[Summer’16 Internship] Neuroscience of Grasshopper Jumps: A new naming system for database!

As I experiment on more and more little grasshoppers, I realize the importance of organization skills. Specifically, I’m talking about how messy my housekeeping of the recordings and analyses have been. In an earlier post, I wrote that my naming system for each grasshopper is in the following format: [day][month][letter indicating order in the day]. While a name of 2408A isn’t terrible, what my mentor Greg Gage came up with in a minute is significantly better. (And sitting down with him to discuss my preliminary results also jumpstarted the task of organizing folders and files and sharing in Dropbox.)

So, now each grasshopper has the following name format: G[number]-[month][day][year]-[test number]. So, G08-070816-01 denotes that the folder containing recordings belonging to the 8th grasshopper I’ve tested on, on the 8th of July in 2016, for the first test. A second or third test could follow, and new folders are made to keep the data for those tests. So my database is now much more organized:

While this log is not about building or experimenting or data, it’s about a skill that anyone, especially scientists, should have. I can imagine all sorts of problems if all my recorded m4a files stayed in the chaos from before: wrong data analyzed, data from different grasshoppers get mixed up, etc. Good thing I sorted this out before entering the point of no return.

By Dieu My Nguyen