Executive Summary: a lab notebook in this context is a record of the research component of your group project.
Context: when you are assigned a 6100 group project you will be expected to:
- Receive the assignment, meet as a group to determine a plan of attack, produce and submit a project plan to satisfy the components of the assignment.
NOTE: faculty welcomes questions about the assignment. Contact data is embedded in your assignment.
- Begin development of a report. These vary based on the contemporary real world assignment your group is given, but in general have two major components:
+ A non-technical summary of your findings and recommendations
+ A technical report on the work that you did, the lab notebook
A lab notebook historically was a composition book, or similar paper record, where researchers logged their expectations, observations, experiments and results. Today in the automated world, while paper records are still useful they tend to be electronic, often including screen shots.
Example lab notebook from the PCAP contest.
When your lab notebook is graded, the faculty will be looking for the following components:
- A logical flow of experimentation based on the problem you were assigned and the solution approach outlined in the project plan.
- Expectations, hypotheses, theses, before you begin an experiment, there should be a clear understanding of what you are testing, what you hope to achieve.
- Details of the experiment sufficient to reproduce your results. This commonly includes essential record keeping: dates, times, locations, and software versions are common artifacts.
- Results, these can be fairly terse and informal, they will be summarized in the non-technical report
- Analysis, were the results what you expected? Do they affect the planned logical flow of experimentation.
NOTE: Unexpected results, miscalculations, surprises, happen, they are as much a part of research as expected results. Simply record what happened and your analysis. In some cases these may cause the group to update the project plan. That is not a problem, project plans are designed to be updated.
This is a great vehicle for organizing the research effort. I recommend that my students also keep track of the academic papers they’ve read. While many of the papers I thought were pertinent to my research (after reading the abstract), and those I did read in their entirety, ended up in the trash bin, I still benefitted from reading them. I revisited some of them in later dissertation iterations and found that the path I took was as material to the final paper as the papers I cited.
ReplyDeleteSo, I would recommend that you keep track of all papers and resources whether you end up using them or not.
-Michael Solomon, PhD
If I were a student without the example, my notebook would be a repetitive series of "Expectations: /n Details: /n ..." in an attempt to gain all the points, not document my process. The example really helps to illustrate the usefulness of the notebook , and prevents that. Make sure you include it, or something similar in order to prevent that.
ReplyDeleteDr. Johannes Ullrich had a similar point, (and I agree with both of you). Feels a little like bouncing off the ice walls in a bobsled race, too much, too little :)
DeleteOur Forensics Lab performs this task as part of our SOP. It is an evolution from the paper journal or legal pad, notating all our activity, to a standardized document template |date|time|action|result|
ReplyDeleteThis format serves our team well when working collaboratively and when needed to provide our findings to an external party for them to test and verify. We purposefully keep the journal simple in format so that any forensicator can pick up and continue the investigation.
I took the bullets and built out some thoughts in CAPS to offset, not yelling
ReplyDelete- A logical flow of experimentation based on the problem you were assigned and the solution approach outlined in the project plan. NOTE: THE WHOLE NOTEBOOK SHOULD BEGIN WITH THE PROBLEM BEING SOLVED AND THE OVERALL HYPOTHESIS YOU ARE ATTEMPTING TO TEST CONFIRM. THEN YOU CAN START DECOMPOSING INTO THE SMALLER TASKS/EXPERIMENTS TO BE UNDERTAKEN, EXPECTED OUTCOMES. AKA THE NEXT BULLET.
- Expectations, hypotheses, theses, before you begin an experiment, there should be a clear understanding of what you are testing, what you hope to achieve.
- Details of the experiment sufficient to reproduce your results. This commonly includes essential record keeping: dates, times, locations, and software versions are common artifacts. I WOULD ALSO REMIND STUDENTS THAT – IN SOME CASES OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY – THAT RECORDING THESE DETAILS ESPECIALLY DATE MAY BE CRUCIAL – LIKE IN DETERMINING PATENT RIGHTS OR INFRINGEMENT – OF COURSE DEPENDS ON THE GOAL OF THE RESEARCH
- Results, these can be fairly terse and informal, they will be summarized in the non-technical report – THEY CAN BE TERSE BUT NEED TO BE CLEAR AND UNDERSTANDABLE BY THE REVIEWER.
- Analysis, were the results what you expected? Do they affect the planned logical flow of experimentation. EXCELLENT POINT AND DO THE RESULTS SUGGEST ADDITIONAL RESEARCH?
Good info ctix
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