COMMON!

Summer is gone... sigh

The new semester starts in 3 days, and I realize that I haven't posted in over a month. Part of the reason is that I found myself a little burnt out and discouraged. The other reason is that I have been taking a mental siesta during this time.

Let's just say the past few months haven't exactly gone according to plan. In my last post I was lamenting about how no matter how much time or effort I was putting into writing, it never reaches completion. A few weeks after writing that post my working group turned in the third(?) version of our review paper for my adviser to look over. Then we didn't hear anything for a few weeks. After making three figures, editing the crap out of the paper, and various people (including myself) leaving town, I more or less had moved on from this project. In my naivety I figured we were more or less done. Oh how wrong I was.

I strolled into my office the other day, my first day back at my desk for almost 3 weeks, and the first thing I see is our paper on my chair. Bleeding. It actually had more comments on it than the previous version. This isn't the end of the world, the figures aren't going to change and the edits are somewhat minor, but COMMON! I'm so over this.

Here's the thing. It's already a really well written paper, I have no problem saying that. Many of the edits are wordsmithing or tweaking, and I'm just not up for this. Granted, some of them are worth following up on, but others kind of change the meaning of what was originally written. And that drives me nuts. I've gone over all the comments, and Meghan and I are going to work on this some over the weekend or next week.Then maybe it'll be done? Maybe?

I also discovered another orphaned paper that somehow ended up on my desk: a non-dissertation related side project left over from a class last semester. I contacted the people involved with it yesterday to see if we could resurrect it and get it done, but so far I have heard nothing. I've decided I'm not even going to worry about it, it's not going anywhere as far as I'm concerned, and I can come back to it whenever. I just don't want to see it never come to completion, especially since so many man hours have already gone into it.

Since I'm not made of time or energy, I'm going to have to start forcing myself to not work so much on side projects. They have their place, but right now I have dissertation proposals to write and comps to get ready for.

Asymptotes

"In analytic geometry, an asymptote of a curve is a line such that the distance between the curve and the line approaches zero as they tend to infinity." -Wikipedia

Figure 1. Time, effort, and perfection. You're never gonna get there.
http://joyfulpublicspeaking.blogspot.com/2011/02/effort-and-asymptote.html

That is, the curve never actually reaches the line. It just gets really, really, really close.


Such is the case with "finishing" an academic project. In my case the "curve" is the paper I've been working on, but really it could be anything academic. A thesis, a project, and experiment, etc. etc. Whatever. The "line" is the completion status of the thing I'm working on. And no matter how hard I work on it, no matter how much time I put into it, I will never ever reach completion. It simply won't happen.


For me, the hardest parts of writing a paper are the very beginning and the very end. The beginning is rough because I have a difficult time building up motivation and getting over the initial hump; but, once I start writing I see the progress being made and it comes easier. The end is even more painful to get through, however, and it is all because of this asymptotic approach to completion. The last 10% of a paper takes an absurd amount of time to get through.


I know perfectly well this paper will never be good enough for my own standards. I know that eventually I'm going to have to just let it go, because any more time invested in it will just give me diminishing returns (see Figure 1). It just eventually becomes more work than it is worth. And that is how you know when a project is "done", even if it technically isn't. 

Because it can't be. It's mathematically impossible. And there's no use driving yourself crazy over it.


But for me, for right now, I think I've yet to reach that critical point where I feel like I'm wasting my time. So I'm off to the crazy factory for a couple more days of staring blankly at my computer screen. 

I'll stop if I start to go cross-eyed.

Academic Flailing

This is a topic I've intended to write on for a while now: academic flailing. I'm bringing this up now because I've been trying to learn how to do something new all on my own and it's taken me months to only be half successful with nothing to really show for it yet.

What's been going on is I have been working on a paper with some friends/colleagues since December. We originally intended to have the paper written and submitted some time in February or March. If you check the time stamp on this post you'll note that I'm writing this in mid June. So we're a "little" off target, needless to say.

The paper is, broadly speaking, a review on niche modeling. Somehow or another it was determined that we should DO a species distribution model to make a figure illustrating some of the points we were making in the paper. The only problem is that no one in our group does this kind of modeling. And I ended up being the one to take on this task while writing and editing continued.

Cut to the punch line: it's been two months, I've sort of learned enough about what I'm doing to be dangerous, but the result thus far hasn't ended up being particularly useful. I'm stubborn as hell and I'm going to do this, but I'm getting frustrated and exhausted fighting with this thing day after day, week after week (month after month). It's been a very steep learning curve, trying to teach myself how to do this thing no one in my lab knows how to do. I would seek out the help of outside people, but I feel like I need a basic understanding before I can even begin to ask them intelligent questions.

And so I've been flailing.

Science is, often, directed flailing. You flail, and flail, and then flail some more. And then sometimes, maybe, you end up somewhere. It's a lot like me swimming. I can keep myself from drowning, and if I point myself in a particular direction I can get from point A to point B. But it isn't pretty to watch.

It's kind of a funny analogy, unless you're the one who's been trying to keep their head above water for an obscene amount of time. And I'm tired, damn it.

