Why are you into science?

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There are probably two types of scientists: the ones who want to solve intellectually interesting problems, and the ones who are driven to safe the world. Of course, in an ideal world, we would kill these two birds with one stone, but deep down, what is mainly driving you?

The reason why I ask is that I find the science of malaria eradication – applied science at the heart – fascinating. ISglobal, the institute I am now associated with, is increasingly focusing on malaria eradication. Academically, this involves a whole shift in mindset: the goal is not output in terms of papers, it is eradication success. I had the privilege to attend a few sessions in the science of eradication course held in Barcelona, a very interesting experience. Although I am skeptic when it comes to eradication, it is an intriguing process. There are many unknowns and I believe eradication is potentially risky, but nevertheless, attempts for eradication will happen, with or without answers. In fact, some of these questions can only be answered by doing the large-scale ‘experiment’.

And as such, while the aim of eradication is not to generate data, it will do so. This is the reason why I am so intrigued by the whole process: it is a large-scale evolutionary experiment. Is my interest based on a drive to safe the world? Perhaps the honest answer to this questions would be no, I think there are more efficient ways to safe the world. However, I do hope that as an academic I will generate data and knowledge that would help the process and I believe it is my duty as an academic to strive for this knowledge to be put in the right hands and minds, so that they can, eventually, safe the world.

Stress

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We periodically have “pub sessions” in place of lab meetings. Your initial inclination, as mine was, may be to assume the pub is short for publication.  This is not the case. A pub session derives its name from the meeting location: the pub. During these informal gatherings, Matt and Andrew lead an informal discussion on a general topic.  This sort of thing has the potential to be completely obnoxious, but actually this is an enjoyable and often helpful experience. However, there is one pub session that I dread and that is the yearly “stress meeting”.

The intention of this meeting is to allow lab members to describe what causes them stress. The desired outcome is that by airing these concerns and addressing them that we will be liberated from them.  Additionally, we will be comforted in the knowledge that others share similar concerns.  Freed from the bonds of anxiety we will burst forth to become unstoppable research machines leaving mounds of Nature and Science papers in our wake.

For those of us that struggle with stress, this scenario is not probable.

First, for those of us who are expert worriers these situations do nothing but increase anxiety.  As Jessi described in an earlier post, worriers practice worrying and are very good at it.  As other members describe their concerns the well-worn networks of anxiety synapses will begin to fire in many of the listener’s brains. Their heart rate increases and muscles will tense as their bodies become anxious and primed to feel worried. Second, as that fight or flight response kicks in the higher processing centers of the brain turn off.  We are left only with the primitive parts of our brain function. These primitive components of the brain are the ones that we share with reptiles. Not too many reptilian paper authors are there?

I think the key flaw in the current model for this meeting is that we are trying to stop stress.  Stress is a physiological response to external stimuli. It is the reason your ancient ancestors survived and the reason you are here. Even though you are no longer scraping in the caves to survive, your ancient stress response remains. It has been heavily selected for and it will always be with you.  We should all feel remarkably blessed that we have supervisors who want to know what they can do to improve our stress.  This will not happen in the real world so feel lucky. Instead of trying to stop stress, I believe we will be better served by working to understand it, recognize it, and manage it, in the same way that a diabetic knows to monitor and adjust their insulin levels. (Yes, body I know you are responding as though we have just seen a zombie bear, but really the PCR just didn’t work. So calm down).

So, what do I suggest instead? I think we should follow the advice of Shawn Achor’s recent TED talk.  Achor does this so beautifully I’m not inclined to attempt to paraphrase.  If I had to come up with one suggestion to take from this excellent talk (this is well worth the 12 minute watch) it would be that we turn this “Stress” meeting into a “Wellness” meeting. We should take a time out to talk about one thing that we absolutely love about working as a scientist and then turn to our neighbor and tell them why we are grateful to have them as a colleague, and yes, we can also have a
few pints.

Shawn Achor TED Talk

Metablogging

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Based on a recommendation from Andrew, I recently read Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. There are some useful parts of the books where I learned new things, for example a section on how introverts and extroverts can communicate effectively and a section describing a longitudinal study of introverted and extroverted babies.*

There are also portions of the book that weren’t particularly surprising to me. For example, the author details how many of the early developers of personal computers and the internet were introverts and, when it comes to communicating with a lot of people at once, introverts tend to prefer online options like listservs and blogs.

Coincidentally, at the same time that I was reading Quiet, I read this PLoS Biology perspective on cultivating an online presences via social media. As an introvert with a highly searchable name, I’m predisposed to agree with many of the points made in the piece. What I found interesting about that piece was that, while social media like Facebook and blogs have been around longer than many of the papers I cite in my latest manuscript, the idea of scientists using this media is novel enough to merit space in PLoS Bio.**

Which raises the question, why aren’t most scientists already using these tools? Or are they and PLoS Bio is behind the times? Is there a natural predisposition to adopting new media? Are the scientists who are already using this media making the conscious decision to improve their visibility, or are they doing it because they find it cool? The authors of the piece suggest that people feel overwhelmed by the online options; others might argue that it’s a generational gap, but this hasn’t been my experience. What say you, fellow Read/Thomas lab members, are bloggers made or born?

