoff frequency of 400Hz sounds like:

(The original by Sir Neville Mariner and the Academy of St Marlin in the Fjord)

The stimulation was set to hefty 140dB levels, to be about 100 times louder than the regular 121dB sound in the experimental tanks (I assume produced by the movements of the fish and the filtering systems etc.). This is way beyond the pain threshold of human ears, but here the sound waves are generated in the water, so the numbers are not directly comparable. The sound stimulation was applied for 4 hours a day during weekdays (the fish got time off on weekends) and lasted for 98 days.

The catch of the day: luckily no fish died during the experiment. After the experiment, though, all trouts were decapitated and dissected. Their brains were frozen so that neurotransmitter analysis could be carried out. Also the livers, spleens and digestive tracts were harvested for analysis.

The fish in tanks that listened to either of the Romanzas, had higher body weights than the fish in the control tanks, and especially the fish who heard the Romanza by Anon were longer than the rest. Also, the fish who listened to the 140dB low-pass filtered Mozart had higher brain serotonin and lower dopamine levels than the rest, suggesting that they were more relaxed than the others.

The authors conclude: “Appropriately applied music transmission supports both the achievement of the optimum homeostasis level of farmed fish as well as, predictably, of their “happiness” and, by extension, of a beneficial-healthy and advantaged aquatic and terrestrial environment, especially as regards use of recirculating water systems, the sum total of these achievements resulting in the producer’s satisfaction and profit.”

I’m not sure what to say about this. In this study the amount of food that was administered to each tank depended on the weight of the fish. So the musically stimulated tanks started receiving more food as the fish in them started to slowly but surely outgrow their peers. So the added weight in the end is explained by the increased feeding, weight does not come from thin air (or water). Thus the interesting question is, what sets the musically stimulated tanks into a different growth trajectory in the first place? Periodic and predictable sound stimulation could have some beneficial effects on growth rates, perhaps through some effect of lowering the stress levels in those tanks. Finding the roots of this effect would be useful. If it is something in the music per se, it might just be the rhythm – not much else of it survives when transmitted under water and through the auditory system of the Oncorhynchus mykiss.

Papoutsoglou, S., Karakatsouli, N., Skouradakis, C., Papoutsoglou, E., Batzina, A., Leondaritis, G., & Sakellaridis, N. (2013). Effect of musical stimuli and white noise on rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) growth and physiology in recirculating water conditions Aquacultural Engineering DOI: 10.1016/j.aquaeng.2013.01.003

(Picture of rainbow trout by USFWS Pacific in Flickr. (CC-BY-2.0)

White matter tracts seen from below – colour-coding shows the direction of fibre tracts. Figure from the Human Connectome Project gallery by LONI / UCLA & Martinos Center of Biomedical Imaging / MGH.

The BBC ran a story today on the Human Connectome Project. The story features a set of colorful pictures, which represent some of the first results of the massively ambitious, $40M endeavor to map the human connectome. The BBC article has the pretty pictures, while a recent advertorial* in Science has a bit more of the technical detail.

The Connectome Project attempts to map the neural connections in the human brain; the connectome (cf. genome) is unique for everyone, a result of genetic and environmental factors, as well as what we’ve learned and experienced in life.

The enormity of the project dwarfs the mapping of the human genome. So far, the connectome of only one species has been mapped: the round worm C. elegans has had the 7000 connections of its 300 neurons mapped. This took ten years, and the human brain has about 100 billion times more connections than the C. elegans. So it’s a huge technical challenge to put it mildly.

However, the pretty pictures on the BBC story are not the connections of individual neurons. Instead, they are the “superhighways” of the brain, the bundles of thousands of axons that allow the different parts of the brain “talk to each other”.

These connections are mapped using the magnetic resonance (MR) scanner, that also produces the pics of “blobs” of activation that we are used to seeing in cognitive neuroscience studies (fMRI) or the generic anatomical images used e.g. in medical diagnostics. It is just a different imaging sequence that looks at the diffusion of tiny water droplets in the brain tissue. Water droplets flow easier along these fibres than across them, allowing the system thus to calculate the paths of these fibre tracts, and then these can be visualised in all the colours of the rainbow!

