Well Wisconsin, here we are. Stranded in the middle of another midwest winter, staring down my last semester of grad school. Yes, the last semester. It’s the final countdown people. Just 16 weeks stand between me and my Master’s degree. Two years ago when I decided to pack up and leave behind everyone I knew to chase this crazy science writing dream across the country it felt like I was facing a mountain of a task. But day by day, my time in Wisconsin has chipped away, leaving me asking… how did I get here?
Category: Grad School
Science For Six-Year-Olds: The Butter Experiment
This semester I took a multimedia journalism class, and decided that it would be great to get my blogging buddies from Mrs. Podolak’s first grade class involved in my work. So, I paid a visit to their classroom to document just what goes on during a science experiment, and what makes science in the classroom so important, even for the primary grades.
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My First Video Shoot
I am working on my last project for my integrated media and storytelling class, which is going to be an iMovie, with some added pictures and audio. Today I went and shot the video and pictures, and I just wanted to share a few of the things I learned along the way. I’ll be posting the finished project once I get it all edited (I promised my subjects I’d put it up here) so stay tuned, but in the meantime:
- It is harder than you’d think to make sure you aren’t cutting off a subject’s head in your shot
- I drink too much coffee to hold a camera steady
- Sometimes the B Roll contains the real gems
- People are comfortable in a group, but get them alone and they can freeze up
- Fluorescent lighting is no one’s friend
- A rolling desk chair can be a fun, and useful prop
- I still hate how my voice sounds when it is being recorded
- The smaller the camera, the less people realize you are shooting them
- Sometimes getting the shot means getting down on the floor, or up on a table
- I’m really tall, I’m really nice, I give good hugs, and I’m like totally old enough to have a husband by now. (My subjects might have been more interested in me than the science, but the interviews were great!)
Now here’s a little hint about what shooting my last project entailed, and what my topic will be:
Captive Breeding and Mummification?
As I’ve mentioned before I am taking a class this semester about the extinction of species. One of the topics we recently covered (and I recently got a crash course in for the midterm) is captive breeding. Captive breeding is a conservation strategy in which animals are captured and held in a protected area, where they are then bred to another specific animal of their species to optimize the production and survival of their offspring. I just assumed that this was a more recent (meaning within the last century) trend in conservation efforts, but then I saw this BBC article about the effects of sacrifice and mummification on Egyptian species, and realized how wrong I was.
Mummified monkey in Cairo. Source: Wikimedia Commons. |
The ancient Egyptians would often mummify animals to be included in a person’s tomb as a sacrifice to follow the dead into the afterlife to provide company and serve as an offering to the gods. However, according to the article by Jane O’Brien, the Egyptians had favorite species that they chose to mummify. They sacrificed these animals so much that they put these species in danger of extinction. Thus, to keep up with demand captive breeding was needed to keep the number of available animals high.
Experts, like Selima Ikram a professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo who was quoted in the BBC article, believe that at least one bird species (the Sacred Ibis) was so popular for mummification that it was driven close to extinction. Other animals that were popular for mummification were dogs, cats, hawks, falcons, and baboons, although Ikram was quoted saying:
“Its easier to say which animals the Egyptians didn’t mummify. There are no mummified pigs as far as we know, no mummified hippos, and I think thats about it – because almost every other creature at some time or another has been mummified.”
According to the article, when the animals most sought after for mummification started to become rare in the wild, breeding programs were launched by temples (the animals were often seen as sacred or representations of the gods) and the nearby villages. Evidence of these programs shows them in place as early as 3,000BC with the height of captive breeding at 650BC-200AD.
I liked this article because it provided a little bit of context about why animals would have been slaughtered for sacrifice in such great numbers. If you just look at the fact that so many animals were killed, it seems like the Egyptians were being selfish, putting human desires (not even needs) above all these animals. However, you have to look at their religion, and how they viewed the animals. Ikram says that the Egyptians would have viewed sacrificing the animals as a great honor for the animals, because they were so revered. The focus was on life, and continuing the animals’ existence in the afterlife, not on death or killing them. I think this bit of context is a really important part of the story and I’m glad it was included in the BBC article. Captive breeding by the Ancient Egyptians… who knew?
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Just want to note that the BBC piece was a plug for the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History’s new exhibit of mummified animals. Haven’t seen it and can’t endorse it, but it looks like it might be pretty cool to check out if you are in the DC area.
Covering The Wisconsin Science Festival
In my integrated media and storytelling class this semester our first project was to cover an event using pictures and audio, and combine it into a slideshow. I chose the first Wisconsin Science Festival at the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery.
I had some upload problems trying to convert from a SoundSlides project into something uploadable but I finally got there. I edited the pictures in Photoshop and iPhoto, and edited the audio using Audacity. I lost a lot of photo quality in the conversion, but please watch and let me know what you think. This was my first foray into multi-media so any feedback would be much appreciated.