* Which I immediately used to diagnose all the babies I know as introverts or extroverts. Most of them are extroverts.

** The PLoS journals generally seem on the leading edge for this sort of thing. On a tangential note, I recently submitted manuscript revisions and there was the option to submit a Tweetable (i.e. 120 character) summary of your paper, which I thought was kind of cool and shows how journals are getting in on the social media action too.

The State of Higher Education in the US: Service with a Smile?

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I’m sitting here writing this in the small town of Delaware, Ohio, where I’ll be seeing my sister graduate from college this weekend. On the 6 hour drive here, I thought a lot about college, and the state of the university system in America. And then I started thinking about the flashback-trippy scenes in Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” as the students matriculate into the meat grinder….clearly, the system’s broken. I have no concrete answers on how to fix the problem, but with mounting unemployment rate and nearly unbearable student loan repayments for recent grads, there has to be something here that’s just not working.

According to a recent survey of 4900 recent US grads published by McKinsey and Company, 2/3 of students state that “college didn’t prepare me well for my job” and state that perhaps incorporating more “life skills” into coursework would have been useful, and they seemed more dissatisfied with their lack of training in “life skills” than other skills such as quantitative reasoning, analytical writing, etc. All buzzwords aside, I’m still confused; having T.A.’d in undergrad and graduate school, the life skills that these students aren’t putting into good practice are things like motivation, time management, responsibility and a sense of interest in education. I’m starting to feel as if the students see college as a pure business transaction, and that higher education in this country has become a customer service industry, and that they’re here to get a “good degree” that will get them a “good job” that will lead them to a “good career”, and if you can’t get them that piece of paper, it’s clearly YOUR fault. You must not be a good instructor/TA. You aren’t sensitive enough to their needs, and don’t offer extra credit when a student has slacked off all semester and realizes they need to pass.

The sentiment has become all too often “YOU didn’t GIVE me an A.” instead of “I didn’t earn an A in this class, I should take more responsibility for my own education”. For a country in which we have pretty free access to information via the internet, libraries, and other resources, the motivation to take learning into one’s own hands is pretty pathetic. My generation seems to have to be spoon-fed exactly what they “need” to know in order to regurgitate the information on a piece of paper only to forget about it later. I’m aware that many of these students feel strongly against incorporating the “general education” curriculum into their time here, and that is surely a source of their lack of motivation. But even then, in the coursework required for their degrees, college students of my generation take little responsibility for their own education when it turns out the way they don’t want. The survey above states that 53% of the recent grads surveyed regret their choice of major and/or university. But the main conclusion is that the university system is responsible for changing this sentiment, and should do more to placate the needs of its customers.

This piece was a bit more of a rant than I had intended; and I’m sure you all have opinions on this issue, and where the solution lies for fixing a broken system. Yet, if I continue into academia, I’d rather not be viewed as a sales associate with a PhD that’s selling a product. In reality, there is a product, and there is capital, but, I still don’t buy the “I’m paying X amount of money, so I should get EXACTLY WHAT I WANT” argument, unless there’s some effort on the other side too.

Part 1 of 2

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I should start by saying that I don’t really believe in reincarnation.

(Well, I should probably start by apologizing to Andrew, who probably was expecting other kinds of topics on the blog. Don’t worry- part 2 will be more related to science.)

I think that I first heard about reincarnation at a pretty young age, when my grandmother mentioned that she felt like she had done such-and-such in her past life. I was probably freaked out by this possibility then. Souls, spirits, ghosts, magic, and aliens were basically equivalent and equivalently confusing to me as a child and, while my default stance towards natural things was to be curious, my default when it came to supernatural things was to be afraid. This fear of the supernatural I blame on the neighbors who tried to save me by taking me to church, without having had anyone explain to me that there is some debate about whether or not Hell is actually a place.

I spent a lot of time being afraid as a kid because people didn’t sufficiently explain things to me. In the absence of explanations, I wasn’t always even able to characterize things correctly as natural vs. supernatural. When I realized this later, I used to think about whether rain would have terrified me if I grew up in, say, the Atacama, and then moved somewhere else. (Most likely yes.)

Also later, once I figured out that eclipses had nothing to do with aliens and I wouldn’t go to Hell for wondering if aliens existed, I also got to thinking about reincarnation. And I came to the conclusion that, if it did exist, then I must be a newbie. Reincarnation is where, I reasoned, people’s intuition came from: you learned these things in your previous life. Since I usually feel like I don’t know anything and that the thing that I use to make decisions besides logic (which is what I would describe as intuition) is so often wrong, this must be my first time around the block.

Back to the future

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It’s hard to imagine life without internet, without computers, televisions, radios, cars, engines, light bulbs, electricity, the scientific method.  Luckily, we have those things, and so I don’t have to.

