Consumer choice

The latest drama slowing down the establishment of my lab is that I'm trying to order some equipment from a company in England, Cambridge Electronics. This is an order for many thousands of dollars (U.S. dollars, no less), and the purchasing department here and the company can't agree over who's going to pay the import duties and taxes, which amounts to a couple of hundred bucks.

I do have some options. I could look for equivalent equipment here in the U.S. Alternately, I can wait.

[Zen whistles to pass the time]

I have few virtues, but patience is one of them.

I mean, I'd already done my comparison shopping. I still think this stuff is the best suited to my needs. Considering that I'll be using this equipment for some years, a few extra weeks for what I want is not a big deal. Just an aggravating one.

If I'd known all the hurdles this process would throw up in front of me, I'd have started earlier. I bet if I were a private individual with a few thousand bucks in my pocket, I'd have my equipment by now.

Funded!

Good news: my colleague Hudson Deyoe informed me that the NSF will be funding a much-needed renovation of the seawater system at the Coastal Studies Lab, where I plan to do a fair amount of research. More details later.

In the lab

I spent the end of last week on South Padre Island at the Coastal Studies Lab, enjoying the company of colleagues Virginia Scofield, Baruch ("Buki") Rinkevich, and new department hire Mike Persans. Lot of good conversation, and I successfully collected some sand crabs (mostly Lepidopa -- I'll explain what those are later) and brought them back to the lab. We all got to see the American Independence Day fireworks from the water, which was a definite bonus.

Today has been good too, as I've spent most of the day working in the lab. A few more equipment odds and ends arrived. I spent part of the day setting those up, checking on my sand crabs, and making a few things I'll need in the coming weeks. Also had a former student drop by with a couple more sand crabs for me, which was a nice surprise.

One week early

My Office of Sponsored Research has informed me that they've now received all my paperwork. They helped me fix my last couple of mistakes and omissions, and the proposal is going to be signed off a full week before the deadline.

So let's talk money. Just how much am I asking for, and what are the biggest expenses?

The total, for a three year project, is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Specifically? Let's say in the $200,000-300,000 range. Needless to say, I've never handled or been responsible for that much money in my life. Yes, it is a little intimidating. While I expected a difference in the dollar values you worry about when you're a graduate student or post-doc compared to a faculty member, the division is sharper than I expected.

The biggest expense? Each of the three years is a little different, but more than half of the budget for every year is one just one line item: salary. Equipment? Supplies? Purchasing animals? Small potatoes. You want a post-doc to help in the lab, now you're talking dollars.

Besides asking for funds for a post-doctoral research fellow, I can also ask for money for me. Because many academic institutions (like mine) do not appoint you for a full year, asking for a salary for yourself is an acceptable cost. In some cases, I believe, it is possible to "buy" your way out of teaching by having grant money salary that you'd normally earn in the academic year.

And people wonder why researchers are so gung ho to apply for grant money.

Yet more chemicals continue to arrive. Today's delivery: alcohol! Not stuff you'd want to drink, though: this is 100% ethanol.

Tomorrow, and possibly Friday, I will be on South Padre Island doing science. I'm going there to meet Doctors Virginia Scofield and Baruch Rinkevich, the latter visiting Texas from Israel (!). Both Virginia and Baruch work on small little animals known either as tunicates or ascidians. For most locals, they're probably just the bane of boat owners, because they're colonial animals that grow on exposed surfaces and will foul the bottom of boats. They're very interesting scientifically, though, and are actively being studied as a model connected with AIDS.

Bits and pieces

Packages of chemicals and the like continue to arrive in dribs and drabs. My favourite this week so far has been a box that was probably 30 cm long by 10 cm high by 15 cm wide. When I opened it up and took out all the packaging, it had a single box of glass slides that fit in the palm of my hand.

And you thought the guy who packs your bags at the supermarket was bad.

Clearly a man with too much time on his hands...

My Bacon number is 3.

I was an extra in the movie Eastern Condor, directed by and starring Sammo Hung Kam-Bo (or just Sammo Hung). According to the Oracle of Bacon, Sammo Hung was in Long feng zei zhuo zei (1990) with Agnes Aurelio, who was in JFK (1991) with Kevin Bacon.

Not sure how to calculate my Erdos number. Not sure I care too much, since mentioning my Erdos number would be a lot more likely to be rewarded with blank stares at social functions.

I was thinking that many biologists would be interested in knowing, say, a "Darwin number" or "Mendel number" detailing their ties to some of the more famous biologists of the world. I suspect that those might be difficult to calculate: neither Charles Darwin nor Gregor Mendel had students.

The way of the future?

Oh, great. So now I'm being blamed for killing a really good web site: Salon. All right, not me personally, but web journals (“blogs”) like this one.

Maybe this thing really can work... In any case, projects like this are gaining prominence.


Oh! I have to mention that this is the first journal entry from my new computer with a new internet connection in my new lab. Huzzah!

