Why I’m sometimes short on details...

I was thinking that my discussion of what I was doing – and will be doing a lot more of in the coming months – may sound a bit murky. Short on detail. Just what am I doing in this lab with that lobster I brought in yesterday?

I'm aware of that, and while I'd like to be more forthright, there are a few reasons why I0Æm not.

Ultimately, my research is meant to be published in journals. One of the basic rules of journals is that they don't take papers where the results have already been published, and for most, that includes reporting on the web. Like in this journal.

There's also the problem that science is a competitive business. Now, I am not in one of the most competitive fields – far from it – but the fact remains that I'm one person just starting a research career with no grant (yet) to buy things and no students to help out. If I blab what I'm working on and what I suspect, it's possible (though unlikely) that another researcher who is currently funded could jump in, set a couple of Ph.D. students, and get the paper out before I could say boo. It's one of those things that you just don't want to have happen, because priority matters in science, just like it does in mountaineering. (Quick – who led the second team to reach the top of Mt. Everest?)

These are just a couple of factors that prey in the back of my mind. As much as I want to go all out to tell people what cool stuff it is that I do, I'm just too chicken about where I am in my career right now to be assured that I'll get it done first.

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Speaking of science communication, this story makes some interesting points about media coverage of science controversies. Should one “maverick bucking the establishment” get equal coverage as “the establishment”? Very tough call, especially in medical research, where so much is at stake and there are lots of people out there with downright loopy ideas.

(One of my current pet theories is that the human brain is capable of infinite credulity. No matter how weird or outlandish the proposition, no matter how much evidence to the contrary, someone out there will believe it.)

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Whoa! Science facts are useful! If you can listen to mp3 files, you absolutely, positively must hear Tripod's song for scientists, written as part of their regular "song in an hour" challenge on Triple J. Look for the "Tripod - Boffin' boffins" link fairly far down, here.

I got to do an experiment!

And any day you do an experiment is a good day.

The story is as follows: I got up and drove out to the Coastal Studies lab on South Padre Island. I thought it would be an uneventful drive, but to my surprise, ran into a couple of massive cloudbursts. The sheeting down, "Can't-I-make-the-windshield-wipers-go-any-faster?" kind of cloudbursts that slow even normally aggressive Texas drivers down to 30 miles an hour. I'm sure there are other places in the world that matches the southern U.S. for the ferocity of cloudbursts, but I haven't been there yet.

Fortunately, while the burst is intense, it's quite small, and I'm out of it fairly quickly. I get to the Coastal Studies Lab to pick up a juvenile spiny lobster that they had been showing off to the public. They had two small lobsters, so I left one behind, so that the public wouldn't be deprived of the viewing pleasure of seeing Palinurus argus. (Couldn't find a link to a decent picture of the beast, sorry.)

Then I scampered back to the lab to look at this beastie's nervous system. This gave me the first real chance to test out my nifty microscope (that cause so much trouble to order... but I won't rehash old details). It worked well, although I may have to see if I can do something to get a slightly larger field of view. Sometimes, even the lowest power magnification is still a teensy bit too high.

The exciting bit is tomorrow, though. Some preparations have to sit before you get to see the results, and this is one. Tomorrow I get to see if it gives me a definite answer to my question... or not.

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Irrelevent recommendation: Down With Love with Ewan McGregor and Rene Zellweger.

Posted

I'm surprised. Revamping a manuscript for submission to a new journal didn't take as long as I thought. I now have four copies of the manuscript in two envelopes (three to an editor and one to an associate editor) waiting to be taken out with the morning mail.

It feels good to have a manuscript in the works again. I have to push and get one or two more out in the coming months.

But first, I have a symposium to organize (today) and make a trip to pick up an animal from the Coastal Studies Lab (tomorrow).

Tedium!

One of the most annoying things about preparing a scientific manuscript is the references. They are fiddly. They are long. And every journal wants them a different way.

For example, I'm revising a paper that I had originally written for one journal for submission to another. The first journal wanted the list of references to look like this:

Paul DH, Then AM, Magnuson DS. 1985.

Very clean, very "Europoean" in its approach to punctuation. Now, however, the journal I'd like to submit this paper to wants the references to look like this:

Paul, D.H., Then, A.M., and Magnuson, D.S., 1985.

The same, you think? Oh no. 10 periods and commas and the word "and" have to go in the latter version that weren't required in the former. One journal wants abbreviated titles for journals and the other wants all titles spelled out in full. One wants colons separating the volume number from the pages, the other wants a comma.

There is software to do some of this stuff automatically, but it's rather expensive. So, back to my word processor I go, putting in periods and commas...

It's noon now. I'll let you know how long it takes.

;;;;;

About an hour! Lot less than I thought, thankfully.

The grant gauntlet

I'm starting work on a pre-proposal for something called the Advanced Research Program grants, which are put up by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. Feeling masochistic, I looked up their funding rate, and discovered that my field, Biology, is the most competetive of anything they fund. Less than 7% of applications get funded.

Why do I do that to myself?

Enough wallowing. Back to writing the proposal...

Replies

Here’s what I sent to the letters section of The Age in response to the article mentioned in the last entry of this journal:

“It’s unfortunate that over a century of high quality scientific research has escaped notice, judging by the article, ‘Pain test to rock lobster fishermen’ (16 May 2003). I was stunned by the statement, ‘Aquatic scientists have now begun examining lobster tails for evidence of nerve tissue.’

“I can save someone a lot of time by saying that not only do lobsters, yabbies, and their kin have nerve tissue in their tails, that nerve tissue has been well studied by neurobiologists. Crustacean nervous systems have been and still are important models for understanding how nervous systems work in all sorts of animals, including humans.

“The question of pain in other animals is an important one, and deserves a higher level of scholarship.”

Doubtful that it’ll see print, but there's no point in letting errors stand uncorrected.

Fighting the forces of ignorance...

We crustacean neurobiologists are frequently asked the question, "Do lobsters feel pain?" (Usually the context seems to be, "Am I a bad person for tossing them live into a pot of boiling water?") The question is being revived in Australia, according to this article in The Age, spurred on by recent research that suggests fish may feel pain (which is sure to be hotly debated for some time yet).

It's not that I don't think the question of invertebrate pain is unimportant -- on the contrary. But I was utterly gobsmacked by this sentence in the story:

"Aquatic scientists have now begun examining lobster tails for evidence of nerve tissue."

What?

We've known the answer to that question for well over a century. There's been about a zillion papers on the neural tissue in the lobster tail (I've had a hand in writing a couple).

I don't know whether to laugh or cry. All I can say is: Nobody better be getting a grant for that research!

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I've handed in my final marks for my classes this afternoon. Have started to receive the usual contacts from students who just missed making a particular grade. Their transcripts don't show percentages. Two students with different letter grades (e.g., a C at 79% and a B at 80%) can actually be closer in performance than two students with the same letter grade (80% and 89.4% are both B students).

I always feel crummy for them. The disappointment that I know I'm inevitably handing over to some students always tempers what an otherwise happy day of completion.

Transitions

This is always a tricky time of year for me, because I'm going from an established routine to a situation where my schedule is totally total free form. I always find those sorts of switches to be quite difficult. Unfortunately, I tend to sputter and not use my time very well for a few days before I get reorganized.

Considering how tight things have been for the last couple of months, though... I think a bit of sputtering around to reorganize might not be entirely unwarranted.

Among the mess of things on my plate are writing grant applications, organizing a symposium at this summer's Animal Behavior Society meeting, finishing manuscripts from my Melbourne work, and, of course, doing entirely new research.

Scary thing? Based on some conversations I've had Friday with our College Dean and today with our Department Chair, it looks like they're interested in getting me involved in preparing a Howard Hughes Medical Institution grant application. It's worth many hundreds of thousands of dollars... if you can get it. I'm a little nervous, because if I get involved in what's really a grant for the college... when will I find time to do the stuff I need for me?

The end is near... end of semester, that is

Haven't been blogging much because there hasn't been a lot of movement on the research front. That should change soon, because today is the last day for this semester that I have to give lectures. Hoo... ray. (You can’t quite see the slight look of exhaustion in my eyes when I see that. I’m sure there's been dark circles under them more than a couple of mornings this month.)

In other news, our Department is putting in requests for new faculty positions. I got tapped to write up the justification for a position I had suggested (which is only fair, I reckon). I suggested we hire a developmental biologist.

In justifying the position, though, I was instructed to play up any possible “biomedical” aspect to the work. I didn’t suggest the position because I thought it was biomedical – quite the opposite, in fact. But in a few short paragraphs, I was able to work in a whole slew of buzz words. I started off mentioning last year’s Nobel Prize for Medicine was for developmental biology. Then I got on a roll.