These diffusion images have been around for a while, so what’s so special about them? Well, these images are produced using a new “connectome scanner”, which is a souped-up MR machine that produces larger magnetic gradients than “normal” scanners. It is the gradient rather than the strength of the magnetic field itself that is crucial for this type of imaging. Also, the pics are the product of new data processing and visualisation software developed for this purpose by the crew at the Massachusetts General Hospital Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging and the Laboratory of Neuro Imaging at the UCLA. The result: finer and more accurate tract maps.

So, consider these first images as “tasters” of what is to come, with more brains being scanned, and more specific research questions are being asked.

Much more info, including academic papers on the technical details and links to many more news stories: http://www.humanconnectomeproject.org/

This post was published also at my Google+ feed under tags #sciencesunday   #neuroscience   #connectome

* (this is one of their “Product articles”, essentially an ad paid for by the vendors and manufacturers of the cool devices that the research is done on, but it explains the general matter pretty well.)

From The Met to Mardi Gras, Glastonbury to Concertgebouw, music syncs groups of people together. Getting people moving together and feeling e.g. joy, sublimity or nostalgia together is one of many virtues of music (of course, you can also see it as a vice if you look at how music is used in preparation for battle or as a propaganda tool).

In studying music and entrainment, the focus is often in the musicians, who need to time their notes at a millisecond level. This is of course partly due to convenience, as it is easier to get a quartet into the lab than the 1000 people in their audience. In studying such phenomena, music researchers often borrow methods from natural sciences. Physics and especially the field of nonlinear dynamics have been very helpful in these studies, as musicians or dancers performing rhythmic movements can pretty well be modelled as oscillators. The interactions and entrainment of these oscillators can then be studied, e.g. producing simulations such as this one on how a group of metronomes entrain together or not, depending on small changes in the parameters.

Physics have also been applied to studying the audience, as Neda et al. showed in their paper on how a concert audience intermittently self-organises and claps in unison, to lose the synchrony again a bit later. They noticed that simple parameters drive this process: the rate of clapping (how fast or slow you clap) and how loud the clapping sounds like. To increase the loudness of the clapping (to communicate their appreciation to the performers) audience members are first locally (either subconsciously or on purpose) synchronising their claps with their neighbours, often in a slower tempo than what they’d normally clap at. This increases the loudness of the subgroup as the sound energies generated by their claps are now more effectively summed together. This brings in more people, again both through intentional synchronisation processes as well as via automatic entrainment (a similar process by which we start to tap our feet to a groovy piece of music without thinking about it).

Now, the whole audience is clapping together and typically starts to speed up, to increase the loudness even more, at which point the synchrony breaks down as the rate gets too fast to maintain. So, to be louder you can clap in sync and clap faster, but there is a trade-off: you can clap faster when you don’t need to sync your clapping with others, so there is a tradeoff between the two, and an equilibrium can be found only at a narrow range of these parameters. The audience constantly changes these parameters in search for the optimal combination and as a result keeps falling in and out of sync.

That study looked at an audience in a classical music concert. People there are generally sitting down still and only making themselves seen or heard after the music has stopped. A study came out this week that looked at a different kind of an audience: the mosh pit of a heavy metal concert.

Now, while the audience in the classical music concert could be modelled as an orderly set of metronomes, the mosh pit is a different beast, and so Jesse Silverberg and colleagues from Cornell looked at the moshers as molecules in a gas! They are bouncing about and to each other in a confined space, forming vortices and eddies in the pit. They analysed video data from mosh pits around the world, and also simulated them as MASHers (mobile, active, simulated humanoids).

