A particularly 2020 problem: attending two conferences simultaneously.
As I mentioned yesterday, I am attending the 2020 Animal Behaviour Society meeting. But some time ago, I also agreed to give a workshop talk about graphics at the 2020 Plant Biology meeting.
Now, my talk for Plant Biology was only supposed to be 12 minutes long, so easy to spend most of the day in Animal Behavior, dip in to the Plant Biology Zoom talk, give my presentation, and pop back to animals, right? Quart of an hour times commitment, right? Wrong!
First, I was still practicing my talk this morning. I decided I was going to give a short, snappy talk which was clocking in at 8 minutes instead of 12. But that meant I had to nail the delivery to get it done right. So the morning had no conference attendance.
Second, I had to show up early for my Plant Biology workshop and stay throughout. So the time spent there was not 12 minutes, but an hour and a half.
But the good news was that we have about 325 people in the
Plant Biology workshop, with very little dropoff during the hour! As the
last speaker, I was kind of worried about people drifting away. And the
feedback for the workshop seemed quite positive.
So, I got to see Animal Behaviour talks in the afternoon, right? Wrong! In theory, I should have watched a bunch of talks, but in practice, yesterday and today were “interesting” days that dumped tasks and decisions on me that I did not anticipate would be happening at the start of the week.
Maybe I’ll get a chance to watch more talks tonight.
People talk about “conference fatique” and information overload with a single in person conference. Welcome to 2020, which says, “You want information?! Here, take two!”
A mix of old and new. The Animal Behavior Society (ABS) was the first scientific society I joined and the first scientific conference I attended. So I feel it’s appropriate that ABS is the first online conference I will be attending. And I’ve decided to do daily blog posts rather than tweet things, because I think it will be easier to create a coherent post from my desktop than it would be in a conference hall.
The first thing I want to talk about is also a mix of old and new. The virtual conference home page is new, because this is the first time they have done it, but the graphics?
A very literal cartoon of a convention center. Not terribly high resolution. It kind of takes me back to 1990s Microsoft efforts like Microsoft Bob:
It was a time when computers were becoming more common in homes, graphics were getting more sophisticated, and nobody was quite sure how people were going to interact with computers, so they interpreted everything as literally as possible.. Your calendar is shown as a calendar on a wall. Your desktop is a space on a cartoon desk.
I kind of thought we had moved past that. Most user interfaces are either more abstract and less literal (your decktop in Windows no longer has to be shown on top of a desk), or the interface is more graphically sophisticated (think of a 3-D video game environment; maybe Legend of Zelda).
Now, I suppose that for a first online conference, maybe that step back to a more literal convention center cartoon interface will help people. I don’t think it will be the sort of format you see for future conferences, though. We’ll see.
What else does the interface do? Well, there is a bookmarking function for talks you want to see. That’s good. But when you go get a list of your bookmarks, it doesn’t show when the events are. You have to click each entry individually, which defeats the purpose of bookmarking.
The times are all given in Eastern. There is a dropdown menu to change the time zone, but it doesn’t apply to all times. It will change a session time, but not the listed “Office hours,” which is confusing.
The format is that there are pre-recorded talks, live Q&A sessions, and “office hours.” You have to be really on the ball to watch the talks you’re interested in before the Q&A session starts! Hopefully, this is mainly a problem for the start of the meeting, and people can “get ahead” of the presentations before Q&A as the week goes on.
The live Q&A sessions are a little tricky, because all speakers for a session are there at once, each gets a tiny sliver of time, and questions are being taken using the chat function. So when a new speaker is on to take questions, there’s “dead air” when people start typing questions.
However, there is an asyncronous “ask a question” feature – a little like a bulletin board – which works very well. You can leave a question for the presenter, who gets an email with a notification, and then you get notified with a reply. So far, I have had 100% responses to my questions this way.
One nice thing I noticed was that recorded talks allow joint presentations. Just have people record their section, and edit together. Awesome. Nice way of showing teamwork and allowing multiple people to shine.
The system automatically logs you out after inactivity, and its not a very long delay before you’re kicked out.
But enough about the interface! What cool science did I see?
I saw some awesome talks updating me on a science story I have been following for some time: the evolution of Hawai’ian cricket populations that have lost the ability to sing. Some of those populations are evolving a new song, which is such a cool story of evolution in action.
Also saw some interesting talks related mostly to crustacean fighting.