But what if I were sent back in time, one (or a few) thousand years?  How hard would it be to build a computer?  For me, impossible.  I’ve spent 80% of my life in school, nearly half of those years were focused specifically on science.  How can I not know how to build a computer (arguably the most important invention of the last century) from a pile of sand and a block of iron?

There is a substantial difference between knowing how something works and knowing how to make something work.  Which makes me wonder, if I did go back in time, what would I be able to do?  I could tell people to do things – wash your hands, heat your milk, test your hypotheses – but I probably couldn’t communicate why without being committed.

I think it would be really cool if there were a science course built around the advancement of scientific knowledge over the past 2000 years.  Starting at the beginning, and showing the interplay between advancements in different scientific disciplines through lectures and labs.  That way, if I were sent back in time, I would be able to build a computer from scratch.  But maybe that’s what History of Science courses already are.

Moving by the numbers

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Since I spent four days of this week on the road, rather than in the lab, I thought I’d share some data I collected along the way.

We traveled for roughly 2,050 miles. The first hypothesis we tested was that cats that have never ridden in the car before will adjust. Our cat took about 4 hours to resign himself to the fate of being trapped in a car, followed by a one hour adjustment period at the beginning of each new day on the road (this means approximately 7 of 34 hours, or 20% of the trip was accompanied by a soundtrack of meowing. The ratio could have been much worse).

Stars of roadside attractions are often larger than life. There was the world’s largest prairie dog, a cow with an extra leg, (we didn’t stop for these), and what was probably one of the largest crosses in the country which dwarfed the trees and made quite the impression even at 80mph.

The largest wind chimes are 49 feet tall and exist in Kansas. This prompted us to test a second hypothesis: that it is windy enough in Kansas that having two bikes strapped to the back of a Civic decreases fuel efficiency by about 10 mpg. Our alternative hypothesis was that the air pressure in the tires had fallen, which we ruled out at the next gas stop (a pressure gage is $1.69 in Nowhere, KS). The fact that our mpg went back to normal after Missouri where there were some hills to break up the wind supported hypothesis #1.

Average gas prices ranged from $3.19 to $3.69 per gallon along route 70. On a side note, I feel this must have been too cheap because there were certainly a lot of cars on the road that had only one occupant, and rarely did we see buses. There was one cyclist chugging along in eastern Colorado with some huge saddlebags, and three hitchhikers along the highway, but I’m not sure we can assume these alternative modes of transportation were due to the price of gas. We kept track of license plates we saw from other states while on the road, documenting 41/50 states. The majority of those missed were from New England, which could be expected since we were heading East and only went as far as the middle of PA. It’s good to be back.

Making use of our human bias

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Terrifying perfection, at least in the petri dish.

The name Dd2 may not mean much to you, but to me it is the Mary Poppins of malaria strains. Dd2 is multi-drug resistant, and research shows it grows faster than many other strains because it invades red blood cells better and makes more offspring per red blood cell–it’s practically perfect in every way.

I worry about sharing that with people, because it is strong evidence that I anthropomorphize the organisms I study, but after reading this article, I suspect that attaching images and impressions to words is a fundamental part of human language processing. The mental images we attach to words and phrases are suggestive of the way we think about the world. For example, when someone says they had a rough day, apparently many of us go to a sandpaper place in our minds. But what I find encouraging about all of this is that we each bring a different set of biases to the table. For the phrase “flying pig” some of us think of a pig with wings but others imagine a Superman-like pig flying through the air. Scientists worry about a lot about systematic biases–like basing our knowledge of the brain on right-handed people only–but if this article is right, many of our more subtle biases might not be systematic. Since all of us carry different biases, then if we got enough people from different backgrounds and cultures together, we could make use of our unsystematic biases to do better science. Perhaps it’s not a problem that I think of Dd2 as Mary Poppins, so long as other people favor a different metaphor.

What was that thing Joni Mitchell said?

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…that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone? Or in my case, going. This always happens to me, and right around this time too. For instance, it wasn’t until two months before moving here that I realised how much I absolutely loved Edinburgh and was going to miss it terribly.

Bye bye Castle in the background

A very sad Nicole on her last day living in Edinburgh

Today I had a surprising realisation: being a postdoc is pretty great. Courtney and I spent an hour talking to grad students who thought that we might have something useful to say. We were invited to a GWIS (Graduate Women In Science, although I noted a Graduate Man there too) ‘Inside the Scientist’s Studio’ event, where they invite two scientists and ask them various questions about getting through grad school, applying for jobs, finding balance, etc. They seemed interested in what we had to say, and we both seemed to find relevant pieces of advice in our brains. I got excited about the possibility that I’d actually have something to say shortly before heading over for the event.

Grad school, for me, was all about not having a clue what I was doing. My postdocs haven’t been much different, actually, but one fundamental thing has changed: I now have a PhD. I managed to make it through the whole process and largely with an absentee (yet endlessly helpful and supportive) supervisor. I can say that I have clearly achieved something. Naturally, this doesn’t stop me from devising theories about how my brain has deteriorated since then and I may never be able to do anything again. But there is some information stored up in that decaying brain, and it’s possible that I know some of it better than almost anyone else.