In their modelling approach, they only needed a few parameters, just as has been done in looking at various kinds of “flocking behaviour“, people moving together in large crowds, or birds flocking, fish schooling etc. Fascinatingly, the model predicted the “birth” of local vortices in the pit, as the crowd “phase separates” so that those moving more flock together; the same phenomenon was observed in the videos, the so-called “circle pit”, where a subgroup of the moshers start moving together in a circle, usually rotating counter-clockwise. The modelled MASHers had a 50-50 chance of rotating clockwise or counter-clockwise, but the actual moshers rotate counter-clockwise about 95% of the time. This, the authors suspect, is because the real life moshers have dominant hands and feet, whereas such a parameter was not programmed into the MASHers.

Isn’t it fascinating how the behaviour of a group of smart, thinking and feeling people is so alike that of molecules or metronomes?

(for those interested in these topics, I can warmly recommend these books: Strogatz, S. (2004). Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order and McNeill, W. (1997). Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History. Both are very readable and aimed for a general audience.)

Picture by wetwebwork @Flickr.

Néda, Z., Ravasz, E., Brechet, Y., Vicsek, T., & Barabási, A. (2000). The sound of many hands clapping Nature, 403 (6772), 849-850 DOI: 10.1038/35002660

Jesse L. Silverberg, Matthew Bierbaum, James P. Sethna, & Itai Cohen (2013). Collective Motion of Moshers at Heavy Metal Concerts Physics and Society arXiv: 1302.1886v1

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 3,700 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 6 years to get that many views.

Click here to see the complete report.

So, my academic writing month started a bit late, and it also ended a week early, as I got the chance to attend a one-week MEG training session by Elekta. This was an intensive full-time course with lots of lectures and hands-on sessions, which basically meant that I had no time nor energy to write anything after the approximately 9 hours of training per day.

This probably sounds like I’m building an excuse to not have met my AcWriMo goals?

Sure, why not. I did not meet the goals as such, in that I did not submit those two articles and the one draft, and my thesis discussion is not ready yet. But, I made a lot of progress, nevertheless, and I appreciate the support that AcWriMo and everyone involved provides. This is what I achieved:

- I have a solid draft of the discussion of my dissertation. It is not ready yet and needs a lot of work, but the drafting process was fruitful and probably without the AcWriMo I would not have been motivated to do it, but rather I’d have done something else.

- I have edited the Recent Study manuscript to be 80% ready. This is a collaboration and I’m travelling to UK next week to discuss the rest with my co-author and after the trip we will be ready to submit. This was the main bit of “writing” I did for the AcWriMo. The MS is now about 6000 words shorter than when I started.

- I have thoroughly edited and debugged a script I used to analyse the data for the New Study, while also sorting my notes and I started to draft the results chapter. I presented the new analysis bits in our internal meeting today. Good progress in the analysis, but as my co-author has also been very busy with other things, the draft has not progressed yet to the point I envisaged in the beginning of the month. The script is now half of the length it was in the beginning.

- I did not touch the Old Study, which I thought was almost ready to be submitted. I hoped my supervisor would give comments and I could then finalise the draft after that, but he has not been able to read it yet. I knew he could do it only later (next week, hopefully), so I decided to not touch this paper at all.

So, in total I have fewer words than in the beginning, but they are much better ones than what I had before. In addition to these three completely separate projects, I’ve worked on one other project, producing one abstract for submission. The lesson here is that writing is a process that (at least to me) is about clarifying what the research is about, which makes writing an integral part of the research process, and the writing and data analysis very much intertwined. Being able to say things in a simpler and clearer way is a goal worth pursuing, as it will not only make the job of the reader easier, but it also makes you understand your work better. If you can’t say it clearly, you are not thinking about it clearly.

This was a positive experience and I’ve enjoyed seeing all the buzz about the AcWriMo in Twitter and in G+. I think also in the future, my work will be about juggling with multiple projects, which means that it is actually difficult to predict in the beginning of the month where the time of the coming month will go. But I think the aim in AcWriMo is admirable: you should write every day (or do something integrally related to writing, such as editing, organising notes etc.). Also I learned that even a short time can make a big difference: this exchange of messages pretty much sums it up. It was in the end a very productive 45 minutes, just as it was a pretty productive month! Thank you, AcWriMo, see you next year!

