A good week (so far)

I like how this week is turning out so far. I got my broken lab fridge fixed. I had an appointment with an immigration lawyer and made good progress towards the first major hurdle in getting a green card. I've got to spend some time in the lab with one of my students doing research. I've had a chance to analyze some old data and am getting very close to finishing a manuscript using it. I'm particularly pleased about that last one, and hope I might have something ready to go into the post to an editor... well, I don't want to say when. Am I being superstitious? Worried I'll jinx myself? I'm not sure.

Kickin' it old school

I just received something I haven't seen in a long time. A reprint request card. It's a little postcard from someone, with a form asking me to send them a copy of a recent paper (in this case, one that came out in Journal of Comparative Phsyiology A). Without getting too nostalgic, they were something I saw a reasonable number of in graduate school -- not so much my own, of course, but there was a reasonably steady stream of them coming into the department's mailboxes.

You don't see reprint cards much now, because people will typically either send out an email, and the revolution in electronic publishing typically means that most people who are interested can just download and read the article electronically. While I'm very pleased for the increased accessibility of electronic publishing, one of the things I do miss is knowing that other people are actually reading the thing. And -- even better -- to learn that it's someone that I don't actually know personally. Sometimes, the field is so small, you wonder if you are making an impact on those outside of your own circle of friends, acquaintances, and colleagues. Reprint cards gave you a little peek at who's reading your work in a way that electronic publishing typically doesn't.

We also finished moving the last of the herbarium cabinets today. No bruises this time, thanks to having a proper dolly to move those suckers.

Oh, and I should also mention that I am now officially the Department of Biology's graduate program coordinator. Ah, the power...

Hm. Not feeling the power yet. Hang on, is this plugged in?

Best use of time

The first day of no class-relayed responsibilities, so I get to...

Move freakin' heavy cabinets.

All of this relates to a big, $1.3 million dollar grant we got from the HHMI. Included was a budget for a core facility. The rooms we're going to build this facility in are currently in use for a herbarium and invertebrate museum. According to someone, work on renovation begins Monday, so we're supposed to clear out these two rooms by then.

So we had three people with Ph.D. degrees doing grunt labour. I don't mind the task (much), but the fact is: This is not my job. I could be using this time to write grants, manuscripts, work on all manner of things. We have Physical Plant guys. But they're not clearing out these rooms, because they're occupied setting up chairs for moms and dads for a graduation ceremony tomorrow.

Copious free time

I just handed in my final marks for the semester, which means that I have a bunch of free time. In theory, anyway. Of course, there are always a couple of students who have little dramas about there marks, always asking if I can pull a couple of percentage points out of thin air ("Damnit, Jim, I'm a scientist, not a magician!").

On my agenda now are the takeover of the biology graduate program, writing grants, writing manuscripts, preparing for summer meetings, supervising undergraduate researchers... which reminds me, I have a final draft undergraduate thesis to review. Must dash!

Never a dull moment

Lectures are done, but there's been no shortage of things that need doing the last couple of days. I've spent both afternoons the last two days interviewing undergraduate students for our HHMI undergraduate research program. I was really pleased that we had a bunch of good applicants, and it was kind of fun to talk to them all. And the interviews didn't stop there. I met with a candidate for Dean of our college this morning. Plus I was running around, getting passport pictures taken care of, and picking up birthday cake for fellow faculty member.

One of the most unusual tasks I was working on over the last couple of days, though, was writing letters. Some weeks back, as a spin-off of my Brain Awareness Week public lecture, there was a feature story in The Monitor. Some teacher apparently took that and ran with it in her grade five class, so I had this stack of letters from kids asking about the article, my research, and so on. Yesterday, I sat down and wrote individual replies to each one in the stack.

Interestingly, I also had another student who had come to my Brain Awareness Lecture, and was intrigued enough to come in and talk to me about neuroscience. It's great, because often you do these sorts of things and wonder if anyone notices at all. It's been a bit of ego boost this week to find out that my quickie jury-rigged talk made a ripple.

How to lie with statistics

We had a departmental seminar on Friday. It was good, but the speaker got under my skin with one silly claim. She was discussing how life expectancy is 36 or so in a region in Africa where she works. So she asked for a show of hands of everyone in the room who was over that age. After a fair chunk of the room did so, she said, "All dead."

Rhetorically effective, but wrong. If average height is 5'8", does everyone stop growing at 5'8"? An average represents the middle of a sample. Some people will be above average and some are below average. Heck, depending on the distribution, the majority could be above average!

And she knew better, which was the most annoying thing.

Irresistable

Not much of note happened today, but who can resist making a post on 05/05/05?

Although yesterday was the last day of classes, the pace of my days has not slowed down. I tested a new oxygen meter for a research project, met with one of my undergraduates, had a meeting about our new textbook, took care of a shipment of new crayfish, filled out some forms and a few other odds and ends.

Better than expected

There was a meeting on the workload policy I mentioned recently. And huzzah! From the criticisms on the draft, they put back the various ways to get teaching release, and even recommended increasing the maximum release (thus lowering the teaching load, potentially). Whew.

No good deed goes unpunished

Our university is trying to move more towards research. As part of that movement, there's a move afoot to reduce the standard teaching load across the board. This is good. A draft version of the policy, however, all but removes any possibility of teaching release. This is bad. The short version is that under the new plan, the hardest working faculty will have to do more work (because the release they had been granted won't exist any more), whereas people who haven't done anything get the benefits of a reduced teaching load. Fortunately, this is a draft document, so there might be a chance of changing it. I hope!

