UC3
Your Turn!
For those of you that have been reading this blog, you know that I’ve devoted much of the content to results from scientist surveys. How about you get involved? If you or someone you know uses Excel in the course of Oceanography, Ecology, or Environmental or Earth Sciences research, please take 5 minutes to fill […]
Sharing Fish Data
Before last week, I had never attended an American Fisheries Society function. I have known a few fisheries biologists in my academic and personal life, including one of my closest friends who works on migration patterns in coastal fishes. I don’t recall having any preconceived notions about the differences between fisheries folks and ecologists (or […]
Excel Use Among Fisheries Folks
Last week I spent some time at the 2011 Fall Meeting for the American Fisheries Society. The streets of Seattle were swamped with an estimated 4,000 AFS attendees… I wonder how many made it to Pike Place Market for a little on-the-ground research? I was more interested in the tasty coffee choices that Seattle has […]
Potentially Problematic Excel Features
This post wraps up my report from the ESA conference, but I saved some of the best info for last. I asked ecologists what features they used in Excel in the course of their research. There’s no question that this group of scientists is using Excel to its full potential. However some of the features […]
Quantitative Results From the ESA Conference
For the last two posts, I have given a brief overview of the qualitative results from the ESA meeting. For this post, I am reporting the nitty-gritty numbers. I formally surveyed 55 Ecologists while at the ESA meeting, and managed to get a fairly diverse pool. Here’s how their academic status fell out: Their areas […]
Ecology Spreadsheets 101
While at ESA, I wore two hats- one as the DCXL project manager, and one as a DataONE postdoc working on engaging the scientific community in data management, education, and archiving (see more about my work with DataONE here). Part of my DataONE tasks at ESA involved participating in two workshops related to data management […]
ESA 2011 Meeting, Austin TX
Earlier this month, I attended the Ecological Society of America’s 2011 Meeting, held in Austin TX. I joined thousands of Ecologists in thinking, discussing, networking, and sweating in the 100+ temperatures. Over the next couple of blog posts, I will share some of my insights based on my interactions at the meeting. The goal of […]
What Scientists Want: The Final Chapter
Here it is — the final installment of the requirements we are submitting for the DCXL add-in “Requirements” are the capabilities we want the proposed add-in to have, based on discussions with scientists and other stakeholders. For more information, read my three previous posts (here, here, and here) and check out the new Requirements page for more details […]
Semantics and Data
There is a good reason that this post on semantics is directly preceded by a post on Ontologies and Data: I often get confused on the differences between the two. This is probably because my left brain, which likes to clearly define, categorize, calculate, and organize, struggles with such right brain definitions like the study of the […]
Open Data Explained
Wondering why we promote open data with DataUp? Here’s a great little video From OERIPR Support that explains: [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tvwp5LK_Wko]