Six degrees of D'Arcy Thompson

A lot of scientists are interested in just how tightly linked communities are. One popular version of this idea is the pasttime sometimes called "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon," where the goal is to shows how many links there are between any actor and Kevin Bacon. If you're just curious and not a movie geek, type in the name of your favourite actor here.

An academic version of the game concerns wide-ranging and prolific mathematician Paul Erdos.

I recently mentioned I had a book on my desk by biologist D'Arcy Thompson, who died in 1948. My colleague Garry Jolley-Rogers informs me that I have a "Thompson number" of three. I did a post-doc with David Macmillan, who was a colleague of Michael Laverack, who knew D'Arcy Thompson.

Cool.

Hurry up and wait

Now that I've finished writing my proposal (I hope), and all the paperwork is out of the way (I hope), what now?

I wait. For about six months.

Oddly enough, the next round of deadlines is six months away; 10 July and 10 January are the two main deadlines for my particular research area. That means I may not know if I'm going to get funding, or even get any feedback on this current proposal, before my next shot at putting in another proposal.

How likely am I to get funded? It's a long shot. I don't have the rate of success for my particular area of research, but in a related field of animal behaviour, about 15% of proposals get funded. If I'm not mistaken, most major funding agencies have rejection rates around 70-90%.

No conflict of interest!

The "Conflict of Interest Certificate" I mentioned previously did not take five days. Huzzah! It's back in my hot little hands, I've made some final fixes based on suggestions from a colleague, and I think this baby is about ready to hand over to the Office of Sponsored Research. The toothpick is coming out of the cake clean...

Just in time for me to take a trip to San Antonio this weekend, and enjoy the Canada Day weekend (though I'll be back by Monday, not in San Antonio). At least, I'll enjoy Canada Day as much as it's possible to do so in south Texas. :(

Meanwhile, I'm trying to get a bit of reading done. I'm currently working through a volume titled The Way of the Cell by Frank Harold. Also on my desk is D'Arcy Thompson's On Growth and Form, which I haven't opened yet. Looking forward to this, because I've heard this book is full of graceful and elegant prose, which is not the sort of thing you normally associate with scientific writing.

Back to the current volume. I'm reading The Way of the Cell to see if it might make a serviceable textbook for a graduate-level class I'm slated to teach next year in cell biology. This should be an interesting experience, since I am not a cell biologist. Okay, I admit that neurons are cells, but that's about as far as it goes! New challenges are good, though; there's a lot positive to be said for a job that always requires you to learn new things.

Eek! More paperwork!

I am so glad that I left myself considerable leeway in submitting my grant proposal. The deadline for when the electronic "papers" have to be submitted to the NSF is 10 July. But that's not my deadline, because my proposal has to go through the university's Office of Sponsored Research.

I was preparing a form that has to go to the Office of Sponsored Research, and noticed a small little line saying, "NSF & HHS Grants must submit Conflict of Interest Certificate." Fine. I look that up, and discover that the Dean of my College is supposed to have that paperwork five days before I submit my proposal to the Office of Sponsored Research. I'm hoping it won't take that long, but it's more lead time that I hadn't anticipated. Okay, "overlooked" is more accurate; but it's difficult to be aware of, and track, all this when you're doing it for the first time.

What else is making demands on my time? There are two candidates for the position of Dean of College of Science and Engineering interviewing this week. Faculty get a 45 minute chat session with each.

Science in fiction

There are couple of interesting articles in the most recent issue of The Scientist. (Viewing these articles requires free registration.) They concern public perception of science, particularly what people take away about science when they go to films.

One article concerns scientists working as consultants to film and television. Anne Simon, science consultant for the recently completed television show The X-Files, says, “[W]hen scientists try to explain their work, they generally come off as condescending or have trouble communicating on the right level.” Sigh.

The other article describes a panel discussion, “Making Science More Sexy” (at least they gave us credit that we’re already at least a little sexy, and we just need to be more sexy) that occurred at a New York film festival. I like this article because it added a new phrase to my vocabulary: “weather porn.” Paula Apsell, who produces the science show Nova uses the phrase to refer to “hurricanes, tornadoes, and tsunamis” that are offered in shows ostensibly about science.

In the “Will we ever really know?” dept.

After the American move to recognize Meucci as the inventor the telephone, my fellow Canadians are responding.

This points out how tricky the business of assigning priority and credit for discoveries and inventions are. It might be more difficult to protect those discoveries today than in the time of Bell and Meucci, particularly for publicly-funded research. This proposal I'm working on now, for instance, is going to be reviewed by fellow scientists ("peer review"), who'll will recommend whether I get the cash or not.

The reviewers are not just other biologists -- these specifically go to people in my field. These are arguably my best competitors, and the ones most likely to be able to scoop me: carrying out research I'm proposing before I do.

People are aware of this possibility, and there are safeguards to ensure that ideas stay with the people who proposed them. For instance, I can influence who reads my proposal – to a degree. I can suggest reviewers, and I can also suggest people who I do not want to review my proposal.

Knowing who to avoid isn't always easy, however, because most reviews for journals (not sure about grant proposals yet) are anonymous. I'll stop there, since I'm sure the issue of anonymous peer-review will come up again later.