Local People, (c) BBC

Last week, I protested the decision made by BBC Eastern to axe the Naked Scientists radio show. Today, I got a reply from the BBC to my email.

Dear Mr Himberg

Reference *removed*

Thank you for your contact to the Head of Regional and Local Programmes for the East region, who has forwarded your concerns to Audience Services to respond to about the future of the ‘Naked Scientists’ programme.

The show is a specialist science programme that succeeds in communicating challenging and difficult scientific ideas in an accessible and engaging way. This is a key commitment the BBC needs to continue to maintain. But no single show can be the sole way to measure whether that commitment is discharged. The BBC is very committed to providing high quality science content on all platforms. This content reaches more than 40 million people in the UK a year. The BBC works with the world’s most influential scientists to produce high quality science series that engage the audience while tackling everything from thermodynamics to information theory, artificial intelligence and the origins of life.

Over the past few weeks BBC Four has dedicated an entire season of programmes to some of the most complicated science subjects on television with Seven Ages of Starlight, the Science of Chance, and Order and Disorder with Jim Al-Khalili. The BBC has long-standing science strands like Horizon on TV and radio programmes like the Infinite Monkey Cage. And the BBC now has a Science Editor for the first time to try to ensure the most important developments in science are reported across BBC news and factual programmes.

So why has the east region chosen to end the Naked Scientists programme? The decision is editorial; the show doesn’t fit the local radio brief. Local radio’s editorial role is to report local stories, local events and reflect local communities. The Naked Scientists, while excellent in reporting science, isn’t really a local radio programme at all as it doesn’t fit that core local editorial function. That’s not to say local radio shouldn’t report science-it should but its primary responsibility is to report local science. Our aim is to ensure that we do even better in reporting science in our mainstream output especially on BBC Radio Cambridgeshire with its obvious connections to science at the University, research institutes and scientific industries. We’re speaking to the Naked Scientists team about how they can help us in this ambition. We’re also speaking to other parts of the BBC to explore how the Naked Scientists team can have a role in creating science content.

We will be developing and strengthening our science reporting capacity across our mainstream output to reflect the significance of science in the area. Listeners will hear more science stories in the parts of the schedule with the biggest audiences.

We’re sorry you’re losing a show you value highly but we hope you find other parts of the BBC’s extensive science output just as valuable.

I’d also like to assure you I’ve registered your complaint on our audience log. This is an internal report of audience feedback which we compile daily and is available for viewing by all our staff. This includes all station controllers and commissioning executives, along with our senior management. It ensures that your points, along with all other comments we receive, are considered across the BBC.

Thanks again for taking the time to contact us.

Kind Regards

Philip Boyce

BBC Complaints

www.bbc.co.uk/complaints

NB This is sent from an outgoing account only which is not monitored. You cannot reply to this email address but if necessary please contact us via our webform quoting any case number we provided.

Again, the strange notion of “local”. Yes, they do interview researchers also from other universities but Cambridge. How about the recent episode on vitamin D? Yeah, not local as such, they interviewed Elina Hyppönen from UCL (a Finn, yay!) and other experts, all from outside the region, but given that approximately 90% of Brits have a deficiency of vitamin D, and that the deficiency might have dire consequences (e.g. diabetes and MS are linked to low levels of vitamin D), I’d think that this would have been necessary and relevant information for people in the Eastern UK? This is just one example, but this whole case demonstrates how the actual problem is either the brief or the people who decide to interpret in this inane way. Too bad that the world does not unproblematically fit BBC’s box diagram of briefs and responsibilities. I sure hope they will also enforce this with the same rigor in their other programming, including the music they play. There’s a lot of great music coming from the Eastern region, it is great that they now have a radio channel that is committed to exclusively policing that they will not let music from outside the region to pollute their airwaves. (Yeah right.)

I’ve just heard that my favourite science podcast, The Naked Scientists is being axed from their radio slot at BBC East. I’m no longer a resident of that region and not a BBC fee payer, so my views might not count as much, but I wrote to BBC Radio 4 Feedback anyway. Below is my letter.

