Note: There are Black Lives Matter protests. There is a pandemic. Fascism is on the rise. I don’t know how to address this in the blog right now, except to say: I want Black people not live in fear of police. As an academic, I want more Black colleagues in my profession and Black students to get higher education. I want equality and not racist policies and racist actions. I want people to wear masks and stay home so they don’t prolong the pandemic. And I want people to not put up nazis and secret police.
With that preface, please forgive a post about career paths. It isn’t the most important thing out there now. But it’s something I’ve been working on for a while.
I dug in, and found the person singing lead vocals was Mike Peters, who led another band I followed around the same time: The Alarm. Again, I had kind of stopped looking for new music from The Alarm, because Peters had quit the band – live, on stage, with cameras rolling – without telling anyone else in the band he was about to do so.
And that was pretty much that for that version of The Alarm.
It was a big inflection point for Peters’s career. He talked about it for VH1’s Bands Reunited in 2004 (about 22 minutes in on this video):
I was committing commercial and career suicide. I was leaving what I was. I was Mike Peters of The Alarm. I still am. But the only way I could find my sanity and find myself again was to actually walk away from it.
I get the sense the Peters made peace with that decision, but that he still has a lingering sense of, “What it?” Could The Alarm have been one of those big worldwide bands, like their contemporaries, U2? But maybe I’m reading too much into it.
I went looking for how Peters came to be singing for Big Country. I’ve been thinking a lot about it ever since.
Big Country’s music was inspirational for Peters when he was first in The Alarm. The video also talks about the stuff I didn’t know:
The long road back for Peters after quitting on stage, with a new iteration of The Alarm.
An epic hoax to show the ageism of the music industry.
Multiple fights with cancer.
A lot of new Alarm music that I still have to catch up on.
And being asked to front Big Country, and getting to sing the song that had changed his life years ago, “In a Big Country.”
A little after watching that video, I listened to this WorkLife podcast about career decline. The first guest, Arthur Brooks, has advice: “Walk off the stage before you fall off it.” Brooks is not optimistic that people can stay productive in careers, and suggests lots of people should turn to things like teaching instead.
Both of these, of course, made me think about where I go from here in my career.
I had spent most of the past couple of years writing a book. That meant I wasn’t gathering new data, I wasn’t working with students. After I submitted the manuscript last fall, the COVID-19 pandemic scrapped any possibility of getting back in the lab and cranking out new data any time soon.
Is this one of those inflection points that I can’t recover from? Is this that combination of personal decisions (like Peters walking away from the band) and external factors (like pop music’s embrace of hip hop and move away from The Alarm’s rock and roll) that is going to sink me for good this time?
Peters’s career does give me some hope. The Alarm has made more albums in the twenty-first century than they did in the twentieth century (back in the 80s and early 90s). He still clearly loves performing. He gives back through charity work for blood cancer, through Love Hope Strength. Next year, The Alarm will celebrate 40 years, which is an achievement to be proud of and that few artists in music reach.
And the second part of the WorkLife also talked about people who do some of the best work in their later years.
I don’t want to quit being a researcher. I don’t want to stop being a scholar. I reinvent myself as a scientist before. I hope I can do it again. As Big Country sang, “Stay alive!”
External links
When you’re a kid and you study history, you read about all these empires of the past that rose and fell. Rome. Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great. The Holy Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the British Empire. (Yes, my history was very western oriented.)
And sometimes you wonder what it must be like to be in the tail end of that, when an empire is breaking apart. “What must it be like,” you think, “to live through that?”
Well, now I know.
Living through history sucks.
Top picture from here. Bottom picture by Associated Press photographer Julio Cortez. Bruce Janu writes: “The upside-down flag has historically been used to signal ‘distress.’ And ‘distress’ may not be a word that is strong enough.”.
Do not insert references using software such as EndNote, which adds a layer of embedded coding to the manuscript; use only MS Word’s built-in endnote function to insert references.
(University spokesperson J.B.) Bird said that UT officials did not know exactly how the virus spread among its custodial staff members, but said they had been practicing social distancing and wearing masks.
I’ve been called a lot of names and accused of a lot of things by emergency patients but it’s surreal to have a patient accuse me of falsifying their COVID result – because they don’t believe the virus is real – as I’m actively trying to keep them from dying from multi-organ failure from COVID.
I asked for examples of predictions that had come true. They could not provide specifics and instead encouraged me to do the research myself. When I asked them how they explained the events (that had been) predicted that never happened(,) they said that deception is part of (the) plan.
I guess it’s time to repeat the main thing I learned from reading a fuckton of Holocaust memoirs again: propaganda does not need to be persuasive, only pervasive. Its secondary purpose is to convince. Its primary purpose is to exhaust.
The mistake we're making is thinking we have a science communication problem when what we have is a terror management problem.
Here’s the thing no one wants to hear: you fight propaganda with propaganda. Unless SciComm can fundamentally scale to address the propaganda machine in sum and substance – and it can’t – then it’s doomed to ineffectiveness.
Sarah Everts, a Carleton journalism professor and co-researcher in the study, said she was “floored by the overconfidence Canadians have in their own ability to distinguish conspiracy theories and misinformation.”
For example, 58 per cent of respondents who believe the 5G conspiracy theory also said they could “easily distinguish” between COVID-19 facts and misinformation.
In 2019, the world is on fire. We should know better. We move on because this is what we do: We get used to the flames, the poison, the death and destruction. We constantly erect new normals, and once those are surpassed, we craft newer normals, and pretend those have always been. When we see signs of that which we cannot escape, we change the channel because it isn’t our cup of tea. We shrug at the monsters, huge and black and opposing silhouettes on the horizon. We get used to the apocalypse because we can get used to anything.
