What I Did on My Summer Vacation...

...or my weekend. Whatever.

I have been playing on Flickr like a maniac, and I just have to show off my stuff.

To get my feet wet, I created a "set." I uploaded a bunch of pictures around a theme (in this case, fun things to do in the summertime). Sets are basically personal photo albums. You don't have to have photos in a set, but I thought it would be nice. I played around with tags and geotagging. I couldn't get the map function to work - this would allow there to be a map showing exactly where the photo was taken just to the right of that photo. Maybe it doesn't agree with Firefox. Here is a link to my set, The Joys of Summer.

After that, I created a gallery. If sets are personal photo albums, galleries are the albums you make with other people's photos. Galleries are my absolute favorite part of Flickr. I think the galleries are where this overwhelming mass of mostly mediocre pictures becomes a place for art. My gallery isn't the most amazing out there, but I like it anyway. I did a sort of pictograph version of the lullabye poem "Wynkin, Blynkin, and Nod" by Eugene Field. It was definitely fun to do, although it took a really long time. Here it is.

Finally, I played around with annotations. If galleries draw the artists, annotating draws the educators. Annotations allow you to place a little box around one specific spot in the photograph and then place a note about the thing in the box. I used a couple of photos we took in San Francisco from the Coit Tower, a huge tower set on top of Telegraph Hill. I tried to identify some of the sights, and maybe add a little interesting fact about them. The end result is pretty cool, although it took FOREVER to do. I was hampered by the fact that I don't actually know San Francisco, so I was trying to figure out the names of the buildings using Google Earth and Google Maps. Here is the first picture and here is the second.

I could think of a bunch of educational applications. You could identify plants in a picture of a garden or forest. Or parts of a plant (or animal). In the zoo field, you could identify good (or bad) aspects of an exhibit. Or particular traits of an animal which help it to adapt to its environment. Annotations would really only be useful, however, if you wanted to investigate parts of a whole.

Setting up these Flickr "exhibits" is really work-intensive, though. I spent hours on the gallery and the annotating. I'm not really sure how useful Flickr really is in terms of educating. But it is cool. I'll give it that.

Bats

I was walking down to the mailbox this evening, right as twilight was deepening. The sky was still a fairly light blue, but the landscape had faded into shades of gray. That's when I saw the bat, flitting back and forth above me. It was just light enough so that when he made a sharp turn, I could just make out a line of light along the "finger" bones in his wing. I watched and silently cheered each turn. It was probably a little brown bat, Pennsylvania's most common bat, and just one of these fabulous little hunters can catch up to 1,200 insects in an hour. Watching bats fly always makes me smile. The sight brings back memories of summer nights at camp, watching the sunlight fade before going to eat my S'more at the campfire, surrounded by friends.

Bats in the northeast are in serious trouble, though. In 2006, a New York State wildlife biologist named Alan Hicks found a large number of dead bats in four caves around Albany. Some of them had a white fungus around their noses. In the time since then, the fungus Geomyces destructans has spread - as have over a million bat deaths. White-nose syndrome is prevalent in New Hampshire, Vermont, NewYork, Massachusetts, Connecticut, NewJersey, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Virginia in the US, and in Quebec and Ontario in Canada. Slowly, however, the disease is spreading.

Scientists have no idea where this disease came from. They don't even know if the white fungus causes the death, or is an opportunistic infection which comes when the bats are hit by something else entirely. All they know is that something wakes up a hibernating bat, causing it to use up precious fat reserves. The bats then freeze or starve. No bat (as far as we know) has survived this disease. In some places, entire colonies of thousands of bats have died - their thin bodies piled on the floor of the cave for helpless bat scientists to find in the spring. Little brown bats seem particularly susceptible, but no bat species has proven immune. So far, there is no cure.

If current trends continue, the little brown bat will be nearly extinct by 2020.

So tonight, as I watched my neighborhood bat, I said a little prayer that his hibernation spot stays clean this year. Then I went to Bat Conservation International, and donated some money for research to combat this disease. Anybody who is reading this, please donate as well! Bats are not only wonderful creatures, but they are extremely important for the ecosystem. They are such effective predators of insects, no one really knows what might happen if they are suddenly taken out of the picture.

If nothing else, we are an ingenious species. We are clever. If anyone can figure this thing out, it will be us - but only if we have the will to do it. The white-nose fungus has been found on a bat in France...a totally healthy bat. Hopefully, this bat isn't the exception to the rule. Hopefully, we won't watch the destruction of European bats, too. Hopefully, this bat is actually immune to white-nose disease. If he is, maybe we can figure out a way to help our bats combat the disease.

I want my kids to watch bats in the summertime, too. Don't you?

For more information on white-nose syndrome, check out the U.S Fish& Wildlife FAQs and Bat Conservation International's FAQs. After you read up, here is where you can help the fight.

