Am I better yet? June 25, 2012
Posted by mareserinitatis in research, work.Tags: health, illness, surgery
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I had a minor surgery last Friday. The doctor said I should be well enough to go back to work in 4-5 days. I’m at three days now, and I’m getting a bit batty, even though I’m also sleeping a lot more than normal. When I’m awake, I feel like I need to be doing something.
I would be fine with this except that the university has a policy that I can only access the supercomputer cluster from on-campus. I was going so nuts yesterday that I made my husband drive me up there (I was on restricted driving, as well) so that I could do a couple things. I would like to get him to bring me back today, but he’s trying to get some work done, so I don’t know how likely that is.
It’s funny – at least when I’m sick, I don’t feel like doing work and so will take it easy. But here, I’m not sick, I don’t feel too bad, and I just keep thinking about all the stuff I want to get done. At least I have to be home to let the plumber in…I think it’s the only time I’ve been thankful for a plumbing emergency.
I can just imagine what I would be like if I were forced to sit at home for a really long time. I think I’d make everyone nuts.
What are you like when you’re under orders to ‘rest’?
Students finding their direction June 23, 2012
Posted by mareserinitatis in education, engineering, geology, geophysics, physics, research, teaching.Tags: engineering, geophysics, majors, math, physics, students
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The younger son’s birthday was this week, and we opted to host a pool party at a local hotel. (IMO, pool parties are the best for the elementary school age group: they keep themselves busy and then go home exhausted.) I was checking in when I noticed a young man standing at the other end of the counter. He looked familiar, so I asked if I knew him.
“I took your class last fall.”
“Oh great! How did the rest of the school year go for you?”
“Great. I actually switched to business and am really liking it.”
“Really? Why did you switch?”
“I just figured I liked business a lot better.”
“That’s why they have you take those early major classes – so that you find out you don’t like it before you get too far into it.”
I think the poor kid thought I would be mad that he had switched. But I wasn’t mad at all. If he feels like he’d be better off in a different major, then he ought to go for it. And that is part of what I’m trying to set out in the class – this is what engineers do. If it doesn’t look fun, then you ought to think about a different major. That’s a perfectly valid choice, and no one should judge a student for it.
(Yeah, I know…I sit here and wring my hands because older son gets these obnoxiously high scores in math and science but wants to be a writer…I’m one to talk.)
But seriously, I actually think it’s sort of silly to make students choose a major really early on in school. I think it’s a good idea to try to take a lot of classes in different fields before you really choose. I say this as someone who major hopped a lot during undergrad. I spent some time in physics, chemistry, journalism, and graphic arts. I finally decided that I liked physics after all, but what got me excited was geophysics. I happened to take a geology class when I was at Caltech because I had to take a lab course, and everyone told me geology was the easiest. Turns out, I really liked it and did very well in the course. (Of course, later on, I found that geology feels too qualitative and prefer geophysics, so it all worked out. On the other hand, I think I would’ve liked geology better if it had all been field courses.) :-)
I have run into people who got upset with me for this type of thing. I was doing research with a professor in undergrad, but I felt like the research wasn’t going well and got sort of excited about a math project that I’d seen a professor give a talk about. I talked to that professor to see if he’d be interested in having me as a student, which he was. When I told the other professor that I was going to work with the math professor, all hell broke loose. (I still think I made the right choice, though, especially since the first project really never did go anywhere.) I have yet to figure out why the first professor got upset, though, and did some petty stuff, like kicking me out of the student office (despite no one needing a spot) and having the secretary take away my mailbox. (This was silly, BTW, as I was president of the Society of Physics Students, so she ended up giving it back to me a month later so I could get SPS mail.)
And what did this do? Certainly reinforced that I didn’t want to work with this person, but I could also see it making a student feel like this person is representative of a particular field. Wouldn’t you wonder if a student would not want to go into a major because of the way the professors treat him or her? I can (and did!), and it just shows how ridiculous the whole thing was.