To be honest, I didn’t see as many talks yesterday as I hoped, because yesterday turned out to be a much, much more interesting day that I expected, and I had stuff pulling me away from the computer.
That’s the biggest problem I’m finding: going to a meeting physically forces you to think about just that. An online meeting puts you in competition with the laundry, taking out the garbage, picking up mail, washing dishes, and all the innumerable little things that pull you away from the computer for a few minutes here and there.
Hanna went through Saturday night / Sunday morning. From my perspective, it felt like the most substantial storm to hit the county since Dolly in 2008.
We lost power Saturday night and didn’t get it back until early Sunday.
No flooding where we were, though the rain caused some leaks and a little water damage that needs fixing.
And the air conditioner got broken and needed repair.
But all up, fared reasonably well. One preparation tip: download at least one movie to your portable electronic device before the hurricane. Sunday would have been much more tolerable if there was even one thing from Netflix or Amazon Prime or Vudu or something on my iPad.
Of course, personal inconvenience is not the biggest problem. I’m now waiting to see how the COVID-19 cases are going to track out a couple of weeks down the road. Hanna might have made more people shelter in place and reduce cases, or it might mean more people were stuck inside with each other and increase cases. We’ll see.
Update, 28 July 2020: Whoa. I had not gone around the corner to the back of the yard.
More damage that I thought at first. That tree is down for the count.
I also had one strange, sad thought. Three years ago, I suspended data collection on a field project that had been running for several years. There was a point where, weirdly, Hanna would have provided an research opportunity. I could have seen the “before” and “after” effect of Hanna on the population of sand crabs out as South Padre Island. Could have been a paper in that alone.
But the project got suspended end of 2017. But even if I hadn’t stopped it then, I might have stopped it this year with COVID-19. I have been trying hard to stay put and I don’t want to go to the beach since they have reopened them, nobody is wearing masks, and there doesn’t seem to be a lot of social distancing,
I’ve never felt a headline so strongly. It is the current landing page on The Weather Channel, yet somehow, it feels like it’s just an apt description of... [flails hands around pointing randomly] everything.
“Conditions deteriorating.”
You said it, Weather Channel. You said it.
So we not only have a major outbreak locally in the global COVID-19 pandemic, and
fascism and white supremacy on the rise, we now have a hurricane – Hanna –
heading our way on top of that.
That’s just fuckin’ ducky.
So where are we on the COVID-19 situation? Well, it’s been so bad locally, here in the lower Rio Grande Valley, that it has on the national news repeatedly, and sometimes breaking out to international news.
For me, it’s the traffic that tells the story.
Back in late March, early April, when I went out to the university to do animal care or pick up groceries, the roads were almost empty. People were staying at home because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Now, despite more cases and more deaths than ever, and the region being in national and international news, the amount of traffic on the road is around what it was before mid-March. People are not staying home.
The small piece of good news is that I haven’t seen any signs of people not wearing masks or being pissy about it. When I go out (which isn’t a lot), I see everyone masked. The problem people who can’t seem to wear a mask properly (it needs to cover your nose) or pull them down to talk to other people or some other reason.
The other comment I have is that in watching a lot of news coverage, it sometimes drifts towards a “blame the victim” feel. Lots of articles have commented on the Valley having lots of Hispanic / Latinx / Mexican people, and several articles have sort of pointed towards the “culture” as being one of the major drivers for the COVID-19 cases here.
I think there is much more to be said about the long, historic lack of resources in the area at the state level. Although I’ve been pleased that that has turned around in the time I’ve been here – notably the creation of my own university, UTRGV – that hasn’t been completely fixed.
And there is a long-standing health care issue here. Back in 2009, Atul Gawande wrote about the crazy high healthcare costs in McAllen. Back then, Gawande wrote:
She wasn’t the only person to mention Renaissance. It is the newest
hospital in the area. It is physician-owned. And it has a reputation
(which it disclaims) for aggressively recruiting high-volume physicians
to become investors and send patients there. Physicians who do so
receive not only their fee for whatever service they provide but also a
percentage of the hospital’s profits from the tests, surgery, or other
care patients are given. (In 2007, its profits totalled thirty-four
million dollars.)
While some things did change in the years since (follow-ups: 2009, 2015, 2019), Renaissance (a.k.a. DHR) is still a physician owned hospital, and this same hospital has been the subject of much scrutiny, as I noted earlier this week.
