One trip

I hate going back and forth from the car to bring in my groceries. This was even worse when I lived in the third floor apartment. Even now on the ground floor, my arms are sometimes dead from carrying a bazillion bags in one trip to the house.

But it is not just groceries. Before I settled in on the couch for some How I Met Your Mother, I tried to foresee what I might need: water, ChocoVine, nail polish remover, cotton balls, nail file, a hand full of Cadbury mini-eggs, my phone, the remote, and my computer. Oh, I made sure to use the bathroom and put on some comfy pants before I sat down. Don't want to get up before I really need to!

[Note: this clearly works most effectively in a household sans children or dogs who may require attention before you truly need to get up.]

K. Off to work on that speech...

Brainstorming

I am the student speaker at my grad school's hooding ceremony. I was very honored when the Dean asked me! I am more nervous about this than I was about my PhD defense though?! I mean you work on something for 4 to a million years to get your PhD, so it makes sense that putting together a defense presentation should not be too overwhelming. Especially when you have spent a few months writing, you are so into your research that it seemed natural for me to put it all together. (That's not to say it was not time consuming to put together my PhD defense!) Also, in the sciences, I am used to putting together a powerpoint with pretty pictures with which to distract the audience...

Talking to all the PhD recipients, their family and friends, and the faculty, administration, and guests of the grad school though? That is intimidating. My goal for this weekend was to brainstorm and start a draft. So far? Nothing. In my defense I am all stuffed up and CF and I wandered around my town for a couple hours and went for a hike yesterday, but still. This is important?!

I have a phone appointment with a tutor of sorts at my grad institution on Tuesday. I really want to get her something by tomorrow so she can see how desperately I need help. :-)

I don't know if I should search for some cheesy quote to use? Should I make it sciencey at all? How can I say something generally applicable without being boring??? I am thinking about starting off pointing out how much more nerve wracking it is to come up with something meaningful and/or inspirational for such a diverse, intelligent, and themselves inspiring group of fellow newly minted PhDs. At least maybe then they'll all give me a break.

ACK!

Lost in translation?

My undergrad had a moment a couple of days ago when he thought he might have to write a (3 - 5 page) paper for next Wednesday. In response to his email, I asked him to double check with our PI about the paper. This is what I emailed to my undergrad:

I will be in lab all day today, as well as next week. If you want me to look at something a little more last minute over email, just give me some notice that it will be coming so I can plan to dedicate time to it.

He did email the PI, and she cc'ed me on her response to him. Below her email saying not to worry about the paper, that his presentation was a substitute for the paper, was his email to her. This is what he had emailed to the PI:

Jenski told me she would be unable to go over a paper under such short notice so I will be unable to have her read and approve it if I do need to create a paper.

Misunderstanding or trying to get what he wants?
I feel like I will need to defend myself to my PI this week when we meet. Oiy.

Cooking and cleaning alternatives

This was going to start out as a cooking PSA, but I have been consciously doing some things around the house cleaning wise to avoid buying expensive cleaners or paper products.

My cooking PSA is for anyone who wants to avoid eggs. As I was cooking oatmeal for breakfast (real Irish oatmeal with a little butter, brown sugar, and berries), I decided to add some flax meal. Why not? On the flaxseed meal bag, it says to mix one tablespoon flaxseed meal with three tablespoons water and let sit for two minutes to substitute for one egg. I have not tried it yet, but if you do, let me know!

I may have mentioned these before too: plain yogurt instead of milk and butter in my Annie's Mac n' Cheese, or a can of pumpkin instead of the water, oil, and eggs in a brownie or cake mix (just bake a little longer; also add pie spices and make vanilla cake mix into muffins this way). I have also heard that a can of diet orange soda in your white cake mix works well instead of all those other ingredients, but I have not tried this either.

I have been using baking soda to get smells out of plastic. I am on year two without a dishwasher, and for salad dressing on plastic or travel mugs, it is really difficult to get them clean by hand. So if you soak them in hot soapy water with some baking soda, it helps A LOT.

I do not use glass cleaner anymore really. I stick to damp microfiber cloths and it seems to work fine. Same with dusting and not using dusting spray. Don't worry, I still use toilet bowl cleaner.

And while I am on a sorta green topic, happy Earth Day. Now that I live in a more rural area, I have started composting sorta. I dump my fruit and veggie waste at the edge of the swamp behind my house. Being that I do not own the place, I did not feel a need for a proper compost pile or bin. I have also started tossing my coffee grounds and the bit of coffee in the bottom of the pot (watered down) into my garden. Why not, right?

