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!

Don't call me "Sir"!

This is a short essay that I wrote for my introductory biology students. A lot of them call me “Sir.” I'm trying to get them to stop.

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I really dislike being called, “Sir.” I have a few reasons for that: a couple of minor ones, and one major, serious one.

First, “Sir” is for knights. Heck, I’ve never even met the Queen! (Though, as a Canadian, I am her loyal subject.) Never bent down on one knee, had the taps on the shoulders with the sword, none of that. So don’t call me “Sir”: I haven't earned it.

Second, imagine if almost everyone around you started calling you, “Your Honour” or some other honorific title. It’s not a bad thing, but it's rather unexpected. I’ve worked in universities around the world for years, and was on a first-name basis with everyone. I come here, and suddenly I got hundreds of people calling me, “Sir.” It just feels weird.

Third: Joking aside, there’s a serious reason not to call me “Sir,” and it has to do with science. I’ll bet a lot of you had it drilled into you that you have to “respect your teachers.” If you’re going to understand science in a “deep down in your bones” kind of way, you're going to have to let go of that.

Science tells me, you, everyone to take a flying leap.

Science doesn’t care if you’re famous. Science doesn’t care if you have a degree. Science doesn’t care if you wear a necktie. Science cares about ideas and the evidence supporting them.

To paraphrase an anonymous quote, “Science stones rebels. Science also stones conformists. Only the ideas that survive the constant barrage of rocks deserve attention. (Science often gets upset with its critics, not because it’s being criticized, but because those critics so often throw marshmallows.)”

And that quote points out that criticism is vital to doing science. When I write a research paper or research grant proposal, it goes out for review. That means other practising scientists have a chance to examine what I wrote, look for bad ideas or bad experimental design, and generally take it apart at the seams. That sort of criticism corrects mistakes and weeds out bad ideas (nobody’s perfect, after all), so that science can improve, and create theories that predict, control, and explain better than our current ones.

If you’re going to be involved in science – which you are by taking this class – you've got to be able to ask critical questions. You’ve got to feel that you can pick up a rock, chuck it at an idea, and see how it holds up.

I honestly do not believe you can tap into that scientific mindset while you’re calling someone, “Sir,” all the time.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m all for politeness. But a lot of people go way past “respect” to “deference,” “kow-tow,” and “don’t argue.” Look at the military; “Sir” is used to reinforce a chain of command where the lower ranked officers follow orders quickly and without question.

Science is partly about constantly questioning and challenging authority. Too much respect is bad for science.

So don't call me, “Sir.” It’ll make you a better scientist.

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Still at page 652 on The Structure of Evolutionary Theory.

Last day of freedom!

Yes, that's an overly melodramatic way of saying, "Classes start tomorrow."

Being an academic is a two part job: you're researcher and instructor both. This is the time of year when the instruction tends to take precedence over research, but I'll be working hard to ensure that research doesn't grind to a halt.

Made yet another trip out to the Coastal Studies Lab yesterday, both to learn a bit more about ascidian development, and to show the lab (and the bee-yoo-tiful South Padre Island beach) to one of our new hires in the department, Chris Little.

Also on my agenda these days is that I am putting together a proposal for a symposium that might run at next year's Animal Behavior Society meeting. This proposal has to go to the meeting's Program Committee, then the Executive Committee in mid-September. Fortunately, the bulk of work for me consists of finding good speakers with interesting things to say.

I'm sure many other interesting things are happening to me, but I'm ignoring them for now.

Pages read of The Structure of Evolutionary Theory: 652.

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Additional: This article on "cam girls" gives me pause about this project, and wonder about my own motivations, to some degree. Did I run this journal as a method of public outreach about science and research -- or I am just a narcissist? Needless to say, I hope I'm the former.

Watching the odomoter

Pages read of Stephen Jay Gould's The Structure of Evolutionary Theory: 595. I've reached the beginning of Part II of the book! Unfortunately, Part II is longer than Part I, so I'm only 44% of the way through the book.

The "I wish I'd done that study" Department

The girls really do get prettier by closing time. And so do the boys, according to this study.

Don't be sad...