I also think there is a lot to be said about state leadership. This hasn’t been ignored, but if I
had to rank the reasons for an outbreak in the Valley, I reckon decisions
made by Governor Greg Abbott contributed way more than family
get-togethers. But the coverage I’ve been seeing about the Valley seems
to give the two equal weight.
It’s bad. Like, extremely bad. Like, horrible. I’ve compiled her first, main thread below (courtesy Spooler). It doesn’t capture everything in her thread, but it gets a lot.
I would argue that these arrangements should be reviewed soon in light of these revelations.
• • • • •
This
thread will be about the abhorrent conditions at the covid "hospital"
DHR put up in McAllenTexas. Staff have walked out of this facility
because of the conditions in which there are literally ants crawling
over critically ill patients. Hiding PPE from staff. DHR is putting
covid patients in this inadequate facility because they want the fully
functioning hospital across the street to remain “clean.”
TW:
Patients in abhorrent conditions. Patients placed in cramped rooms
without adequate ventilation or air conditioning and full of medical
equipment. Oxygen in the facility stopped working on July 5th, staff has
been forced to using portable tanks for patients.
For reference these tanka last 45 minutes when run at 100% FiO2 and they only had 3 people to change them out for 90 patients.
The black dots on the patients back and on the bed are live ants crawling all over them. This is unacceptable.
This is absolutely horrific.
Doctor’s
Hospital Renaissance converted a hospice facility into a covid unit.
The thread above exposes the abhorrent conditions that was not covered
in this article. (texastribune.org/2020/07/02/tex…)
The nurses and respiratory therapists are being threatened into
silence. The hospice facility was converted into a COVID unit so that
DHR would stay “clean”
I
do not work at this facility. I am assisting in blowing the whistle on
the conditions of this facility. Those who work at this facility have
been threatened into silence. To clarify this is who “Krucial” is, a
staffing agency that has been staffing surge cities.
”Race-Based disparities in health outcomes are not abstract” Texas is failing their Latinx community
covered DHR in an article today and here they talk about what my
contact told me, the main hospital has been “kept largely free of the
coronavirus to treat patients unrelated to the pandemic....as well as
some elected procedures”
From a Nurse at DHR in McAllen, Texas.
More nurses confirming this story.
Covid is not profitable. Cutting corners in order to allow for continued elective procedures is profitable.
A newly hired nurse who was basically fired for testing positive for covid because she couldn’t use her PTO as sick leave.
Man, moving to online instruction en masse because of COVID-19 has been a trip. Partly because I’m getting exposed to people’s attitudes about teaching in a way I didn’t expect.
To teach entirely online, our university has been requiring training in online instruction from an outside company. I did this, because I moved to teaching more online a couple of years ago. I wanted more time to work on the Better Posters book, and there was demand for core courses online that were hard to meet with face-to-face classes.
Since COVID-19 gave more people incentive to teach online, more people had to do the training. And wow, are they ever pissy about it. I’ve listened to people complain about:
Having to create rubrics for assignments. “I don’t want to have to spell out everything, I want the students to do something more freely.” If students are going to be evaluated, you must have some idea on what basis you’re going to evaluate them, and they deserve to be told what that basis is. It also will save you time in grading and make grading more consistent.
Not having “understanding” as a learning objective. “I think it’s important that students understand the content.” Y’all need B.F. Skinner. Internal states are not knowable directly. How are you going to tell if students understand something? You are going to ask them to do something observable, like write or talk or create something. So make it your objective that the student be able to do something, not reach some internal state that they are probably ill-equipped to judge. Lots of professors have heard, “Oh yeah, I get it, I understand” from students who tank the exam the next day.
Not wanting to provide accessible content. “Why do we have to do all this work when we might not have any student who needs it?” and “It’s not our job to close caption videos” This is perhaps the complaint that frustrates me the most. Because first of all, accessibility is the law.
Second, making something accessible, by providing something like closed captions, makes the content better for everyone. It lets someone watch a video when they maybe don’t want to play the sound out loud and don’t have headphones. It makes hard to hear sentences and spellings explicit.
I am in a weird profession where people whinge so much about wanting to do things their way and no other way even when it is demonstrably a good thing to do.
There is research that indicates that women scholars are cited less than men. There is research that indicates that Black and brown scholars are cited less than white ones. So I see, and am sympathetic to, calls for people to check who they are citing. Citing only white guys perhaps means you are not capturing the full range of scholarship that exists.