Anyone have alternatives or stop using something like cleaners when cooking or cleaning?

Easy for them to say

Once in grad school our student-invited speaker was a funny old white dude from Hah-vahd. He told stories of digging for fossils in the arctic and the big polar bear print he found outside of his tent one morning. He also told us Hah-vahd was not that great. Easy for him to say - He had been a tenured professor there for close to eons!

I went to a seminar today. The speaker was another funny older white dude who told his story about how he got a PNAS paper. He told an interesting story about how getting published in science can go while also telling us about his interesting story. The idea for the research was first submitted to the big British broad science journal that shall remain nameless in 1991. The reviewers all had different takes on why it should not be published and what additional experiments they should add. When they added those experiments and resubmitted a while later, the editor said it was old news and to submit elsewhere.

So they submitted to the big American broad science journal, and reviewers said they needed more proof for their story. A few years later and some really cool science was added to the paper before resubmitting it. The editor said that the story was now an obvious thing and that they should submit elsewhere.

So they submitted to PNAS and the four or five (I can't remember how many) reviewers immediately told the editor upon reading the paper to accept the paper as-is immediately or the journal would lose the opportunity to have this wonderful and creative story published in their journal. This was in 2007. After 16 years of trying to get the story published. The idea never changed, but they kept adding more proof that their original idea was true. The research group that contributed to the ultimate publication had grown from 4 to 10 scientists, and they won an award for their work (not a Nobel, but a prestigious award).

16 years. And the speaker made an aside to the "young people" in the room to note that it took 16 years to get this great story published and that "you shouldn't rush experiments to get a degree." Easy for him to say - He is a famous successful established scientist who already has his PhD. It never ceases to amaze me how older scientists do not seem to realize that graduate school has changed significantly since they were there. Plus a PhD dissertation should not be an entire research program, but rather a part of the PI's research program.

For the record, both scientists seemed to enjoy interacting with trainees. Plus they were both extremely enthusiastic about science and their research and interactive during questions. So while I will chalk up some of the things they said to being established white dudes in science, it was worth listening to their enthusiasm and graciousness and stories.

Generic?

Generic prescription drugs are often argued to be the same as the name brand. When I had my thyroid removed, I asked the doctor why they prescribe a particular replacement hormone over another, and he said no particular reason, but when a patient is on a specific name and dose that works, they do not like to play around with it. He mentioned that "inactive" ingredients can change how a drug is absorbed or works. When I specifically ask doctors to write "no substitutions" for my levoxyl, they all reiterate that with thyroid medication, they particularly do that.

So why is thyroid medication special? In theory, if one thyroid substitution has the same amount of active ingredient as another, they should act the same. Yet physicians seem to believe otherwise.

I always thought my birth control was the generic. Apparently there is a generic-generic. Any woman out there taking hormones probably has experiences some side effect of birth control - migraines and weight gain are common. After 2 months on the generic-generic though, I have lost 4 pounds.

May not sound like much over 4 months, except that I am far from trying to lose weight. When I was having eye problems, I was not going to the gym and have only been averaging twice a week since, I have not changed eating habits at all. Other things I have noticed are that my hair has stopped brekaing/falling out and I am not as tired as I used to be. Now, all of these could have to do with adequate sleep; being productive at work, but not working too much; an end to the chronic stress of graduate school; different water (seriously, my water is really hard and full of iron); more dairy in my diet (lots of people say dairy fat can help with weight loss); quiet at night in the winter, and peepers at night now rather than all cars and sirens; or different inactive ingredients in my prescription drugs...who knows?

Random stuff

These are beautiful animals.
The variation on this Asian beef noodle soup was pretty good. I used rice noodles, beef stock from a boiled dinner last month, dried cilantro, and added some fish sauce.

I know lots of people getting married and having babies recently or in the next six months. Very exciting! I get to be a bridesmaid in one of the weddings and the bride picked red. I am a fan of red.

CF and I just bought tickets to visit his family for a little over two weeks in June. Cross your fingers all those Icelandic volcanoes quiet down a bit.

I did lots at work today - a couple experiments, make up some solutions, read a paper. Productive, huh?

My hair is getting a bit longer and so the bit of wave I have in my hair is noticeable. I asked my sister, the one sibling with curly hair, what she uses to see if I can boost the wave a bit and work with it. We shall see.