“Cancer research!” “Spinal cord injury!” “Aging!” And I even brought in the big ace-in-the-hole new bite star: “stem cells.” OooooOOOoooh. AaaaAAAAaaah.

Writing it all made me feel like such a sell-out.

Last big boxes

Got two boxes yesterday, which contained one of my last major equipment purchases (for a while). It was the second of two stereo microscopes that I had ordered. Now all I have to do is get through the rest of the semester, and hopefull in less than a month, I'll actually have a chance to use all this equipment that I've been accumulating over the last year.!

Happy anniversary, Major Gagarin, wherever you are...

Quirks and Quarks informed me that today is the 42 anniversary of the first manned space flight, by Major Yuri Gagarin. Major Gagarin died in 1968.

Being reminded of the early days of the space age makes me a little sad. I don't think any other enterprise in my memory has ever captured the exhilarating feeling of "Ever upwards!" (literally) than the space program. I wrote to NASA as a kid and got a big stack of goodies -- posters, pictures, articles -- back. Visited the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral on a family vacation. I can't think of any sort of equivalent science/technology program today that is as accessible and appealing, especially to kids. I just can't see a kid sitting down and writing, "I am interested in the Human Genome Project and would like to know if you have any pictures to spare to hang in my room..."

It's no accident that, "We can put a man on the moon" still has coin in our vocabulary as a towering achievement. (You know, as in, "We can put a man on the moon, but we can't get a cable guy to show up for an appointment on time.") Even though it's been how long...? Just over 30 years since Apollo 17 made the last moon landing.

Damn. From the first man in space to the last man on the moon in only 12 years. Was it really that short?

Maybe a research venture like the Human Genome Project is ultimately more practical. But when it comes to inspiration, real, honest-to-God space travel hasn't been topped yet. I miss it, even though I barely remember it.

Data!

Little late to report this, but on Monday I was back out at the Coastal Studies Lab, taking our second candidate for a Biology faculty position, [name deleted for legal reasons]. For once, I planned ahead.

As I mentioned last week, there were a couple of small spiny lobsters in the public display tanks. I've been very interested in the behaviour and neurobiology of spiny lobsters for a long time.

While [name deleted] was getting a tour of the lab from acting director Don Hockaday, I set up a video camera and got a bit of videotape of these lobsters behaving. It probably wouldn't make it into a finished paper, but it should be enough to give me something to use as "preliminary data" in writing grant applications.

Oh boy, here it comes...

While walking into my office this morning, I noticed that there’s heavy machinery on the future site of the Regional Academic Health Center (or RAHC – pronounced “rack" – as it’s frequently called here). It’s a little surprising to see something happening, since the groundbreaking ceremony was back in December and nothing had happened since then.

Although it’s located on Pan Am property, the RAHC is actually owned by the University of Texas Health Sciences Center at San Antonio. Unfortunately, the presence of this facility is causing tension in my department (Biology) because there is a push for us to collaborate with the research going in the RAHC. While collaborations are good things, there is a certain fear that we will suddenly be expected to do applied medicine and not biology.

The building is slated for completion in summer of 2004.

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Daylight savings time?! No! In this of all weeks, I didn't need to lose an hour!

"Debunking" a 'Net "psychic," Part 2

How does the Flash Mind Reader work? (If you haven't seen it yet, you may want to scroll down to read yesterday's entry first.)

When I read the instructions, I strongly suspected that the little procedure ("Pick any 2 digit number, add the digits, subtract the total from first number") would give a very limited range of possible answers -- not the range of 100 shown on the page. Not being a mathematician, I had to check this in a "brute force" sort of way.

Using Microsoft Excel, I randomly generated a lot of numbers: over 65,000! I ran them though the procedure asked by the web page, and plotted them all on a histogram. As I suspected, the resulting numbers were not randomly or broadly distributed.

There are only nine possible answers. 9, 18, 27, 36, 45, 54, 63, 72, and 81. All multiples of 9. In retrospect, this isn't a big surprise, as 9 was considered a "magic" number by a lot of mystic thinking types. If you multiply any one digit number by 9, and add the two numbers together, you get... 9! This funny property is also used in this gag (also here). (When I was learning multiplication in school, this trick let me remember my multiplication tables for 9 easily; only the "5 times" tables were easier to learn.)

From here, the rest is easy to decipher. All you have to do is to put up the same symbol for the nine possible answers. Because:

• The multiples of nine are widely spread,
  
• There are 91 distracting "possible" answers,
  
• There are over a dozen possible symbols, and
  
• The symbols change every time you click on the crystal ball (and the page takes you to a new screen to get your "psychic" answer),
  

...The regular, invariant pattern is well concealed. Thus, the webpage creates the powerful illusion of "knowing" your answer -- which is not as wide as you think.

There you have it, folks! Behold the power of science!

Link of the moment: If you liked this journal entry, check out the website of magician James Randi.

“Debunking” a ‘Net “psychic”

A crucial part of research is skepticism. It”s not just useful to being a practising scientist; skepticism saved me from the fake eBay email I mentioned in my last entry.

For a scientist, few things should trigger the old skeptical filter (a.k.a. the "BS detector") like the word “psychic.” So when a student mentioned the “Flash psychic,” my antennae went up.

As far as self-declared “psychics” go, the Flash Mind Reader is pretty innocuous. It presents itself only as a an entertaining diversion, and asks for no money. Something of a rarity among psychics.

The page shows a crystal ball with instructions underneath to pick any 2 digit number, add them, then subtract that from your first two digit number. On the right, you are presented with an array of numbers from 0 to 99 with associated symbols (I got to 15, then stopped counting). When you click the crystal ball, the symbol next to the number you picked is supposed to appear in the crystal ball.

It’s a clever little device. Its accuracy seems impressive. Try it.

Of course, being a scientist, I have to ask, “How does it work?” It took me a while, but I figured out the solution. (Hint! It's not really psychic!)

I’ll give you the answer... but not yet. Come back tomorrow to see how it’s done.

eBay lookalike scam

Received a sneaky email that just about caught me. It looked like it came from the well-known online auction house, eBay. But I vaguely recalled seeing something about a scam that sent people official looking emails... which was a good thing, because there are some.

Nasty, ugly piece of work. And not as well known or easily detected as the "Nigerian" scam.

Read about it here and remember to excersize skepticism for all emails in your box!

Showing off the place

Spent a good part of the day showing off our Coastal Studies Lab to a job candidate. Our department is in the market for a “Vertebrate Physiological Ecologist,” and we have two candidates who will be visiting for an on-site interview for a couple of days. (I can't mention the candidate's name, because there are laws prohibiting candidates from knowing who else is being interviewed for the position.)

I probably could have used the time at the office to mark papers or something, but what the heck. I worked all weekend, and I’m on the Search Committee.

Plus! While the major point was to show off some of our university resources to our candidate, the trip was also fortuitous. I discovered that there were some animals in the CSL’s aquaria that I want to film: young spiny lobsters. I’m hoping I can get back before something happens to them.

;;;;;

Some things are just a delight. Fireflies are one.

They are fireflies in the grass around the university, and when I walk home a little late around this time of year (like tonight), there they are, quietly blinking on and off in their slow, pacifying intervals. If I ever get tired of them, buy me a coffin, ‘cause I'll have obviously lost my taste for life.

Where two cultures meet...

Being a Canadian living in the southern most tip of Texas, this makes my heart feel good as much as it makes my brain confused:

This October, the Rio Grande Valley will have its own professional hockey team: the Killer Bees. (Pro sports is all about the logo.)

I'm hoping cricket and Aussie rules football teams will soon follow, seeing how they have about as much history in southern Texas as hockey.

A look in the lab

Here's the infamous microscope that took an inordinately long time to purchase (partly due to delays in getting start-ups funds, partly due to my misunderstandings of the purchasing process, partly due to... oh, you get the idea.)

Isn't it pretty? I've joked more than once that I don't actually plan to look at anything through it, I just need a scope for show to impress the visitors.

You'll notice a camera attachment on the left; it's a nice digital camera. A camera lucida (a.k. drawing tube) is on the right. It's a device for looking at the material under the scope through one eye, and looking at a piece of paper through the other so that you can trace what you see. It's excellent for making records of material that isn't flat, which can't be easily photographed because of depth of field problems.

That's about $8K worth of microscope you're looking at there. It's probably the single most expensive thing in the lab.

Here's the runner-up in expense (would tie if you included the software asscoiated with it).

That little "bruise-coloured" box (i.e., black and blue!) on top of the silver one cost over $6K. It's an analog-digital board: it converts continuously variable electric signals into digital signals that my computer can understand.

But enough tech for now. Let's turn to a more green and pleasant thoughts...

The view out my lab window. There used to be a baseball field (right picture), which was ripped down last year. I've heard various things about what is going in there. It might be a new building. Or it might be a parking lot (I'm kind of hoping not). But at least I have some green plants and blue sky to view when I look up from my scope.