This is harder than it sounds.
Some authors want to obscure their gender or background, sometimes to reduce bias. So they use only their initials.
Some journals show only author initials, particularly in the references.
Some names are used by both genders. Names like Terry, Kelly, Zen...
Once you get past your own language and culture, trying to work out gender from the name alone becomes much more difficult. I wonder how well most English speakers would do at guessing the gender associated with Chinese or Indian names.
So when someone asks, “What percent of your reference list in your papers are white men?”, my answer is, “I don’t know.”
I am not sure what the solution here is.
In theory, this kind of demographic data might be registered by ORCID. Eventually, I could imagine a system where you downloaded ORCID into a citation manager, which could then do an analysis on a reference list. Or you could have a plug-in or webpage that did that. But ORCID currently doesn’t capture anything like that. I don’t think any academic database does.
Otherwise, the only answer I can think of is doing a lot of googling, which will probably not lead to definitive answers in many cases.
Update, 14 June 2020: Thanks for Beth Lapour for alerting me to this work. This paper tries to examine citation bias in neuroscience journals. Excerpt from the abstract:
Using data from five top neuroscience journals, we find that reference
lists tend to include more papers with men as first and last author than
would be expected if gender were unrelated to referencing. Importantly,
we show that this imbalance is driven largely by the citation practices
of men and is increasing over time as the field diversifies.
They used a couple of automated techniques to try to distinguish gender of the authors. Using two databases, they assigned an author as male or female if their confidence was 70% or better. One was an R stats package. I seem to recall reading criticisms of this package on Twitter, but can’t find it now.
They failed to assign gender for 12% of authors: 7% because there wasn’t high enough confidence by their criteria, and 5% because no author name was available for the paper. I’m not sure what the latter group could be. Unsigned editorials, maybe?
They then tried to find an independent way to check the accuracy for the 88% of authors they assigned a gender. They did this by sampling 200 authors and Google stalking them for pronoun use. And according to that, their algorithmic assignment was about 96% accurate.
So according to this, the problem is currently small. But this is just a snapshot of one field. I wonder if the difficulty will get larger or smaller over time for reasons mentioned in the main post.
Update, 28 July 2020: Marie Rivas articulates some of the reasons I am uncomfortable with using software to assess gender for research purposes:
1. You cannot “identify” or “verify” gender on behalf of someone else; you can only guess.
2. Guessing gender is often inaccurate, offensive, and exceptionally harmful.
3. You don’t actually need to know peoples’ genders for most use cases; and if you really must know, just ask.
Reference
Jordan D. Dworkin JD, Linn KA, Teich EG, Zurn P, Shinohara RT,
Bassett DS. 2020. The extent and drivers of gender imbalance in neuroscience
reference lists. Nature Neuroscience: in press. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-020-0658-y
Most of the discussion about the content book will be over at the Better Posters blog, although I will occasionally talk about about the creation and backstory of the book here.
My only disappointment is that the ISBN is not a prime number. Divisible by 379. Damnit.
The Better Posters book is still in press. I am getting periodic updates from the publisher, which is exciting.
I am waiting on reviews for one project.
I am writing another big project, and I have many thousands of words down for it already.
So these are good. But I have no idea when I will be able to collect data again, and it’s kind of getting to me sometimes.
I was preparing for a journal club presentation about snapping shrimp. Which are awesome beasts. They make sound louder than a gunshot, louder than a rocket launch, with their claws. The journal club talk isn’t even about claws, but I wanted to mention how they worked because it’s tangentially relevant to the main part of the talk.
I came across this paper about the evolution of the snap. It’s comparative, got behaviour, 3-D modelling of the claws, biomechanics, a lot of the kind of stuff I was doing more back in grad school. It’s amazing work.
And I feel sad. I want to do stuff like it. I want to do good, original science.
Three serious research efforts have put numerical weight — yes, data-driven evidence — behind what many suspected all along: Americans who relied on Fox News, or similar right-wing sources, were duped as the coronavirus began its deadly spread.
Dangerously duped. ...
Those who relied on Fox or, say, radio personality Rush Limbaugh, came to believe that vitamin C was a possible remedy, that the Chinese government created the virus in a lab, and that government health agencies were exaggerating the dangers in the hopes of damaging Trump politically, a survey showed.
