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.

Taken to TAS

My presentation at the Texas Academy of Science meeting today was well attended and well received. I probably had between 40 and 50 people in for my talk, which is great considering that many other speaker in my afternoon session were probably talking to less than ten people. I rock.

Almost like being there

A slideshow of my recent "Teaching Technology" presentation is available here. I particularly like slides #6 (I seem to be hitching a lift), #11 ("You can make a lovely shadow of a swan...") and #13 ("Disco inferno!"). Oh, and in classic UTPA style, the forward and backward buttons in the upper right corner are reversed: the "Forward" button sends you back and vice versa.

Three good things

Apart from the aforementioned loud music emanating from our building's lawn, today was a fairly good day. First, a new graduate course my colleague Anita Davelos Baines and I put together (Evolutionary Theory BIOL 6324) was approved by the university. Once given the rubber stamp by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, we'll probably be able to offer it next year. Second, I gave my Teaching Technology luncheon today, and it all went very well. People were interested and I got good feedback. Third, got the formal acceptance for my latest manuscript. I always love be able to update my curriculum vita and delete "submitted" and replace it with "in press." This is one of the better days I've had in a while. It starts to make up for a rather lackluster weekend.

Next up: My talk for the Texas Academy of Science meeting this Friday. I was tinkering with it this afternoon, and I think it's going fairly well. This is turning into a good week for adding up points for my merit and tenure folders.

Military incursion

The Navy is holding some sort of concert as a recruitment event. They're practicing not too far from our building, and they are loud. Extremely irksome.

Completion

I finished a revision on a manuscript today and sent it back to the editor. It looks like it will be published without any more fuss, which is a very good thing.

Many other tasks will get completed this week. I have two presentations to give; one on teaching, and one scientific. I'm looking forward to giving both talks. The teaching talk is tomorrow; I'll let you know how it goes.

Let the reign of terror commence

I just became the Graduate Program Director in waiting for our department. The change was confirmed in a faculty meeting that ended a few minutes ago. The current director, Tim Brush, continues until the end of this semester, and I'll be taking over this summer. I will apparently get some teaching release time to deal with this responsibility. And it's a pretty substantial one. There's a lot to do. I might talk more about this later, since graduate studies are intimately tied to research (which is, of course, the main point of this journal).

Snapping my suspenders

Storyteller and game author John Wick once wrote a column about how the audience members watching fiction engage in willing suspension of disbelief, but sometimes, the storyteller messes up and something happens that yanks you out of that willing participation; he said that such moments "snapped his suspenders."

After having written positively about the verisimilitude of the television crime show Numb3rs, which features an academic, mathematician Charlie Eppes, as a lead character. And then, the last episode, "Prime Suspect," goes and snaps my suspenders.

In this episode, we learn that mathematician Charlie is a tenured faculty member, who buys a big house from his father—at full cost, mind you—that is being sold because property values are skyrocketing, and that he is almost 30.

"Snap!" "Ow!"

Okay, I know that mathematicians typically have an earlier career start than biologists; many mathematicians do their best work when they're younger. But just for comparison, I was incredibly proud that I defended my doctorate just before my 30^th birthday. In the spirit of the show, let's run the numbers. Average age for entering university is 18. Four year degree puts you at 22. Average length for a doctorate in mathematics—let's say four, putting our protagonist at 26. Not sure chow common postdocs are in mathematics, so I'll give the benefit of the doubt to the writers and omit that step of most academic careers. The average tenure-track period at most universities is probably five or six years; let's give the benefit of the doubt and say five years, which puts Charlie at around 31 to make tenure.

Even if I could get around the age thing, which I almost can, what the heck do the producers think assistant professors make? The episodes made mention of some academic awards, but even given that, I know of no assistant professor on one income who could manage to afford a two story house in prime real estate in a major city.

Maybe there's more money in applied mathematics than biology. Hm. Expression of sincere doubt.

