7 ms·

Yeah I did an experiment with metabolism in relation to temperature with rodents in college. Our results were just absolute garbage for the most part. I think t

Yeah I did an experiment with metabolism in relation to temperature with rodents in college. Our results were just absolute garbage for the most part. I think two of us owned cats, walk in temperature controlled fridge was incredibly loud and the light never turned off, and the fridge was on the opposite side of the building from the only lab with the correct equipment to run the experiment. Plus the enclosure for measuring VO2 was not very relaxing for the mice regardless. Another group was doing a metabolism experiment with caffeine and rats. The only meaningful result they got was the half-life of caffeine. The rats were incredibly animated regardless of whether they had been dosed with caffeine or not, and they basically got garbage for results as well. I'm an analyst now, and I've noticed biology is a second-class science in the eyes of a lot of hiring managers when it comes to analytics. Not everyone knows how to use data in bio, but if you are a data-type person, you get so much experience working with the worst data imaginable. The pure math types aren't that great at experimental design, and the physics and chem people tend to be able to control most of their variables pretty easily. I'll admit that bio people tend to be a bit weaker in math, but almost every real-world analysis situation I've been in has been pretty straightforward mathematically. Most of the time is spent getting the data to the point where it can be used.

jonlucc 10y ago
There's some neat software now (not sure if it was around when you were in college) to translate video into reliable data about the movement of animals. I've used it for fish, but the same software can be used to track people around a room or to track mice in a cage. I think that might be much more useful than, say, how many backflips a mouse does in their cage.
- Declanomous 10y ago
  This was about 9 years ago, so it probably existed in a certain sense, but our lab computers were still apple II's because that was what the software for the VO2 sensors was written for. The lab group doing the caffeine experiment was trying to measure whether the resting VO2 went up when dosed with caffeine, so the fact that the rats were moving at all was the primary problem. We tried using a machine vision program written by a grad student at another college to count trees from old survey photos at one point, and it did not work well at all in anything with more trees than a park-like setting. We ended up just having a human circle all the trees they saw and I wrote a program to detect the circles. It worked much better. The program I created was based on something similar used to count bacteria colonies on petri dishes.

jonlucc 10y ago

There's some neat software now (not sure if it was around when you were in college) to translate video into reliable data about the movement of animals. I've used it for fish, but the same software can be used to track people around a room or to track mice in a cage. I think that might be much more useful than, say, how many backflips a mouse does in their cage.

Declanomous 10y ago
This was about 9 years ago, so it probably existed in a certain sense, but our lab computers were still apple II's because that was what the software for the VO2 sensors was written for. The lab group doing the caffeine experiment was trying to measure whether the resting VO2 went up when dosed with caffeine, so the fact that the rats were moving at all was the primary problem. We tried using a machine vision program written by a grad student at another college to count trees from old survey photos at one point, and it did not work well at all in anything with more trees than a park-like setting. We ended up just having a human circle all the trees they saw and I wrote a program to detect the circles. It worked much better. The program I created was based on something similar used to count bacteria colonies on petri dishes.