Biology myths of our time

Heard on television commercial currently playing locally:

"I can't concentrate. Could I be pregnant?"

Somehow, I doubt that an inability to concentrate is the first clue women use to detect a pregnancy. And if the makes of this pregnancy test don't know that, would you really trust them on some of the other details...?

The power of blogging

Anyone who still doubts the power of blogs (“web logs” like this journal) to be effective at reaching a wide audience will probably not be able to have those doubts for much longer. A blog from Bagdhad is now receiving international attention.

Another piece of the lab puzzle

My new microscope is now assembled and ready for action. I'm not sure when I'm going to be able to get much use out of it, but I feel so much better just seeing in the lab. I'll take a picture of it later.

I should be getting my second microscope in a couple of weeks, which will be the last major piece of equipment I'll be buying from my start-up funds. Anything I need after that (and I do need some stuff) wil have to come from a successful grant application.

Good thing I ain't too proud to beg.

And... Action!

One best momentary distractions I've come across lately is the Action Film Trailer Generator. The visit is enhanced if you can either imagine the voice of the man who does so many of these movie previews -- or, better yet, have a friend who'se good at mimicry read them aloud in his best "Coming attractions" voice.

My most recent visit to the page rewarded me with entries that are almost indistinguishable from the real thing ("In an infernal empire, four fighters hope to avert the apocalypse.") to the goofy ("In an infernal city, two nuns hope to participate in the greatest fighting tournament of history...")

Which got me thinking: What would the "action movie preview" for me (and this journal) be? Maybe something like...

"In a foreign land, in a confusing beuracracy, one scientist fights to triumph over ignorance..."

I could keep at this all day. But I probably shouldn't...

;;;;;

Quote of the week: See Neil Gaiman's second entry for 20 March 2003.

Evidence

Back to teaching, preparing for teaching, and pretty much nothing else.

Like most others, my mind has been very much on the conflict in Iraq. I was thinking about what lessons a biological researcher's training might be able to bring to bear on such an event. The one question that I've learned to ask as a scientist that seems appropriate in this instance is this.

What is the evidence?

In such situations, assertions and claims are made back and forth in furious successions. "Iraq has weapons of mass destruction." "Saddam Hussein poses an immediate threat to the security of [insert name of country here]." "Weapons inspections are working." (Ooops. Suppose that should be "...were working.) And so on.

What is the evidence?

When my brain is working well (which it doesn't always), few things trigger my radar like such flat statements. Unfortunately, politics and much current news reporting does not always do a good job of presenting evidence, nor do many people take the time to look deeply at available evidence (and I'm sure not excluding myself here). Instead, factors like fear and trust come into play in a big way.

What is the evidence?

Who gathered it? How did they get it? What tools did they use? Are there numbers specifying quantity? How about confidence intervals, or the possibility of measurement error? Can it be confirmed by other independent sources? (This is a big one in science, where it gets the technical name of "replication.")

What is the evidence?

Of course, many people outside research seem to have little patience for scientists' insistance on looking at evidence all the time. This may have been what led Cecil Marice Bowra (1898-1971) to comment, "Scientists are treacherous allies on committees, for they are apt to change their minds in response to arguments."

Scope it out

Oh joyous day! Two big boxes arrived today, containing within them the components for one of my microscopes. Now I just have to put it all together.

I also managed to get the paperwork off my desk for my second major microscope. I'm hoping that will go through channels quickly, as it's under the $ value where it has to go out for bids.

In other news...

This week is the infamous American "spring break," a time synonymous with drunken debauchery. (In Canada, we have "reading break," just to show how studious we all are.) A local radio station was referring today to nearby resort South Padre Island as "South Party Island." I've had no classes to teach, but a surprising amount of other things keep vying for my attention. Because so many faculty left (meetings, etc.), I got left holding the bag for several tasks this week, mostly related to the Search Committee.

Sigh.

I couldn't wait for last week to end. Now I'm terrified over how soon this week is going to end!

A long standing bugbear resolved

Was so run off my feet yesterday that I didn't have time to report a piece of good news. I have finally been given the go-ahead to spend the last 1/8^th of my start-up funding. This should give me the last crucial item or two, and a lot of minor bits, needed to get my research lab ready to do actual research this summer.

This was far and away the best news I’ve had all week. This has definitely been one of “those” weeks, where every time I turned around I had new things to do. I was getting behind on preparing lectures, I was running to prepare labs, I had to schedule meetings on short notice, I have to undergo Sexual Harassment Training. (I keep wishing they could call it something else; it sounds too much like a “How to” course. “Have you taken the Sexual Harrassment Training session?” “Have I? Watch me make a pass at that cute first year student...” Ick.)

I am so ready for this week to end. Not the least reason is that next week is break here, so I won’t have any classes to teach. A little uninterrupted time to get ahead, caught up, and so on will be highly welcome.

But back to the subject of start up: I should have my first research microscope delivered in two weeks.

Odd spot: It’s cold in here! The outside is pleasant and warm, but the air conditioning is needlessly belting it out in many rooms in the building. Apparently there’s a problem with the Central Scheduling, and they can't turn off the air con in several buildings. I find it bit hard to believe that the “Off” switch is broken...

Odder spot: A front page story on the campus newspaper, The Pan American describes a controversy over an article in Vanity Fair over comments on Hispanics made by Dame Edna Everage.

What someone might not realize from some of the commentary is that Dame Edna is a fictional character. Criticizing Dame Edna for making a joke in poor taste is like criticising Sherlock Holmes for being a drug addict...

Palindromes

Not much to report here, but who can resist the urge of making a post on 03/03/03?

Hm. I wonder how many doomsayers will appear just before 6 June 2006?

Actually, I'm doing a bit of everything today: a bit of grant writing, some lecture writing, and more administration than I bargained for (I'm on a Departmental Search Committee for hiring new staff and faculty, and the searches have not gone well).

Back to the grindstone...

Grants; screensaver needed!

The major research thing I'm working on these days? A draft of another grant proposal for the National Science Foundation, this time working with my colleague Virginia Scofield. I originally planned this to be a C-RUI proposal, but we may not make the deadline.

Outside the lab... My television went on the blink Monday. Got a chip in the windscreen of my car on Friday. And this morning, the screen on my computer laptop suddenly turned black. It is stubbornly refusing to show anything. Fortunately, the computer itself is fine (I think); simply running a cable from the laptop to a new screen should solve the problem.

Off topic

I can't resist the urge to post a link to one of my favourite writers, Peter David, for his comments on Saddam Hussein's suggestion of a televised debate. It's at the top as I right this, but if you come in late, look for the 25 February 2003 entry.

Happy Birthday to me

Today's journal entry is the only thing I'm doing that's even remotely research related. My present to me is a day off.

Not enough people got me cake. Other than that, it's been a good day.

Less money

And another thing. We had a meeting of the College of Science & Engineering yesterday (of which the Biology Department is a part). They were explaining how the University and the College are trying to cope with the state of Texas asking for 7% of their unspeant budget back.

There were also warnings of a further 12% reduction from the state next year.

This does not bode well anyone, but I reckon it's a particularly ill wind for any new faculty member trying to get on her or his feet.

Not that I'm talking about myself, mind you. Well, not necessarily.

I should be writing a grant proposal now. Excuse me...

If there's no snow in Texas...

...How can I be snowed under?

When it's work rather than white stuff, I guess. Teaching, trying to get a grant together (which is faring poorly), committee duties are all making it rather difficult to do anything but just keep up.

Unexpected interruptions

Two fire alarms late this afternoon. Two. Very distracting. Fortunately, I guess, they were late enough that I just went home during the second one. The leading theory was that some student didn't want to take a test, so pulled the switch.

Or maybe this was a particularly inept terrorist attack. And me without my duct tape.

(Duct tape?! Who the blazes is in charge of American "homeland security"? Red Green?)

Reality science?

People find other people endlessly fascinating. And not any particular sort of people; pretty much anyone will do.

Although I have never watched a single minute of Survivor (I was living without a television in Australia when the first series was making waves), there is no escaping the prevalence of “reality” television. There are the dating shows (Elimidate, The Fifth Wheel, and lots more), the home makeover shows (Changing Rooms and its American successor, Trading Spaces, and all of its third generation imitators, like While You Were Out and Surprise by Design and even, almost unfathomably, the rock celebrity Rock the House), and the “stick strangers together and hope they hop into the hot tub” genre (The Real World, The Surreal Life, Road Rules, High School Reunion).

Now setting aside that most shows place people in profoundly “unreal” situation, the main attraction seems to be the chance to see (initially) unfamiliar personalities in action, making choices, interacting, and in conflict.

