There is a post-doc column in the prestigious journal Nature.  It’s meant to give a short opinion of the practical side of being a student in science.  You know what it gives me? The gaggies.  To quantify the extent to which I dislike these cheesy blurbs of group think, I decided to deconstruct one.  This jambalaya wouldn’t earn passing marks in my middle school English class, but it’s apparently just fake enough to pass muster in a leading scientific journal.

Lab trips foster collegiality

Every summer the members of our lab spend a weekend at a state park, and our most recent annual outing was to Niagara Falls, where we camped, hiked and enjoyed the scenery. I was captivated by the thunderous roar and sprays of mist emanating from the falls.

Really? Captivated?  The honeydew smell of the sweet mist was all my soul needed to quench the eternal void of lost love in my aching heart.  Only 7th grade honor students–the kind who try too hard in their writing–string together such overspent prose.  Thunderous roar.  Emanating mist.  My turn!  How about “churning stomach juices.”

I always look forward to the lab outing because it is guaranteed to be fun — as it was this summer.

No. Just no.  It’s not guaranteed to be fun.  Why would you even say this?  How about everyone in your party drinks water from a Giardia-infested stream?  3 days of rain and near hypothermia?  Endless re-tellings of that Bunsen burner story?   How about polling scientists and seeing just how many agree that a weekend in the Adirondacks with coworkers is “guaranteed to be fun”?

But these outings are more than just fun excursions. They also build collegiality among our lab members. This is important because cooperation and effective communication can help the lab to run more smoothly and more efficiently.

Cooperation is important? Woah, slow down Socrates.  For those that missed it the first time around, “cooperation and effective communication can help the lab to run more smoothly and more efficiently.”  My English teacher would have X’d out that entire section with red ink and included an insulting work like “trite” or “trivial” or “no shit, see me after class.”

During summer outings, lab members work together to set up tents, build a campfire and cook meals. We exchange confidences during long hikes. The value in building these interactions is reflected in the operations of the lab, as co-workers must similarly depend on each other for reagents, interpreting results and troubleshooting.

♫ You’re wearing that ugly old baggy t-shirt from that team building exercise you did for your old work. And it’s never looked better on you. Oh, team building exercise ‘99. ♫

In a different lab, I once watched two graduate students troubleshooting related molecular-biology protocols. One eventually discovered that a labile buffer had gone bad. However, he selfishly opted to keep the knowledge to himself, leaving his fellow student to flounder for weeks.

Verily, this would never had happened if the two had soul gazed over smores and mosquito bites.  The kind of person that knowingly inflicts weeks of lost time on a colleague is what we call a jerk.  A jerk is not made whole by a day at Six Flags or a Paintball outing with the lab.  I am an Eagle Scout.  I spent over 100 weekends in the the woods with jerks of various flavors.  I would know.

A lack of collegiality can have a serious impact on lab members. Consequently, in the near future when I look for another job, collegiality is a factor I will consider. I have witnessed at first hand its value in the workplace.

This is when I take a pause and ask, “what did I just learn”?  Teamwork is good.  Getting along is good. It is important to get along. In the future, I will look for a job where we can all get along.  These are all profound points, but perhaps not the author’s main message.  If I may summarize:

The road to guaranteed fun is paved with forced time in enclosed spaces doing pre-planned activities (egg on a spoon race, preferably) which nobody really wants to do, but which everybody does, owing to the lack of a better activity which all parties find, at minimum, passably tolerable.

Nature wouldn’t publish my version of the story, oddly enough.

Some guy from the internet on the topic of science education:

I wholeheartedly believe [Cambridge] is the best science university in the world. Universities in America are all about tests and straight knowledge they don’t properly teach you to critically think unlike universities like Cambridge which are amazing for this knowledge as well but also teach you to critically think. That said it is interesting to note that the only ranking systems I’ve seen that put Harvard above Cambridge have been published in the US

Ohh snap America.  You just got Nard-dogged. I think there’s a new official motto buried in there. Cambridge: amazing for this knowledge as well but also teach you to critically think. Can anyone give me the Latin for this?