No, students need some time to explore their interests and getting mad at them for not doing what you think they should do is silly. They are the ones who have to deal with the consequences of their choices, and if a student takes my class and decides they don’t want to spend the next five to ten years of their life studying engineering, then I think they’ve learned something very important and just as valid as anything else I have to teach them.
What have I done?! June 21, 2012
Posted by mareserinitatis in education, engineering, papers, research.Tags: math, minion, textbooks
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(As I sat down to write this post, I realized I have a dilemma tangential to the point of the post. The Minion is officially no longer a minion, given he’s finished his undergraduate education. Formally, he’s been upgraded to a henchman. However, if I start calling him the Henchman, I realize no one will know who I am talking about. Therefore, I shall continue to call him the Minion, but please try to remember that his rank is officially that of a Henchman.)
A couple days ago, the Minion asked me for help on something. He’s doing some work on a topic with which I have very limited knowledge. (I consider this sad because it’s something I have interest in but little time to explore.) However, what he needed help on was a mathematical aspect. After finally getting a handle on what he was doing, we sat down and came up with a way to solve his problem. Mike came in and overheard us talking and suggested there may be a paper in what we’re doing. The Minion thought it would be interesting but wanted to talk with someone who has more knowledge of the field (as I obviously don’t), and he was going to check with someone he knows.
I sat down and spent an hour writing out the formal mathematics for the problem so that it would be easier to present this to someone. It looks very pretty (especially since I did it in LaTeX). However, I couldn’t help thinking, as I proofed it, that I managed to take what, to me, seemed like a straight-forward approach to solving the problem and obscure it with symbology.
I think I could potentially have a career writing textbooks.
Musings on research June 13, 2012
Posted by mareserinitatis in career, engineering, grad school, papers, research, science.Tags: engineering, engineering research, research, scooped
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I made an interesting observation today. It’s funny that I should’ve noticed this before, but I didn’t.
I have finally come to the realization that the question, “How’s your research going?” is really a euphemism for, “How long until you’ve finished your PhD?” I’m not sure why it didn’t hit me before. My usual response to the question is to ask ‘which research?’ because I work in two totally different areas of research, both of which I find pretty fascinating. I thought the person asking the question was actually interested in what I was doing.
Nope. I realized today that they always say, “Why, your PhD work, of course!” And, when it comes down to it, only a handful of people who ask really are interested in the research itself. Most are just interested in how close that completion date is.
The reason I should’ve realized this before is because my husband got the question all the time. It didn’t occur to me until this line of thought became clear that once he’d graduated, people started asking, “How’s work?” (And usually, they aren’t interested in his research, either.)
If there isn’t a PhD comic strip devoted to this topic yet, there ought to be.
—–
I got scooped. (A work related project – not my dissertation.) It was a small side project that I’d worked on here and there but had really not had any significant time to commit to. I’d gotten started on it and looked at things here and there. In part, I was waiting for someone else to finish some of his software development. (Of course, he was laid off earlier this year…so I imagine I’ll be waiting a while.)
Anyway, I am kicking myself because I obviously had a good idea (given someone else published exactly. the. same. thing.), but there was just no time to flesh it out. Did I make the right choice by focusing on other things or did I miss the boat? On the other hand…hey! I had a good idea. I, of course, have a couple of ideas of things that can be done based on the original project, but it’s disappointing that I won’t have the paper that gives the original idea. Of course, at the rate that particular project is going (because it’s so low priority…just some ideas I had playing around in the lab), I’m not sure I’ll ever get those other papers out.
This makes me wonder…is it good to focus on the ‘next big thing’? Or should one keep trying to work on those little things in the meantime? How do you prioritize? I think I made the right decision…but it’s easy to second-guess yourself.
thinking work June 10, 2012
Posted by mareserinitatis in grad school, research, solar physics.Tags: grad school, productivity, programming, solar physics
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I have to give a presentation next week and older son took off for the summer, so between getting slides together and getting stuff and people shuttled to the airport, it was a rather busy weekend. There was some code I wanted to work on but didn’t have the chance.