I turned a year older on Friday - I am a whipping 31 now.

Dinner and dessert

I do not have any photos, but I do have some good suggestions.

I made Crunchy Chicken salad and have been eating that for lunch every day. According to my mom's recipe, this is from Food and Wine magazine February 1991. [Look at her citing her source?!] It is, of course, not online. So check out the comments if you want a summer chicken salad.

For my birthday/lab meeting tomorrow, I made lemon-lime refrigerator cake. After googling a recipe, my guess is this originated from a jello box or something. My version of the recipe is only slightly different from the link - it calls for you to mix 1 1/2 c cold milk with the instant pudding and then when it is set, to fold in the cool whip. This time around, I apparently did not get instant pudding, and only realized this when I already dumped it in the milk and could no longer go back and just make real pudding. SO, I think I'll carry the cool whip to work, put that on top, and maybe bring some sliced strawberries to make it look fancy.

Have a good weekend! CF came up with fun activities for my birthday weekend to fit in between him collecting poop and blood samples for his research in the middle of the night, so maybe I'll have pictures or something non-sciencey to post next week.

Giver-taker-backer

Yeah, I'm sure that you've heard those three words from lovers and they fell flat,
But this ring ain't something I need to give you and then take back,
I'm a little more country than that

I decided today that science is a giver-taker-backer and I like the above song. I heard that name on some sitcom a bazillion years ago and it stuck with me for a reason. This post is also going to be a mix of a post I keep composing in my head titled something like, "Validation". Also, sometimes I think science mixes up the order of giving and taking back just keep you on your toes. Here is a nice mix of science doing just that.

My PhD advisor's method of mentoring did not do well for me. My new advisor will make comments like, "Things seem to be going well," "You'll have those results by the conference," "That's exactly what you should do," and "Yes, that would be interesting to know." I appreciate feeling like I am doing something right.

I started getting results at lab. I have some pictures from the microscope that I think are beautiful, but nothing that provides an answer.

My PhD advisor was a stickler (sorta) when it came to the timing of publishing and defending. Within this week though, I finished proofing the [in press] version of one manuscript and the last small paper was accepted with minor revisions. All that disagreement over how defending and publishing would go with her, and it ends well.

Sometimes I think science just pushes you down until you are ready to quit and then gives you something good to keep you going. Science should be more country than that.

You be the judge

My PhD advisor was SUPER stubborn about having our first author papers accepted for publication before she would consider setting a defense date. Now, I was only her second PhD student, and my friend was a year ahead of me as her first PhD student. Some of her actions I believe were a result of the lack of experience she had mentoring grad students. I do not remember the timing, but within the week before my friend defended, her paper was accepted for publication, and our advisor informed her that she was lucky. I pushed my advisor hard to defend, had a post-doc and was awarded a spot on the university's training grant, so she reached a point that she could no longer rationalize keeping me there. Also, I had a first author paper in my third year, so we were trying to get my second (and a communication short paper) accepted. She also tended to blame a lack of communication and timing of paper submission on us.

Okay. Looking at my email history. She sent me an email around Thanksgiving suggesting that we get my paper submitted before I defend. I sent her all the files in a single email clearly labeled and suggested she look through them before submitting. The paper was not submitted before I defended. A week after I defended (mid-December), I sent her a follow up email about this and the communication paper. She emails me two days before Christmas to tell me she has not had time to submit (the finalized files I sent her three weeks earlier). Then January 5th she emails me requesting a whole bunch of the files for submission and attaches three earlier versions of the figures.

After I cooled off, the next morning I forwarded her the email I sent her a month and three days earlier with all of the files she was now requesting and the finalized figures.

Fast forward past two rounds of revisions and finally getting my paper accepted. This morning I am going through the page proofs and some of the lines in the figures look funny. I am looking at a black and white print out though, so I pull up the file. Sure enough she submitted the older versions of the figures not the ones I attached to an email...twice. I fully admit that this is something I should have caught for the first or second revision submissions, but who else should hold some responsibility for communication and timing of paper submission, huh? I sent her all the files together - all she had to do was submit the files in that email.

Also, we only submitted the shorter paper because I happened to email her three days before she had a planned vacation that I did not previously know about. In this email I pointed out that I had sent her a draft of the paper a month earlier and that I thought it was ready to submit. Who can't read a 5 page paper in a month and submit it?