The Wonder that is Flickr

I've started reading about Flickr, and I was expecting to be impressed. I thought Flickr was just a place to dump all your digital photos, and I'm not really interested in seeing 10,000 pictures of a family that I don't know. I had thought that was all Flickr was about.

I was wrong.

There is an amazing amount of photographic art happening on this site. I am not sure how many of the photographers are bona fide professionals, and how many are "simply" gifted amateurs. I suppose it doesn't actually matter when you are working online, where the ease of publishing means all photographs can be judged on their own merits. Still, I was blown away. LEt me show you some of what I found:

Here is a series of dual photographs taken by a photographer in Atlanta, who stopped regular people and took portraits of them and photos of all the stuff in their bags. They all have the usual keys, cell phone, credit cards, etc - but there are also unusual items that hint at the personality of the person. The way he (she?) photographed both the items and the person also implied a kind of story that I found utterly fascinating.

Looking Into the Past is a "gallery" of photos taken by many people. I like the idea of galleries. Basically, you choose a subject or theme, and then find photos on Flickr that will go in that theme. In other words, you don't have to be a fantastic photographer to come up with a really interesting gallery. Making galleries would be a really fun and educational homework project...if I were a teacher, I'd make a mental note of that.

Here is another gallery with a more meditative theme. Just beautiful. And, of course, each photo is linked back to the original, along with what group(s) the photographer put the picture in. The groups are another interesting way photographs are organized, only this time there is no one "curator" of the group - photographers place their own pictures in there. There is a group for just about everything. The best groups have really vague themes - like the "Red Rule" group. The only rule is that the picture must contain red. The mix of types of photos is riveting.

The other really fascinating thing with Flickr is that it has public archive photograph collectionsm called The Commons. The idea is to make these archival photographs more accessible, and also (maybe) to get more information about the photo from someone, somewhere, who may know something. I got really excited about this idea for a little bit, because the Zoo has some great archival photographs, but they aren't really organized. How fabulous would it be to put it on Flickr?! Unfortunately, at this time they aren't accepting more Commons Photographs (although they encourage interested institutions to put their photos online through a more regular account, and maybe they can be added to the Commons collection later.) Still an interesting idea. Here is a photograph from Oregon State University, of all places. Among the Commons participants is the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and major archives from around the world. Awesome.

What I really like about Flickr right now is the creative potential of the site. You can create your own photo album, or you can create an album using other people's photographs. You can create a collection around anything at all, from a place (many photographs are linked to the specific location where they were taken) to an activity to an idea. And because you are playing with pictures instead of the written word, the ending product is just richer and more interesting. It is exciting.

In fact, I'm going to go play right now!


(Picture of Ben from a great set of the Philly Zoo! Thanks, ucumari!)

Librarians Do Gaga

I am a librarian now. I lot of people (including my own mother!) have stated disbelief that I would leave the zoo-keeper field to enter the wonderful world of records, archives, books, and magazines. I left I job where I would routinely scratch the head of a snow leopard! Crazy!!

But, hey, librarians are cool, too! And here is my proof...

Looking for a Wiki in a haystack of needles

This week I'm researching wikis. I can't say I'm impressed with what I've found. I suspect that browsing for wikis the way one would browse for books in a library is an activity destined for frustration and failure.

But let me tell you what I found. I tried looking for zoo-specific wikis. I found the promising American Zoo Wiki, which is supposed to have pages on all the zoos in America. It has one. The Central Park Zoo's entry says simply, "The Central Park Zoo is a zoo in New York City's Central Park. The zoo started out as a menagerie for exotic animal gifts."

Zoo Wiki also looked promising. It is a "collaborative animal archive wiki" with a bunch of entries, each on one species of animal. Unfortunately, the entries are all very small, including only the taxonimic information, the size of the animal, the continent where that animal can be found, and a drawing of the animal. As far as I can tell, there is only one contributor to the site, so it's not much of a wiki. The wiki manager also has a blog on her wiki, and it details her trials and tribulations. It is pretty disheartening - she starts out all excited for her lovely wiki, but she slowly has to shut down access to it because of intense and persistent spamming. As of May 2nd, she had to remove even the ability to become a member of the wiki because fake users were being set up with the purpose of vandalizing her blog. Now, if you want to be a member of her wiki, you have to contact her directly.

I got really excited when I found Zoo World Wiki. It had a bunch of entries, and the description on the main page started, "Hey, Zookeepers!" But it turns out that this is a wiki about a Facebook game called Zoo World. Apparently I'm not the only one frustrated: one of the comments under the Overview section was from "Angelsinthewindow": "Damnit! I thought this was for the zoo world on FACEBOOK! darn it all."

I also looked through Wikipedia's list of active wikis. The active wiki entry is a little annoying because all the links simply go to the Wikipedia entry on that wiki, as opposed to linking directly to the wiki in question. But I can copy and paste into Google with the best of 'em, so I followed up on interesting looking wikis for a while. I did manage to find some good wikis here. One that sounded intriguing was Whole Wheat Radio, which is a indie music-streaming website with an associated wiki. Interesting stuff (and good music!), although it was hard to search if you didn't already know a fair amount about Indie musicians. Another good wiki is the International Music Score Library - a library of public domain music scores for the use of all. I don't have much need for musical scores myself, but the wiki struck me as useful, at the very least.