It’s funny, though, because I was still thinking about it, and I actually think I made good progress on a plan of action. I realized I had three options: fix it, rewrite it, or throw my hands up in despair and give up. (Okay…last one is very low on the list of possibilities, but I can’t say it’s non-existent…there have been days.) I’m not sure I can fix it, but I have an idea of how to go about doing it. It’s a piece of code without commenting, but I know what it’s supposed to do, and I have an awesome ‘cookbook’ of numerical algorithms that explains it. (Need a spline written in a jiffy….I’m your woman!) I also suspect that in the process of trying to fix it, I’ll figure out a way to rewrite it a bit more efficiently, likely with less effort than fixing it will take. And I planned out how I can verify everything, as well.
While I didn’t have much time to work on it directly, I got my resources together and know what I’m going to do so I can hit it first thing after work tomorrow. I wonder if I made more progress by spending my ‘off’ time thinking about it than if I’d just dived in. I guess I should know in a couple days. But it’s funny how stepping away from something and letting your mind idle on it can result in something worthwhile.
The moment your heart stops beating May 25, 2012
Posted by mareserinitatis in engineering, research.Tags: bad results, engineering, engineering research, experiment, research
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I hate when I hear the words, “I need some help in the lab.”
I try my best, but I’m the last person you want in the lab. Therefore, if someone is asking me to help in the lab, you know there is a major catastrophe.
The other day I was asked to help in the lab because things weren’t working right. In fact, when I started looking at it, things weren’t working at all. While I hadn’t done the setup on this particular experiment, I was supervising it. So I had to run through the list of variables that could be affecting the results. It took a couple hours, but it turned out that some piece of equipment was being swapped out for another, and this new equipment simply didn’t work in the experiment. So we tried the original equipment again and it worked. New equipment didn’t. We tried a third piece of gear and found it worked, but only in particular situations where we spoke the incantations in a foreign tongue (or something similar).
Anyway, we figured it out for two of the three cases. However, when I first was looking at the non-working gear and not getting anything, my heart just stopped for a moment. It’s one of those moments where you think, “But I thought I knew what was going on? Did I completely screw up?! How could I have made such a huge mistake?!”
And of course the best one: “Does this mean ALL of my research is trash?!!!!”
I hate those moments, even if short-lived. Don’t you?
Incomplete instructions May 10, 2012
Posted by mareserinitatis in papers, research, Uncategorized.Tags: papers, peer review, research
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I know I’ve been talking a lot about reviewing papers, but I figured one more post on the topic couldn’t hurt.
I was very lucky that my MS advisor started us reviewing papers as soon as we took a class from him. In all of his grad level classes, we were usually required to select 2-3 potential published papers for review and then to write up a critical analysis about 4-6 pages in length on one of them. It was a good experience, but I don’t think I would’ve made a very good reviewer my first year or two into grad school.
My real critiquing skills came when I started getting into some of my MS projects and I had to reproduce some of the work already done in papers. The first three I came across, it became very clear that the reviewers hadn’t done the best job: all three were missing critical details that required me to write the authors and ask how they had done certain things. In other words, there wasn’t enough information to replicate the work. That, therefore, became one of the first things that I look at with a paper. It would be nice if, when reviewing, one actually had time to sit down and try to replicate the experiment. Unfortunately, that’s not realistic…although I’ve also had papers with blatant errors that I’ve been trying to reproduce. I hope it’s just an oops that is the result of last minute writing, but I am beginning to think there are a lot of careless authors out there.
I’m not sure why this is the case, other than the fact that maybe people get too far into their experiment and fail to realize that there are many things they do automatically that one cannot take for granted. Even though most of the work I do is in simulations, there are a lot of things that appear superficially minor but can really change your results.
While there are other things one should look at it, I think the quality of most papers I’ve read follows along with the detail presented in laying out the process. If the process is not clearly spelled out, then chances are the other aspects of the paper are going to need some work, too.