So, as a postdoc I have slightly more confidence in the fact that I do have a (small) clue about what’s going on and I don’t yet have the enormous burdens — teaching, sourcing funding, managing people and personalities, to name a few of the most terrifying — that come with being a PI.

Up until today, I thought being a PhD student was better than being a postdoc, mostly because it’s absolutely clear what you need to do (hint: finish that thesis!). But now I realise that having fewer bounds on what you need to do, as well as having some ideas stored up about what you’d like to do and the time to actually do it, is pretty freaking awesome. I’m glad I didn’t rush off after being offered a faculty job, but now I wish that I couldn’t count down my remaining postdoc weeks using only my fingers.

UPDATE: I’ve just read the post from Becky Timms and it seems that I’ve simply managed to rephrase her Point #3. Well, folks, it must be true!

Why Science?

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At some point Andrew was going around with a video camera asking people why they do science. He actually never asked me with the camera, but I thought about my answer in case he ever did (see Eleanore’s post).

I do science for the same reason that a painter paints, a musician plays, and a dancer dances.  For me conducting science is an act of pure joy.  When I design an experiment or think on a problem I feel a glorious clarity. It feels certain that I’m doing what I was made for. I feel my purpose align with my practice and a deep calm comes over my often scrambled brain. Science brings me great happiness.

For me this sense of peace is addictive. I can even get a contact high when listening to other people talk about doing science.  I just finished leading a graduate student seminar and (despite my boss’s distaste for graduate student course work) found this to be an extremely rewarding experience. These students are in the earliest part of their scientific careers.  It was fantastic to watch them debate ideas with each other. At times, I literally had to sit on my hands and bite my lip to stop from interjecting. They are just starting and I am excited for them.

So for all the bullshit, the hideous funding, the long hours, and an upsetting interaction between my confidence and many of the realities of this line of work, I’m hooked. I am posting this sentiment to our lab blog for a particularly selfish reason: I can easily look at it whenever I need to.

Thinking of a career switch?

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I was just reading the online newspaper and I was stunned by the announcement that the selection for a commercial trip to Mars, scheduled for 2023, has opened. Mind you, this is a one way trip, the plan is to establish a human colony and grow this population by four every two years.

Crazy? Get this, cause who do you think is all going to pay for this? Us, sensation-seeking human beings. That´s when I realized this was clearly a Dutch initiative. Remember ´Big Brother´? Big business. Combine that with the dollar making versions of ´Pop Idol´ and a very simple commercial idea was born: Let the selection of astronauts be a publicly broadcasted sensation, one where, of course, the viewers can cast their votes. The selected candidates will be followed in all the ups and downs during preparation, travel to and life on Mars. This is all planned to become the biggest media-event in history.

My disbelief just grew and grew. Is this some kind of April fools joke? Or am I just too naïve to think this would still be too much science fiction? Also, who would ever want to sign up for something so permanent as this? Perhaps expectedly, the latter doesn´t seem to be an issue, the organization received tens of thousands applications before the call was even opened. There is clearly lots of ambition out there to be the next Neil Armstrong.

What do you think? Is this crazy? Exciting? And most important of all: will you watch?

Not a Giant

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And Andrew said “Yes, I agree and that’s exactly what Troy’s paper says”.

So its continued. Its been twice, maybe three times, in a matter of weeks that I’ve had the feeling that there are no good ideas left or that all of them have already been tested.  And it always seems that I was so close and yet so far  – the PNAS paper published in January 2013 exploring ‘my idea’; the newly encountered Biology Letters article that confirms my suspicions about some process or other (interesting how one tends to recall when ideas appeared in decent journals, no?). Its dispiriting to the burgeoning scientific spirit to get that rush of excitement, sketch out the idea and then – often while not even looking – find that someone has already confirmed it.

I can hear you, dear reader, telling me to stop feeling sorry for myself or closing the laptop, concluding that you have far more important things to worry about (Kids! Dinner! Papers! Game of Thrones!) than to listen to the whining of a graduate student.

I agree with you. There’s a seed of egotism behind these thoughts. How can I expect to think of a good, truly original idea or experiment given the sheer numbers of (far more intelligent & experienced) people that have come before me? Is it not the case that, even within one field, most scientists stand on the shoulders of a few giants, adding bricks to the towers distributed throughout the scientific landscape? I also suspect this creeping feeling is a consequence of my way of exploring science. Like a toddler in a ball pit, I grasp a body of literature and run with it for a while, never really stopping to realize the ball is an onion, with many an unpeeled layer to be discovered. As a result, most of my ‘new ideas’ are actually links drawn between branches of biology – roads between towers, not bricks in themselves. Perhaps these ideas are more easily discovered?

