By Dr Poppy Watson

When people think of computer programming (coding) they might picture a group of hackers trying to steal bank details or people making video games and coding YouTube algorithms. However, coding is an important tool across many industries and it is becoming more and more integral to scientific research. Although it might seem that coding is only for extremely clever mathematicians living in their mother’s basement, it really is not that difficult to learn. It’s also really fun! Tweaking code and puzzling out the errors is a very satisfying part of my job as a researcher.

The scientific field that you are in will determine which programmes are used and the ‘languages’ that are used to code. Although the languages might be quite different in the commands that are used, most of the coding concepts are similar. In the field of Psychology we tend to run complex experimental paradigms – presenting sounds or images and recording responses. These often interface with external software such as eye trackers and neuroimaging (MRI or EEG) equipment. These in turn generate huge amounts of data which needs to be reduced to a manageable level for statistical analysis. Depending on what you need your computer to do will determine which software package you will code in. In Psychology for example some of the most common are Matlab, R, Inquisit, Python, Presentation and jsPsyc. These all have their pros and cons and many have a community of users who are passionate about their favourite programmes. I went on a hunt around the UNSW Psychology department to find out who else enjoys programming and what software packages are being used.

Jess Lee

Jess is a postdoctoral researcher who looks at how people generalise what they learnt in one situation (e.g., the dog bit me) to novel situations (e.g., do all dogs bite)? Overgeneralisation to too many novel situations is thought to be a problem in anxiety disorders. Jess runs lots of online experiments and uses the jsPsych library for running experiments in the browser. She also uses Matlab for programming lab-based experiments and R for analysis of data, making figures and computational modelling. Computational modelling is frequently used in psychology and behavioural neuroscience. It involves building a statistical model that best describes participants’ behaviour over the experiment (e.g., response behaviour, eye-gaze movements or brain responses or a combination of these). It gives a much more nuanced view of what individuals are doing, rather than just taking the mean across all trials in an experiment. Another advantage is that it allows you to concretely specify and test a theory and generate novel predictions that you might not have thought of otherwise. A self-professed lover of R, Jess recently gave a talk at the launch of the R-ladies Sydney chapter.  R-ladies is a global community committed to promoting R and encouraging gender diversity in the programming world. They organise seminars, online tutorials and meet-ups for people who just want to code (and get support in their coding). Jess loves R because it helps her to be more efficient: “It’s great for making pretty figures and already being a user of R means that I had the confidence to pursue computational modelling”.

Justine Fam

Justine is a postdoctoral researcher who works in the behavioural neuroscience labs. She studies specific brain regions and how they contribute to behaviour. She uses Matlab to control apparatus in the lab (e.g. the presentation of lights and tones) and to analyse behavioural and neural data. Huge amounts of data are collected when investigating brain activity and Matlab is needed to filter it down (think huge excel files being made more manageable by collapsing the data across various columns and rows).  Justine learnt during her 4^th (honours) undergraduate year at UNSW how to code in Matlab – simply by trouble shooting, reading other people’s code and extensive reading of the help sections. “After a while you realise that running your script will not result in anything bad happening just a few error messages!” I think that Justine’s experience is common– not many people are crazy coding geniuses – instead, researchers learn on the job and modify existing scripts – continually learning and improving them.

Follow Poppy on Twitter (@Pop_Watson)

By Rosie Steinberg

Have you ever dreamed of going to gorgeous islands surrounded by coral reefs for work? I certainly have ever since I was a little girl, and throughout March I got to realise that particular dream in Lord Howe Island Marine Park. Unfortunately, it wasn’t all sun tans and mai tais – I was there to record, monitor, and study the ongoing coral bleaching event. When I was travelling I was very nervous – what would we find? Would we be recording a climate-change induced massacre, or would the reef survive? Would this be a story of tragedy, or one of resilience?

Lord Howe Island has the most southern tropical coral reef in the world and has many fish and coral species found nowhere else. It is so beautiful and unique that it has even been listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site. If you have ever been, you’ll know exactly why. It’s like nowhere you’ve ever seen – There are amazing corals everywhere, but between them are gorgeous bright green temperate algae. The fish are also a mix of tropical and temperate, with bright yellow temperate stripeys attempting to blend into schools of tropical chromis. The seamless mixing of tropical and temperate is absolutely spectacular, but it is also at risk from climate change.

I’ll give you all the bad news first – some of the bleaching was extensive. The most inland reef, surrounded by land on 3 sides, showed over 90% bleaching. That’s by far the most extreme bleaching I’ve ever seen. It was mostly the stony corals that were affected here – soft corals and anemones were more resilient, though during a second wave of hot, sunny weather even these softies started to bleach. The second most severe site was in better shape, with only 50-60% of coral bleached on the reef crest (near the surface) and the deeper areas much less affected.

Now, the good news! Some reefs were hardly affected, with less than 5% of the corals at these sites showing any signs of bleaching. These sites were generally very close to the oceanic edge of the lagoon or on the opposite site of the island, where they were regularly flushed with cool water from deeper in the ocean. Lagoons are excellent coral habitat because they protect these delicate animals from storms and let in lots of sunlight, but in our current warming climate they can get too hot, like a swimming pool in the sun.

What this tells me is that this is a story of resilience, not one of tragedy. Overall I have high hopes that we will see a lot of recovery in the coming months. When conditions improve, corals can recover from bleaching in as little as a few days, depending on the severity of the bleaching event. I hope to be able to return in late April to understand how quickly Lord Howe Island corals can recover from bleaching, and to quantify any coral death that may have occurred.

Follow me on Twitter (@RosieRiots) if you want to see how this research progresses.