11:00 to 11:45 am, Tuesday January 25, 2005
I visited the post-doc to tell her about our plans for deploying Anoto Pens. She is interested, and we will deploy one to her today.
Plants, Defenses, and Herbivory
She told me about her upcoming experiment, which is to track the defense mechanisms of plants and how they respond to herbivory (animals feeding on them). She is running an experiment where she has set up many plants in a greenhouse, and will simulate herbivory by cutting off a number of leaves. The data she will collect will be very quantitative—rows upon rows of tables of measurements. She said that she occasionally enters qualitative notes, but they are not common for her projects. She told me that behavior biologists would probably take more qualitative notes.
I described to her the Streaming Notebook idea (my new name for this project—basically the one where we correlate many streams of information and center it around the notebook), and the Multi-Mobile/Multi-Modal idea (where the system picks the best modalities to use depending on what you’re doing).
After this experiment, which won’t take more than one Anoto notebook, she will embark on the Jasper Ridge mammal experiment (described in B.CI.4’s notes).
Summary:
Biology research at Stanford seems
to be very quantitative. Let’s
attack this problem first!