The End?

I had a surreal moment yesterday afternoon. I suddenly became aware that the semester was ending, and I was caught off guard. It sounds dumb, but it hadn't actually registered in my head that the reason my big-ass class project was due this week was because we only have a week left of class, and then finals week is after, and then nothing. I recall a couple weeks ago being kind of annoyed because it felt like it was due "too soon" in the semester. No. It is due exactly when it should be.

I don't know if it's because I don't really have exams anymore, or I'm not teaching, but at the end of both this past fall and this spring I have had almost zero concept of time and the calendar. A week goes by, a month goes by, and it's all the same to me. I recall I was having anxiety over something back in February, and I felt like I been dealing with it for several weeks. Turns out I was way off, it had only been one week.

Maybe I'm impatient, and that is screwing with my concept of time. I'm simultaneously tired of waiting for certain things, and other things can take their sweet time for all I care. I've also been very distracted lately, which means I'm not really paying attention to many things around me, like time.

This hasn't had any permanent or detrimental consequences, yet, so I'm not worried.
I'm living in the moment, for now.

Peer Review Take Three: Done!

So it was down to the due date, but I managed to submit my review to the editor before 10pm tonight. Comments to the editor: check. Comments to the author: check. Annotated PDF: check. I feel relatively good about this, seeing as how this was my first time. I probably spent more time on this than I should have, but from what I hear that is typical. I probably missed some details on some things and didn't give enough feed back on another thing. But it is done and off my desk.

At the very least I can hope that one of the other reviewers was more experienced than me and will pick up on stuff I missed. I was reviewer #2, so I know that at the very least one other person besides me and the editor looked at this thing.

The one thing I really appreciated about the manuscript was that it was really well written, despite any complaints I did end up making about clarity. I've read published papers before where I have absolutely no idea what is going on. At the very least that didn't happen this time around.

I get to add this to my CV right? This was a submission for a pretty big journal. I feel like I should be able to brag about it.

Peer Review Take Two and Spring Fever

I've been staring at my screen all afternoon, knowing full well that I'm not getting anything done, and that the review for this paper is due. Tomorrow.

I remember times when I was productive. Like a couple weeks ago, I was sitting at home feeling blue so I went to my friend Natalie's apartment and magically spat out my presentation for lab group in no time. Or last semester, when I worked furiously for two weeks on a grant submission for the EPA. Or back when I was an undergrad and I would get my second wind at around 11pm, and then spend 3+ hours in the computer lab working on my senior thesis.

No such luck this week.

It's not that I don't want to do this peer review. I do. I believe strongly in the peer review process, and it is actually a really interesting paper I'm going over. Its just been an emotionally exhausting couple of months, and I never really fully checked back in (mentally) after winter break. You read that correctly... winter break... as in January. It's April. And I have a million other things on my mind other than school/work.

I have a really hard time working when my mind is other places. My brain doesn't shut off, and I am one of those people that will ruminate over the same thing over and over and over again until it is resolved either in reality or in my head. I've never been diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder, but lately I sure have been feeling like I'm afflicted.

At any rate, I've read the paper that I'm reviewing in excruciating detail, and I've made lots of annotations to the PDF directly. Now it's a matter of writing out my comments for the editor and the author. That is going to be the thing that will require a lot of activation energy on my part. The Word document is open on my desktop. The major bullet points for the things I want to address are typed. I just need to do it.

But all I really want to do right now is go lay on some grass somewhere, watch clouds float by, and think about what I'm doing with my life.

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.

Don't Call A Woman A Slut

I'm going to digress for a bit from my usual banter about my life and school to bring you...

Rush Limbaugh

What he actually said:

“What does it say about the college co-ed Sandra Fluke, who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex? What does that make her?” Limbaugh said on his radio show on Wednesday. “It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex. She’s having so much sex she can’t afford the contraception. She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex. What does that make us? We’re the pimps.”

What he wants us to think he meant based on his "apology":

"I think it is absolutely absurd that during these very serious political times, we are discussing personal sexual recreational activities before members of Congress. I personally do not agree that American citizens should pay for these social activities. What happened to personal responsibility and accountability? Where do we draw the line? If this is accepted as the norm, what will follow? Will we be debating if taxpayers should pay for new sneakers for all students that are interested in running to keep fit? In my monologue, I posited that it is not our business whatsoever to know what is going on in anyone's bedroom nor do I think it is a topic that should reach a Presidential level."

I'm not an English major, but these two statements have very little to do with each other. The first is a sad man's attempt to entertain or be humorous in a way that is crude, misogynistic, and inappropriate. The second statement could be a well articulated social commentary if you ignore the fact that it uses straw man arguments, logical fallacies, inaccurate information, and completely misses the subtle nuances of the debate. Never mind that he clearly has no idea how hormonal contraception works or what else it is used for. Limbaugh would have been better off using that second statement if his goal had, in fact, been to make a social commentary. But that wasn't his goal. His only goal is to maintain listeners who for some reason like to hear his big mouth flapping. And it's sad that in this day and age that sort of things sells. We really are that unsophisticated as a society.

