Even in Kyoto

I posted a brief question on another social media platform about this, but it deserves its own, more extensive post here.

As background: the deadline for the annual submission of research proposals to the National Science Foundation is looming. Depending on your experience, you may or may not know much about the ins and outs of how scientists find money to do their jobs, but here's my brief synopsis of the current state of affairs: if your work is in the "basic" sciences, this means it is inherently work conducted with the goal of gaining a better understanding of how the world works. This doesn't mean it is completely abstracted and removed from practical purposes, but it does mean that any such benefits are secondary to the primary curiosity behind the exploration of a particular topic. As such, if you're seeking to address a particularly complex topic, you may require financial resources to do your work. These financial resources could allow you to hire someone to help you with the work, or could pay for expensive instrumentation or analyses. My recent example of a camera setup for filming cricket movement is actually an example of a super-cheap thing I cobbled together. But if you need money, you'll have to go hunting for it.

Who will fund basic science? In the United States, the public has generally and historically recognized that there is substantial public benefit to funding basic science. This underlies the creation of the National Science Foundation. It's most certainly NOT the ONLY potential funding stream, but it has been a big one for many scientists working at many universities. In May, one of the authors of the Dynamic Ecology blog wrote an extensive piece about the current state and future of the NSF, which is worth reading.

But I want to focus on a slightly different topic. Some time back, pressure from Congress caused the NSF to modify its grant proposal guidelines, to require proposal-writers to explicitly describe "Broader Impacts" activities that will be performed in conjunction with the research proposed in the grant. An article came out in 2012 assessing how this whole "Broader Impacts" thing has been going, and if you read just the abstract, I think you'll observe the actions have fallen pretty short of the ambitions.

So now let's come back and put the rubber to the road a bit. I've engaged my my fair share of "Broader Impacts" activities, although much of those happened during graduate school - I've done almost nothing of the sort as a postdoc. Or haven't I? What I wonder is, where do we put things like the small project I've been developing, to document the research methods I use for studying leafcutter ants and crickets? Is there a better clearinghouse? At ASU, my department worked to help faculty structure their broader impacts by providing a collection of activities and programs to choose among - things like Ask-A-Biologist, which is explicitly directed towards K-12 education and has fine-tuned its processes for getting science into the hands of the public.

But I don't know if my photo albums really belong at that sort of place. So my general questions, on that other social media site, are:

Something I've wondered about - what makes for the most meaningful "Broader Impacts" science activities? It seems to me that people are all over the board on this front, ranging from classroom visits to "citizen science"-driven research programs. Some feel the activities are a distraction from work requiring intense focus and time; others see them as vital to the scientific process. What's the best way to effectively direct these energies?

I imagine some of you may have thoughts on the subject, too.

Sometimes, getting myself worked up to work on a job application is incredibly difficult. I wasted spent this morning trying to wade through a bunch of miscellaneous "academic job search" pages to find something I read once about how to handle the search, mostly in vain, before finally giving up. The main part I remember is that it suggested calling the institution conducting the search to ask a couple of specific questions, but I can't remember the specific questions, dangit. I *do* remember thinking the questions would be valuable to ask, and would help me deal with some of the emotional barrier I experience when applying for things, if that makes any sense. Sigh.

And meanwhile, here are two things I read:

1. The story of someone whose soul got crushed in academia but who is still dedicated to helping others succeed

and

2. The UC-Berkeley Career Center pages on the academic job search, et cetera

Application formats all have their own special little quirks. For this one, I need to fit a lot more information into the cover letter, but I'm going to make it fun information, goshdarnit, because it can all be about the stuff I really enjoy in insect physiology. If they don't want me for who I am, it's probably a place too closely aligned with the description in item 1, above, and that isn't where I want to be. I desire to be in a place where people are happy humans, not in a place dominated by obsessions over rank and prestige.

I think I found this essay, 'Linda Grant: "I have killed my books"' through gfrancie. It captures many of the mixed emotions I feel over stuff-ownership (and especially book ownership). Amusing that it's an excerpt from a Kindle Single.

Let's remember Rachel Carson. I think at times I've shied away from learning more about her because environmentalism can be a polarizing topic. However, this interview makes it clear that she was a thoughtful, multidimensional person, and certainly deserves to be honored and learned about.

NY Times: What Farm-to-Table Got Wrong. My CSA in Arizona gave us grains and legumes. I found the wheat berries challenging to use; they felt labor-intensive to prepare and cook. I like the concept of more local, food-processing middlemen, but I don't know how it all should get / will get actualized. The article title is obnoxious, and I don't think the content deserves it.

Are US researchers slowly boiled frogs? - or thinking out of the box about the future of NSF. Again, an item where I don't have all the answers. But since science is my livelihood, I'll stay tuned in to the conversation on innovation.

Your House is Full of Flies. A grad school friend of mine has gone on to work with the research group that produced this article. They're doing some really cool stuff - cool on a number of different levels. He's been studying ants in New York City, for instance - so, not only is he learning about what the ants are up to, he's having all sorts of opportunities to teach other people about urban entomology. As with any line of inquiry, I'm sure it has its ups and downs. But there's considerable merit in studying the biology immediately at hand. I want to think about ways to do analogous projects with crickets.

