Today Tom and Buzz and I met in Westfield to talk about collaboratories in preparation for the BioQUEST meeting next month. We looked at the collaboratory materials in the BioQUEST packet and didn't see much about data gathering. There was quite a bit about using data currently being gathered by the big instrument laboratories, but not much about having students gather and share data. But the information about the workshop is still sketchy. We brainstormed up some thoughts on how to work on the asymmetry paper, which has been stalled for about a year. Hopefully we'll get it moving again. I spent some time thinking about the biodiversity lab I had thought about a while ago. In addition to collecting samples from different habitats, if the lab were conducting multiple years, you could perform the lab at different times of the year to capture seasonal changes. You could also collect additional data, such as temperature and rainfall to see if you could associate presence of particular organisms with particular factors over time. Finally, Buzz suggested that the organisms collected could serve as a dataset for phylogenetic study as well as ecological study.
When we arrived, Buzz was trying to test a new Airport Extreme basestation he'd gotten recently and brought home from work to do some testing. He found that he couldn't connect to the basestation: it kept appearing and disappearing. He turned off the basestation and turned on his regular station. It worked OK for Buzz and Tom, but I couldn't get a reliable connection. The connection would fade almost periodically. I set up a process pinging an IP -- 15-30 packets would get through and then 15-30 would get dropped and the cycle would repeat. I tried moving to different parts of the table (to orient my tibook differently), but this didn't help. Eventually, I suggested turning on the "interference robustness" setting on the base-station. That worked! I don't know what might have been producing interference, but something obviously was. What a relief! We were finally able to get some work done.
We had lunch at the 
School Street Bistro. What a great menu! Every time I've been there, they've had something new and interesting to try. Today I had the wild mushroom and spinach lasagna. It won out over the hot pastrami sandwich after a long battle. It was excellent.
After I got home, I spent the rest of the afternoon cleaning gutters (yuck) and helping my son practice baseball. Practicing baseball was a lot more fun but, getting the gutters clear was pretty satisfying too -- especially now as I hear it pouring rain.
StevenBrewer