This isn't about being or not being politically correct. This whole thing speaks to a deeper issue about how our collective perception of women is still in the dark ages. What Limbaugh said is appalling, but what might be even more disturbing is that some people actually came to his defense. You can't justify what he said without conceding that it's okay to be verbally abusive. He used this woman. He used her to boost ratings for his show. When you use someone, you dehumanize them. And when you dehumanize someone it makes it that much easier to keep abusing them. I suspect this is why he initially double down on his comments and didn't apologize until he started losing sponsors from his show.

Based on the content of his "apology" Limbaugh is giving the impression that he wants to talk about personal responsibility and accountability. If he wants to be responsible he can start by not promoting misogynistic hate speech. And if he keeps it up, he should be held accountable. Here is a reddit posting with his list of sponsors, you might not want to buy their stuff if they sponsor such trash in the media: http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/qg3tx/a_comprehensive_list_of_rush_limbaugh_ad_sponsors/

Soul Searching

This is kind of a weird post to be putting up on a blog about getting a PhD. I've actually been second guessing whether or not a PhD would actually be a good idea for me or not. This might seem like it's coming out of nowhere, but this has been nagging at me for a while now. In the past I've jokingly made long lists of all the things I could feasibly do if this doesn't work out. Some of the things on that list are silly, like being a dancer at a club (haha); still, other things I could see myself doing. More importantly, I can see myself being happy and less stressed out doing them.

I can do research. I understand research. I like learning new things and I actually enjoy teaching people quite a bit. I've talked in the past about how I can't imagine myself doing anything other than being a college professor. Lately, though, I've been questioning 1) whether I'll get the satisfaction out of it that I thought I would and 2) if I have the personality to be constantly vying for grants and publications and status. If I'm stressed and worried now, that's not going to change if I graduate. If I become a professor I will be doing that for the rest of my working life. I want to be more laid back than that.

I sometimes think I'd be happier with a regular job where I have time to pursue other interests. Where my entire existence doesn't revolve around one thing. Some of the people I go to school with just seem like they're always "on", always talking about work. I have other interests besides my research and I'm really frustrated that I feel like I have no time for them. And I don't know how to tell people that I don't want to talk shop all the time.

Maybe I want a career where I feel like I'm making a tangible difference? I can sort of relate what I'm doing now to real world problems... but it's so far removed that I'll never be able to pin point a single event or person and say "Yes, I helped!" Other jobs are much more directly in contact with the real world, like doctors, nurses, paramedics etc. Stopping someone from bleeding to death... yeah, that is pretty direct. I'm not even sure at this point that I want to be an academic. Maybe a government or industry job would be more fitting for me, but there aren't too many jobs like that for paleontologists. I just know that right now I feel like I don't want to be at a research university forever.

I have two degrees, I've been in school for almost 9 years, not counting the one I took off. I hated what I was doing during that year off, it was a crappy job. But a lot has changed since then and I have more experience doing other things. Surely I could find something that makes me happier than what I was doing then? Maybe I need to do something completely different. I know plenty of people who went to college for one thing and then ended up doing something else that was unrelated.

I'm not making any decisions right now, but I am re-evaluating what I'm doing with my life. I'm going to stick it out for the rest of the semester, think about my options, and then just take it as it comes. My philosophy going in to graduate school was that if it doesn't work out it isn't the end of the world. And I don't want to waste my time being unhappy. I believe there are very few instances where we can't change our trajectory. I'm freaking out now and feeling really badly about all this, but I have to keep this all in perspective.

Duck Sex

For those who don't know, mallards are pretty aggressive this time of the year. They're kind of mean jerks most of the time, but late winter/early spring they are particularly bad. The reason for this increase in obnoxiousness is, obviously, because it's time for the ducks to start pairing up and mating.

I've been attending college for the better part of a decade. All of those campuses I've been at have duck ponds, with a ton of mallards, yet somehow I've never seen "the deed" being done. I'm not a wildlife voyeur mind you, but as someone who is interested in nature and spends a lot of time outside I just think it's kind of weird this has never happened. All that changed yesterday.

I went out for tea yesterday morning and wandered down to the bridge at the duck pond. I was pondering the mysteries of life enjoying my London Fog, and as I was standing there my friend Lee walked by and we chatted for a bit about ducks and Pleistocene fauna. As we were standing there I noticed something weird; I thought I had been observing two ducks, but for some reason I now only saw one duck sort of struggling in the water. It turns out that there WERE two ducks, but one was under water, beneath the other duck. It was a strange moment, one where it probably took me longer to figure out what was going on than it should have. Awkward.

The whole incident probably took all of 5 seconds, so the female wasn't in any real danger of drowning. But the most ridiculous part came at the end, when the male bit the female in the head and then did a victory lap around her.

I told you mallards were jerks.