Category Archives: Uncategorized

New Website Section: Photos

Posted on by
Reply

[Note- I have not yet started organizing photos for a WordPress site]

I’ve added an additional page to my website here: Photos! I’ve decided to add this for a couple of reasons. First, I’ve been navigating the world of digital photography for a little while, and about a year and a half ago made the jump to DSLR photography. There are a lot of options when you are just starting out, and it can be confusing to know what accessories to get, upgrading etc. I’ll start to collect some advice there.

Secondly, like many people who enjoy taking pictures but don’t necessarily do it for a living, I’m happy if they can be useful to someone else. If anyone would like to use the images in that section for educational purposes, feel free, all I ask is attribution in whatever presentation you are constructing, and I’d love to know about it! If you’d like to use them in other contexts, please contact me.

I’m still working out exactly how I want to display the photos there, so it may take me a while to populate the page.

Patricelli Lab Pumpkins 2011 Edition

Posted on by
Reply
2011 Lab Pumpkins

2011 Lab Pumpkins

This week we indulged in our principal lab tradition, the carving of the pumpkin. As you can see, another great round of artwork. Mine is the owl on the left.

Otherwise, there’s been a lot going on of late. I’ve been doing a lot of reviewing recently- an NSF full proposal and several manuscripts . My labmates have also been really productive, so I’ve gotten to view drafts of a software manual, a graduate school admissions proposal, and an NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant (DDIG).

We are starting to think about next field season already! Field assistant ads will probably go out within the next couple of weeks.

I’m also going to start finding away to post my Matlab code here on the website. I’m definitely a hack when it comes to coding, but I’d guess some of the things I’ve figured out may be useful to someone else.

I can’t believe it is almost November already!

Pumpkin Outreach

Posted on by
Reply
Durham-themed Pumpkins

Durham-themed pumpkins

If you’ve followed my website in previous fall seasons, you’ll know that I am an enthusiastic pumpkin carver (see, for example, the 2010 and 2009 lab pumpkin party pumpkins). This year I got a special request for an early pumpkin. My father is involved in starting a history museum in Durham, North Carolina called the Museum of Durham History. As a way to promote the museum, they are having a Carve Durham contest to see who can make the best Durham-themed Jack-o-Lantern. To help out with some examples that they could advertise in advance of the contest, I carved a historic mill at West Point on the Eno, and the neon sign from a beloved local diner. Of course they’ve already gone completely rotten. Not sure yet what I’ll carve next.

Resurrecting old data

Posted on by
Reply
Yearling Male Turkey

Yearling Male Turkey

Every so often I get to take a ride in the ‘way back machine’ and revisit my dissertation data. Not long ago I got together some summary data I sent to Rich Buchholz to go along with the samples I sent him. Just recently I got another request, this time from a fisheries biologist who teaches a molecular ecology course at the University of Washington. He wanted to use some of the microsatellite data from my turkey project in a lab exercise dealing with the calculation of relatedness and assigning paternity. Once I made sure the entire dataset wasn’t going to be posted online, I was happy to oblige. I hear fairly frequently that people use the turkey story in their lectures- I’m excited to see it making it’s way into hands-on learning as well.

Makes me anxious to finish the several remaining back-burner turkey papers too!

Campus Birds

Posted on by
Reply
Yellow-billed Magpies

Yellow-billed Magpies, Davis, CA

With fall quarter beginning, students are not the only things flocking to campus. Many songbirds are migrating through from northern breeding grounds, or returning to the lowlands after spending the summer in higher elevations up in the mountains.

This gives me a good excuse to mention the UC Davis Birders group, an informal group of students and staff who enjoy watching local birds. We periodically tour part of the Arboretum over our lunch hour and see how many species of birds we can find. This is a fun time of year to be out, since almost every outing we will see some new migrant species on it’s way south, or get to welcome another winter resident back to the Central Valley.

All skill levels welcome- we’ve had people with very little experience join us and over time become more skilled at bird ID.

If you are interested in learning more, or getting added to our email list, just send me an email. You can also visit the group’s new page on Facebook.