Look at entertainment or sports, and again, there is a strong fascination with the personalities involved, and not just the game or the art or the work. Yeah, sure James Lipton says Inside the Actor’s Studio is an exploration of acting craft, but there’s little doubt that it has appeal beyond that because people are interested in the opinions and experiences of creative folks, not just their technical skills.

Then you flip to science programming and you see... plants, animals, the food chain, exploding stars, and lots of computer animation to explain the theoretical bits. Actual scientists are scarcely seen.

Maybe this isn’t a good strategy, considering that there is ample evidence that the level of knowledge about science in the general public could be better (to put it mildly). Maybe a way to get people interested in science is to show off scientists as having interesting people in interesting situations facing problems to which other people can relate. Surely the problems faced by researchers must be as engaging as chefs-in-training.

Yes, that’s right. Here in the U.S., specialty cable channels The Food Network is running a show called Cooking School Stories, which shows the “true life” struggles of students becoming chefs.

Why not Grad School Stories? Follow grad students as they try to balance their supervisors insistence they work at the bench with their other demands in their life?

“Can Carol finish her thesis? Will Jim's paper be accepted in Nature, or will it be scuttled by reviews from a competing lab? What happens to Yang’s research project when research funding runs out before its finished? Stay tuned...”

Or perhaps Iron Scientist. Give two researchers an experiment and see who is able to perform it faster and get better data. “Whose protocol will take it all?”

I think I have an untapped vein here. Maybe I should form my own production company.

Microscopic!

After sundry delays, I finally signed off approving bids for one of my microscopes today. Keep watching to see how soon it'll actually arrive in the lab...

Meeting with Dean

Several of the assistant professors from my department had a meeting with the new Dean of the College of Science & Engineering here, a fellow named Michael Eastman. Been on campus for about 5 weeks. Was good. Was much more impressed by him in a face-to-face meeting than I was in with his presentation to larger groups. Hopefully, we were able to provide him with some information that he wouldn't have known otherwise.

Challenger and Columbia

The radio has just reminded me that the Challenger disaster was seventeen years ago. Time flies...

The Challenger disaster was very affecting for me. At the time, I was working on The Meliorist, the University of Lethbridge student newspaper, and I went home at lunch and drew probably the best cartoon I ever did there.

Today, what makes me sad is that I'm not as stunned or sad for the Columbia crew as I was for the Challenger crew. I'm not sure why. Maybe it seems less shocking because "it's happened before." The images of cloud trails in the sky seem so similar to those of seventeen years ago.

It's a sad time. I simply hope that people don't forget that there are still people in orbit at the International Space Station who need to come home.

Too much stuff, too little money

Wow, do I have a lot of work to do this semester. Barely able to catch a breath to continue the blog.

Bad news: The State of Texas is asking state Universities to give back 7% of their operating budget. This means cuts to everything, and new faculty in our College are being advised to spend our start-up funds ASAP. This makes me particularly worried, considering that I'm still owed a full one-eighth of my promised start-up funding.

Still here and stuff

I'd been neglectful since the Christmas and New Year's holiday. It's a neglect brought on by teaching two new classes this semester. The pressure to come up with stuff - lectures, lab preparation, etc. -- has been pushing lots of things I should be doing slightly to the side.

The journal will get back on track now.

Well, dang!

In the bad news column, just checked my emailbox and found this:

"Dear Dr. Faulkes:

"I regret to inform you that the National Science Foundation is unable to support your proposal..."

For those of you scoring at home, this is the answer to a proposal I submitted back in early July.

Two grant proposal rejections in one week. I haven't yet checked what the reviewers have to say; don't think I'm up to it tonight. There might be a chance to rewrite this and resubmit it.

In the meantime, I shall simply make the occasional Grinch-noise from my small office overlooking the town of Grants-ville.

Bugger.

In the bad news column: My "letter of intent" for the Whitehall Foundation won't be continuing into a full grant proposal. The rejection letter said they got 81 letters that might lead into grants, of which they gave the nod to 17. They eliminated 79% of the applications in just that first stage of screening. Those remaining 17 now have to write full grant proposals.

Back to the old drawing board, as the saying goes.

;;;;;

In the good news column: All my marks for this semester got handed in yesterday.

Symposium poised for publication

And in the good new column: The Animal Behavior Society symposium I've been organizing looks like it's found a home where the talks from it can be published as proper scientific papers. If all goes well, the symposium will be published in the Journal of Comparative Physiology A.

It's all very encouraging. I feel like I'm watching a cocoon, and starting to think that a bird might emerge instead of a butterfly.

;;;;;

In the bad news column, I'm trying to finish the marking for my students, but the class website won't let me log in, and I need some of that information to finish! Grr. This is what I get for embracing computers. They turn on me in my hour of need.

Manual labor

For this I spent six years in grad school?

I was planning on getting out of the office early, when one of my colleagues walked into my office and asked if I wanted to help clear out lab space. I said, "No." It was the honest answer -- I really didn't want to move stuff. But I'm a pushover, and did it anyway.

There are several unfinished lab spaces in our building, and they're about to start construction for our two newest faculty members, Mike Persans and Chris Little. Unfortunately, as with so many empty spaces, they became magnets for unwanted junk. In the case of Chris's lab space, this was a bunch of stuffed animals and a number of huge, heavy glass cabinets on very skinny metal legs.

Whole lots of no fun to move. It took six people to handle one cabinet.

The cabinets were so tall, we couldn't get them out of the room without tipping them over. We broke one of the legs when we tipped a cabinet over, because the leg was just too flimsy to take any pressure. And we had a couple of scary moments where the cabinets started to tilt, but we caught them before they went over.

We got halfway through, and should finish clearing the spaces out tomorrow.

Classes done for the year

I just gave my last lecture for the year! Huzzah!

The work for this semester's teaching is not done, though. My students still have quizzes to complete, and I have to calculate and hand in their final marks. But still, having the lectures complete is a nice feeling.

Meanwhile...

I should be hearing back from the Whitehall foundation around the end of next week if they like my "letter of intent" enough for me to submit a full proposal.

My revised proposal for an Animal Behavior Society symposium has been given the thumbs up. Word about it is now getting around under the name, "The neuroethology of decision-making." The title isn't exactly what I had in mind, but it's certainly snappy. I even had a colleague from Germany contact me, asking if there might be a way he could participate as a speaker. (We'll have to wait and see.)

The next major thing I intend to do for that symposium is to see if I can rustle up a little more cash, and maybe find a place to publish the papers.

Seeing that this symposium thing seems to be working out all right, I submitted a proposal for another symposium today. This one, if it goes, would be for the annual Karger Workshop held by the J.B. Johnston Club. But with ABS symposium next year in 2003, I'm suggesting this workshop for 2004.

Review of The Structure of Evolutionary Theory

I threatened I would do this. But seeing Gould's book on the general science section on the shelves of Barnes & Noble decided it for me. I feel I must warn the general public: If you are not a professional biologist, you are absolutely barking mad if you are thinking about reading this book.

It's not because the book is big (so obviously so that it's impossible not to mention it), or because it's boring (it isn't). It's just because this book is not aimed general readers, not even well-informed ones. Gould doesn't define a lot of the technical terms he uses. (Know what anagenesis is? How about formalism or internalism?) He even makes the occasional comment like, "And we know how the data for that turned out." And sure, I know what he's referring to, because I'm a professional biologist with an interest in evolution -- but it's the sort of comment that seems designed to frustrate a casual reader.

I suspect many copies sold in general bookstores will be left on shelves, unread, as a subtle ad to convince friends and visitors of how smart the buyer is. (Many people explain how Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time spent so long on the bestseller lists this way.)

That said, because I think this book is interesting and important -- people will be discussing it for years, literally -- it's good for those of us who've read it to try to summarize and comment on it.

So here we go.

In Chapter 1, Gould has two contentions. First, there are three basic things Darwin proposed that make natural selection an important and powerful theory. Second, all three of those basic ideas have been substantially expanded by recent research. Darwin wasn't wrong about natural selection, but it is not the whole story. I'll paraphrase Darwin's idea in bold and the expansion that Gould suggests after in italics.

1. Natural selection works on individuals.

Selection occurs at many levels. In particular, punctuated equilibrium implies that selection of species occurs and is important for macroevolutionary patterns.

2. Selection for small, adaptive features in organisms is the major source of evolutionary change.

There are limits to how much organisms can change over time.

3. There was nothing special about the past. We can use what happens around us today to extrapolate what happened in distant yesterdays.

Sometimes, a really big rock falls out of the sky.

Gould spends the rest of the book's first half exploring historical ideas about evolution. Gould is clearly in his element here, and the scholarship is impressive. In fact, it comes out that Gould owned many key books. Several pictures were taken from his own collection of antique books, some of which had never been published before.