Lifting a curse and beating the hydra

My week started to turn around a little today. First, my student Anna and I finally got some fluorescent antibodies to label some neurons in some long preserved ascidian embryos. This is a pretty big deal, because I have been struggling for literally two years trying to get something to glow from any fluorescent technique. I really felt I had some sort of curse with me and these techniques, because they are widely used by so many labs, and I'd had such trouble. I hope to post a picture of this later, if I can figure out why the camera is colouring things purple on the screen that are green through the eyepiece.

In between meetings with students of various sorts, I composed a remarkably restrained email to the director of the Helpdesk; copied to his boss (Director of Academic Computing), my department chair, and the Vice President for Research, about my recent computer problems. I said that I thought the response time was poor but I could live with that, but that messing with my computer operating system settings so that I couldn't use it as I saw fit was unacceptable. To my surprise, I had a staffer from the Helpdesk in my office before the day was out, fixing the problem that needed to be fixed. While he was finishing up, I had a phone call from the Director of Academic Computing, who apologized and explained why they had made the changes they did.

Vindication.

Tomorrow, I will write a follow-up email to those same people saying thanks for taking me seriously. I wasn't sure if I could get someone to pay attention to the problem without me flying into a blind rage in someone's office. Other than me venting in my own office... I got plenty mad, visibly upset, but! Not at the support staff. I didn't lose my temper with any of them.

The Helpdesk hydra is not dead -- I know I will be tangling with them again, probably over installing software on classroom computers -- but the head has been buried under a rock, where it will lie dormant and not spawn new heads. For now.

Round the twist

I got my computer back today. The screen is now working. I should be happy, but I am instead incredibly angry.

Because, you see, the computer helpdesk didn't simply fix the problem that I had (broken screen). No, they took it upon themselves to made some changes to my operating system. All my settings for my programs? Gone. I can't access some of my files. And I certainly can't install new software. They managed to give my office computer a lobotomy. I hate to think how much time I am going to waste trying to get things put back to the level of functionality I had before the helpdesk "helped."

So what can I do? I have to call the helpdesk and my request goes to the bottom of the queue.

Dealing with our helpdesk is like fighting a freaking hydra. For every problem you kill, two more rise to take its place.

I can't get any Sex happening

I want to create a new course on animal courtship and mating and sexual selection. First, I submitted it as a fourth year undergraduate course, simply titled, "Sex." The department's curriculum committee asked me to revise it, on the grounds that other departments (Psychology, Health, Sociology, maybe) were too likely to argue that it was a topic they should be teaching, not biology. So I took it back and changed the title to "Evolution and sexual reproduction" and resubmitted the proposal.

The departmental curriculum committee met again yesterday and I ran into a whole bunch of new objections that weren't raised in the first meeting. One of the reasons for creating the course was that we have our courses grouped into five areas; students need at least one class from each of the five areas. I wanted to create a class that would fill out the smallest section, which has only three classes. The first objection was that this course would draw away students from Genetics. I said, "There's a prerequisite; students can't take this instead of an existing course in the group, because you need a lower-level course to get into this one."

From this, it comes out that there is actually no way of enforcing prerequisites on this campus.

What?

Yes, it turns out that pretty much all of those course requirements are apparently not enforced, or even enforceable.

Being curious, I ask if the goal was to pump students into genetics why the course is not a requirement. After the meeting, I learn that the reason it's not a requirement is that many, many years ago, the person who taught genetics was so bad and so unpopular, he drove people away, so there was resistance to making the course a requirement because of this one instructor's unpopularity. Although the reason for not making the course required no longer remains, it would be hard to make the course required because it is argued that there would be complaints from pre-med students about adding more courses they have to take to finish their degrees.

Anyway, whether this course would pull people away from genetics or not, the second suggestion from a committee member was that I make the class a graduate course instead of an undergraduate course. I say, "Not what I had in mind, but I'll consider it." In the afternoon, I go away and write up two versions of a course description, for the third time.

After the curriculum committee meeting, I was left wondering if it was "appropriate" or "ironic" that my course on sex keeps getting screwed.