Dear BBC Feedback,

Please do not axe the Naked Scientists radio programme from BBC East. As a Cambridge University alumnus and a researcher, I have been a fan of the programme for a few years now, and would personally be very sad to see the programme go. However, I wanted to write to you as I see that much more than my personal education and entertainment is at stake here.

First, more and more of science is done in multidisciplinary groups, and it is getting vital to understand not only one’s own field deeply, but also have a good overall understanding of what is going on in other fields of science. To this end, I find the high quality science programming of the Naked Scientists extraordinarily suitable. I have just recently shifted to a new path in my own scientific career, and without access to such resources, I do not think this would be possible.

Second, popularising science is something that the scientific community needs to do more, and I think the public broadcasters should help in this effort, given how vital it is to inform the public about scientific advances. However, not many of us researchers are good in talking or writing about our own research, and we do not have the audiences to make these efforts worth while. Thus, we are not only in a dire need of people like the Naked Scientists who are actually good in both science and communication, but also in need of broadcasters that share the mission of serving the public not just for short term profit but for a better future.

Naked Scientist have managed to painstakingly build their own audience and the capabilities to serve as a bridge between scientists and the general public. It would be sad to see all that fall apart. Most of the academic research done in the universities is paid for by the tax payers, and a there is a lot of pressure to give back to the society. This is one of the key arguments for making scientific publications open access. Unfortunately, scientific papers need to be technical and complicated, as we write them for other scientists. Without high quality scientific journalism there is no way even educated non-specialists can find, let alone understand what the current trends and developments in science are, and how they might affect their lives. Science journalism in most news outlets suffers from lack of expertise in the actual scientific content, making the outlets and their audiences vulnerable to the biases in press releases and abstracts, and the resulting skewed and shallow view of research. None of this has ever been a problem for the Naked Scientists, and I think they serve as a model that should be adopted elsewhere, as well.

As I want to become a better communicator of my own research, I listen to a lot of science programming and read a lot of popular science books from around the world. So far nothing compares to the Naked Scientists. I use their programmes in teaching and am constantly impressed by their approach, which makes extremely difficult and cutting edge scientific questions understandable and relevant. You can hear and admire the large amount of work they put into their programmes, and their love for science as well as their enthusiasm is contagious.

I’ve heard that one of the arguments why the show would be axed is that it is not local enough for the regional manager Mick Rawsthorne. I find this argument weak, as the content of the show is produced by people in the “local” university, the University of Cambridge. Of course, science is global, and Cambridge is a global leader in science, but shouldn’t that just strengthen the case for broadcasting that global insight for the people in the region? Either Mr Rawsthorne has a very “League of Gentlemen” -like concept of what “local” means, or he is not disclosing the real reasons behind his decision. Whichever the case, I truly hope that this exceptional and exemplary programme could live on to enlighten locally, regionally, and globally.

Best regards,

Tommi Himberg

soon-hopefully-PhD-from the Faculty of Music, University of Cambridge

Researcher

Brain Research Unit | O.V. Lounasmaa Laboratory | Aalto University

In the previous post, I said I’d be working on three papers and the thesis. I’ve got the Current Study, the Recent Study, and the Old Study. Of the Current Study, I wanted to achieve a full draft that I could send forward internally to others in the group. Here I’m not going to be the first author, but have promised to draft some bits. In the Recent study, we already have a draft but it requires heavy editing and possibly some analysis, and the aim was to be able to submit this by the end of the month. Finally, the Old Study is something I’ve sat on for a while, it’s a part of the thesis and just needs to be spun off as an article.

So, here’s what happened on the first week.

Current Study: drafted a basic structure of the article, and started to write up the results. I was going back and forth between the text and the analysis, and started the week by trying to hunt down a bug in the analysis script, and ended the week by noticing that I had made a mistake in another part of the analysis. So I struggled with the analysis more than I had anticipated and thus had less time to write / draft. I’d say the draft is about 10% done, although as the analysis is now on the final straight, the writing will advance much more this coming week. Also, the first author is also getting on board with the writing, so we’ll hopefully get a lot done this week.

