The Regional Student Group Program of the ISCB Student Council: Stories from the Road

The International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) Student Council was launched in 2004 to facilitate interaction between young scientists in the fields of bioinformatics and computational biology. Since then, the Student Council has successfully run events and programs to promote the development of the next generation of computational biologists. However, in its early years, the Student Council faced a major challenge, in that students from different geographical regions had different needs; no single activity or event could address the needs of all students. To overcome this challenge, the Student Council created the Regional Student Group (RSG) program. The program consists of locally organised and run student groups that address the specific needs of students in their region. These groups usually encompass a given country, and, via affiliation with the international Student Council, are provided with financial support, organisational support, and the ability to share information with other RSGs. In the last five years, RSGs have been created all over the world and organised activities that have helped develop dynamic bioinformatics student communities. In this article series, we present common themes emerging from RSG initiatives, explain their goals, and highlight the challenges and rewards through specific examples. This article, the first in the series, introduces the Student Council and provides a high-level overview of RSG activities. Our hope is that the article series will be a valuable source of information and inspiration for initiating similar activities in other regions and scientific communities.     

Soft Skills: An Important Asset Acquired from Organizing Regional Student Group Activities

Contributing to a student organization, such as the International Society for Computational Biology Student Council (ISCB-SC) and its Regional Student Group (RSG) program, takes time and energy. Both are scarce commodities, especially when you are trying to find your place in the world of computational biology as a graduate student. It comes as no surprise that organizing ISCB-SC-related activities sometimes interferes with day-to-day research and shakes up your priority list. However, we unanimously agree that the rewards, both in the short as well as the long term, make the time spent on these extracurricular activities more than worth it. In this article, we will explain what makes this so worthwhile: soft skills.     

This Examined Life: The Upside of Self-Knowledge for Interpersonal Relationships

Although self-knowledge is an unquestioned good in many philosophical traditions, testing this assumption scientifically has posed a challenge because of the difficulty of measuring individual differences in self-knowledge. In this study, we used a novel, naturalistic, and objective criterion to determine individuals’ degree of self-knowledge. Specifically, self-knowledge was measured as the congruence between people’s beliefs about how they typically behave and their actual behavior as measured with unobtrusive audio recordings from daily life. We found that this measure of self-knowledge was positively correlated with informants’ perceptions of relationship quality. These results suggest that self-knowledge is interpersonally advantageous. Given the importance of relationships for our social species, self-knowledge could have great social value that has heretofore been overlooked.     

How to Learn Effectively in Medical School: Test Yourself,Learn Actively,and Repeat in Intervals

Students in medical school often feel overwhelmed by the excessive amount of factual knowledge they are obliged to learn. Although a large body of research on effective learning methods is published, scientifically based learning strategies are not a standard part of the curriculum in medical school. Students are largely unaware of how to learn successfully and improve memory. This review outlines three fundamental methods that benefit learning: the testing effect, active recall, and spaced repetition. The review summarizes practical learning strategies to learn effectively and optimize long-term retention of factual knowledge.     

Beyond Shape: How You Learn about Objects Affects How They Are Represented in Visual Cortex

Background

Experience can alter how objects are represented in the visual cortex. But experience can take different forms. It is unknown whether the kind of visual experience systematically alters the nature of visual cortical object representations.

Methodology/Principal Findings

We take advantage of different training regimens found to produce qualitatively different types of perceptual expertise behaviorally in order to contrast the neural changes that follow different kinds of visual experience with the same objects. Two groups of participants went through training regimens that required either subordinate-level individuation or basic-level categorization of a set of novel, artificial objects, called “Ziggerins”. fMRI activity of a region in the right fusiform gyrus increased after individuation training and was correlated with the magnitude of configural processing of the Ziggerins observed behaviorally. In contrast, categorization training caused distributed changes, with increased activity in the medial portion of the ventral occipito-temporal cortex relative to more lateral areas.

Conclusions/Significance

Our results demonstrate that the kind of experience with a category of objects can systematically influence how those objects are represented in visual cortex. The demands of prior learning experience therefore appear to be one factor determining the organization of activity patterns in visual cortex.     

Yanomami: The Fierce Controversy and What We Can Learn from It

Yanomami: The Fierce Controversy and What We Can Learn from It . Robert Borofsky. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. 372 pp.     

School Programs and Characteristics and Their Influence on Student BMI: Findings from Healthy Passages

Background

Little is known about the contribution of school contextual factors to individual student body mass index (BMI). We set out to determine if school characteristics/resources: (1) are associated with student BMI; (2) explain racial/ethnic disparities in student BMI; and (3) explain school-level differences in student BMI.

Methods

Using gender-stratified multi-level modeling strategies we examined the association of school characteristics/resources and individual BMI in 4,387 5^th graders in the Healthy Passages Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Additionally, we examined the association of race/ethnicity and individual BMI as well as the between-school variance in BMI before and after adding individual and school characteristics to test for attenuation.

Results

The school-level median household income, but not physical activity or nutrition resources, was inversely associated with female BMI (β = −0.12, CI: −0.21,−0.02). Neither school demographics nor physical activity/nutrition resources were predictive of individual BMI in males. In Black females, school characteristics attenuated the association of race/ethnicity and BMI. Individual student characteristics—not school characteristics/resources-reduced the between-school variation in BMI in males by nearly one-third and eliminated it in females.

Conclusions

In this cohort of 5^th graders, school SES was inversely associated with female BMI while school characteristics and resources largely explained Black/White disparities in female weight status. Between-school differences in average student weight status were largely explained by the composition of the student body not by school characteristics or programming.     

On the Move: How and Why Animals Travel in Groups

On the Move: How and Why Animals Travel in Groups. Sue Boinski and Paul A. Garber. eds. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000. 811 pp.     

How Humans Differ from Other Animals in Their Levels of Morphological Variation

Animal species come in many shapes and sizes, as do the individuals and populations that make up each species. To us, humans might seem to show particularly high levels of morphological variation, but perhaps this perception is simply based on enhanced recognition of individual conspecifics relative to individual heterospecifics. We here more objectively ask how humans compare to other animals in terms of body size variation. We quantitatively compare levels of variation in body length (height) and mass within and among 99 human populations and 848 animal populations (210 species). We find that humans show low levels of within-population body height variation in comparison to body length variation in other animals. Humans do not, however, show distinctive levels of within-population body mass variation, nor of among-population body height or mass variation. These results are consistent with the idea that natural and sexual selection have reduced human height variation within populations, while maintaining it among populations. We therefore hypothesize that humans have evolved on a rugged adaptive landscape with strong selection for body height optima that differ among locations.     

Regional Fishery Organizations: How and Why Organizational Diversity Matters

Regional fishery organizations are increasingly being viewed as "vehicles of good governance" created to secure the sustainable development of international fisheries. These political expectations have not been followed by analytical refinement of how to explain and understand their formation, roles, objectives, institutional setups, or efficiency. This article provides a conceptual discussion of regional fishery organizations and introduces an organizational typology as a basis for their study. Thus, an analytical distinction is made between regional fisheries management organizations, regional coordination and development organizations and scientific research organizations. This typology and the evolution of the Law of the Sea, from an open access to the exclusive economic zone regime, are used to analyze the institutional arrangements of regional fishery organizations.