So, for those who review papers, do you have things that you really look for in a paper and, if so, why?
Was blind, but now I see… May 6, 2012
Posted by mareserinitatis in engineering, papers, research.Tags: double blind, papers, peer review, single blind
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I was recently asked to review a paper for a fairly large conference in one of the engineering subfields I’m involved in. This particular conference is one which I’ve not attended, so I had no familiarity with the procedures. As a side note for non-engineers, I discussed before (on my old blog) that many (most?) engineering conferences take full, peer-reviewed papers.
When I received the paper and looked it over, I nearly fell out of my chair. I could see the freakin’ authors!
In most of the conferences where I’ve submitted papers, the peer-review was double blind. One conference in particular was this way because it’s such a small area of research that they wanted to make doubly sure that people are as objective as possible. (In reality, there’s a good chance that you could tell who it was just by what they were doing, but I applaud the effort.) It seems like a very straight-forward thing to do: you submit the paper without any names on it. The session chair knows who it is but picks people to review who will be none the wiser. If the paper is accepted, a revision is submitted with names on it. Easy-peasy.
I have to say that this was very disconcerting for me. I don’t WANT to know whose paper I’m reviewing. I spent the whole time writing this review terrified that knowing who they were, where they were from, how many authors were on the paper, etc. was affecting my perceptions of the paper and destroying my objectivity. I was amazed at all the stupid things I found myself questioning in terms of my reaction. Was I making a mountain out of a molehill? Was I overly impressed by something which shouldn’t have impressed me?
It really isn’t all that hard to keep reviews double-blind when using an automated submission system such as the one used for this conference (and most IEEE conferences), and as a reviewer, I would have been far more comfortable.
I’m curious about other fields, though. Is single-blind review the norm? (When I stumble across these things, I feel like I’ve been living under a rock.)
Permanent position April 24, 2012
Posted by mareserinitatis in education, research, science.Tags: academia, funding, science funding, soft money
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The other day, I was talking with a professor who was asking about my employment situation. After clarifying where I was at, he said, “But your husband has a permanent position, right?”
“Permanent insofar as he’s on soft money, too.”
One thing that’s become fairly obvious is that there has been a bit of confusion about our research center. A lot of people don’t realize we run entirely on soft money, which is a very uncomfortable situation to be in. It’s even more uncomfortable when both members of a couple are in that situation.
I recently read this article about the money trail in academia, and it got me thinking: what would happen if PIs were in the same situation as some of the rest of us. That is, what if they not only had no tenure, but also had to bring in their own salary? (I say this is the realization that, in some places, this is the case.)
I have a lot of thoughts on what may happen, but I’m going to put them in a separate post. In fact, by the time this post has been published, I will already have my post written so as to be untainted by potential comments. In the meantime, however, I’m curious what you think. Do you think this sort of system would help or hurt academia? Encourage or discourage competition, quality, efficiency? Do you think this would motivate the system to change or would it just be more of the same?
I also blog at Engineer Blogs, home away from home to some of the best engineering blogs.
Review season May 7, 2012
Posted by mareserinitatis in engineering, papers, research, younger son.Tags: engineering, engineering research, papers, peer review, research, reviewer comments
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Both Mike and I have been getting requests to review papers, and this has led to a lot of foul language around the house…along with frequent reminders from the younger son that our language is inappropriate.
It’s really hard to restrain yourself, however. As we’re sitting at the dining room table, occasionally one of us will turn our laptop toward the other and ask something like, “What does this look like to you?” or, “What do you think this means?” or, “What the hell were they thinking?”
I have to admit that I appreciate having a second pair of eyes to catch the things that I miss. I’m sure the authors of the papers we’re reviewing probably will not appreciate it. Not only do they have the third reviewer going over their papers, they have two of them. I hope this will result in double the hair pulling and teeth gnashing on their end…because it sure has for us.