Chapter 2 discusses (or, to borrow one of Gould's stylistic tics, "presents an exegis of") Darwin's Origin of Species. Considering that Origin of Species is one of the most famous books in science, is it worth it? "Darwin said..." gets said a lot in biology. Gould's agrees that Darwin said many things, but makes it his mission to disentangle comments made in passing versus the major themes that Darwin revisited over and over.

Subsequent chapters discuss the historical counterclaims to Darwin's three major ideas. Gould is not aiming to revive these older criticisms of Darwinism, but he clearly does want to show that the expansions to evolutionary theory he's discussing have a long and serious intellectual history.

Chapter 3 discusses point 1, above (individual vs. hierarchical selection).

Chapters 4 and 5 focus on point 2 (which Gould variously typifies as "functionalism vs. formalism," or "externalism vs. internalism." He never clears up the difference between these terms, if he intends one). I found these to be quite fascinating. Gould points out that there was a long tradition of treating the evolution of species the same way as the development of individual organisms. Some workers went so far as to argue that species had predictable stages of birth, development and growth, and inevitable weakening and death.

Chapter 6 looks at geology, and how strongly the idea of uniformity of events impressed itself on Darwin (point 3 above).

Chapter 7 covers the so-called "Modern Synthesis" of the mid-20^th century. Gould emphasizes how utterly confident researchers at the time were in the all-powerfulness of natural selection, and in the completeness of natural selection as a theory.

Chapter 8 leads the second half of the book, and it's a lengthiest slice, laden with digressions. The Table of Contents entry for this chapter alone spans almost three pages! You might call this the "punctuated equilibrium" chapter: punctuated equilibrium clear has pride of place in Gould's efforts to develop a theory for species selection. Gould freely and frequently admits his bias: after all, he developed the idea of punctuated equilibrium with Niles Eldredge.

Gould spends many pages examining studies designed to provide evidence (pro or con) for punctuated equilibrium, and concludes that punctuated equilibrium occurs at relatively high frequencies. This is a major starting point from which Gould develops a hierarchical theory where natural selection can occur at any biological level, from the small to the large.

This chapter is simultaneously fascinating and frustrating, because it is so personal for Gould. Gould does not mince words in describing how biologists responded to punctuated equilibrium. He claims that some of the controversy around the idea was due to professional jealousy on the part of some colleagues. On the other hand, I could have done without the long sections where Gould examines how others have used or misused the idea of punctuated equilibrium outside biology. While it's hard to criticize digressions in such a huge volume, laden with footnotes that span multiple pages, these sections have little to do with the book's self-declared purpose.

Where are we again? Ah, Chapters 10 and 11. I group these two chapters together because they are both concerned with the ideas that there are constraints upon natural selection, and that not every biological feature is an evolutionary adaptation.

I also think of Chapter 10 and 11 and "the spandrels chapters." What's a spandrel? Biologists probably know (or know about) a paper co-written by Gould (with Richard Lewontin), partially titled "The spandrels of San Marco." For you non-biologists – or non-architects – a spandrel is a bit of architectural space. Specifically, when you put two arches next to each other, there's going to be a space between them. You can use that roughly triangular space for decoration, although the space wasn't made for decoration. Gould and Lewontin argue that many features in living organisms are spandrels: they weren't custom made for anything (just as architectural spandrels weren't made for decoration), they were just conveniently... well... there for other reasons. The idea of that biological spandrels are commonplace expands traditional Darwinism, argues Gould, because in most conventional Darwinian explanation, pretty much everything is argued to be "custom made;" that it, every feature has some sort of adaptive function.

These two chapters also has Gould discussing recent developments in genetics, which showed that regulatory genes that control some aspects of growth have stayed more or less the same in a wide variety of animals for a very, very long time. This was a startling finding, because Darwinians argued that given time, almost everything would have been fine-tuned and replaced through natural selection. This field, as Gould himself admits, is moving so fast that this chapter is probably going to be outdated before any of the others.

Almost done...

Chapter 12 is relatively short. It asks, "Doe the processes driving evolution stay the same throughout evolutionary time?" Darwin counted on that fact. Gould argues that the answer is "No," citing as his major example that we now have a prime candidate for the extinction of the dinosaurs: a meteor hit the earth and upset the applecart. A meteor strike is sufficiently unusual that it can't be counted as a routine event, but it definitely had an important impact on the face of life on this planet. Gould notes, though, that although the planet has had several mass extinctions, it doesn't seem that meteor impacts explain any extinction except the one at the end of the Cretaceous. So, while Gould applauds the fruitful science that lead to the discovery of the meteor impact, he does seem wistful that it hasn't led to a more wide-ranging theory.

The final epilog (which Gould calls, "honest to God, a true end to this interminable book") is quite affecting. Gould pays tribute to his hero, Charles Darwin, in a moving way. Gould writes that even without Darwin, biologists would have a theory of evolution – eventually. But, "we would have experienced the same biological revolution without the stunning clarity… of a complex central logic so brilliantly formulated(.) In this alternate world, we would probably be honoring a different and far less compelling founder by occasional visits to a statue in a musty pantheon, and not by constant dialogue with a man whose ideas live, breath, challenge, taunt, and inspire us every day of our lives, more than a century after his bones came to rest on a cathedral floor..."

We were pretty lucky to have Darwin, Gould says.

And we were pretty lucky to have Gould, too. While there are lots of criticisms to be launched The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (particularly that some editor should have reigned in Gould's excesses), the ideas presented within will be rich grounds for discussion for years to come.

Role reversal!

Today's top in Edinburg, Texas: 9 degrees C. (Felt like 5 degrees C, according to the meteorologists.)

Today's top in Calgary, Alberta: About 14 degrees C.

What's on the plate?

This comic pretty much says it all.

Otherwise, how are things? I'm in the last two weeks of classes. Luckily, by having my classes taught partly online, and using weekly quizzes instead of huge tests, there's no massive rush to finish things at the end of the semester.

I'm now getting more worried about next semester's classes, when I'm supposed to teach my new Neurobiology class and redo a graduate student class in Advanced Cell Biology. Two new classes in one semester. Could be... interesting... in the Chinese sense of the word.

Just sent off a revised proposal for the Animal Behavior Society symposium I've been toiling away on. It's one of a whole slew of little things I've been meaning to get to that I think I'll get done this week. This week may hold a holiday for all these Americans around me, but for me, it's just a chance to work in my office without interruptions...

Policing

Walked into my second lecture this morning, and was puzzled to see men in uniform with microphones attached to their shoulders. Turns out they were police, and they had a warrant for the arrest of one of my students. Said student was not in the class, which I was rather happy about, as it avoided any potentially awkward situations.

Makes the computer in the lecture theatre not working seems kind of a small in comparison.

Ad busting

A few entries back, I mentioned that I had an ad appear in the middle of one of my classes. The ad was for a university diploma, as it happened.

To see the exact irksome ad I was talking about, and -- more importantly -- how to prevent these stupid things, check this article.

Consulting

On Thursday and Friday, spent some time with a consultant. Some branch of the University has hired him to help people turn in more competetive grant applications. I was a little disappointed by one of his last comments, which was basically, "Change your research interests to something funding agencies are interested in, so you can get some money."

I hope it won't come to that. Ever.

I also had some very interesting words with our VP Research, Wendy Lawrence-Fowler, when I went by her office for something totally unrelated. Seems the University is investigating research partnerships with universities in Vietnam. Lot of interesting animals in Vietnam, I'll bet.

Equipment arrives!

A delivery man finally rolled into my office with two packages from the U.K. Specifically, two packages from CED: my analogue/digitial board, an amplifier, and a lot of bits of cord and documentation and styrofoam. It all seems to be in good working order. Or at least, the little lights in the front went on when I plugged them in, which is a step in the right direction.

It all puts me a step closer to getting my first nerve cell recordings. I'm pretty excited about it.

It almost makes up for my voice being scratchy, my throat feeling congested, and this stupid ache in my right hip. I've felt better...

Society for Neuroscience 2002, Part 5

Tuesday, 5 November: SFN 3
We have a late afternoon flight, which means I get to spend half a day at this meeting. I bring Sarah along just to have a peek at the vast huge expanse of science. She's a good sport and pretends to be mildly interested before running off and doing other things.

While walking around with Sarah, I come across my favourite quote of the meeting:

"If the brain were (sic) so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn't." - Lyell Watson.

(I saw this written under a quickly sketched human brain on a white board in the History and Teaching posters).

It's good to see that even in a room full of people with many, many advanced degrees, the fate of a stray piece of paper isn't much different than elementary school...

But even though there are still two days left in this meeting, some people are already worn out. But if you've spent too long in front of posters talking science, it's good to know you can get someone to give you a quick rubdown.