Speaking of teaching, my last lectures for the semester were yesterday. Time now to do some grade bookkeeping and start figuring out what projects I'm going to try to do over the summer.

Finally, in these days where getting research published is quite competitive, I found this story to be highly interesting.

(W)hen the Brown University researcher's paper was recently rejected from an occupational medicine journal, he simply bought two pages of ad space and printed the entire article in the same journal.

Next time, try not to cut it so close...

Proposal done with less than 11 minutes to spare. Required some fairly elaborate racking down of some other people, since two people involved in some way were both out of town today. Just awaiting electronic submission now. But it looks like this proposal is going to make it in, albeit under the wire. Whew...

Additional: Submitted with 4 minutes, 29 seconds to spare.

Good thoughts

A post to let former fellow grad student Mary Anne know that I'm sending her positive thought vibes as she interviews for a new job.

Deadlines

The current grant proposal I'm working on may not be the biggest I've submitted, but it is easily the most complex. I have four co-principle investigators (two was my previous record), have been working with architects, physical plant, and others... yeesh. The practical upshot of all this is that rather than being done a couple of days in advance, this thing is due at 5:00 pm today, and there is still some information missing from the proposal. That doesn't make me very happy, but I'm hopeful that I can pull this off somehow.

Defenses

Another busy day today. I was sitting down for the defenses of two Honors undergraduates. One was a student who I supervised, Yajaira, who gave a very confident presentation. You would never have known we were making changes to her presentation only 20 or 30 minutes before her talk! After her defense, I learned she was a former Miss Rio Grande Valley or some such thing. Explains the poise; she's used to standing in front of people.

Second student was Tina, who actually did most of her research off at Louisiana State University as a summer research project. She also did a good job, although we were lamenting a bit about the level of assistance she got from her supervisor at LSU. It sounds like her supervisor may not have given her quite as much help as she could have. But as someone always pressed for time myself, I can see how that would happen.

But my contributions are nothing compared to my colleague Scott Gunn, who is either supervising or being on the committee for sixteen, count 'em, sixteen undergraduate Honors thesis. He broke the old record of twelve in one semester, a record that was previously held by... himself! And yes, he was on the committee for both of the students today.

You may be an assistant professor if...

You receive an receipt for a program application that you had completely forgotten writing and submitting. That happened to me yesterday; I got an email from HACU about my application for their "Professions Capacity Building" program. I dug around on my hard drive and sure enough, there was the short two page application I had written up and submitted back in February when the request for applications was made. I had totally forgotten about it.

Meanwhile, I am soon to be up against the wall for my latest NSF application, which is due in a week and a half. Unfortunately, I'm depending on other people to provide me with information, which they haven't done yet. I'm getting nervous about it.

Denied!

Another day, another rejection letter, this one from the NSF. They didn't like my proposal for Neurobiology Methods enough, so back in for resubmission it will go.

In other news... I've been busy. Hence, no posts. The fun never stops in Zen's world.

In all the papers

One of the spin-offs from my recent Brain Awareness Week talk was that I spent a good chunk of an afternoon talking to a reporter from the local newspaper, The McAllen Monitor. The story from that chat is available here. The final story doesn't quite do justice to a wide-ranging conversation over a couple of hours. I love the composition of the picture they used, but I just wish I didn't look quite so... sombre.

Bits and pieces

What have I been up to lately?

I've been talking to job candidates a lot. Even though I'm not on the search committee this year, I'm trying to get as much face time with each of the candidates as I possibly can. I think we're three down, and have four to go. Whee!

I'm grinding away on another grant proposal, this one for the Coastal Studies Lab. I've got a few weeks to work on it, luckily, but it requires coordinating information from several people, so that'll make it a bit tricky.

I'm geeking out over the start of the new footy season, even though my first tip for the season was wrong.

But even that pales in comparison to the top-flight geek-out I'm having over the latest teaser trailer for the new Doctor Who series. It's going to be a bit of a struggle not to watch that over and over while I should be working! It makes my heart go pitter patter thumptthumpthumpthumpthump...

Takin' it to the streets

I gave a public lecture last night as part of Brain Awareness Week. I got a very pleasant surprise; I reckon I had over 100, maybe 150 people there. Most were students looking to earn some extra credit, but hey, I'll take anything I can get. I may try to expand on this and do something a bit more elaborate next year.

Time to update the resume

One of my papers has now made the transition from "published online" to "published." It's "Mechanisms of behavioral switching" (I didn't pick the American spelling of "behavioural," by the way, the editor did), in Journal of Comparative Physiology A volume 191, number 3, pages 197-199. You can see it here. Accept no substitutes!

In other news, I am now spearheading another grant proposal. This one will be for the National Science Foundation, asking for about $350,000 to help fund improvements to our Coastal Studies Lab out on South Padre Island. Yipes!

We've also started this year's round of job interviews. We're currently trying to fill four tenure track positions, and we had our first visitor -- of seven -- on campus yesterday. One down, six to go.

End of no lecture week

I can't bring myself to call it a "break" like others. I did get one day of that rare treat: I didn't come into my office at all yesterday. Actually, it wasn't that much of a treat, because I didn't plan ahead for myself and didn't really have much to do and was rather bored and more than a bit depressed. Otherwise, though, I got caught up on some class related stuff and did various odds and ends over the last week. I hope will be able to jump into the fray full throttle tomorrow.