If I may make a literal translation:

I wholeheartedly believe Cambridge is the best science university in the world, despite the sophomoric idiocy it takes to assert some universal ranking on a school. The thousands of Universities in America, comprising millions of disparate departments and millions of sub disciplines and with hundreds of years of tradition and Nobel Prize winners and industry-leading technological advances, are all about tests and straight knowledge [OMIT PERIOD] they don’t properly teach you to critically think [OMIT COMMA] unlike universities like Cambridge [OMIT COMMA] which are amazing for this knowledge as well [OMIT COMMA] but also teach you to critically think.  That said [OMIT COMMA] it is interesting to note that the only ranking systems I’ve seen that put Harvard above Cambridge have been published in the US.  Also, Asians are good at math and white people cannot jump as high as black people.

I just can’t stand people who generalize like this.  I can’t stand it even more when it’s couched in atrocious grammar.  Ooohh, Caltech is better than MIT. Harvard is better than Yale.  Cornell is better than Bucknell.  Err, I take it back; that last one is empirically true.  Fancy shools are fancy because they admit fancy people who have to become even fancier to compete with the other fancy people.  The rest is the 10% (maybe less) of education that is rate limited by access to resources/funds/minds/etc.

I just want to go on the record as the first to predict a hit pop song from a duet between Kanye and Taylor Swift.  It will probably be out before 2010.

I would wager a not-small sum of money on it.

If pushed for details, I predict it will be a predominately country motif with spoken monologues from Kanye, part of which will be an apology wrapped in some vague message about being positive.

It will be a widely accepted as a “good guy” move from Kanye and Taylor will be praised for her range and ability to incorporate “hip-hop” themes.

There is a 65% chance of autotune.

I will be gagging.

You heard it here first.

Scientific publishing is broken. Most published research findings are false (spare the ironic citation joke, please).  What to do? Stimulus money is needed, that much is sure.  We must form committees! Establish a National Council for the Validity of Published Research.  Let’s get some NASA-level bureaucracy up in this piece.  We need protocols and fact checking and procedures and theorem checking widgets!  I’ll spearhead this beast.  Pay me $420,000 a year of public tax money, please.

I have a better idea.

Publish. Less.

The pressure to grow one’s scholarly phallus is too large for most to ignore.  We must publish or perish.  Grants don’t get funded unless we splatter our names across journals and conferences the world over.  Grad students don’t graduate.  Post docs don’t get jobs.  Assistants and adjuncts don’t get tenure.  Your CV is fewer than 5 pages?  You must be stupid.  Join more vacuous clubs, dues-hungry societies, and enter more regional poster conferences.  Get back to us when you’ve padded that sucker out to 10 pages.

What if we did a little more thinking and a little less sharing?  What if a publication was thoroughly peer reviewed?  But there’s no time for this, right? Everyone is too busy, right?  There’s the rub.  We’d have the time to check our research if we stop shotgunning our whims at every conference with two legs and a skimpy dress.  Suddenly, we’d see the ridiculous page limit requirements relax.  We’d no longer have to fit complex talks into 12.225 minutes.  Most importantly, we might start to understand what the hell other people are talking about.  Fancy that, a presentation outside your narrow niche that you can follow?

Let me list just one more.  I shudder to write this, but maybe, just maybe, we’d see some effort put into how to present an idea rather than how to lose the audience with a crappy power point and exorbitant formulæ.

Blasphemy.  Deny this man a job.  He stands for idleness and ivory-tower introspection.  Science is about progress and speed and lasers and intellectually one-upping our peers.

I don’t propose to have a great plan to fix this systematic lunacy.  Like many system-wide problems, it’s likely the change must come from the individual level.  Some scientists have a publication list so long it would be humanly impossible for them to give even a cursory summary of each paper.  This needs to end.  “Paper factory” labs are not homes to prolific scientists; they are homes to prolific publishers.  The two terms are less synonymous than most scientists would like to think.

