Research Platform Services Blog

by Vincent Khau

Have you ever wanted that shiny new VR headset to explore new ways of visualising data in your research area? Or a cutting-edge aerial drone to help take remote data samples? Maybe you’ve even wondered about getting a 3D printer to quickly prototype your ideas!

Well wonder no more! Research Platforms is now taking applications for technology equipment under 2000 AUD that will improve research in both your department, and across other faculties as well. The above examples are in no way an exhaustive list, or even an indication of what it is we’re looking for; let us know what you want us to buy for YOU!

Originally posted by gurl

So you’re just going to buy it for me? What’s the catch? Do I have to sell my soul in return?

Nope, there’s no catch at all! Well actually, now that you mention it…

The aim of these grants is to facilitate cross-disciplinary collaboration and communication; to this end, Research Platforms will store the tech toy in the CoLab at Old Quad for everyone to access. Our tech library is filled with wacky gadgets and gizmos that can be loaned out for you to use, just come in and ask! We’re all about community engagement so we may ask you to write a blog post about how you’re using the equipment to make your research better, or help us run basic workshops and training for other researchers and students who want to use the equipment.

So get cracking on the application either here or at the link below and turn that tech dream into a tech reality! Applications close August 31st and any questions please contact us at research.bazaar@gmail.com. We hope to hear from you soon!

Application link: http://goo.gl/forms/ShGNMlwy4R7HCPFk2

1. “The loneliness taboo: Why doing a PhD doesn’t have to be an isolating experience” by Nikki Rubinstein and Christina Tuke Flanders 
Research Community Coordinator & PhD student Nikki, and Psychologist Christina, explore how loneliness and isolation can be found at the heart of research - and provide strategies to combat against this debilitating epidemic. This is an important post which resonates widely and cuts through career stage, research area, and institution.

2. “Medical 3D Printing Case Study” by Jasamine Coles-Black
Jas, one of our newest CADventurers, is also an aspiring surgeon! Here she outlines how medical 3D printing is being used at Austin Health - particularly with modelling arteries and veins which surgeons use to have a better understanding of the surgeries they’re about to perform.

3. “Looking Through 3D printed binoculars” by Emilie Walsh
Also a CADventurer, Emilie looks at 3D modelling from a completely different lens - a binocular lens, to be exact. Studying a PhD at VCA in Fine Arts, Emilie’s post looks at her journey to the Research Bazaar and how she apples 3D Printing and modelling technology to the world of art!

We have four new workshops in Data Acquisition & Web Scraping. Click on the links below for registration. 

Introduction to Web Survey Tools Using Google Forms
Thu 28 July - 10:30am to 12pm - CoLab, Old Quad

Introduction to Mobile Data Collection using Kobo Toolbox
Thu 28 July - 1pm to 3pm - CoLab, Old Quad

Introduction to Web Data Collection Tools
Thu 4 Aug - 10am to 12pm - CoLab, Old Quad

Introduction to Web & Twitter Scraping using Kimono Desktop and TAGS
Thu 4 Aug - 1pm to 3pm - CoLab, Old Quad

Hi Folks, I’m Ewan! (pronounced like Ewan McGregor, no relation (?))

I’ve just started as a MATLAB Research Community Coordinator. That means it’s my job to teach researchers how MATLAB can help with your work and help out with any specific problems you may have.

I’m a PhD student in the NeuroEngineering Lab at the University of Melbourne. I’m interested in signal processing and machine learning of brain-wave data, and looking at new ways of recording information from the brain. Brains are constantly generating electrical signals that reflect how focused you are, whether you’re moving or not, measure how well you’re sleeping, and help monitor diseases such as epilepsy and psychiatric disorders. In short, you can learn a lot about someone by measuring their brain waves. Most of my research involves processing experimental data through MATLAB to try and find patterns in people’s brain activity.

MATLAB is a great one-stop-shop for anyone wanting to do quantitative data analysis, data cleaning, analysis, statistics, machine-learning, optimisation, visualisation, you name it. You can now even export programs you have written as executable files, meaning you can write programs for coworkers who don’t have MATLAB. Neat!

If you’re new to the University this semester, welcome! Make sure you check out our catalog to get an idea of what kind of digital tools you can learn about (for free!) to help you navigate the wild frontier that is university research. We also run weekly events to help you with writing, coding, or can point you to tools to help you answer your research questions. The Graduate Student Association also holds training sessions for helping with academic writing and have heaps of social events (whatever you do, do not miss their Spring Graduate Ball). The university libraries also run lots of workshops on everything from data management to monitoring your publication impact. There’s also great resources outside the university, like thesiswhisperer.com that can help you through the writing process. For down time (yes, you need to set time aside to relax), check out this page which has everything you need to know about all the student run clubs on campus. There are clubs for everything from lawn bowls to chocolate. The sports centre also run heaps of sports clubs, consider getting a team together from your lab for their on-campus soccer or netball competition. Melbourne also has some great research night-life, including Laborastory where stories of weird and wonderful researchers are shared, and Nerd Nite where experts share insights about their field of expertise. They say it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a whole university to raise a researcher.