With the innate curiosity that comes as a given with scientists, I cannot be the first or the last with this…problem. But since I am not a country parson of the 18th Century, free to collect rocks while also fetishizing butterflies, I must find a way around it or, preferably, to harness it. Hence the vow to ‘Stay focused!’ in the recent annual meeting. The second vow to ‘Be Persistent’ is related. Its a weakness of mine that I feel disheartened when I realize a certain road has already been discovered, even in the merest sense. I have to learn to stop, map it out, pour the concrete and perhaps even build a 5-foot-1-and-a-bit sized hut on it.

Growth

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Breakfast with Nina last week. She fessed up that she and Monica had been secretly doing a course on tropical rain forest ecology. I hate PhD students doing course work: it is an excuse not to do research. Course work is easy. Defined targets, supportive professor who knows where things are going (for the most part). Research is hard. Targets you have to define for your self. Supportive professor (if you are lucky) who has no idea where things are going (if it is real research).

Nina fessed up because there is a chance they will be on NPR. But finally, I had an explanation for why the two of them have been talking so much community ecology in the last few weeks.

And I was very proud of them. They were interested, and they did it despite me.

(My wife’s comment: what else are they doing they have not told you about?)

Becky, and transferable skills

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I was in Scotland last week, staying with one of my former students, her husband and her three adorable children (6, 3, 1.5 y.o.). Becky went into banking after she finished her PhD over a decade ago. For those who do mouse malaria, Becky is the Timms of Timms et al. We got to talking, and this is what Becky wrote…

So, imagine this, you are part way through your PhD or postdoc and you are thinking about what you will do next. It might be more of the same, a move to a different research area, or a move out of academia. This is something all junior researchers face. In my particular case, towards the end of my PhD I didn’t have any firm ideas. I wasn’t sure if I was going to stay in science. Or, if leaving science would feel like a failure. Or, now I am recalling this, if I would ever finish my bloody PhD. But what I can share if you are in a similar position is that you have options. Quite exciting ones in fact. And your experiences are developing skills that are wonderfully valuable whether or not you stay in science. At the request of Andrew, I am going to share my personal story and 8 Points that I would have found helpful back then.

Some of you may have heard of me via lab group meetings, but for the others, let me introduce myself. I did a PhD with Andrew way back in 2001 in Edinburgh. Thesis title: The Evolution and Ecology of Virulence in Mixed Infections of Malaria Parasites. At the time, I obviously spent rather a lot of effort thinking about, and doing, the work that went into my thesis. Just now, I had to look up the title. Even I am slightly shocked by this – all the blood, sweat and tears, and I can’t recall the exact title?! Point 1: the work that you obsess about today may fade as it becomes less relevant, however your skills are transferable.

At the end of my PhD I became a banker. Now there’s a modern-day swear word! I made a very difficult decision to leave academia. And a (general linear model free) analysis of my skill set was a large part of this. Now, perhaps this sounds easy to you? It was awful: I am British; I am a woman; and, despite outward appearances, I was not very confident. These three conditions made it somewhat challenging to catalog my skills (am I good at X? Well not as good as they are….). Point 2: this exercise is not about saying what you are best in the world at. Just what you are good at. I found it helpful to compare my current day skills to those that I had when I was 16.

So what transferable skills do you develop in research that can help you in your career outside academia? I will assume you are mid-PhD like I was.

Straight up with Point 3: completing a PhD gives you confidence and an edge. Let’s face it, following many iterations of selection, the folks around you are fairly bright. Possibly among the brightest in society. That can ruin your confidence and make you feel stupid at times. But remember, you are part of that peer group and have been through similar rounds of selection. You many not feel it at the time but, being objective, and on reflection, you are also quite clever. There, I’ve said it. This is a wonderful, beautiful revelation and you can guard your secret if you wish, but even if you never tell anyone, you carry this knowledge in your heart. And, more importantly, consciously or otherwise, in your behaviours. This will get you noticed. I’ve met a lot of very clever people in the business world. But none of them have been cleverer than some academics I know. And when I talk to these business people, they are consistently impressed and interested in hearing that I have a PhD. This is a great conversational aid and can help you hugely with networking (I might include networking as another Point, except that I didn’t learn how to do it properly until very recently – of course, you might not take as long as me to learn this and I have some helpful tips if you are interested).

Another skill, that is easy to trivialise, is that you will be quite an expert in Microsoft office software such as PowerPoint, Word and Excel etc. Having software skills is expected, but don’t underestimate how helpful these can be – I have helped many people who have in turn helped me out with something. Point 4: being personable, eliciting favors and learning from others is the quickest way to get on top of a new job.

Point 5: giving lab group meetings, departmental seminars, and conference talks means that you are pretty damn good at giving presentations and communicating difficult ideas to an audience that can be either more expert than you, or new to the material. This is very useful at interview, and essential in your business role. Being able to clearly communicate with people is the key skill in business in my view (with networking being a close second). And the audience will never be as scary.

You already are, or at the very least are mid journey into becoming, a magnificent critical thinker (Point 6). All the literature reading, scientific debates with your mates, and those bruising challenge sessions with Andrew has sharpened your thinking. Once dissecting arguments and data sets becomes second nature, you are onto a winner that will help you cut through to the core of issues and work out the solution.

