Tag Archives: exhibit

Fiber optics and LEGOs

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Kent got a new toy recently. It’s a kit by Industrial Fiber Optics, Inc. called “Adventures in Fiber Optics.” If you’re like me, fiber optics don’t exactly signify “adventure.” They may be vital components of adventurey things like airplanes and MI6 gadgets, but they don’t get your heart racing on their own:

 

 

But wait! When Kent gets done with this kit, it will become an interactive element of the Life History Transmitter exhibit. If history has taught us anything, it’s that Kent can basically deconstruct and rebuild fun itself. I won’t be moping long.

Meanwhile, Mark and I are playing with LEGOs. By “playing with,” I mean “damaging with power tools.” They’re going into the wave tank, so they should be somewhat destructible. This requires us to undermine their defining characteristic of not falling apart. A Dremel tool works well for this. The tough part is that damaging LEGOs sort of hurts. LEGOs became an internal currency of my very imagination during childhood. Defacing them feels like some sort of crime under the jurisdiction of my brain’s Secret Service.

As with Kent’s fiber optics kit, the work should be well worth it in the end. You’ll be able to play with our toys soon.

 

The fun begins

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Two of our wave tanks arrived this morning.  The largest wave tank needs a little more time in the oven, so it should be arriving in a week or two.  I’ve spent more time crawling around in acrylic tanks than I have moving them, so I was a little surprised at the weight of the things.  They definitely feel solid.  With summer approaching, I’m sure they’ll get a thorough durability test in their first few months of service.

 

What are you all doing over there?

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Mark and I did some guerrilla filmmaking this morning.   Despite some hiccups and an uncooperative Sun, we got some good footage.  As I type this, Mark is preparing these and other videos for the Sea Grant all-hands meeting tomorrow and Friday.

Communicating what we do is a big part of what we do.  This is ethically necessary for human-subjects research (see Katie’s post from Monday), and it’s also a great way to teach science as a process.  It’s a somewhat recursive approach that can be, oddly enough, difficult to communicate.  I like to think we do a decent job of it.

I think the key point, as always, is that we’re all in this together.  Visitors, researchers, students and educators each have a role to play in this thing we call “Science.”  Researchers can learn about natural phenomena from the observations of the general public, while the general public can learn about research and natural phenomena from our Visitor Center exhibits and outreach products.  It’s a two-way street—nay, a busy four-way, multi-lane intersection—and our job is to facilitate the flow of information in any direction.

Much of what we do is familiar and time-tested—Bill, resplendent in his bloodstained white lab coat, holding aloft the entrails of a found shark before a crowd of excited children.  Such childhood experiences with classic museum interpretation are what drew many of us into this field.

Hopefully, the new strategies and technologies we’re in the process of introducing will come to be equally accepted and enjoyed by visitors.

What can I do to meet your needs, Katie?

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I’m back to the sales calls, this time for Video Management Systems, the back-end software that will coordinate all our cameras. This field seems more competitive than that of eye tracking, or maybe there is just more demand, as VMS is what runs your basic surveillance system you find anywhere from the convenience store to the casino. So people are scrambling for our business.

However, whenever we try to describe what we’re doing and what our needs are, we run into some problems. You want to record audio? Well, that’s illegal in surveillance systems (it’s ok for research as long as you get consent), so it’s not something we deal a lot with. Don’t mount your camera near a heating or cooling vent or it will drown out the video. The microphones on the cameras are poor, and by the way, it doesn’t sync correctly with the video – “it’s like watching a bad Godzilla movie,” said the engineer we spoke with this morning. You want to add criteria to flag video and grab certain pieces? Well, you can’t access the video stream because if you do, then it’s not forensically admissable and can’t be used in court (Ok, we just need an exported copy, we’re not going to prosecute anyone even if they chew gum in the Visitor Center). You want to record high-resolution images? Well, you can either buy a huge amount of storage or a huge amount of processing capability. Minor obstacles, really, but a lot of decision points, even more than eye trackers. Again, though, it’s a learning experience in itself, so hopefully we’re generating some data that will save someone else some time in the future.

The pricing and purchasing is a bit strange, too. The companies seem to all have “sales” teams, but many can’t actually sell anything more than the software, some don’t even sell their software directly. Instead, we have to deal then with retailers and sometimes “integrators” that can sell us hardware, too, or at least specify requirements for us. Then there’s the matter of cameras – we haven’t decided on those, either, and it’s becoming clear that we’ll have several different types of cameras. Juggling all these decisions at once is quite a trick, literally.

At least it’s a moderately amusing process; many of the sales folks are here or were visiting in the Northwest recently, and we’ve commiserated over the last week about all the rain/snow/ice that ground the area to a halt from Seattle to Eugene.