I personally found workshops about academic writing very helpful for writing my confirmation report and journal articles. Even though English is my first language, it’s a very specialised way of writing, and writing a document well can save hours (days, weeks …) in editing. Writing is the main way we communicate with other researchers, so it pays to make sure your written communication skills are well polished.

If you have any questions, comments or thoughts about using MATLAB or neuroscience (or both) drop me a line @EwanNurse on twitter or email at enurse@student.unimelb.edu.au. You’ll also find me most weeks at HackyHour, 3pm at Tsubu bar. See you there!

Not your regular rubberised goods

Once upon a time life was simple. When someone said that they’re into latex, there was only one interpretation that could come to mind.

Those days are past. We all know that the 21st Century is a complicated time. Latex outfits are more popular than ever, but now they face increasing rivalry from LaTeX. It has similar spelling, and also aims to enhance the natural beauty of anything that uses it.

Actually, my puns have been a bit naughty. You see, the second LaTeX isn’t pronounced “lateKS”. Instead, the idea is to prefix La onto the Greek spelling for Tech. (Anyone who has ever done a chi-square (χ²) test or walked past AXIΛΛEION (Achillion) Cakes in Coburg can tell you that the X is kind of like a letter K with its back broken.)

So what is this LaTeX (go on, say it: lay-tech) and why are researchers swarming to it in droves? Are they just confused and think they are signing up for some cosplay in latex outfits? Our LaTeX workshops do make extensive use of cat pictures. Could it be that we are only attracting Catwoman fans?

Well, while it would be quite reasonable for anybody to want to dress up like Catwoman, I’d argue that there are other good reasons to use LaTeX, such as for fun and profit. No, that’s not right. For research and publications, that’s what I mean.

LaTeX is what’s called a typesetting system. Back in the 1970s, a computer scientist named Donald Knuth got sick of publishers making his mathematics look ugly. Publishers, right?

Thanks to his background, Dr Knuth was in a good position to understand that beauty adheres to principles, and principles are exactly the kind of thing that computers are good at understanding. Thus the programming language TeX was born: a programming language that could convert simple plain text into beautifully typeset documents.

Unfortunately, TeX isn’t great at automating a lot of things we kind of expect from a non-trivial document. It doesn’t understand title pages, tables of contents, sections, or references. But not to worry! Since TeX is a programming language, all that extra useful stuff could be automated in later on.

And that is what happened. Not many years later, TeX fan Leslie Lamport released a whole bunch of useful extensions to TeX. Thus we get LaTeX from putting the first two letters of his surname onto TeX.

Today, LaTeX is used by anyone who needs to create large, complicated documents, or anyone who has special typesetting requirements, such as abstract notation and technical diagrams. LaTeX has traditionally been ubiquitous in fields like physics, computer science, mathematics and statistics, but is now attracting a lot of people from the arts and humanities as well.

In Research Bazaar, we have begun holding regular LaTeX workshops. About once a month for the last few months, a general audience has shown up cosplaying as academics and found themselves learning how to create beautiful documents.

If you’d like to either attend one of our workshops, or if you just want a bit of help with your existing LaTeX project, get in touch and we’d love to help you out! You can also express interest in LaTeX or any other Research Bazaar workshops through a form at the bottom of this page.

You should also get in touch if you can already use a little bit of LaTeX and would like to help your fellow researchers by participating as a workshop helper. The less experience you have, the better! Novices love it when the people helping them turn out to be just humans who make mistakes and have to look things up on Google.

I’d like to give a big shout out to all the fantastic people who have already helped out at one point or another:

• Tiane Ryman
• Alexis Lucattini
• Alex Zarebski
• David Wakeham
• Axel Almet
• Ada Yan
• Meirian Lovelace-Tozer
• Andrew Elvey Price
• Michael Lydeamore
• Matthew Mack.

Thanks everyone!

Coming in the second half of 2016, we’re going to begin expanding the workshop material to cater to people who have gone beyond the bare basics. We’re currently seeking people interested in the following advanced topics:

• General LaTeX Part II: More references, floats, and customisation.
• Beautiful diagrams with PGF/TikZ.
• Version controlling LaTeX documents with Git.
• Integrating data analysis and visualisation with R into LaTeX using Sweave or KnitR.
• Packages and bibliographies for the Arts and Humanities.

It would be great to hear from you as well if you have ideas for other types of advanced LaTeX workshops, or if you’d like to run a workshop specialised for the interests of your research group or department.

(NB: Showing up to LaTeX workshops in cosplay or full body latex suits is not required. However, Research Bazaar loves novelty and diversity, so you can if you want to.)

Credits

This blog post used or linked to copyright images shared under various Creative Commons licences:

• Parader in full-body latex suit is Copyright Jason Pier (2010) and shared under the CC-BY-NC licence.
• Chibi Catwoman 2 is Copyright hedbonstudios (Beau Schemery) (2007) and shared under the CC-BY-NC-ND licence.
• Git logo is Copyright Jason Long and shared under the CC-BY licence.
• KnitR logo is Copyright Yihui Xie (2015) and shared under the CC-BY-NC licence.