Point 7: you write beautifully, or you will by the time you have written up your PhD with Andrew.

I’m sure we all agree that science is a glorious pass time and a thrilling day job. But it can also be a curiously perverse and sadistic sort of job with endless rounds of disappointment and rejection: ideas can be complex and difficult to understand; experiments go wrong; results don’t turn out as expected; papers get rejected; grants get knocked back. It is compounded by the fact that we tend to be consumed by research and live and breathe it, which makes it feel all the more personal when it goes badly. Still, Point 8: all this adversity builds your resilience. Resilience is the new buzz word in the banking world as we grapple with rebuilding our reputation following us becoming public enemy number 1.

Finally, your key weapon is a nuance of Point 3, which was about confidence arising from overcoming something that you personally aspire to achieve – completing your PhD (or why else would you be doing this). The twist on this is that once you complete it, you have had the ringing endorsement from one of the sharpest thinkers I have come across. Someone who motivated and inspired, no inspires, me. You have the fortune to be working with the amazing Andrew Read. Treasure your time in his care, I miss him. [ok, editorial Andrew here: I did not write this, honestly]

My take home message after all this reflecting is that I was a fairly average PhD student, but I have gone on to have a rewarding and satisfying career in a completely new field. I used to find the business world a little intimidating – money and power are irresistible to many, and so you would have to be brilliant to succeed wouldn’t you? What I have learnt is that I was mistaken. If I can do this, then it is not beyond the wit of you too.

p.s. Andrew has my contact details and permission to pass them onto you if you want to follow anything up.

Performing

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“…remember that some nervousness makes for a better performance. If after some experiments you are still very nervous, an alcoholic drink before the concert can be most beneficial.” – Trevor Wye. Practice Books for the Flute, Vol. 3: Articulation.

In some ways, I think that giving a talk is one of the less stressful forms of verbal communication for me, because I don’t have to speak extemporaneously. It’s like I’ve carefully prepared a piece of music and now that it’s finished, I’m playing it in front of an audience. The luxury of time to think about what I’m going to say does wonders to ward off l’esprit d’escalier* and outside of giving a talk, it is a luxury not generally available in spoken communication.

On a visceral level, however, being the center of attention still makes me extremely nervous. This is where the analogy of a musician performing a piece becomes particularly useful to me because, between the ages of 5 and 18, I was an aspiring musician. I took weekly lessons, I practiced daily, I played in several ensembles, and I made a small but noticeable dent in the 10,000 hours you need to be really good at something (so Andrew says). All of which has lead to some great coping mechanisms, except now those skills don’t go towards standing up and playing a solo, instead they go towards standing up and talking about science.

Even if I know that I can deliver a good performance, I also accept that I can’t avoid the nervousness that precedes it. With that in mind, I make sure that I know a piece backwards and forwards before I get up in front of an audience, that way I can rely on muscle memory to carry me through until my brain starts working again. Of course there isn’t the same kind of muscle memory when giving a scientific talk, but I treat each slide as a flash card and I memorize the key points for each slide to make sure that I stay on target no matter how nervous I feel.

Although I do rely on memorization, I don’t want that to come across in my performance. When I play a piece, I want it to be technically correct but I also want it to be expressive. So, when I give a talk I aim for polished but not rehearsed. Some of this comes from practicing not just what I’m saying but how I’m saying it, and some of it comes from following the advice of my PhD advisor to STOP PRACTICING THE TALK. (Note that you should read that last bit of advice in a stern Dutch voice).

More generally, giving a good performance is about hiding all of your hard work. When I play a piece of music, the point is not to demonstrate to the audience that I have mastered a difficult piece. Likewise, some of the best advice I’ve received about giving a talk is “people don’t complain that a talk was too easy to follow.” Even if I’m presenting a complicated experiment or a difficult to interpret result, I aim to present it in such a way that the audience reaches the conclusion on my next slide before I’ve put it up.

Lastly, I know that listening to more experienced musicians will help me improve my own playing. So, when I see a good talk I pay close attention to what the person is doing, why it’s working, and how I can incorporate these aspects into my next talk.

* A French phrase that will probably be instantly familiar even if you’ve never heard it before. It translates literally to “the spirit of the staircase” and it refers to all the perfect things that you think to say after the conversation is over. I suffer from this condition constantly.

It’s a dangerous place

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The recent warm weather has been a delight after what seems far too long a winter. Going for a run now is not the brass monkey exercise it has been for the last few months and jogging between the trees on a sun-dappled path is a pleasure(1). But the woods hide a number of dark secrets. As Peter’s grandfather said so portentously, “Its a dangerous place. If a wolf should come out of the forest, then what would you do?”

Well, maybe not a wolf round here but there is an equally, nay more, dangerous creature that goes through a strange transformation in a few weeks time.

I encountered it for the first time last year and still don’t feel I have fully recovered. There I was, sometime in May or June, running along, few cares in the world, a latter-day Fotherington-Thomas(2), when there was a rustling in the undergrowth and a rufous bundle exploded onto the path and began to bear down on me with murderous intent.