Though I did overhear some other members attending comment, "It'd be weird to have a stranger massage your feet..."

We get back to the hotel, spend a lot of time waiting for the shuttle to the airport. We have enough time to look through all the airport stores, then spend a fair amount of time waiting around in the airport lobby. We get back late, and the process of catching up begins...

Hm. Now that I'm all caught up with my web journal (only took me a week), I may be caught up on everything. Or at least as caught up as I ever get...

Tracking equipment

No, I'm not talking about equipment for tracking, I'm talking about tracking equipment that's coming to me. One of the last major pieces of equipment I need for my lab -- which I ordered back in June or July -- is finally on its way here. According to FedEx, my analogue/digital board and amplifier from Cambridge Electronic Devices is in Memphis.

What is this equipment for? It takes an electrical recording (from a nerve, neuron, or muscle) and converts it to a signal that my desktop computer can understand, store, and manipulate. Physiologists used to (and probably some still do!) use reel-to-reel tape recorders to store their recordings. I did much of my doctoral work that way, but I'm thoroughly pleased to be past that point.

Of course, how long it'll be before I physically touch this equipment. I had two phone calls about its entry into the country yesterday, so who knows how long U.S Customs will hang on to it.

Caption contest!

"And a little of this applied once a day will remove wrinkles virtually overnight!"

Maybe that what's the goof in the center is thinking.

I was a little surprised when a student showed me the new graduate catalogue, since I wasn't expecting to be in it. I did know my picture was being taken in front of our Coastal Studies Lab. They had a professional photographer taking publicity pictures with a bunch of volunteer students. The photographer asked if I had any equipment that we could pose the students with, and I said, "I have a shovel." Not quite what he had in mind, I think.

So we went out to the beach and I dug for my sand crabs. I'm pretty sure I hadn't found any when this picture was taken. So I just had to pretend that the sand I was pulling up was mighty interesting...

I eventually did find some crabs, but they didn't use that picture.

Society for Neuroscience 2002, Part 4

Monday, 4 November: SFN 2

One of the fun things about a meeting like this is stumbling across little creative touches in posters.

I spend the day looking at people's posters and talking to folks. Lots of interesting conversations. One is so interesting, I miss a scheduled meeting with Paul Stein, a possible speakers for "my" Animal Behavior Society symposium. Fortunately, I run into him that evening at a social and do a few mea culpas for missing him.

Socials are another fun thing about the Society for Neuroscience meeting, and is another way to make the meeting feel smaller and more intimate.

Notice the motto in the upper right corner of the sign? "It's about the science." I'm a little relieved by this. Last year's motto bugged me: it was, "Unraveling the mysteries, delivering the cures." Maybe I wasn't the only person a little put off by a slogan that seemed to ignore (or maybe even alienate) people not doing medical research.

;;;;;

After the social, Sarah and I went out to dinner at a place called Jungle Jim's. Good food, excellent service. Sarah tries a burger called "Peanut Butter Bet." Yes, it's a burger with peanut butter, and if you don't like it, they scratch it off the bill and don't charge you for it. Waitress Aurora says the peanut butter reminds her of a Thai peanut sauce. Aurora rocked; we have fun being her customers. She's intrigued by my job description, and practices saying "invertebrate neuroethology." When she reads my credit card ID, we get to commune about our weird names.

Interruptions

Spam. Every time you think it couldn't get more annoying, somebody proves you wrong.

I was in the middle of a General Biology lecture on genetics. I use PowerPoint as part of my lectures, so the computer is on and projecting on a screen.

Suddenly, a window appears spontaneously, advertising university degrees. You know the pitch. For a low price, you can get a degree from a "prestigious non-accredited institution." (Now there's a contradiction in terms!) "No one turned down!" "Degrees based on life experience..."

Yeah, like this is a message I want thrown up in the middle of a lecture to a bunch of first-year students. You might as well make up a degree in your own graphics program, print it and tape it to the wall -- it has about the same value.

I wasn't surfing the net (though the computer was connected) or using any program that is advertising supported. I reckoned some sort of adware is on the computer. These annoying little programs are often bundled and installed -- without warning -- as part of a larger program you want.

After the lecture, I downloaded Ad-Aware, software designed to get rid of ad software. Sure enough, it found an ad program installed on the computer. I took great pleasure in getting rid of it. I hope that solves the problem.

;;;;;

Society for Neuroscience reports coming back soon.

Society for Neuroscience 2002, Part 3

Sunday, 3 November: SFN 1

The main event gets cracking on Sunday in the Orlando Convention Center, where the privilege of having a medium bottle of pop will only set you back... $2.50?!

The same sized bottles are 80 cents outside my office. The sad thing is, there are obviously people who pay that much, or those wouldn't still be there.

The thing that invariably impresses me about the Society for Neuroscience meeting is its sheer size. Non-biologists are always stunned when I tell them how many people come to this. They keep a running tally near one of the entranceways.

And remember, this is only a single branch of biology... (And students still don't think you can get a job in biology besides teaching and being a physician.)

I'm always forced to compare the main poster session room to an aircraft hangar, because I don't really know of any other building that has the same sort of proportions as these massive convention centers that the SFN meetings are held in.

There are scientific posters and vendors in this room all the way to the back. And the posters change twice a day. And there are presentations in tens of rooms outside of this one.

And yet, paradoxially, despite this meeting being so big (or perhaps because of it), you run into people you know very often. Because you simply can't even begin to hope to see even a fraction of the work on display, people are very focused about what papers they want to see. You begin to learn who's in your field of research because you keep seeing in front of the same posters you're interested in.

Note to new students in neuroscience: This is prime networking territory! Ask questions of the poster presenters, and strike up as many conversations around these posters as you can. These are the people who will be looking at your job applications and reviewing your grant proposals.

Society for Neuroscience 2002 Report, Part 2

Saturday, 2 November: Hookey and ISN Executive

The main item on my agenda, the ISN Executive Committee meeting, doesn't start until 2 pm, so Sarah and I go to Universal Studios for a while.

We have great fun. Sarah kicks butt in the Men in Black: Alien Attack ride. You get to shoot at rogue aliens in that ride and earn a score. Sarah was easily first in our car (160,000 points!), more than double my score (and I was in second place of four; over 60,000). If you ever take that ride, my tip is: pay attention to the dialogue!

I have to leave midway through the day, but Sarah stays and has a blast.

I make my way back to the ISN meeting, in my role as Chair of the Web Committee. This is the first time I've been in any meeting like this, so I find it all quite interesting. I get a lot of good suggestions about the Society webpage, some of which I've already started to put into motion.

Midway through the meeting, we go out to a very nice steak and seafood restaurant. It's so good and there's so much that I don't order dessert (which is pretty unusual for me!).

After that, my contribution to the meeting is done, so I go back to the social of the J.B. Johnston Club and chat to a few more researchers about things, particularly my planned ABS symposium.

While I'm at the J.B. Johnston Club social, I get to see Mary Sue Northcutt (a founding member of the club and super lady) take a jump into the pool -- completely clothed -- to raise money for student researchers.

Society for Neuroscience 2002 Report, Part 1

31 October: Travel.

Air travel is fast and efficient... once you're in the air, that is. We spent a lot of time hanging around in airports, most particularly waiting for a shuttle in Orlando to take us to our hotel. Still, Hallowe'en is always fun, and we saw a few staff in the Houston and Orlando airports in a little makeup.

;;;;;

1 November: Karger Workshop

The Karger Workshop is an annual symposium held by the J.B. Johnston Cub, and sponsored by the Karger publishing company. This year workshop was titled something like, "The Comparative Evolution of Cognition." I thought the title was a bit of a misnomer, because most of the meeting focused on only one topic: spatial memory. It was a much narrower symposium than the title indicated.

I have lunch with Phil Stoddard, the junior Program Committee for the Animal Behaviour Society, to discuss the symposium I'm hoping to hold next year. Phil is a thin, intense invididual, and I often think he's more gung ho to hold this symposium than I am. He talks about wanting people to leave the symposium thinking, "That's how I want to be studying behaviour!" While I think convincing behaviourists to go back to their labs and pick up microelectrodes is a tall order, I do appreciate Phil's enthusiasm and support.

Lunch with Phil is a good push to one of my major goals for this meeting: to find speakers and topics for my symposium.

To be continued...

Back to the grindstone...

I’m back in Texas, and catching up on the pile of work the accumulated in my absence. It was definitely worth it, though, as I had many interesting and useful conversations. I’ll talk a bit more about some of these in days to come.

One conversation of personal interest was that I talked to someone who belonged to a department which got one of my 40-50 job applications. When I was doing a post-doc in Australia, I applied for many positions, and always worried that I would tend to be written off early because of the cost of my traveling to North America. I found out that I almost got short-listed for a job, but I didn’t make the final cut mainly because I was in Australia.

