All posts by Brett Branco

I am a marine scientist in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Brooklyn College. I am an active researcher in the Aquatic Research and Environmental Assessment Center (AREAC) and helped found the Science and Resilience Institute at Jamaica Bay. My research focuses on human impacts on shallow aquatic ecosystems and I spend a lot of time in the lakes and coastal waters around New York City.
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Safe Spaces

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I wanted to spread a positive message during these turbulent times. This was originally posted to Branco Lab at Brooklyn College on Facebook:

I don’t like to post about politics or religion on Facebook, especially on my professional page. But given the increasingly hateful, ignorant and quite frankly dangerous rhetoric that can be heard everywhere these days, I feel like saying the following, particularly for the students that follow me on here:

Over the past six years at Brooklyn College, I have had the privilege and pleasure to teach young people of incredible diversity in all respects. No matter your religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, politics, or immigration status, my classroom, laboratory and office will always be a safe space where you are treated like a human being, and where together, we can pursue our mutual love of science, knowledge, critical thinking and respectful discourse.

– Prof. B

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Reflection Writing

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I have gone through everyone’s five reflections now. I realize after the fact that I need to provide more background and context for the act of writing reflections. Many of you have pointed out in your reflections that your prior science class experiences were based on memorizing a large quantity of fact and explanation without taking too much time to discuss. While it is certainly an important part of science to “know the facts”, science and it’s role in society is much more than that. The reflections are one mechanism for making you think about this. The best reflections are those that connect what we are doing in the Science Forward seminar to your personal experiences and both your formal and informal prior learning. Here is a perfect example from one of your entries:

In the past, I have only taken high school science classes like Biology and Chemistry, where the teacher would write facts and theories on the board and the students’ role would be to memorize them. We would go chapter by chapter, topic by topic through a textbook. The students would sit quietly and listen, and only raise their hand if they didn’t understand something. In English class last semester, we learned that this method of teaching/learning was called the Banking concept of education where basically students are just basically filled up with facts, without gaining insight to how or why it’s important. I did well in these types of classes because all I had to do was memorize information, but I never retained the knowledge afterward or felt like I was getting anything out of the classes.

This entry connects past personal experiences to new knowledge gained in the classroom (last semester’s English class). The rest of the entry was equally outstanding. There were other really good examples like this, and this is the type of reflection that I am hoping to see from everyone for the last few entries we’ll be doing. Here’s a link to some information on reflective writing from the University of New South Wales:

https://student.unsw.edu.au/reflective-writing

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Poster Presentations

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There are many ways to communicate your science to an audience. Lectures, whether part of a conference or symposium, or a lone invited presentation are popular, but represent a linear and one-way form of communication. Slides and information are presented by the speaker to the audience, and there is no time to dwell on a single slide or piece of information before the speaker moves on. Interaction between the audience and the speaker occurs as a question and answer session at the end, if time permits. It is extremely important for the speaker to hone their message so that the audience remembers the content later.

The scientific paper or report is another type of one-way communication that can pack in more information. The reader can take as much time as they like reading and rereading the information. However, the author is not there to interact with the reader and answer questions.

Posters can be some of the most interesting and interactive ways to communicate science to various audiences. It is a two-way form of communication that integrates elements of both the scientific talk and the scientific paper. A good poster promotes dialogue between the presenter and the audience, which is contantly changing as people drift in and out of the conversation. A good poster should rely on graphics to tell a story. If people have to spend too much time reading your poster, then it is not well-designed.

Examples of past Macaualy posters can be found here:

http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/seminar3posters/category/2014-posters/

Some good resources on science posters can be found on the Internet here (from North Carolina State University):

http://www.ncsu.edu/project/posters

and here: (from UC Merced):

http://graduatestudent.ucmerced.edu/jmatthews/Site/Designing_Effective_Research_Posters.html

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5.25 Trillion Pieces

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Data are the currency of scientists, but it is always a challenge to present data in ways that allow their stories to emerge. When you find a data visualization that really makes the story come alive, it can be exciting, both as a researcher and as a teacher. An ecologist for the Wildlife Conservation Society, who himself is quite good at allowing data to tell stories, posted a link on Twitter to this visualization of ocean plastics:

http://app.dumpark.com/seas-of-plastic-2/#

It tells the story of 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic that currently inhabit the oceans. It’s worth a look. The data come from some work by Eriksen et al. 2014 that can be found here:

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0111913

I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but will post something about it when I get a chance.

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The Plastics Highway to Trinidad and Tobago

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A CUNY colleague of mine shared this short video shared on the Facebook page of the Papa Bois Conservation organization in Trinidad and Tobago. It’s short and simple, but describes how plastic waste from far away places washes up on the shores of this Caribbean Island. Note that the sources of many of these items can be determined by the markings and information found on the bottles and other debris. The fact that the information survives the journey across the seas from Guyana to Trinidad speaks to the durability of the plastics, and why they have become such a distinctive and ubiquitous feature of the Anthropocene.

Do you have any idea how far trash travels in the ocean? Have a look at the space rocket parts that regularly wash up on Trinidad's East Coast, together with plastic bottles from Guyana, Surinam and Venezuela. See some footage of Trinidadian bottles that made it all the way to Mexico!

Posted by Papa Bois Conservation on Monday, 7 September 2015