Science Forward

Today I attended the 10AM-12PM poster presentation at the Macaulay building. It was really interesting to see the different topics that each group decide to make a poster on.  It was nice to get a little insight into what each Macaulay class within each different school has been discussing for the entire semester.

To my surprise, no two posters were the same. Every group had something unique to say and had a different way to present their ideas. While listening to people’s pitches, I used my science senses to analyze the information and data they gave. This helped me to better understand what a group’s poster was about, and it also enabled me to ask the right questions and dig further into their research.

There was one poster that stuck out the most in my mind. It was titled The Entropy of Madonna’s Music Over Time. This group analyzed the entropy, measure of uncertainty, of Madonna’s music over time. I don’t know much about music, so I didn’t really understand the technical terms, but their results and then their explanation of the results, really intrigued me. In the beginning on her career, Madonna’s songs had a higher measure of entropy, then began to decrease and then after increased again (current career). This can be understood because at the start of Madonna’s music career, she wrote songs that she liked, that had a lot of randomness to it. As her career took off, she wanted to please her fans and wrote more songs with less random lyrics (more repeated choruses), and when entropy started to increase again, it was because she wanted to do what she liked instead of following everyone else, and went back to writing more random songs. My science senses high, I asked a lot of questions to fully understand how this result was proven. All of their data and numbers added up. It was really cool to use my science sense to better understand thing.

Lastly, what I enjoyed the most though was actually explaining my group’s poster to other people. Before the presentation, we tried to perfect our pitch and make sure that we covered all of the bases. However, as people came up to our poster and asked us questions about our research, it became easier to say what we wanted to say. I realized that I learned a lot about plastic accumulation over this course. One professor asked me a question that I really liked- what do you do with all this information now, what’s your next course of action with this problem. My first response was to help spread awareness to recycle, which was exactly what our group PSA video is about. Actually discussing the details of the poster research to someone other than members of our class really brought the topic alive for me.