On Thursday, Texas A&M University System Chancellor John Sharp told all 11 university presidents in the system that they will reopen their campuses next school year and be ready to play sports, a university system official confirmed to The Texas Tribune. Texas Tech University has also announced that it plans to resume on-campus classes in the fall, and university President Lawrence Schovanec told the Tribune that Tech is planning to play sports, too.
OH SHIT NO.
I cannot see any scenario in which UT System campuses being open for fall will not mean a lot of people are going to get sick and some are going to die.
Milliken said the UT System has encountered economic hardship as campuses shut down.
The Texas Department of State Health Services reported fifty new deaths from COVID-19 in the state, the largest single day increase during the pandemic. For only the second time since tracking began, it also reported more than one thousand new confirmed cases.
It’s an epidemic when people you don’t know get sick. It’s a pandemic when people you know get sick.
Still amazes me that some principal investigators (PIs) and leaders can write whole pages on their grants proposing “outreach activities” but haven’t moved a finger to educate the public when it is mostly needed.
Science faculty, part of our job is teaching science. What better time than now to share our science knowledge with everyone? Even better, support students and postdocs who want to learn and participate in #SciComm!
(Local health authorities) have begun to notice something else particular to South Texas: strong family ties are exacerbating the virus’ spread.
“We have large households and these large households, they like to visit with other members of their family,” (Dr. Emily Prot, regional medical director of the Texas Department of State Health Services’ Region 11) said.
That needs to stop, she explained.
“We need to really avoid that and stay within one single household. So, no visiting tias, tios. No visiting the mother-in-law. That has to stop. We’re seeing too much spread right now within those family groups,” Prot said.
Prot hammered home the point, adding, “Those interactions are leading to more spread and we’re seeing that at a regional level.”
The Valley as a whole is at higher risk for seeing patients needing acute critical care, or who experience serious complications from the virus, Prot said.
“Well, we have more rates of diabetes in our region, and most of them (deaths caused by COVID-19) are due to older age, but we also had in Laredo, one of the deaths was in his 40s,” she said.
The three things you must always ask yourself before you say anything:
Does this need to be said?
Does this need to be said by me?
Does this need to be said by me now?
Three fuckin’ marriages it took me to learn that.
First, those three give “realism about the fictional world” too much weight in judging artistic works. They make is sounds as though the best feature of any story is how well it mimics the consistency of reality. 
Fifteen days, huh? Longer than I thought.Friday, March 27, 2020 :: Office of the President
Dear Campus Community:
UTRGV learned today that one of our students and one of our faculty have each tested positive for COVID-19 (coronavirus). Our student tested positive after traveling out of state and our faculty member after returning from international travel. Please join me in sending positive thoughts to these Vaqueros for a speedy recovery.
Timming was making a variation of an old, long-running argument about “basic verus applied” research. Now, I’ve heard a lot of retorts to this. I like, “If we only ever did applied research, all we’d have would be better mammoth traps.”SOFIA: So one thing that I found really interesting in your article was the state of coronavirus research in general and how that plays into how prepared we are right now. Like, this is a big group of viruses that cause a decent bit of disease throughout the world. But one researcher you talked to said that until recently, not that many people were studying coronaviruses.
YONG: Right. So a very small group of people - maybe, you know, several dozens of researchers - have focused on coronaviruses for a few decades now. But it really has been a very, very niche field, even among virologists. When SARS classic first emerged, I think coronavirus researchers were really shocked that the things that they were studying were suddenly of public health importance.
SOFIA: Right.
YONG: And they are even more flabbergasted now.
SOFIA: And so because of that - because even after SARS, there wasn’t a huge uptake in how many people were studying this, we don’t necessarily have surveillance networks in place for coronavirus like we do for the flu.
YONG: Right. A lot of our preparedness measures in general have been focused on flu as the most likely next pandemic - and for good reason - because flu actually is the most likely next pandemic. It just so happened that this time, it was a coronavirus. And we don’t have surveillance for coronaviruses. We know, actually, surprisingly little about coronavirus biology. And all of those deficiencies have contributed to this dire situation that we’re facing when we don't know enough but we're forced to act as quickly as possible.
If we discovered an comet, asteroid, or meteor on a collision course with Earth tomorrow (and given how 2020 is going, I feel like we should be watching the skies more), the headline would probably again be that scientists were caught flat-footed. Even though people have known this is a possibility for decades.
External links
I am getting ready for the forthcoming release of the Better Posters book! I now have my own author’s page on Amazon!
| Date | Topic |
|---|---|
| Monday, March 16, 2020 | Why posters matter; show me your poster! |
| Tuesday, March 17, 2020 | Planning your poster |
| Wednesday, March 18, 2020 | Designing your poster |
| Thursday, March 19, 2020 | Presenting your poster |
| Friday, March 20, 2020 | SciComm while sciencing |
| Saturday, March 21, 2020 | The randomizer! |
Attorneys for the students arrested said they were unfairly trapped by the U.S. government since the Department of Homeland Security had said on its website that the university was legitimate. An accreditation agency that was working with the U.S. on its sting operation also listed the university as legitimate.
Attorneys for ICE and the Department of Justice maintain that the students should have known it was not a legitimate university because it did not have classes in a physical location. ...
“Their true intent could not be clearer,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Brandon Helms wrote in a sentencing memo this month for Rampeesa, one of the eight recruiters, of the hundreds of students enrolled. “While ‘enrolled’ at the University, one hundred percent of the foreign citizen students never spent a single second in a classroom. If it were truly about obtaining an education, the University would not have been able to attract anyone, because it had no teachers, classes, or educational services.”
The school was located on Northwestern Highway near 13 Mile Road in Farmington Hills and staffed with undercover agents posing as university officials.