This has just been rolling around in my gut for days. People keep asking, “How did wearing a mask become political?” This is how.
While I still think recommendation algorithms are a huge problem for science communication, this article is a reminder of two things.
The first reminder is that while new media are influencing the information spread in ways that nobody can predict, established, pre-Internet media still exerts a huge influence on how people think about issues and problems.
In times of crisis, you need consistent and pervasive messages about what people need to to do to protect themselves and others. This is why the US Center for Disease Control keeps getting shit for: because they were slow to recommend masks. But I don’t think that is even slightly comparable to the Fox News situation. If the CDC messaging created a chink if the armor, Fox News messaging stripped off the armor and went dancing naked and blindfolded through a minefield.
The second reminder is that Fox News has a lot to answer for. The damage it has done to the United States is almost incalculable. And I am not just talking about the COVID-19 pandemic.
This was a letter I set to my university president, Guy Bailey, last month. I’m posting it today because I think in the US, 4 July is a good day to have serious discussions about history.
I was also motivated by listening to “Return of Oñate’s Foot” on the 99% Invisible podcast – an excellent telling of a story about a somewhat similar historical figure.
In particular, Escandón’s professional climb
that led to his mandate to colonize the region was in part based on his success
in quelling uprisings
of Native Americans and “pacifying” them. That alone is problematic, particularly
for our Native American students (5-11 students over
the last four years). but also consider the larger role of colonialism in perpetrating
slavery and genocide.
Other universities are
taking this moment to examine and change the symbols that represent racism and
colonialism. Imperial College London changed
its logo to remove its motto. They recognized their motto, “Scientific
knowledge, the crowning glory and the safeguard of the empire” is “is a
reminder of a historical legacy that is rooted in colonial power and oppression.”
Over the last few weeks, many communities worldwide
have been re-examining their statues and the messages they send. Protestors pulled
down a statue of a slave trader in England. McGill University students are petitioning
to remove a statue of university founder James McGill, who owned slaves.
Statues glorify individuals
and values. I hope that you will consider whether this statue represents values
that UTRGV supports.
Based on your field study what type of mythical beast or folk-creature would you be an expert in?
Mythical crustaceans. Not many of those around. Except for the one that fought Hercules.
You
see, Carcinus the crab and the hydra were buds. So when Hercules showed
up all like, “I gotta take out the hydra because of penance and a chance of immortality and all,” Carcinus is all like, “Don’t touch my mate,
asshole, the only way to him is through me.” So Carcinus takes on
Hercules.
This moment of inter-create mateship is immortalized in Greek vases.
The crab imagery on this vase is more realistic. Shame it’s pushed off to the side and cropped in this image.
And by the way, anyone who has dealt with an angry crab knows that being attacked by one of these is no joke.
This explains something I had known for a long time, but the connection never clicked. There is an abundant genus of crabs named Carcinus. No doubt in honor of Hera’s servant.
One of the problems we face in the United States is that unfortunately, there is a combination of an anti-science bias that people are—for reasons that sometimes are, you know, inconceivable and not understandable—they just don’t believe science.
Fauci is operating in a political environment, so I think he is reluctant to list the many reasons we know why people don’t believe science.
People don’t believe in the science of evolution because of religions.
People don’t believe in global warming / climate change because of a misinformation campaign prompted by fear of communism.
People don’t believe in COVID-19 because of Fox News and the current US president.
But all of these examples boil down to social influence – or, to put it another way, peer pressure. Humans are social animals. We pay a lot of attention to what other people think, say, and do.
In the information / belief / influence ecosystem, professional science is relatively new (maybe a few hundred years compared to thousands of years for some religions), relatively small (Rupert Murdoch’s wealth, ~US$17.3 billion, exceeds the entire annual budget of the National Science Foundation, currently ~US$7.8 billion), and disorganized as shit (“committees top to bottom”).
We’re lucky that science gets things done. Because of that, we are sometimes able to overcome those disadvantages and punch above our weight. Honestly, it’s sometimes surprising that science has as much sway as it does.
Science is not a natural, intuitive way of thinking. There’s a reason the training for scientists goes on for so long. It doesn’t take a long time just because you have to learn a lot of facts, it takes a long time because you have to practice the patterns of thinking so that they become habitual. (“What are the alternative explanations? Does this prediction really flow from that hypothesis? And what do those error bars show, anyway?”)