First Publication

I got an email today from the editor of my book chapter, forwarded from Felisa (even though I'm first author), indicating that the electronic version of the book we contributed to is available online.

Paleoecology in an Era of Climate Change: How the Past Can Provide Insights Into the Future

Abstract:

Anthropogenic climate change is the most prominent conservation issue of our time. Expectations are that the Earth’s climate will warm ~2.5–6.5° within the next century. The accompanying biological consequences will no doubt be huge. How will the diversity of life on our planet respond to rapid climate change? The best way to predict the future may be to examine the past as biota have experienced numerous episodes of climate fluctuation throughout geologic time. Some of these climatic fluctuations, particularly those of the late Quaternary, have been as rapid as those anticipated by climate warming scenarios. Analysis of the paleontological record can yield valuable information on how past climate change has shaped biodiversity in the past, and provide clues for what we may expect in the future. 

Paleontology in Ecology and Conservation

Springer Earth System Sciences, 2012, 93-116, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-25038-5_6

This is very exciting, and it gave me a boost this morning. I was kind of dragging when I got in to work today. Good news is always nice, and I'm going to try to ride the momentum through the day.

Peer Review Process

I apologize for the hiatus, I've had some personal stuff going on and an existential crisis that is still looming over me. But I'll leave that for another post once I have time to process what I've been going through. For now I want to talk about my first experience as a reviewer.

Over spring break I received an email from a fairly big name journal in which I was asked to peer review a submission. How I came to get this email became clear once I saw the name of the editor that selected me as a reviewer: it was my adviser. Advisers often have their graduate students review papers they themselves are selected for, mostly to give the student experience doing something that is important to the scientific publication process, but also in part (I suspect) to clear things off their own desks. This request from Felisa was slightly different since I was directly asked as a primary reviewer.

The most amusing part of the email was that it was addressed to "Dr. Pardi". Cart before the horse.

For those who didn't know this already, the peer review process involves sending out manuscripts to other people in the scientific community for critique before publication. Reviewers identify weaknesses in the science or analyses of a paper, and the authors receive these comments. Reviewers can request that additional analyses be made, or if a paper is really bad they can indicate that they feel the paper shouldn't be published at all. In summary, it is quality control that the scientific community has embraced as a whole. It can, unfortunately, be a painful process for many involved.

I can't go into details about the paper I received, but I'm kind of nervous about being the person who is judging someone else's work. Almost everyone I know has gotten nasty reviews back on a grant or a paper before. Reviewers can be brutal, unnecessarily so. They can also give away their own ignorance by making irrelevant or stupid criticisms when they aren't necessarily an expert in the topic they are reviewing. I don't want to be either of these kinds of reviewers, and it is that second category that I am particularly wary of falling into.

Having said all this, I'm going to try to do this one on my own, at least initially. It turns out that I do know a bit about the subject matter, enough to refer Felisa to other people who would also make good reviewers if she needed anyone else. I have until April 10th the get this done, and my goal is to get it done early and do it right without being a jerk or sounding like a moron.

Sick Start to the Semester

Well no sooner did classes begin did I catch a cold. I've been coughing up a lung all week. I've noticed a lot of people around me coughing, so I think there is probably something going around. At first I was worried that it was my allergies (new kitty), but then Matt started having a sore throat and post nasal drip too. I feel pretty confident now that I've been actually sick all week.

Aside from this minor health setback, the first week of school went pretty well. I like my classes so far, although I'm already anxious about Macroecology. We have two assignments, the first being a class project with very little guidance from the instructors. I'm a little nervous trying to work on something with 25 people, but it isn't due until April. The class is already trying to organize itself, and if we can pull it off we'll hopefully finish the semester with a paper we can submit to a journal for publication.

The rest of my classes just seem like they're going to be fun. My working group is also trying to reorganize ourselves to get back to writing our paper. We got an extension, and I've been trying to do more background reading. At the moment I don't feel competent enough to do much writing, but that will come eventually.

Done? Really?

Seriously, this just in! The only thing standing between me and my book chapter is the consent form.
25 pages, 158 references, and 4 figures have been completed, corrected, and sent off to the editor as of this evening.

To celebrate, I bought a new laptop. My current one has been dying a slow death for the past two years, and it recently started sending me error messages about not recognizing the power adapter. That was the last straw. Just for the record, writing a book on a stodgy computer is hard. I don't recommend it.

I won't be making any money from this book, but the sense of accomplishment feels pretty good anyway. It's also not indexed, so the publication "technically" doesn't have the weight of a peer reviewed pub. But it's still something I can put on my CV. The blank area for publications will now have something there, and I'm relieved for that.

The name of the book is Paleoecology in Ecology and Conservation, my chapter (Ch. 6) is Paleoecology in an era of climate change: how the past can provide insights into the future

That's all I can say about it for now. Springer is publishing it, and I have no idea when it will come out in print, but rest assured that I will post that information as soon as I know it!


Cheers everyone. I'm off to enjoy the remainder of my break.