It’s unfortunate that overseas applicants are at a disadvantage, especially given how small the job market is for specialized research.

Update from Florida

The J.B. Johnston Club meeting and the executive committee meeting of the International Society for Neuroethology are behind me, and today was the first day of the Society for Neuroscience proper. Attendence is down a little from last year... as of 1:00 pm today, "only" 20,000 odd people have attended.

;;;;;

During the J.B. Johnston Club meeting, one talk mentioned Stephen Jay Gould, whose last major work, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, I just finished. When I mentioned in a question after the talk that I had just finished the 1,349 pages of the book... someone applauded.

The BIG meeting is coming soon

The biggest annual event in my field is undoubtedly the Society for Neuroscience meeting, which I expect will crack 30,000 people this year. It starts this weekend in Orlando, Florida.

I'll be leaving for it on Thursday. I'm leaving a few days before the meeting because this meeting is so big, it spawns little mini-meeting offspring. More officially, they're called "satellite meetings." The logic is, "Look, we're all going to the Neuroscience meeting anyway, so rather than trying to find another time that everyone can make it, let's just meet a couple of days before / after Neuroscience."

In particular, I'll be attending a meeting held by the J.B. Johnston Club and attending the Executive Committee meeting of the International Society for Neuroethology.

I'll be taking my laptop with me, so I hope to have updates from the meeting. A lot depends on just how well equipped my hotel room is, and maybe how quickly I can figure out my new dial-up settings that SBC Global gave me.

Decisions, decisions...

Buying a microscope is like buying a car.

For one thing, the price range is about the same. I’m not kidding; the cheapest car these days is running just under U.S.$10,000. That's the budget I have to work with to buy one stereo microscope.

And, like buying a car, the more you look, the more difficult the decision gets. You are presented with a huge range of options, and a fairly substantial range in price. Yet they all do basically the same thing.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time the last couple of days looking at three quotes for microscopes: from Nikon, Olympus and Zeiss. I’m not having fun deciding between them.

Stupid of the Week!

Last week on my campus saw many events held as part of HESTEC. The idea of the week was to encourage Hispanic students to enter careers in science and engineering.

One such event was a Congressional roundtable, featuring heavy hitters such as a Nobel laureate, director of the NSF, and various executives of high-tech companies.

And what do we hear about the value of science and technology?

"Science and technology in the country let us survive WWI, and the Cold War."

So David Swain, senior Vice President of Boeing, is reported to have said.

Cripes.

"Gee, what do we researchers do when there isn't a war on?" I think to myself.

And how nice to know science won the Cold War. And here I was all this time thinking the U.S.S.R collapsed because of poor economic policies operating under governments that included arguably the most brutal dictatorship in history. But no, it was our sleek transistor radios. Or something.

Why science gets the nod for WWI, but isn't credited with helping to end World War II is a bit of a puzzle. I would have thought the development of the atomic bomb surely represented a major technical achievment.

Now, I'm willing to entertain the notion that Swain was quoted out of context, in which case the "Stupid of the Week" goes to the writer of the article, not David Swain.

But in either case, it's exasperating to hear a quote like this about science education. It is about the furthest thing on the minds of most scientists I know. Some are drawn by the beauty of the natural world, some by the challenge of intellectual puzzles, some by the desire to improve the lot of others. But "Science wins wars" -- while undoubtedly true in some ways -- is about the last thing I'd use as a selling point for my field. It seems so far off the mark.

Done.

Pages read of Stephen Jay Gould's The Structure of Evolutionary Theory: 1,343. That, my friends, is the last text page. After that, references and an index, and I don't feel any great need to read those.

I'm done. Earlier than I expected. Maybe I'll post a small review later.

Time to clear that tome off my desk, and get back to writing lectures for my new courses.

Hey! A picture!

If this works, I'll be livening this journal with a few more visuals from here on in.

If I've done this right, above this text is a picture of a little baby ascidian tadpole larva. It's not exactly publication quality, but I reckon it's pretty good... considering that I just held up my video camera to the eyepiece of a microscope.

The head is on the left, and you can see the tail on the right. It's about 1 mm long. The clear line running down the middle of the tail is a notochord. In us, the notochord becomes a spinal cord. A notochord lets us know that this little guy is actually a fairly close relative to humans within the animal kingdom.

If you think it's not much to look at... you're right. And that's the whole point. This little guy has about 1,000 cells or so. A thousand is a manageable number for biologists to work with (compared to however many billions in a mouse or cat).

Despite being small, this critter has a big task. In very short order, it has to pick a spot to settle. There, it undergoes metamorphosis, and spends the rest of its life in that spot. Imagine trying to pick the home where you'll spend the rest of your life at the age of 2, say, and you'll start to get an appreciation for what this guy is up against.

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I have my first underlings!

Or, if you insist, "Undergraduate research scholars."

Back in September, I had applied for a university program designed to give undergraduates a bit of research experience. I found out today that I got it, and will have a couple of first year undergraduate sudents working with me. These two will be helping me out in the lab, analyzing older videotape and who knows what else. They get a bit of $$$, and so do I. Looking forward to working with them.

Everyone's favourite little blue pill

Everyone has something to say about Viagra. But easy jokes aside, this article suggests Viagra might finally end the centuries-old demand for all manner of animal parts that were supposedly aphrodisiacs and/or cures for impotence.

I have data! Nyah-nyah-nya-NYAH-nyah!

I'm a-doin' the happy dance.

The little experiment I mentioned in my last entry was a rousing success. There's a result worth investigating more, which is just the sort of thing a dude wants as preliminary data for grant applications.

I wish I could show the picture of the results, but I'm going to hold on t it until things are a little further along.

Experiment 1

I'm excited. After over a year in my current job, spending a lot of time teaching and waiting for equipment, I am running my first little experiment, on ascidian tadpole settlement. Can't say too much about it, but whatever I find could become some early data that I can then use in grant applications.

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Although I spend a lot of time talking about my research, in most universities, the bulk of the research is done by graduate students. The Biology Department here at UTPA has a Masters program, but no doctoral program. We are taking steps towards that goal, though. The department was recently asked to submit a pre-proposal for a new doctoral program.

Unfortunately, there is a major disagreement in emphasis desired by some of the interested parties. Within the Biology Department, the general feeling seems to be that we have a strong case for some sort of Subtropical program, because we are located in one of only two subtropical locations in the U.S. (south Texas and Florida). Our Vice-President of Academic Affairs, however, tells us the University President is strongly interested in a Biomedical doctoral program -- a crowded field, with competition lured in by the scent of money.

I reckon it's a case of the Cool Hand Luke problem: "What we got here is a failure to communicate." Today, we asked to have a meeting with our VP of Academic Affairs. We'll see how it goes.

I may have to wear a shirt with buttons to that meeting. 'Cause I really want this place to move to a Ph.D. program.

Great Moments in Science: The Funniest Joke in the World

It brings to mind a classic sketch from Monty Python’s Flying Circus. (If you've never seen it on television, let’s just say that the transcribed link isn't anywhere near as funny.) But even humour isn't immune to scientific inquiry, so if you want a joke that’s been scientifically tested to stand above the rest, you might want to read this article.

The article notes that Canadians don’t get it.

And hey, the Nobel Prizes for this year are being announced. This year’s winners for Physiology and Medicine went to researchers who started intensive work on a millimetre long worm, C. elegans, which has been used for all sorts of groundbreaking research, particularly in development of tissue and genetics. The winners got the Nobel for Medicine and Physiology, because there is no Nobel prize for Biology. :(

(Aside: There's no Nobel prize for Mathematics, either. But at least the mathematicians have an interesting myth concerning the prize’s founder to explain why they don't have one.)

Back to the beach

I'll be spending the next couple of days out at South Padre Island at the University's Coastal Studies Lab. I'll be testing some rough and ready experiments so that, if the Whitehall Foundation lets me apply for a grant, I'll have some preliminary data to include in it.

But, you might ask, "Isn't the entire point of writing grants so that you can get money to do experiments? Why are you having to do experiments before you send in the application for grants?"

The reason for needing to do experiments in advance is that funding agencies want a pretty good indication that the research they fund will be successful. Given competition for funding is very tight these days, it's a funder's market, so a funding agency can set very high demands for their applications. So... you have to show some indication that you can do the work, and the best way to do that is to include some real examples.

The complaint that "You have to have the work done before you can get funding for it!" is a common one among researchers, but I've seen very few practical solutions for it.

Mo' money

I finally received word yesterday that I will be getting another quarter of my start-up money from the Dean's office. I'll be using it to buy a microscope. Currently, the lack of a microscope is largely holding any research I might do to a standstill.

