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2月, 2014の投稿を表示しています

First that meeting for the new semester

From April I will have four students in my lab and 1 exchange student from China. The Chinese exchange student is from Shanghai and two of my students are grad students. Anyways I had a small informal meeting at my house and the undergraduate students and my current graduate students were able to come. Anyways I also thought it was a good idea to have a barbecue and not a typical Japanese barbecue, and got them some hamburgers and hotdogs. OK, we didn't get to the hot dogs but they sure got to the hamburgers! I think they had at least 20. One thing I know for sure now is that coming April we will have a rather talkative group and they are all ready to get into the water. That's a good thing, since our first field trip is April 3 - 4.

So something doesn't look right

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Went to the Nagasaki Science Museum(長崎市科学館) today. They were having a small activity for school children. One of the activities dealt with making a globe. But something is wrong with the globe I wonder if you can figure that out. Take a look.

Kotoe's presentation

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So, Kotoe and the rest of the 4th year students at the Institute gave their thesis presentations today. I was surprised by the quality of the presentations this year. All of the students probably did their best to get the data and give an informative talk. Her presentation was on the retention time and dispersion of a fluorescent tracer in the canopy of Sargassum thunbergii. She also got as far as examining how fish in the canopy affects the dynamics of the tracer. The images are probably a bit hard to see, but the students do their talk with powerpoint slides and need to keep it under 12 minutes (8 minutes of talk and 4 minutes of discussion). She was able to peak Prof. Nakata's (oceanographer) interest, and he asked a few question that I think she really didn't understand. Hopefully she can address them in the thesis. Anyways, she is staying on as a grad student in my lab, and I think she wants write up her research as a paper and do fieldwork for her masters.

Senior thesis presentations are today

Today at Nagasaki University, the seniors (4th year students) will distill a year of hard work into 8 minutes of slides. Hopefully, they will be able to deliver their message, but often times things can get quite incoherent near the end. They also have 4 minutes of Q&A. Which is rather generous, since they tend to take the question with the "cat staring into the head lights" look. I'll be chairing at least 5 of the talks. I hope there are lots of questions from the floor so that I don't have to ask any.

Prof. Matsuoka's final lecture and public talk on Omura Bay

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One of our professors at the Institute for East China Sea Research is retiring this March. As is customary for the professors leaving the Faculty of Fisheries of Nagasaki University, they present their final lecture that typically covers their entire career at NU. He is one of the professors here at Nagasaki, that helped shape my career here, and will probably continue to do so, even after he retires. In fact he will probably stay on as a Professor emeritus, and we should see him more often. If things work out, he will be moving his lab from the main campus to the our campus. Anyways, Prof. Kazumi Matsuoka gave his talk regarding dinoflagellate species diversity and paleobiology. I never realized it, but he had written a number of important papers linking the resting cysts (spores) and the adults. This type of research apparently is useful in identifying fossil records of similar cysts.  I was also amazed that many of his former students took the time to attend his

Aerial movie of a canal in Kagoshima City

A good friend of mine, who is studying the coastal environment uploaded an aerial video of a sea-water canal in Kagoshima City. The dark patches are seagrasses.

Next week, the Seniors (4th year students) are giving their thesis presentations.

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So this year, I have one 4th-year student working on her thesis. She has been examining dispersion in small canopies of Sargassum thunbergii (ウミトラノオウ), and has also added some marine catfish to the experiment to see what they do to the water. Apparently the dispersion rates increased with increasing density of Sargassum, and the fish only contributed to dispersion when the density of Sargassum was low. This is the experiment done in the acrylic flow-chamber. This is a small group of Sargassum thunbergii at our field site.

Off to Kagoshima

The weather is really lousy today. But at least it is warmer than yesterday. Will be going to Kagshima to discuss this seasons fieldwork. Hopefully I'll get there, just in time to have lunch.

Winter semester if finished

Classes for the winter semester is finished. About time. I was getting rather weary grading all the homework and quizzes. The grading policy for my class is 50% homework and 50% quizzes; no final exam (always hated them when I was a student). I gave 6 homework assignments and 6 quizzes that were strongly associated with the homework. Meaning that if you did the homework, the quiz is a piece-of-cake. Homework is not typical for university level course work here (Japan), probably because we don't get much help grading them. We do get a teaching assistant, but they don't get paid enough to do all my grading, but that is another story. Anyways, this year we had some "irregularities" in the homework, some students had the guts to submit perfect copies (i.e., photocopies) of their classmates work. But there is something incredulous about all of this. Some of the printers at the university are setup to print the student's id number at the bottom of every page. Yet a fe