I can't imagine what it must be like for people who are working on "hot" projects with immediate and substantial commercial and / or medical applications. The competition is immense. If we've learned one things from big global sporting events like the Olympics, intense competition does not always bring out people's most noble and selfless sides.

First draft done

I just finished uploading my working draft of my budget and its justification to the NSF web site. Whew. I'm going to sit on it for the weekend, proofread it Monday, and maybe turn the Office of Sponsored Research loose on it Monday or Tuesday.

Mysterious beast

It's a pity the sasquatch or Nessie enthusiasts are never able to produce a picture like this.

Makin' it purty

I'm redecorating the site a little. You'll notice the couch is now facing the opposite wall, and that ceiling fan just had to come down...

I'm changing the title, and want to make the page a little more distinctive. This was prompted after I visited someone else's web journal. This in itself is not unusual, as I'm an incorrigible surfer, except that this was a subject that does not interest me at all: weddings. I got sucked there due entirely to the clever title: Going Bridal. I thought, "My page is dull. Got to start fixing that."

I thought a lot last night about what I could use to replace the bland "Neuroethology" title. While neuroethology is what I do, it's not exactly what the journal is about. I wanted to keep the "Neuro-" in the title if I could, because it's such a great prefix. It worked for William Gibson, whose break-out novel had the wonderfully tantalizing title of Neuromancer.

"NeuroDojo" seemed to fit. A "dojo" is a place of training and practice, much as a research lab is. It gave me an excuse to put up the "Constant improvement" quote, which I say to students a lot. And the term has assonance.

I think I'll have to learn a bit more HTML before the place really looks the way I want it. Just a little more constant improvement for me to undertake.

Individuals and institutions

Apparently, good things don't come in threes. No equipment today.

Meanwhile, I've got a first draft of my proposal budget. I think this project is getting pretty close to being handed over to the Office of Sponsored Research.

Hm. Methinks that term, "Office of Sponsored Research," might need a little explaining.

Funding administration varies quite a bit from country to country. In Canada, grants are generally awarded to an individual. Nobody else can touch a nickel of the money that's awarded to a researcher (or researchers, in cases of collaborative grants).

In the U.S.A., grants are generally awarded to institutions. This is actually a fairly substantial difference. First, this means not all the money goes to the researcher. Institutions get a cut of all grant money in the form of "indirect costs." It's worked into the proposal in advance, and it can be a big cut. On my campus, it's over 50%, and I think that figure is higher on other campuses. The indirect costs are supposed to feed back into the university so that they can provide infrastructure like secretaries, buildings, janitorial services, and so on. I'd feel better about these "indirect costs" if there weren't a set of unfinished labs in my building...

But I digress.

The habit of making grants to "institutions" instead of "individuals" also means that "Sponsored Research" offices play a sizable role in grant application. I cannot submit my own grant application to the NSF; I have to submit it first to the Office of Sponsored Research, who vets the application, and they ultimately submit the proposal to the funding agency.

One reason why I want to get this proposal in early is because, not having been through this process before, I want to leave plenty of time to fix any foul-ups that the Office of Sponsored Research points out to me.

Threes

After two straight days of receiving equipment packages, I'm pretty excited to see if good things really do come in threes...

Christmas in June!

Yesterday, paper. Today, plastics. Tomorrow, the WORLD!

Just kidding about that last one.

Yes, another bunch of boxes of equipment arrived this afternoon. Mostly plastics and glasswear: beakers, graduated cylinders, carboys, disposible pipettes, petri dishes, and so on.

The biggest arrival, both literally and figuratively, was my new lab computer. It's got plenty of computing power, decked out in black and silver (you gotta approve of a colour scheme that matches much of your wardrobe), CD burner, DVD player, and a slim, flat screen. My techno-geek side is pretty excited about all this.

I'm still a long way from recording that first action potential, but the lab is starting to look like someone works there. And that someone is me. Which feels pretty good.

Promos

In today's mail, a special offer from scientific supplier Fisher. Free, with your $500 (!) order of chemicals, you get a free copy of the classic board game Monopoly. But not just any copy of Monopoly, but a special edition celebrating the 100th anniversary of the company.

While I have no intention of ordering all those chemicals just to get the game, I am very curious about what it looks like. The picture of the game box on the flyer appears to show tokens in the shape of a microscope and a flask. I wonder if you build research labs on Oxford instead of hotels on Boardwalk. Is there a card in "Chance" that says, "Your research grant is funded! You get $100,000!" or "You are found guilty of plagiarism! Go to jail!" The mind boggles...

There's a bigger point here, though. I've had a fair number of students ask me, "What can you do with a degree in biology?" The possibilities they can see are medicine, maybe research, and not much else. They don't realize that science is Big Business. Advertising is indicative of that: small companies with no competition don't have their own customized games made for their customers.

;;;;;

And here we are in the middle of summer, with weeks of 30-40 degree C weather on either side of today...

And I have a cold! The sore throat became a cough which became the runny nose and I don't like it at all.

Pout.