The solution to this problem is heartbreakingly simple.  Science needs to slow down.  Without the pressure to put out short blurb papers every 2 weeks, we might get thorough, lengthy, reproducible publications.  Isn’t this what publication is about?  What do we gain from a 4 inch thick tome of ten trillion conference abstracts?  It’s a whole lot of people saying things that a whole bunch of other people are too busy to verify.  This gets accepted by grant committees and employers and deans as the sign of productivity.  It’s high time for said parties to reevaluate this metric.

You see, the problem is not the picture.

The problem is that the picture doesn’t change when you take me out of it.

Img from this sordid pile of skullduggery

]]> http://wcuk.wordpress.com/2009/08/13/on-society/feed/ 3 wcuk cars1 cars2 http://wcuk.wordpress.com/2009/08/07/good-for-bike-races-bad-for-hallways/ http://wcuk.wordpress.com/2009/08/07/good-for-bike-races-bad-for-hallways/#comments Fri, 07 Aug 2009 17:13:09 +0000 wcuk http://wcuk.wordpress.com/?p=936 ]]>

Or, how to run in to everybody when you are leaving the hospital cafeteria even though you work here every day and constantly run in to people and never grasp the concept that if you just walk on the right side of the hallway you will stop getting hit by people and gurneys.

I stumbled upon a great essay during a thesis writing break today.  I’ve tried writing something similar in the past, but never found the eloquence to do the topic justice.  Don’t get bogged down in the slightly stilted language you get in the Latin to English translation.

“Why do we complain of Nature? She has behaved handsomely; life, if you know how to use it, is long. One man is possessed by an insatiable avarice, another by assiduous application to trifling enterprises. One man is sodden with wine, another benumbed by sloth. One man is exhausted by an ambition which always depends on the votes of others, another is driven over every land and sea by the trader’s urge to seek profit. Some are plagued by a passion for soldiering, and are incessantly bent upon threatening others or anxious about others’ threats. Some are worn out by self-imposed and unrequited attendance upon the great; many busy themselves with the pursuit of other men’s estates or in complaints about their own. Some follow no plan consistently but are precipitated into one new scheme after another by a fickleness which is rambling and unstable and dissatisfied with itself; some have no objective at all at which to aim but are overtaken by fate as they gape and yawn. I cannot, therefore, question the truth of the great poet’s dictum, uttered with oracular impressiveness: “Slight is the portion of life we live.” All the residue is not living but passing time.”

The rest is here

Hipsters ruin everything.

There’s a spammer on Reddit who submits stuff to the cycling group.  I find his writing most interesting.  It’s a tier above the garbled nonsense keywords of true spam, but below what a 2nd grader might craft when trying to write blurbs for a Colorado Cyclist catalog.

This Mongoose ShowTime Boy’s Bike is a great bicycle for the little ones. It is a great bike.

This particular item is a Mongoose ShowTime Boys Bike and can be used to get ready for the Tour de France, or as you are in a cycling race, on a trail leisurely, or just cycling in your town.

You think you just found the secret training edge of the Tour de France peloton?   Just wait until you hear his rave reviews of the WeeRide Kangaroo Child Bike Seat:

This particular item is a WeeRide Kangaroo Child Bike Seat and can be used for the Tour de France, or as you are in a cycling race, on a trail leisurely, or just cycling in your town.

Hang on little Johnny, daddy has to descend the Col du Tourmalet.

Despite the fact that every post seems to be auto-generated from some Engrish catalog bot, it’s strangely mesmerizing to read post after post of this stuff.  I hate to give a spammer what he wants, but the entertainment value of this site is so much higher than the downside of giving him eyeballs.

http://www.mycyclingadvice.info/

Just remember: it is important to have a nice mountain bike for your cycling trips.

Aaron voluntarily made my lunch for me the last two days.  Fights with Aaron? More like, friends with Aaron.

Any guesses what the sly bastard has up his sleeve?

Public Service Announcement

From the desk of wcuk:

It is no longer funny, original, or constructive to make fun of twitter.  You are not entertaining when you playfully jest about tweets, twits, tweeting or any variation thereof.  It was dead when Conan O’Brien did it, it was dead 2 years before he did it, it remains dead indefinately.  There was a time when this joke was funny, just like there was a time when cargo pants roamed the earth with dinosaurs.