Recent Study: I made some big decisions about the article, and came up with a way to cut down excess text and to make it a more logical and coherent paper. This was mainly editing existing text, cutting down unnecessary bits, reorganising the introduction etc. Good progress here, but I’m afraid the re-analysis of one part of the data might take some time, as getting into an old dataset always takes a lot of time, even though I’m trying to document everything as well as possible. I’d say in terms of writing, I’m up to 30-40% of my total target.

Old Study: no progress here, I left it for after I send the Recent Study to my collaborators.

Thesis: got some preliminary feedback, which was positive. I’ve got ideas as to how to re-work it, and will do that work next weekend.

I think all these writing tasks are very typical for academic writing, the writing part is integrally connected with the rest of the research. Thus of course setting any word-based goals would not make sense. In the Recent Study, the manuscript is now about 4000 words shorter than when I started working on it, and that is progress. In the Current Study, the document is about 1000 words but it has very little apart from just subheadings and some initial sketching. I’ve tried to estimate my progress against what I think needs to be done still, but probably the percentages are not accurate. In general, I’m very glad that AcWriMo exists, as it motivates to keep going. I got nice supportive tweets from PhDForum and a DrWCarter who both saw my tweet on Saturday when I wailed that I only had 45 minutes to write. And I was happy to report that you can actually achieve quite a lot in 45 minutes, and just as in exercise, any is better than none. In that 45 minutes before the library closed, I got through maybe three pages of text that I was editing for the Recent Study. Not amazing, but good progress, and less to do next week.

Thanks for this, looking forward to the next week of AcWriMo!

Right. Here we go. November is a month of campaigns. Some people neglect taking proper care of their facial hair to raise awareness of prostate cancer, some others have decided it should be the month of writing books. The National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo for short) has been around since 1999, and last year 256 618 people took part, with 36 843 people reaching the 50 000 word goal. Loads of schools are taking part, as well. The point is to take advantage of the usually foul weather and churn out text by writing every day, and logging your progress on the website, and making noise about the whole thing in the social media while you are at it.

The NaNoers are writing novels. There are initiatives to write scripts for plays, as well, and last year people started the Academic Book Writing Month, or AcBoWriMo. This year, there are people going ahead with AcWriMo, or Academic Writing Month, as most academics would not be writing books but conference papers, articles, theses, applications, research proposals etc. etc. The focus is not in churning out astronomical amounts of words, but as the mother of the idea Charlotte Frost puts it, to

1. Think about how we write,
2. Form a valuable support network for our writing practice,
3. Build better habits for the future
4. And maybe – just maybe – get more done in less time!

So, you decide on your own goal, make it public, and then get writing. The hashtag #AcWriMo in Twitter, blogs and Google+ circles serve as the public arena and mutual support groups related to the project.

My goals

My goal is to finish some stuff. I’ve got four things I want to work on.

First, I’ve got a draft of an article that has been sitting on my hard drive for a while. It’s part of my PhD thesis and it should not need too much work so that it could be sent out. I’ve got to figure out to which journal I should send it to, but this should be a relatively straight-forward goal.

Second, there’s a draft of an article that I’ve prepared with a colleague of mine. Last summer we worked on it and we got to the end of the analysis, and there is a relatively OK draft of the paper already. We would need to get the story straight and figure out what results to present and from that everything else will fall in place (we’ve written more background that we can cover, so we’ll need to choose our angle). Preparing this so that it could be submitted is my second goal.

Third, there is a new study I’m working on at my new job, and that analysis is still ongoing. But there are some results emerging now and we have tentatively decided we should go ahead and publish them in a short paper. My third goal is to get a full draft of this written by the end of the month, so that it can then be sent out internally to all the collaborators and developed into a submittable manuscript hopefully before Christmas.

