Log Book

An especially important aspect of science is documenting your experimental techniques and results. Equally important is the ability to document your thoughts. For this reason, many researchers have taken to keeping an ongoing log book, or academic diary, in which they record notes about articles they have read, people they have talked to, ideas for research projects, theoretical musings, and the like. By doing this the researcher is able to periodically look back at the log book and have a sense of what he or she was doing at an earlier point in time. With respect to research ideas or theoretical considerations this is often important because there are only a limited number of projects you can have going at oned: it is nice to have written record (rather than a faulty memory) of your ideas so that you can go back to them when you have time.

One of my goals of this course is to expose you, the student, to some practical skills needed by academics. As you have probably figured out by now, a log book is one of those skills I feel to be important. Hence, this assignment.

What I want you to do is keep a running log as you go through this course. Since I am not giving you a final exam, on a purely pragmatic level, I am using the log book to ensure that you do the required readings: keep any notes or comments on the articles you read in your log. These notes can be a brief synopsis of the articles, ideas that the articles prompt you to have, or thoughts about how the readings relate to the experiments that go with them. Additionally, I hope that you will find the log book useful as you begin to work on your major research assignment (the major oral presentation and the major paper). You may wish to use your log book to record thoughts, theoretical issues, concerns, and the like, for these projects. As well, you might want to treat your log book as a more conventional diary, keeping track of your progress on various projects. Any ideas you have from other courses or talks you attend can also go into your log book if you feel they are relevant to the study of navigation.

On a somewhat darker note, the grim reality is that there have been a number of cases of academic fraud in recent years. Whether or not such cases are on the rise is debatable. Regardless, a log book is an excellent way of heading off accusations of research impropriety. Log books have also figured significantly in cases where one researcher has plagiarized from another or a question of copyright has arisen: a log book can show who had what idea when. For this reason, I strongly recommend that you also record the date on which you make an entry.

The physical details of how you keep your log are largely uo to you. I suggest using some sort of medium sized coil notebook that is easily transportable so that you will have it with you when you are in the library, reading on the bus, or whatever.

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