Photo: Malou van der Sluis FameLab is a presentation competition in which young researchers get three minutes to present their work. So they have to keep it short. And there are handicaps: they are not allowed any aids such as PowerPoint, video or other bells and whistles. All the attention therefore falls on the presentation itself: the words, voice and gestures.
Final
PhD students Malou van der Sluis and Sophie van der Vlugt got the highest marks from the jury last Friday, while Rose Pinto won the audience prize. A total of 13 young researchers entered the Wageningen preliminary round. The three winners will represent Wageningen in the national final of this international competition.
PhD student Van der Sluis explained why and how she has been tracking chickens closely for three and a half years. Literally tracking them with a small (13 mm long) sensor attached to the chickens’ legs. The chickens are in a run (1.80 by 2.60 metres) equipped with a special floor fitted with antennae that register signals from the sensors on the chickens.
‘The aim of this study is to monitor the individual movements of each chicken,’ explains Van der Sluis. ‘And that is new. We don’t usually look at chickens at the individual level.’ Anyone who has ever seen a barnful of chickens will understand why that is. It’s impossible to keep track of chickens individually without special technology: they all look too much the same for that..
I thought it would be nice to give a presentation without PowerPoint or animations for onceoen zonder powerpoint of animaties
Malou van der Sluis, PhD student of Breeding and Genomics
The information gained from this electronic tracking can be used, Van der Sluis says, to study whether and how activity is an indicator of wellbeing and health. ‘You can then use that knowledge to select and breed for healthier animals. Or you can look at the effect of activity on growth.’
Plastic chicken
Van der Sluis took part in Famelab for the challenge. ‘It thought it would be nice to give a presentation without PowerPoint or animations for once.’ And this time, without an audience either. The participants made their films at home. To liven up the story a bit, Van der Sluis had a white plastic chicken with her that she called Bob..
Why not a real chicken? ‘Um, no, didn’t think of that at all,’ she replies in a tone of surprise. ‘And I don’t have any chickens of my own. It’s a fun suggestion for the finals, but I think I’ll stick to the plastic chicken. It doesn’t get stage fright either.’ She has time to think about it, though: the national final is on Tuesday 1 June.