gracias shakira



while i am not a huge fan of her hair, shakira es caliente!

some old school shakira helped keep me awake last night while i was trying to get some results ready for a meeting this morning with my supervisors. things are going slowly, as i may have mentioned a few times before (anyone who asks me about my project is probably tired of hearing it), but i am really starting to see some great results and it's exciting! the locomotion portion of the project is very slow and tedious, having to look at every frame over and over again... on the bright side, i am getting similar results to another paper who also looked at kiwi locomotion, but overground instead of on a treadmill. this is promising because it establishes the validity of treadmills in the analysis of kiwi locomotion and opens the doors for future studies with the aparatus that my supervisors and i created. my main supervisor, brett, has used the treadmill with a kiwi in the wildlife ward once since i was away to start evaluating it as a rehabilitation tool. brett also talked to me today about another student who is interested in studying the effect of a weighing technique used on kiwis in the field where they are hung up-side-down by their legs. while kiwis do have very robust legs, there is speculation that this causes muscle damage and they want to use the treamill to see if this handling technique causes enough injury to be seen in locomotive kinematic paramters. since i was the 'guinea pig' for the treadmill study (ok, actually the kiwi was the guines pig since it was the one on the treadmill, but i was the guinea pig in that i got to make all the experimental mistakes in the treadmill trials), brett asked if i would be keen to pass on my knowledge for this student's project next year. if all goes well with my locomotion paper, maybe i could be looking at a sort of supervisory or co-author role? that would be very cool.

next week i am headed to havelock north in order to get some data from another kiwi researcher who collected information on the growth of wild kiwis. this is pretty exciting a) that another researcher wants to share his data with me, and b) this data will really boost the awesome factor of my paper because i can make a comparison between the growth of captive and wild kiwis.

as for now, i am trying to finish up my embryo section so that it can go to my supervisors tomorrow for some much needed academic repair. we are trying to think of an appropriate journal for submission of this paper and it all depends on how great i can make the results sound. one suprvisor, murray, suggested journal of zoology, london!! that might be my dream publication, but apparently the rule of thumb in submitting papers is if you aren't rejected at least once then you didn't aim high enough. i'm not sure how i will handle rejection, but i guess it's something i have to get used to when trying to publish...

Comments

Popular Posts