Fourth, I’ve FINALLY managed to get together the draft for my PhD thesis. I’ve sent it out to a few people, including my supervisor, and while I’m not going to get all their comments by the end of the month, my goal for the month is to finish the bits that are still unfinished (discussion, appendices, acknowledgements) so that I’m ready to re-write as I get the comments.

How am I going to do this? 

I am going to write every day. There is still some analysis to do, figures and tables to make, literature to read etc., but in addition to all that, I’m trying to go through some writing stuff every day. And I’ll use the #acwrimo hashtag to report my progress daily, and I’ll write something in this blog about weekly to sum up.

My writing rig is as follows. I use the amazing, awesome, and indispensable Scrivener for putting together the manuscripts. Then, depending on the required output, either port stuff to word documents or using Multimarkdown to LaTeX, after which I’ll fire up the awesome, excellent TextMate, and use that to do final edits, further LaTeX coding and compiling to PDF. No academic writing could be done without a good reference manager, in my case it is BibDesk.

OK, it’s already the 4th day, I haven’t yet started, I must run!

Putting together a setup for an experiment is one of my favourite parts of the research process. I suppose it is because it is practical work, providing a nice balance to the usual sitting in front of the computer for hours and hours -routine that most of the rest of the process consists of. Also, it is the point where usually a lot of abstract planning gets its physical form – a moment of birth, in a way. Emotions are involved, usually frustration as things do not work, but in the end also satisfaction and sense of accomplishment when they finally do.

A very nerdy confession: I like to read the methods and especially the apparatus sections in research papers. Even if the study itself is strong mainly in meh-ness, there might be clever bits in the way the study was conducted. And, a lot of very clever stuff was done before everything was done with computers.

So today, while searching for stuff on turn-taking and timing in conversations, I came across a paper I later remembered reading already before. It is a paper by a Harvard anthropologist Eliot D. Chapple, and it is titled “Quantitative Analysis of the Interaction of Individuals”. It is from 1939, and while it is an early example of an attempt to look at the timing of interactions, it is mainly a report of a work in progress, reporting data from one pair, and also uses the loosest possible definition of interaction (one person does something followed by the other person doing something), and so the findings are not very interesting. The calculations are of some interest, but what impresses me is the apparatus.

Someone doing Chapple’s study today, would simply set up a video camera on a tripod, and after the experiment would load the video into Observer, ELAN or some other software and set markers for when something important happens – when people start their turn in conversation, for example. And nowadays the video segments would probably be coded by multiple people, so that the inter-rater reliability could be calculated. But Chapple did not have access to computers or video cameras, so here’s what he did:

“In order to obtain a record of a sequence of actions manifested by individuals, it is necessary to use some kind of a time-recording apparatus. Accordingly, a simple device was improvised. A large wheel was fitted to the rubber roll of an old noiseless typewriter. A small electric motor drove this wheel by friction at a uniform rate of speed (15 inches to the minute). A roll of adding-machine paper, mounted on a brass frame, was fed through the roll to a take-up driven by another small motor. The take-up motor rewound the paper on a wooden roll and was arranged so that no pull was exerted on the paper coming through the typewriter. Thus, any influence on the speed due to the changing size of the upper rol was eliminated. An observer, seated at the typewriter, struck a designated key when the first individual acted, and when this action was ended by the action of the second individual, another key was struck.” (Chapple, 1939, 59)

Brilliant. That description gets all my steampunky juices flowing. Chapple says there is a more sophisticated apparatus in the pipeline, but I’m sure it doesn’t beat the simplicity of this. This reminds me of the device that Lewis Stevens used for his study “On the time-sense” (Mind, 1886), in what is often billed as world’s first reported synchronisation-continuation tapping study, although that setup was much more complicated. But in addition to the well-known stories about the struggle to measure time accurately, there were less-known struggles for measuring time-dependent phenomena and their temporal dynamics.

Picture: Mateusz Łapsa-Malawski (BY-NC-ND)

Chapple, E. (1939). Quantitative Analysis of the Interaction of Individuals Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 25 (2), 58-67 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.25.2.58