Lab Meeting on 25 July 2019 • Kirstie Whitaker

This week’s meeting was jaaaaaam packed!

Keep reading to learn about some of the fun things that folks are celebrating and thinking about and scroll to all the pictures at the end to see some fantastic updates from the lab projects.

Kirstie kicked off the celebrations with a laundry list of items!

The existence of the first lab meeting blog post.
The video of her keynote talk at PyData London from a couple of weeks ago (and the playlist for all the other talks).
A heads up that the deadline for poster submissions to the Cambridge Neuroscience Seminar on Artificial and Biological Cognition is coming up fast on 2 August.
A lot of excitement for submitting her first ever grant (with James Hetherington as the lead investigator).
And finally, a whole lot of love for Serena Williams in this fun video.

Maxine is having fun writing up her PhD - and not in a sarcastic way! She’s really loving knitting everything together.

Patricia ran a really successful Friendly Introduction to GitHub session which went really well.

Sarah is working on “defending her time” because she’s finding it too distracting being at her desk with lots of interesting ideas around her. The sitting alone in a room with a calendar booking that said “Hacking on Binderhub” seemed to work pretty well!

Georgia (and Kirstie) are really excited to have received another piece of paperwork that takes us one more step closer to being able to publicly collaborate on designing the Autistica/Turing citizen science platform. Any day now 🤞🤞

Questions we’re thinking about

Kirstie is thinking about how to make it easy for folks to share their expertise with each other.

Some ideas that came from discussion before and during the meeting are:

Have a lab member present their project and then work together on that one to learn more about it.
Give an “introduction to my subject” session to get folks up to speed on the necessary background knowledge.
Recognise that everyone can share some skills, and that while a project may not look smilar from the outside, there are a lot of aspects of open science, open source development, reproducible research, and open, kind and collaborative working that are shared across them all.

Patricia is curious about what folks think about the current discussions in the library community about teaching via games, for example at this upcoming event. Let her know if you think it would be fun, silly, off putting or engaging!

Alex asked about tailoring a presentation to different audiences. The general take home message is to adapt the background and introduction slides depending on the group you’re presenting to. Kirstie pointed out that neuroscience audiences in particular tend to come from a lot of different backgrounds so getting everyone on the same page is really important. She also noted that almost no-one is paying attention for all of your talk 😭. So putting some effort into bringing folks back to the story when you’ve lost them (eg 1/3 and 2/3 of the way through the presentation) is really helpful!

Georgia is learning python and looking for folks to learn with too. Sarah has linked her up with the Turing Research Engineering code club and recommended Rosetta Code as an interesting resource.

Ang is curious about resources for getting started with open science. And in particular how to make it easy for different groups with different expertise or who use different languages (human and computer!) to work together. The group recommended the Open Research chapter of the Turing Way, and the reading list in the Whitaker Lab onboarding repository.

A general update

For this meeting, everyone was asked to share one powerpoint slide about work that you’re doing that is of interest to the lab.

Here they are!

Louise Bowler

Elizabeth DuPre

Sarah Gibson

Patricia Herterich

Isla Staden

Yo Yehudi

Georgia Aitkenhead

Yini He

Ang Li

Whew!

That’s a lot of very cool work going on at the moment. Thank you so much for sharing everyone and letting me work with you on these awesome projects 💖💖💖

—Kx

Celebrations and cool things to share