Tip 1: Only mark fresh eggs

This is the first in a series of posts Vicky will be publishing in which she shares some tips for accurate worm watching based on the annotations she’s analysing.

-André

———————————————

Hello once again, Wormwatchers!

To continue on from the Top Ten graph in my last post, here is another graph giving the number of users recording times in a 30 second video containing only one egg-laying event. Here is the link to this video:

The red dotted line marks the time of the egg-laying event. As you can see, most users press ‘z’ close to the actual event, but a few users seem to go astray.

Help is at hand! From now, I will be posting tips to help you on the way to becoming a professional Wormwatcher!

Tip of the day: Do not mark eggs that are already there!

It’s very tempting to press ‘z’ when you already see an egg, but ONLY press ‘z’ when the egg appears from the middle of the worm while you’re watching. Have a look at 0:27 of this video where an egg appears next to the red spot:

There are already two eggs at the start of this video, and these must NOT be marked.

 

A few of you go into a clicking frenzy as soon as you see one egg. Only click ONCE when you see ONE egg-laying event. Rest assured that the time appears on the right hand side of the video and it is recorded. If you see another egg, press ‘z’ once again to record the next egg. If you make a mistake and accidentally press ‘z’, you can remove the time by clicking the cross next to it like so:

So, one press per egg, please!

Happy Wormwatching!

~~~

Advertisement

Top worm watchers so far

This is the first post from Vicky who is working in my lab for the summer.  She’s doing a first pass through all the data you’ve collected so far and will be writing a few posts like this so that you can see how the project’s progressing.

-Andre

—————————————————

Hello Wormwatchers! My name is Vicky and I am an undergraduate student from Cambridge University working in Andre’s Behavioural Genomics lab at the MRC over the summer. My job will be to collect all the data from the past year’s worm watch project and to optimise the data for later analysis. Soon we will be able to see which mutant worms have a change in egg-laying behaviour and also whether this can be linked to other behaviours.

Since June last year, more than 200,000 videos have been watched by more than 20,000 people, so a big thank you to those of you taking part in this fantastic project. Your diligent worm watching abilities are most important for this project to succeed.

First things first, I can already see there are some particularly dedicated users so I have found the Top Ten, who have watched the most videos without an  unreasonably high average egg-finding rate.  This is a first-pass way of filtering out the users you’ve been discussing on the talk page that are recording way too many eggs.

Congratulations to shawym3 for topping the chart!

I know a few of you in the top ten are not far off and for the rest of you it looks very close, so keep up the good work! We really appreciate your input! Remember, it’s important for us not only for people to go through the large set of videos, but also to get accurate annotations for the egg-laying events.

For those of you who have not made the top ten and who have quite a tight life schedule, wormwatching for 15 minutes per day for a week will get you through AT LEAST 30 videos. I have gone through about 60 videos in 15 minutes, so in a week that could be at least 420 videos! Easy!

If you are new to worm watching, it is important you understand the tutorial first and make sure you are familiar with what you have to do before getting into the real thing.  If you are unsure of anything in the videos you can comment on the discussion board.

Finally, all I have to say is..

..get Wormwatching! ~ ~ ~