(Recap: When I started here, the Vice President of Academic Affairs promised money to start my lab. But his office only provided 5/8 of that money, and said the Dean of Science & Engineering would provide the other 3/8. The Vice President of Academic Affairs didn't tell the Dean this. Not surprisingly, the Dean had no money in the budget for it until the start of the new fiscal year, about a month ago.)

Germination

A couple of seeds that I planted some months ago have begun, while not to bear fruit, at least poke a few green shoots into the air.

Received a phone call concerning a proposal for a symposium I had submitted to the Animal Behavior Society. My initial idea was to highlight some recent development in neurobiology and suggest how they might impact on people studying behaviour (since "making behaviour" is the job of the nervous system, after all!). Qualified success. They like the idea, but are suggesting I try to refine it a little more into something a little less wide ranging.

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Also got a piece of equipment today that I submitted the purchase order for back in June! Even with that, I'm still waiting on a couple of more "big ticket items" that I kind of need to make a working lab.

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Pages read of The Structure of Evolutionary Theory: 1069! I'm finally into Chapter 10, and have moved well past the 75% mark.

On your mark...

Just received a confirmation letter from the Whitehall Foundation. They recieved my "letter of intent" in time for their current grant deadline. I'll find out if I have to write a full proposal on 16 December 2002. If I do, well... so much for Christmas "break"!

I'm hoping that I'll have The Structure of EVolutionary Theory finished by then. Pages read: 986!

Drawbacks

Ah, fall. It's here now, and temperatures in southern Texas have become "pleasant," rather than "oppressive."

Nothing comes free, though. Cooler temperatures, higher winds. Possibly a lot higher. Living on the Gulf Coast means that my plans to make trips to the Coastal Studies Lab are frequently tempered by whether a hurricane or tropical storm is brewing in the Gulf of Mexico or south Atlantic, and whether it decides to hit Mexico, Florida, Louisiana, or Texas. If all goes well, the current storm -- Lili -- won't keep me from my next trip.

I'm also hoping that such storms won't mess up my currently planned trip to this year's Society for Neuroscience meeting, to be held next month in Orlando, Florida. It happened before, when the meeting was held in Miami in 1999. I didn't go that year, but it was apparently not pretty.

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I realized earlier this week that some equipment I ordered back in June hadn't arrived yet. A query to purchasing led to some phone calls, and the company is apparently shipping it now. I hope to see it by the end of the week.

And the morale of the story is: Pay attention.

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Pages read of The Structure of Evolutionary Theory: 958.

New directions

I shipped off my "letter of intent" to the Whitehall Foundation today. If they okay it and I get to submit a full proposal, the full proposal will be due 15 February 2003. (By that point, I expect to have the results of the NSF grant application.)

Although the Whitehall letter was only three pages long, it was an intense three pages to prepare. Most of my research to date has been on crustaceans and insects. I'm looking to "expand my horizons" and see if I can start doing some work on ascidians. As adults, ascidians are the kinds of critter that people tend to mis-identify as "sponges" (i.e., anything non-mobile on marine piers, boat bottoms, that's not a plant or barnacle).

When they're young, though, ascidians have a little swimming tadpole that swims around to find a place to live. And when you look at this tiny little tadpole, it turns out to be a reasonably close relative to us (a chordate, if you want the technical term). These tadpoles swim around and find a place to live with a positively miniature nervous system: there are about 100 nerve cells in the entire animal. The small number of cells makes them fairly attractive for researchers.

And it just so happens that the University's Coastal Studies Lab is a great place to study these guys. These animals do not like to be away from the ocean, and every effort so far to rear them inland for any length of time has failed miserably. Yes, folks, research and real estate have something in common: Location, location, location.

I have two problems facing me in trying to start ascidian research. First, I don't know the animals very well, but I've been working hard to remedy that. Second, I've never worked on anything remotely this tiny. The whole animal is about 1 mm long. So I'm going to have to develop a whole new set of skills to do research on this beast.

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Pages read of The Structure of Evolutionary Theory: 882. That's halfway through chapter 9, which is 279 pages long! Yes, a single chapter in this baby is longer than some entire books.

Hi! I've been negligent!

Whew. I knew the start of the semester would slow things down on this journal, but I didn't quite realize how much. The other reason that I haven't updated much is that not much has happened on the research front. I'm still waiting for money and some significant pieces of equipment.

The only major research-related thing on the go now is that I'm drafting a "letter of intent" for the Whitehall Foundation. They have a somewhat lengthy proposal process, wherein you have to let them know you're planning on submitting a proposal before you actually submit a proposal. If the initial letter gets past the screening, you get the paperwork.

Luckily, the letter is limited to 600 words. Of course, finding the right 600 words is not a small problem... In particular, I'm going to use this proposal to (I hope) open up a fairly new line of research work for me, so it's more work than it would be otherwise.

Factoids

I hate the Internet.

One of the downsides of communication technology, like e-mail, is that its just as easy to circulate untrue things as true things. After jokes, another popular type of e-mail that makes the rounds between friends is the “Did you know...?” variety, usually with a list of short one-line “factoids.” No references, no explanations.

I got one of these yesterday, and spotted a couple of alleged “facts” that, fortunately, other people had already taken the time to puncture. For instance...

“A duck’s quack doesn’t echo.” Fortunately, Straight Dope columnist Cecil Adams dealt with this one here.

One that really grabbed my attention, because I'd never heard it before, was the claim that all polar bears are left-handed.

Wow. The mind reels with questions. For instance...

Who thought that one up? This page suggests this was derived from native folklore; this is apparently supported in this article on, of all things, transgendered bears.

Would this “fact” be making the rounds if the claim was that all polar bears were right-handed? Probably not; I suspect that a difference from what’s typical in humans is part of the fascination with the claim.

Is it true? polarbearsalive.org lists it as a myth, here. This page claims there’s real scientific observations to support this, but gives no references, which makes me mighty suspicious. One thing to consider, though: would you really expect all bears to be left-handed? There's definitely handedness in humans, but nobody would say we're all right-handed.

How would you know? In humans, we normally take “handedness” to mean the hand we write with; care to try to get a bear to pick up a ballpoint and scribble a few words? Seriously, though, how you would show that sort of preference is an interesting problem.

Is it scientifically plausible? Okay, I have an advantage on this one, because I have a fair amount of training in animal behaviour and neurobiology, so I remembered reading an article about animal handedness. This short article from Scientific American backs what I vaguely recalled: handedness in behaviour of an entire species is not well documented for any species besides humans. Handedness in humans is thought to be related to the specialization of the two halves of our brain (see here).

I was able to find all this info to stick pins into this claim, while I’m tempted at this point to reverse my earlier statement and say, “I love the Internet.” But I’m still a little depressed. A search for “polar bear” and “left handed” yielded dozens of pages saying, “All polar bears are left-handed,” but nothing else, which far outnumber the few more substantive articles I collected above.

I am a little sympathetic to people for buying this claim. After all, it”s not as though most of us have ready access to polar bears to watch for a few weeks and record what they do with their paws.

But there are still a lot of untrue things that people believe, even though they are shown to be untrue easily. Ever hear that you can only balance an egg on the day of the equinox? Try it today, while the fall equinox is still over a week away. It takes some doing, but it can be done.

The morale of the story? For me, a factoid like “left-handed polar bears” reminds me of one of, if not the most useful questions I have as a scientist: “What is the evidence?”

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Good sites for tracking down common urban legends include The Straight Dope and the Urban Legends reference pages.

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Correction to earlier entry: Previously, I talked about the costs of accrediting an institution. Apparently, I misread – the application fee is for the initial accreditation for the institution. A “substantial change” may only require a fee of $300 – plus 125% of the cost for an accreditation committee to visit the campus.

Photo by Valerie on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

The cost of being recognized

Most scientific research is done at universities who train doctoral students. But have you ever thought about what sets apart universities from the “diploma mills” who spam your e-mail, offering to give you a Ph.D. without ever attending a class?

Part of the difference is accreditation, which is essentially a review system that says, “Yes, this institute meets the minimum accepted standards for its field in teaching and awarding degrees.” There are various accreditation agenies associated with different regions. Texas, for instance, is part of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools.

I discovered that starting the accreditation process for a new degree plan will set you back U.S. $8,000. That’s the application fee. If you make it to the point of inspection, that’ll be another U.S. $2,500, thank you.

Of course, something like that is a drop in the bucket for most institutions, but still, it's hard not to see something like that and evaluate it in terms of your personal finances.

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Journal entries are being slowed, of course, by teaching. On the plus side, a new crop of students means new possibilities for getting research help. The University has a program called the “Undergraduate Research Scholars Award,” geared mainly at first-year students. I’m planning on putting in an application for that, which could let me have my first minion – I mean, research assistant.

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Pages read of The Structure of Evolutionary Theory: 702. Hey, I’m past the half-way mark!