This article in The Scientist (free registration required) has a quote from someone saying that assistant professors (like me) are expected to write 3 papers a year.

Lucky for me, within this month I have a new technical article coming out in Marine and Freshwater Behaviour and Physiology (you can read a summary here) and a book chapter in Crustacean Experimental Systems in Neurobiology, published by Springer Verlag. (You can find a description of the book by searching Springer's on-line catalogue for the title or the main editor: Wiese.) I will follow Meat Loaf's advice and not be sad, 'cause "Two out of three ain't bad."

I spent a good chunk of Friday and the weekend at the Coastal Studies Lab, learning more about tunicates from Virgina Scofield. She took a couple of animals and extracted eggs and sperm and fertilized them on Saturday morning. By the afternoon, they had divided several times and were starting to make their guts tails. When I came back Sunday morning, we had a bunch of tiny, but complete, little swimming tadpoles with complete nervous systems and behaviour, looking for places to settle. When I say tiny, I mean it; the swimming tadpole larva is about the same size as the unfertilised egg.

Also picked up a few more sand crabs.

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Pages read of The Structure of Evolutionary Theory: 480.

We now return to your regularly scheduled journal...

Bad news: Vacation is over.

Good news: It was very fun, thanks.

Bad news: I didn't get quite as much work done along the way as I hoped. I had forgotten how difficult it can be to read in a moving car.

Good news: Most of my crabs are alive and well even after another 10 days of benign neglect. They've been surviving reasonably well for six weeks with no intervention on my part, which is highly encouraging. Animals that require large amounts of care are not on the agenda right now.

Bad news: U.S. Customs rejected our application to import some equipment from the U.K. duty-free. Disappointing, but not a surprise.

Good news: My colleague Virginia Scofield will be making a trip to the Coastal Studies Lab tomorrow, so I will probably be going out to meet her. I hope I finally see some active ascidian larvae!

Good news: My on-line material for my General Biology class has passed muster from one of the folks in our Center for Distance Learning. There are still improvements to be made, but they're relatively minor.

So overall, there's more good news than bad. And that alone is good news!

Science takes no vacations!

But scientists sure take vacations.

Probably no updates until 15 August due to vacation. I won't be completely inactive; I'm taking along a copy of a neurobiology textbook with me to read, so I can start preparing for the new neurobiology class I'm slated to teach in January.

Nothing to do with science

Poor Carlton.

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Pages read of The Structure of Evolutionary Theory: 352 (part way through Chapter Five).

Hallway fauna

Was just walking into my lab to play around with a DVD (tranferred from video I shot in Australia), I saw something running along the wall. Being a biologist, of course, I bent down to have a look at it, thinking it was probably an insect of some sort.

To my surprise, it was a gorgeous little gecko!

I popped into my lab, grabbed a beaker, and coaxed it in. A little tricky, since these guys can walk over anything, up to and including smooth, dry glass, and it was pretty quick for its size. It almost looked like a little demented wind-up toy when it ran.

It was only about 5 cm long from nose to the tip of its tail. I was disappointed I don't have any microscopes or even magnifying glasses sitting in my lab to have a closer look. I could see its famous feet: close enough to see the pads, but not close enough to make out the hairs that allow this animal to bond to surfaces using sub-atomic forces (see Reference 57 in this list if you're interested). The skin on its underside (easily seen, since it was in a glass beaker) was so thin you could make out some of the shadings from its internal organs and blood system.

After admiring this beastie for a few minutes, and wondering how the devil he got on the second floor of the Science building and managed to survive (can't be much food up here!), I took him outside and set him on his merry way, running off through the grass.

A small benefit of living in a tropical climate: you just don't find cool little critters like that north of the 49^th parallel very often. (Not that it makes up for the oppressive heat, mind you.)

New URL

You can now reach this journal at this much easier to remember URL:

http://dojo.shorturl.com

If I had a witty heading, it would go here

Like everything in academic circles, even a set of talks at a meeting needs a proposal. That's why I spent a good part of today working on a proposal for a symposium that, if approved, would take place at next year's annual meeting of the Animal Behavior Society. The idea for the symposium is to review recent developments in the field of neurobiology that bear on what animal behaviourists think about.