I also found A Million Penguins, an experiment by Penguin Publishing to write a wiki novel. Within five paragraphs, I confirmed that it is indeed not a good idea to write a novel by committee. It's a mildly entertaining read if you go for post-modern random oddness. Are they in an internet cafe, or on the beach? And why is the walrus so intent on his painting? Very strange.

So, at the end of my searching, I've come to the conclusion that wikis may be a great collaborative tool, but I'm not sure how useful it is to collaborate with EVERYONE out there. If a wiki is just put out there in cyberspace, as the poor managers of Zoo Wiki and American Zoo Wiki learned, you're likely to either be spammed to death, or ignored. I think wikis should be used in more specific applications. My first idea for a wiki was an Enrichment Wiki for zookeepers. The wiki could be arranged by animal (or perhaps by type of animal) and zookeepers could post enrichment ideas they've had success with. There is something like this already, a database maintained by the Fort Worth Zoo. You can submit items to the database, but you have to be an approved member to actually post things. In a wiki, keepers could discuss what does and doesn't work, safety issues, etc. It would be more of a living document.

There could also be wikis on the husbandry of some difficult-to-care for animals, to allow the the subset of the zoo community involved in the species in question to develop best practices collaboratively. Or a wiki for zoo educators. There are many possibilities, but I think the wiki should be restricted to a specific population. The wiki also needs to be advertised to the appropriate audience. The enrichment wiki could be presented in the zookeeper's professional publication, Animal Keeper's Forum. The husbandry wikis could be supported through AZA's Conservation Committees. Etc, etc.

Wikis are collaborative tools, so the idea that you need a group to collaborate with might be completely obvious. With Wikipedia being the most well-known wiki, however, I do think a lot of people skip that first step. So, this is what I've learned: gather your group together first. THEN collaborate.

I know. I'm brilliant.

Weirdness

So, I'm pretty new to this whole blog thing. I don't really know what I'm doing. I'm not sure if it is me or blogspot, but I haven't been able to leave any comments on this blog. Since the discussion in the comments section is a huge part of a blog, I've really felt this lack.

I finally tried looking at my blog in Internet Explorer (I normally use Firefox) and it was a revelation! First of all, my blog looks pretty crappy through Explorer. Nothing is centered exactly right, and there are some differences in the colors. It's a little ugly. BUT (and here's the important bit) I can leave comments.

So. If you are using Explorer, I encourage you to look at the world through the eyes of another browser. And if you can't leave comments, you can go to Explorer, but don't pay too much attention to the look of the blog.

Or maybe I'm the only one with this weird problem. I probably hit a button somewhere. Or something. Ah, technology!

Where do emotions come from?

I was skimming through the latest issue of "Science News" at work today, and I saw an article stating that people with Botox have a slightly harder time "evaluating descriptions of negative emotions." If your facial muscles are paralyzed, it takes just a smidgeon longer for you to read sentences about sad or angry things. It doesn't sound like that big of a difference, but we are hard-wired to pick up on the smallest and briefest cues from facial expressions. Even a slight hesitation in being able to read and respond to such a cue will be noticed - if only subconsciously. So Botox people may be at a social disadvantage. Maybe even more chilling, they may feel certain emotions less intensely, or are at least slower to feel those emotions.

This is crazy to me. I guess, deep down, I've always thought of emotion as coming from my mind or my soul, and my body simply expresses the emotion. But the article says, "...scientists have posited that facial expressions trigger and intensify relevant feelings, rather than simply advertise what an individual already feels." I listened to a Radio Lab episode (sorry, I can't remember which one) about this subject, too, and it really blows me away. The folks at Radio Lab were saying that, in effect, the body "chooses" an applicable emotion before the mind does. The mind actually picks up on the body's signals and says, "oh...let's see...I'm sweating, my heart is beating rapidly, my stomach feels like I'm falling. I must be scared. What am I scared about? Holy crap, a bear!!" (Or whatever.)

But this article is talking about something more subtle than the mind noticing the body's flight-or-fight response before the mind is aware such a response is needed. This is more like, "huh, my eyebrows are drawn together and the corners of my lips are being pulls down. Hmm...I must be sad about something. Ok, release all the feeling-sad hormones!" If your face is stuck in an angry position, your mind will find reasons for you to be angry. If you always look sad, you will find reasons to be sad.

If you keep smiling, you will find reasons to be happy.

This reminds me of a wonderful Real Live Preacher blog entry. He said, in effect, faith (and love) isn't something you feel or think. It's something you DO. You make a decision to be faithful, and you act in a faithful way. The feelings come after. Maybe happiness is something you do, too.