Yes, there. That animal. See? Vicious little bastard. Mean glint in its eye. What? What do you mean “where?” No, its not behind the ruffed grouse, it is the ruffed grouse. Huge sharp …

Okay, they might not be large but size, as we all should know, isn’t everything. After all, when on the rampage they ruff their neck feathers like Nedry’s nemesis, point their wings like the pectorals on a great white shark making its very final approach while at the same time they utter blood-curdling clucks. True, their excuse may be that they were only protecting their newly precocious offspring – “well honestly officer, look at him, all that heavy breathing and dayglo spandex. Wouldn’t you have feared for your children?” – but they are wholly undeterred by any difference in size between them and the object of their fury. They savage ankles without fear or discrimination.

All in all a terrifying experience, enough to make anyone soil their armour. The only thing one can do, in the absence of the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, is, of course, run away. Or if cornered, fend them off with a suitable twig.

Thankfully the rabid grouse season is relatively short lived (coincident with the fledging of offspring) and the chance of encountering ones imminent demise passes by the end of June. Then we can run unmolested again and go back to monitoring whether the chipmunks are stockpiling ordnance for a summer offensive.

But that, as they say, is another story.

1. That may be a gross exaggeration if not a downright lie considering that, aside from the ever present nag of age, the sore achilles, the recalcitrant knees, and the slight lisp the only real pleasure comes when it ends.
2. “He sa, Hello Flowers! Hello Trees! he is uterly wet & a wede.”

Musings: Hemingway and Evolutionary Neuroscience

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I am an “Analytical” on the common “social styles” quadrant used to assess communication styles in the workplace. I doubt this surprises anyone who has spent more than five minutes with me, and my analytic personality even invades my procrastination time. While on reddit the other day (the greatest time sink in the history of the internet), I came across two things:

1. “Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.” -Ernest Hemingway
2. This article.

Both of which I mulled over for a while, and then synthesized them.

1. I think Hemingway is brilliant, but he is clearly speaking from a biased stance of self-reflection, and most likely said this while drunk. However, his sentiment stuck in my mind, as I clearly surround myself with highly intelligent, yet [seemingly] happy people on a daily basis. But then I thought about figures I consider to be highly intelligent, mostly of the artistic variety, who are/were also plagued by at least one of the psychiatric symptoms mentioned in (2.) – anxiety, paranoia, obsession and compulsion. What gives; is there a correlation?

2. If you read the actual paper, you’ll see that the entirety of this study is based on the platform of the Evolutionary Threat Assessment System Theory, a portion of neuropsychology that suggests that parts of the brain (basal ganglia, prefrontal cortex and the limbic system, a set of structures responsible for emotion and memory, primarily) have evolved to detect threats, tangible or intangible. Malfunctions or deformities in this anatomy is suggested to contribute to a spectrum of mental illnesses, but I’ll be focusing on anxiety (as overanalysis often leads down this road). But I wasn’t interested in the ETAST in the context of religion and spirituality; I was concerned with it in the context of intelligence (I know this is a subjective term, but bear with me, this isn’t my forte).

Human intelligence and our understanding of our surroundings and the world in which we live is continuing to evolve. We’re slowly moving away from performing rituals to appease an angry deity, but we aren’t seeing a reduction in generalized anxiety disorders (GAD) in adult populations. This, in some percentage of diagnoses, is surely due to overdiagnosis as well as changes in mental health evaluation. However, I posed that along with high intelligence comes a certain degree of perfectionism and dissatisfaction (perceived threats), which, in some cases may lead to anxiety (an evolved defense mechanism), and in diagnosed GAD patients, to a level of chronic anxiety that is surely maladaptive.

I did find some support for my thoughts throughout my hour of searching (and making a facebook plea to my social scientist friends to help me out). A study published last year demonstrates that in patients diagnosed with GAD, scores on the Wechsler scale of intelligence and IQ tests positively correlate with scores of a “Psychosocial Work Environment and Stress Questionnaire”. Now, to me, these data present issues as they are from a small data set (GAD n=26, healthy n=18) and the tests are obviously quite subjective. However, the study cites several findings supporting that choline levels in the brain can be correlated with neuronal processing integrity, which is positively linked to intelligence. Choline metabolite levels (obtained by specific MRI scan sequences) in GAD patients showed the same positive correlation between IQ and “worry score” as noted by the PWSQ.

Although being a chronic worrier doesn’t necessarily mean one cannot be happy, I think that perhaps both Dr. Coplan of the SUNY Medical Center and Mr. Hemingway are on to something. As someone who has a decent level of intelligence, and one who over-analyzes and frets about nearly everything, I can attest that I am one data point that would support the above hypothesis.

Hard to take puce skin tones seriously?