There are a bunch of posts on the science-y blogs I have been reading, so if you end up here and are in the sciences and are curious what type of publishing environment my PhD lab was: My advisor had one paper from the institution when she received tenure. The MS and two PhD students she had (including me) published four papers in the three years after her tenure. She submitted a grant on my project last summer because all PIs on a grant the department was submitting had to have individual grants in the agency's system in order for the department to submit the group grant. She was not ready to submit a grant on her favorite project, so she just whipped one up on mine, NBD. I actually confronted her because she did not show interest in my project and here she was submitting a grant when I was trying to finish and going on interviews even though she had previously said in lab meeting this grant would be on her favorite project. I think if she was as interested in my project or the possibility of continuing it, she would have been more interested in getting the papers out, but that is just me.

Back to looking for her mistakes in the page proofs.

Sources

When teaching intro science labs, TAs were expected to really focus on scientific writing. This is probably good because the labs we led had not changed in a bazillion years and were generally pretty dry. Writing seemed like a good thing to try to teach the young'uns, even though they all (incorrectly) think they are awesome at it. Plagiarism is HUGE deal in academia, from the teaching and research perspectives. Just as important as citing your sources and not copying what they say word-for-word though is choosing reliable and accurate sources. Google has academic resources (though not as complete as other indexes I have found) and there are other public, private, for profit, not for profit, opinions, blogs, and whatever else out there you could happen upon. You really need to learn how to evaluate a source and determine if it is accurate for your purpose, otherwise it is easy to perpetuate a non-truth.

For my graduate work, one of the publications I regularly cited had a concentration we used to base our initial experiments on. The authors stated this concentration and cited their source. About a year and a half (6 months of which I was rotating in another lab on a different project, so really after about a year of working on my dissertation research), I was finally able to track down their source*. And they had cited it wrong. By a factor of 1000. I think I know how this happened because they had changed the units the original source used and probably got it mixed up. It ended up making life difficult. (Who cares because I am finished with that research project now, right?)

As a result of how difficult it is to navigate a citation train*, I was really conscientious about including details and original sources of that information in my final publication, for example the actual name for a particular body part or protein size, and the reviewers said it was too "jargony". How can the actual name of something be jargony? But I digress.

I think determining the validity and truth of your sources is important for everyone though, not just "academics". This hits me the most when I listen to politicians and read the news. I do not know if politics have become more political, if issues the government is now tackling are more controversial, if Americans have forgotten how to compromise to improve the overall state of our nation (and similarly in other countries), or if as I have gotten a bit older and with the training I have had as a scientist, I just am more aware of the contradictions, irrationality, and lack of source citing in statements that are made.

I had a couple of examples in real life that I was going to post, but I will just say, if you forward an email you received or believe everything you see on TV, do yourself a favor and pause next time to at least check it out on google and decide for yourself if the source is reliable or if there is something else to consider. If you do not have facts that might back up something you believe strongly in, that is fine, but do not make stuff up!

* By “citation train” I mean when you look something up and they cite the point, then you look that up and they have cited it too. Then you look that up and they have cited it too…until maybe, eventually, you will find the original source that “proved” something. A patent lawyer friend of mine once asked that I not do that - it is time consuming to sort this stuff out!

I try

From CF's favorite country musician (or at least one of his favorites):

She's as pretty as a picture
Every bit as funny as she is smart
Got a smile that'll hold you together
And a touch that'll tear you apart
When she's yours she brings the sunshine
When she's gone the world goes dark
Yeah she's heaven on the eyes
But boy she's hell on the heart

Dirt and sawdust

This spring seems springier than previous springs. I think it is from all the nature around me though. In grad school, it would get nice in the spring, the undergrads would start wearing less clothing, the starlings would get all frisky, and there would be more people walking around. Here in the Midwest though, there is more animal activity.

I attribute this perceived springiness to the variety of animals around and early farming activities around where I live. I grew up in Vermont and New Hampshire though, so I think it is a little strange that this catches my attention so much. My bird feeder has been busy. At night, I can go to sleep to the sound of all the peepers in the swamp behind my house and wake up to the birds singing in the morning. And of course, the undergrads here are all of a sudden wearing sun dresses when it is still barely 65 degrees out.

This morning was a good example of what I keep noticing. In a short half hour drive, I saw three turkey vultures in a field presumably eating something, one with its wings spread open. A ring-necked pheasant also crossed the road in front of my car. There was also a farmer flowing his field and it smelled of fresh dirt. At another house, a man was cutting up a tree he had felled. I can't wait until the first fresh-cut grass of spring.