About ANT-ibiotics - a cool interview with scientists studying the antibiotics used by leafcutter ants. A completely different way of using insights gained from the natural world.

A roundtable on an explicitly *urban* sustainable development goal. This is some fairly abstract thinking, but there are interesting thoughts tucked in here.

...and now I can close a bunch of tabs and work on other things.

As mentioned in my previous post, I spent a lot of time over the past week with I, a new graduate student. Interacting with her is reminding me of a number of little things that I have learned over my time as a scientist. A lot of those little things are obvious, in retrospect, but I always have to wonder if I would have spent less time flailing around if I'd known about or thought about many of them earlier in my career. A few examples:

1. Enter in your data as you collect it. (this is what I'm working on today, which is what made me think about this entry)

2. Along those same lines: Clean up as you go along.

3. While writing manuscripts, keep a text file with a "to do next" list. Actually, this should be started even before you start writing a manuscript. For me, it has been the simplest way to put down a project and then be able to pick it back up with minimal fuss.

4. When meeting with other people, put as much as you can into writing, but keep it simple. To have a focused meeting, have a goal for the meeting and put that at the top. Do you want feedback on a specific piece of writing? Do you want help with the experimental design? Do you want help figuring out the holes in your logic? Are you trying to figure out who to put on your committee or who to include in the project? The sooner you can get concrete specifics in writing, the easier it will be for others to help you make progress.

5. Have a plan for analyzing your data *before* you collect the data. You might change your mind later on, but this will save you many potential massive headaches. This means having a thorough outline of your experiment and its dependent variables. Is it frequency data? Continuous data? How many treatments are you comparing? How many figures in a paper will this translate into?

6. Consider keeping annotated bibliographies for projects. I don't know about you, but my brain and memory are small, and the amount of literature I need to be familiar with is large, and covers a wide range of themes. Annotated bibliographies are a shortcut for organizing your thoughts about the literature, and for staying on task with #3. I just keep mine in text files. No need to get fancy.

7. There are a lot of other useful sources of information that might be helpful. Don't skip over them. Read them in the evening before bed. This book comes highly recommended (although I haven't read it, I suspect if I read it I would do a lot of nodding). For academic writers in all walks of writing, I've found How to Write a Lot helpful, too.

8. For keeping the different parts of a research project organized, here's an idea of how I structure my files. I'll come up with a short name for the project and will make a directory (folder) for it. Within the directory, I'll have subdirectories for: datasheets, raw data (as it is entered in to the spreadsheet), figures, R scripts, and the manuscript. I'm not good at throwing things away, so whenever I generate new files, I make a directory within a folder, label it "Old," and stick the previous version in there.

9. I like Zotero as an open-source browser plugin for keeping track of references. I still download pdfs of references into a big (separate) folder, and label them with the authornames, year, and a few keywords. Note that this is completely separate from my annotated bibliographies.

I suspect I'll think of ten more pointers somewhere further down the line, but this should be a good starting list.

What work-organization insights have you wished you'd had at an earlier stage?

A conversation with bluepapercup is deserving of a wider conversation. She was hoping to finish her master's degree this spring, but recently had to decide to postpone her defense until the fall. So much of the process has been out of her control, such that it's inspiring to see her determination to finish.

In the midst of it, I'm thinking about some of the things I wish I'd known more about back in the day when I started graduate school. I also wonder how many people actually finish their academic work "on time." My guess is, not many, and those who do often miss out on other important life experiences. What does it mean to be "on time," anyway, when it comes to high-quality scholarly contributions?

A lot of people apply to graduate programs and then start them without asking certain critical questions of the program:

1. What's the average time-to-graduation for participants? Departments generally won't share this information with you unless you pry it out of them, because the numbers usually aren't as zippy as they'd like. I talked to a Biology faculty member about this at some point in the midst of earning my degree - she said the TRUE national average for time-to-completion for biology Ph.D.s was 8 years. This pegs it closer to 7 years, but still. It still makes me scratch my head over the overly optimistic paperwork I received upon arriving in grad school, which had me scheduled to graduate in 5 years. If only they had told the ants about that.

2. Related - what's the attrition rate for the program, and why? Specifically, is it because they don't give anybody any money, or enough money?

3. What careers do people from the program pursue after they graduate?

What questions would you add to the list?

It would be perhaps interesting to write a lengthy piece in response to Dawkins's talk, but I won't. Instead, here are two matters I take issue with:

1. The idea that science can be used to arrive at truth. Both Dawkins and Dennett quite simply state that that is the function of science. An oversimplification, gentlemen, or what? Spend some more time looking at your supposed truth, and discover where reductionism does and does not get us.

2. How to move the conversations forward. It's one thing to target something like Westernized, monotheistic religions. That's a reasonably straightforward target. But can we move past it, please? Dennett at least acknowledges that we don't exactly have a replacement for this thing we call religion (and should we?), but regardless, where does that leave those of us who are bumbling around in the midst of an ongoing existential crisis? I'd like more dialogue, less monologue.

My thoughts went to two people as I listened: to David Abrams (The Spell of the Sensuous) and Wendell Berry (The Gift of Good Land would be a reasonable start).

But I suppose if I was looking for something new and different, I wouldn't have attended the Dawkins-fest.