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The funny things with nerves is that you never know quite when they are going to hit and how badly. I can sometimes stand up in front of a room and feel confident that I know what I am talking about, and that others will be interested to listen, but other times I will be griped by a feeling of rising panic and a flush of blood which makes my face turn puce* (or in the worst cases vivid purple)**. The frustrating thing is the direction it goes does not necessarily seem to linked to the importance of the occasion. I have spoken at conferences with people I would really like to impress in the room feeling pretty unfazed and then panicked at the prospect of saying two sentences to introduce a seminar speaker. I once gave pretty much the same talk three times in two weeks, once during my interview here and then at two conferences in the week after I got back. The first time and the third time were fine, but the second time (where I wasn’t interviewing for a job and at the smaller friendlier of the two conferences) I felt like my head might explode. I also know from chatting to Nicole that I am not alone in this unpredictability of nerves but it does pose a problem on how to deal with them – apart from make-up/a mask with normal skin tone in my case.

*defined in the United States as a brownish-purple color.  In the UK, it is defined as a purple brown or a dark red. In France, where it was invented, it is described as a rather dark reddish brown.Any of these could probably apply.

** As a side note that is my reaction to nerves, others get a wobbly voice or shaking hands, I go very odd colours.

Happy National High Five Day!

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Yes, it really is National High Five day (the third Thursday in April), and I am personally a huge fan of the high five.  For those of you that are too old to appreciate the high five (e.g. Andrew and Matt), the high five is a hand gesture that occurs when two people simultaneously raise one hand about head-level high, and proceed to slap the flats of their palms together against each other.  Sometimes this gesture is proceeded by one person verbally saying “Give me five” or “High five,” but if you happen to be someone that doesn’t recognize when a high five is being invited without the verbal cue you automatically fall into the old person category.  The reason why I love the high five is because it typically represents two people acknowledging an accomplishment spanning from just being friends to actually getting something meaningful done together. 

Here is some history of how the high five got started and its many meanings.  The high five most likely originated as a variant of the “low “ five, which was already prevalent in African American culture since at least World War II, and was given as a greeting between friends.  The first documented case of the “high” five occurred on October 2, 1977 between two baseball players, Dusty Baker and Glenn Burke, on the Los Angeles Dodgers.  Dusty Baker had just hit his 30th homerun during a game against the Astros, which made the Dodgers the first team in history to have four players each with at least 30 homeruns.  So, the players were pretty excited.  Burke, who was waiting on deck, threw his hand up in the air in a major show of enthusiasm to greet his friend as he crossed the plate.  Baker, in response, slapped his hand and the “high” five was officially born.  The Dodgers then went onto popularize this gesture throughout the remaining season, and the high five became a universal gesture of celebration between teammates in the sports arena.  Burke, who was one of the first athletes to be openly gay, went on to use the high five with other homosexual residents of San Francisco after he retired from baseball making it also a symbol of gay pride and identification.  In the nineties there was a falling out of the high five, with many youngsters being too cool for school thinking that the high five was cheesy.  Maybe the Grunge era was when the fist pump got started?

Once the high five originated, there quickly were many variants of the high five radiating out from the site of origin.  If one denies someone a high five, this could be interpreted as the person being too old (e.g. Andrew and Matt), as an insult, or a jest.  There is also the self-high five, which honestly is a bit sad, and our favorite rhyme growing up: “Up high, to the side, down low, your too slow.”  This involved the initiator of the high five to withdraw their hand on the low part of the sequence before their partner has a chance to slap their hand.  And probably my most favorite and most recent addition of the high five is the “air five” or “wi-five,” where two people high five from a distance and never physically touch.

Even though the high five has worn many hats spanning many themes including race, sexual orientation, and athletics, in general it has always represented a symbol of comradery.  So I am a fan, and Happy National High Five Day.  Wi-five to you all.

Pray for rain

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Get psyched, because tarping season is here!  With a 30-foot tarp and four tent spikes in my car, all that’s left is to find a hill and wait for a storm.

Some of you might be unfamiliar with the sport of tarping.  I feel sorry for you.  Or maybe I envy you.  I feel sorry for you because you have never experienced the most enjoyable sport ever created, but I envy you because you are still able to experience tarping for the first time.

Tarping is a sport that was invented by a team of astronomers, physicists, and biologists in Madison, WI during the summer of 2004.  The sport of tarping is comprised of a series of slides in which the participant (slider) travels down a tarp-covered hill.  The goal is for the slider to achieve a higher tarping score than his or her opponents.  Scores range from 0 to 6, with a 6 representing a perfect slide.  These scores are tabulated from 3 equally weighted categories: difficulty, style, and distance (measured on a log scale).  The only rule in tarping is a “no blatant cheating” rule.  Violation of this rule results in the disqualification of that slide’s score (or the previous/next slide if the cheater was not the slider).  There is no longer-term penalty.  Refereeing and judging are performed subjectively by anyone other than the slider (but see no blatant cheating rule).

The regulation tarping field is comprised of 1) a grass-covered hill, 2) a tarp spiked into the ground, and 3) fresh rainwater.  Even with these regulations, every tarping field is unique because of variation in hills, tarps, and rain intensity.  This feature keeps the tarping experience novel, and often results in a “home hill advantage.”

And as a final tip, it gets pretty muddy out there.  Wear old clothes.