This summer the University of Oklahoma had a special opportunity to send students and faculty to Ecuador to study the history of the theory of evolution and tropical ecology.  Dr. Piers Hale of the HSCI department and Dr. Ingo Schlupp of the ZOO department teamed up for two four-week classes of intense lecturing, reading, and exploring.

Based in a town called Cumbaya outside of Ecuador’s capital city, Quito, students attended the Universidad de San Francisco de Quito.  Through USFQ the group was able to visit a cloud forest, the rainforest at the Tiputini Biodiversity Station and the Galapagos Academic Institute for the Arts and Sciences, or GAIAS.

USFQ’s beautiful campus

To get to the remote rainforest station, students and faculty flew from Quito to Coca, took a two hour boat ride on the Napa River, followed by a two hour bus ride through Block 16 of oil land, and another two hour boat ride on the Tiputini River.

The rainforest was amazing!  Observed wildlife included countless species of plants, from the beautiful to the bizarre, like walking plants and bromeliads; birds (the group made a species list from their own observations), including macaws, oropendolas, roadside hawks, tanagers, and tyrants, among many others; a capybara was spotted, as well as caiman, piranha, various insects, and monkeys.  The experienced guides not only were able to navigate through the rainforest, but they were very knowledgeable and willing to answer the many questions the students and faculty had.

The adventurer-scholars explored the rainforest from the canopy to the river, climbing around 120 feet above the ground and swimming in the Tiputini.

The GAIAS campus is on San Cristobal Island.  Other Galapagos Islands visited included Floreana, Isabela, and Santa Cruz.  Professors held a class at the bay in which the HMS Beagle first arrived, and iconic wildlife was spotted on land and in the ocean.  The wildlife included sea lions, land and marine iguanas, blue-footed boobies, frigate birds, sharks, equatorial penguins, and tortoises.  The landscapes were fascinating, as well; calderas, volcanoes, and beaches were visited.

Dr. Piers Hale on San Cristobal Island

One of the professors’ goals for this trip was to integrate the history of science with science in college education (check out the focus section in Isis Vol. 99 No. 2), and Dr. Hale, Dr. Schlupp, and the College of Arts & Sciences are hopeful that the success of their cooperative Ecuador courses will become a regular program at OU.

One completely free tool that I have found useful in this second challenge is a website called writeordie.com.  The main feature of the site is to provide a tool: you type in how many words you want to write and how long you want to write.  The site then produces a blank word box for you to type in and a timer.  If you stop typing for too long, the background on the screen will become increasingly red until the program sets off an alarm to grab your attention and bring you back to work.  You can change the settings to have more or less friendly alarms.  However you adjust the settings, by using the site you are signing up to get your writing done.

The website also has a feature called “online competitive multiplayer writing” or “Word War.”  This is just like the first feature, except you sign up with a friend (or a random person) and the long distance peer pressure serves as an added incentive to do your writing.

Some of us do something similar in person: we meet for a couple of hours and work for a certain percentage of the time.  For example: we will meet for 3 hours.  The first 48 minutes of each hour is spent working and the last 12 minutes of each hour is spent chatting.  It may sound odd, but the simple peer pressure of telling the other person what you did for the last 48 minutes forces each of us to get at least some work done.  For those of us that tend to procrastinate by checking ESPN or whatever other site a significant portion of the time, 80% work done on each hour represents a good return.

Congratulations to Sarah Swenson.  The zoology senior and former History of Science research assistant was named a Rhodes Scholar today.  In addition to her zoology degree from Oklahoma, Swenson plans on getting a second bachelor’s degree in English and History at Oxford.  For more on Swenson’s wonderful accomplishment see the OU Daily’s article.

Subterranean fires from Kircher's Mundus subterraneus. Image courtesy of the History of Science Collections, University of Oklahoma.

Welcome to the University of Oklahoma History of Science Association Graduate Student Blog!  We intend to use this space to showcase our interests, research, publications, and presentations, as well as inform about activities, colloquia, and interesting reviews, articles, and books.  It is our hope that anyone interested in the history of science and in our department will find this information as fascinating as we do, and helpful in a search for knowledge regarding the history of science and graduate studies at OU.