Or, to put it more glibly, to line up a bunch of "neuro" types in front of the "etho" (or behavioural) types and see if I can get them to talk to each other (ha!).

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Pages read of The Structure of Evolutionary Theory: 250 -- the end of Chapter 3! (The book has 12 chapters.)

Zen's Law of Time

I hate paperwork. I especially hate customs paperwork, which is what I spent a good part of the last two days dealing with. It's like this, see... I'm trying to buy scientific equipment from a U.K. company. I put in a purchase order for the equipment back in mid-May, and it's been held up over who's going to pay the customs fee. (At least, that's my understanding of what Purchasing told me.)

So they've got a customs broker involved. And now I have a set of government forms to get this stuff sent duty free. The forms ask a long series of questions like, "What is the research you plan to do? Why is this better than any domestic equivalent product? Did you contact domestic vendors? Did you ask for bids? Did you ask if they could modify their existing equipment to meet your needs?" And like that.

I thought this was a consumer society and that free trade was all the rage.

Anyhow, I'm going to keep trying to get the equipment I want, and hope I'm not committing the Concorde fallacy ("too much invested to quit;" a logical error a lot of gamblers fall prey to as well as British and French engineers).

Everything is following Zen's Law of Time: "Everything takes longer than you expect."

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Pages read of The Structure of Evolutionary Theory: 200. I expect to be finished by December. We'll see what my Law of Time does to that date...

Ah, bureaucracy...

Got an e-mail today from one of the NSF directors about my recently submitted proposal. One of the things the proposal asks for is "Current and pending support." In other words, just how much cash do you have from other agencies, and how much time are you going to be spending on these other projects?

Being new to all this, I have none.

They want me to submit a page that says "None."

I guess I don't think enough like a civil servant.

In any case, I have to get some help from the NSF to figure out just how I'm going to do this. Although the director gave me permission to make this little addendum, it's not an easy thing to do. Let me rephrase that: I can't do it myself, because -- as I've mentioned previously -- the entire proposal process is electronic. After a proposal has been officially submitted, you normally can't go back and make changes, for obvious reasons.

Pages read of The Structure of Evolutionary Theory: 145 (1% of book).

Briefly...

More equipment arrived (huzzah!), but still lacking bits necessary to perform an actual experiment.

Spent part of the afternoon starting to learn the many, many rules and regulations governing small purchase orders.

Pages read of The Structure of Evolutionary Theory: 133 (<1% of book).

Common thread

Yesterday, two books arrived in my apartment that couldn't look much different physically.

The first is a magnum opus by Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. It is massive. It's a book that should probably be measured by thickness or weight rather than page count. If you include the index and references and such, this sucker is well over 1,400 pages long.

I'm halfway through page 33. Wish me luck.

The other book to come in was a slim volume of poetry titled Eunoia by Christian Bök. I can't remember the exact page count, but even that's deceptive, since each page contains a single paragraph with a lot of white space. The concept of Eunoia is that each of the five chapters is written using only one vowel. You just gotta hear it read out loud; the effect is stunning.

What links these two books that look almost nothing alike? My favourite virtue: persistance. Gould mentions that he was working on his book for 20 years. (That he died so shortly after its publication makes you wonder if the desire to see the thing finally out in print was one of the things that kept him going against cancer.) Bök's task took seven years to finish. Bök probably invested more time per word than Gould!

And the moral of the story is: Do not stop and do not quit and do not give up.

Still kicking

The sand crabs I collected way back at the start of the month (5 July) are still alive and well, as far as I can tell. A few have kicked the bucket (unsuccessful moults, and those that got clipped by a shovel when we were digging), but by and large, they seem to be doing all right. It's a little surprising, considering that I've pretty much just left them alone.

It bodes well for research, though: I'm not a big fan of research animals that require intensive care. I am in utter awe over the effort that some researchers have put into looking after their animals. An excellent example is Irene Pepperberg's outstanding work with her parrot Alex. Dr. Pepperberg has described the demands of her parrot as being akin to having a baby in the terrible twos for decades...