The dinosaurs had a good run of things.  They knew when to call it quits.  Cargo pants got the memo.  When will your johnny-come-late internet jokes follow suit?  I suspect not before you are the bell of every pool party this summer with your Seinfeldesque, “What’s the deal with these twits always tweeting about what they eat for dinner every night?!” jokes. You’ll be the last comic standing in Aunt Flo’s eyes.

Guess what? Aunt Flo dials in to AOL. Straight 28.8 kbs 3200 baud.

If you need a hot new joke to fill the void, may I suggest taking the meta road? Soon it will be all the rage to hate on twitter haters.  A new genre of humor will grow organically from this.  It will be cool to hate on the people that hate on the twitter haters.

If you hurry, you can still claim some of that land for your own.

You bought the Phoenix album I recommended, right?  Ye ole wcuk didn’t lead you astray on that rec, did he?  This post around I’m bring the thunder with just one song. It’s Matt Pond’s Red Ankles.  Catchy, seasonal, and brilliantly lyricized, if you don’t like this song, I must say, your taste is in your mouth.

I looked high and low to find a fulll version on the web.  The amazon preview is the best I can offer without soliciting a letter from the RIAA.  If you buy the song and don’t think it worth a dollar, I will refund your money, or not write a blog post for a week (whichever your prefer).

Sleeping became useless when the thought had hit my mind
the markings from your socks impressing skin into design
so with it walk away

The part I’ve faced
your face in parts
the lines that will not leave my head
a change like strings of lights that spark
looking down
your ankles red

I’ve imagined every single detail of the strain
the sickness is what I don’t know that will not go away
that will not go away

The instinct of cameras
is all for the instant
the nettles
the blueness
fallow for progress
the end of July
can’t be called liar
to you I am no liar

The part I’ve faced
your face in parts
the lines will not leave my head
a change like strings of light that spark
looking down
your ankles red

Your celebrity encounter stories are really boring. Consider a sampling of some fantastically exciting quotes on the Reddit post, “Have you ever met a celebrity?” These are written by different people about different celebrities.

He was extremely gracious.

Really cool guy.

I also met Shaq, who was down to earth.

…is a damn nice guy

Cool guy, very tall

He was the nicest, most down to earth guy.

Very nice guy.

She was really nice

He seemed nice.

Bill Cosby. What a nice guy.

He is one of the nicest guys ever.

He’s a nice guy

overall pretty cool.

Really nice guy with a huge laugh.

Super nice guy,

He was a nice guy but he wasn’t a great tipper.

Oh, do go on!  Tell me more!  I’m on the precipice of caring too much. She was nice? He was totally down to earth, bro?!  Get out. You don’t say.

Here’s a theory: most celebrities make millions of dollars to work 2 days a week and have loads of free time, during which people shower them with praise and attention.  Don’t you think you’d be pretty “nice” and “down to earth” in those shoes?  Something about the complete absolution from ever having to earn another dime in your lifetime just has that calming effect on people.  The result? Your celebrity encounter reads like a bad 4th-grade book report. “He was nice. It was good. I like celebrities. She was pretty. Then he said something funny. I laughed. He was nice. I can’t believe she buys groceries just like me. When I grow up, I want to be nice and good like him. I like turtles. Sports are fun.”

This is the part of the post where commentors post specious counter examples in a statistically inane attempt to invalidate my post.

And this is the part where they decide not to post after all, because they would only be making my prophecy come true.

If this all sounds cynical, it’s because Miley wouldn’t autograph my DVD.  (But it’s still all good, because her best friend Leslie made clear that she’s just being Miley.)

I loves me a good YouTube comment, even if it cuts as deep as this one. Ne’er a more poignant social critique hath been uttered.

fluffyxoxo has made a comment on Oh, Hey Aaron:

wooww! this vedio is pointless like what the hell.. if you guys are trying to be funny you guys arnt but nice try++++ that punch was sso gay and fake.

For shame. It’s the crushing weight of critiques like this that forced Aaron and I into early retirement.