All of the above (most of which I tweeted earlier) got me thinking about how one of the keys of science’s success, the reason we punch above our weight, is that science institutionalized and valued behaviour that is kind of anti-social.
Criticism.
Because we are social animals, we do not like criticism. We feel attacked. We get defensive. We try to shut it down all the time. (In my many years of blogging, the only times I got aggressive emails about posts were from professors who didn’t like that I was commenting on student posters. It wasn’t even criticism of them.)
Science normalizes criticism in a way that a lot of other institutions don’t. A lot of institutions place a lot of value on reinforcing their existing beliefs. There may be traditions of criticism and examination within that, but there are usually some lines that you don’t cross if you want to stay part of that community.
Author David Brin like to say, “Criticism is the only known antidote to error.” I think there’s a lot of truth to that. We have to recognize how fundamental its role in science is.
And, as I said above, we have to recognize that learning how to deliver and take criticism without destroying the social glue that allows the scientific community to function is not a natural, normal thing to do. It is something that you need to learn, a habit you need to develop, and a skill you need to practice and improve.
I was looking back at a high-profile paper that was published some years ago. The paper ran into trouble and was widely criticized, and the main claim has not been borne out. The paper hasn’t been retracted, but it’s more a cautionary tale than a success.
The paper had twelve co-authors. I did a little digging and looked at the track records of all the co-authors in the years since publication.
The first author, who would broadly be called an “early career” researcher, never published another paper the year after this one dropped. Based purely on the publication record, it looks like the problems in the high-profile paper ended that career. It may have been more complicated than that – there may have been other factors at play that I don’t know about – but it sure looks like cause and effect.
The other eleven co-authors? All of them kept publishing. The mean for the group was 3 papers a year. The most prolific member of the team had 6.8 papers a year (according to Web of Science).
It sure looks like none of the other co-authors suffered any serious professional consequences from being associated with a deeply flawed paper.
What’s the saying? “Success has many parents, but failure is an
orphan”? Here, failure came from a single-parent family. One person
out of twelve bore the brunt of all the criticisms.
It’s a clear-cut example that shows that how we assign authorship doesn’t line up at all
with who we think is “responsible” for a scientific work. If you asked researchers, “How is responsibility split with twelve authors?”, I suspect they will not say, “100% for first author, 0% for authors 2 through 12.” (I also don’t think they will say, “Responsibility is split twelve ways evenly.” But that’s not what happened here.)
Update, 16 June 2020: I asked people, a“If there are 10 authors on a paper, much much responsibility should the FIRST author bear if the paper is flawed or flat-out wrong?” Almost all (25 out of 27, 93%) said, “Somewhere between 11-99%”. Of the other two, one person said, “All” and the other voted, “One tenth.”
Some might argue, “This is what you get tenure for, to be able to take
risks and prevent you from the shocks of having a bad paper.” Okay, but
tenure and seniority should be a cushion that softens the blow of a
mistake. Seniority should not be corbomite that deflects all consequences away from the senior authors and returns then back on the first author, particularly when early career researchers involved. Early career researchers are vulnerable, and power dynamics are not in their favour.
If eleven authors were able jump off the sinking ship, maybe there should have been room for one more in that
lifeboat.
If only one
author is going to bear all the responsibility for getting it wrong,
then only one person’s name should have been on that paper in the first place.
It’s late Friday night and I want to go to bed, but before I do, I have a
recommendation and I want to get it out there in case I get lazy or
distracted after I sleep.
Anyone who has anything to do with science, or academia, or is interested in matters of equality and justice in the face of discrimination and bias, should watch this film.
It mostly tracks three women: one dealing with institutional unfairness, one coping with bullying, and one navigating academia as a black women. It is both damning and hopeful (at least sometimes hopeful).
I am particularly happy to see a couple of people I know in it, who are of course awesome. And they are not alone. There is no shortage of awesome people in this film.
The film is streaming online. In a very cool promotion, when you rent it, you get to support a movie theatre of your choice with your purchase. There wasn’t a theatre in Texas involved (which sucks, especially given chemist Raychelle Burke was in Austin when they filmed this), so I picked Hawai’i, because that state has been nice to me when I’ve traveled there for conferences and my honeymoon.
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.
A while ago, I stumbled across a Big Country album that had been released a few years ago. I stopped following Big Country because their lead singer, Stuart Adamson, died. I didn’t think there would ever be another album.
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!”
