Vegetarian Zombies

I DON'T CARE IF IT'S FRIDAY, THIS IS A QUIZ.

My teenage daughter and some friends came up with a list of possible topics for a character in a theater project. Scan this list and see if you can detect the one that I think does not belong in this list:

Person going through a divorce because he cheated on wife
College student sleeping with best friend's girlfriend
Fifteen year old breaks up with boy/girlfriend over FB
15 year old loser -- family issues, no money, school drop out
Bartender -- free alcohol, works late, loves job
Stripper -- paid well, diseased boyfriend trouble
Meth addict -- depression, well-paid job, boyfriend troubles, no friends
Prostitute who is beaten up by a pimp
Kid starting college - doesn't want anyone to know his mom works there
Gay teenager about to come out
Guilty serial killer
Vegetarian zombies
Cannibals
Tiger Woods
Drug addicted wrestler
A drunk priest
A man addicted to helium

Reorient Express

Fellow professors: In the past few weeks/months, days, I know that many of you have looked on with intense jealousy and longing as the first-year students on your campus have participated in a variety of fun and stimulating orientation activities, many involving awesome bonding rituals and cool games. On some campuses, new faculty also have their very own orientation events. We old professors are entirely left out of all of these reindeer games.

I am going to fix that.

No, I am not going to start a nationwide or local crusade to convince administrators to (re)orient returning faculty. My efforts are going to be confined to this blog. Yes, I know that is ambitious, but I am highly caffeinated at the moment, and that is what I want to do.

So here goes.

Activity 1. Everyone must stand in a (virtual) circle and hold (virtual) hands. Now, one person (not me) will stand in the middle of the circle and impersonate a chicken (I saw this with my own eyes not long ago while walking by an orientation flock and I have no idea why one of the orienters or orientees was imitating a chicken but it really happened and so we are going to do it as well, for authenticity).

OK, now that that disturbing ice-breaking event is out of the way, I want each of you to think about your most memorable teaching experience.

Now I want a volunteer to act out this experience, without any words, and the rest of us will try to guess what happened and whether it was a good or bad experience. You, over there on the right, the professor with the hair, you can go first.



















Great! Thanks! Now let's guess what happened and why it was so memorable.

[Leave your guesses in the comments. Note: I totally made this up. There is no one right answer. This is like those cartoons without captions at the back of The New Yorker, except the drawing is maybe a bit more impressionistic.]

Activity 2. OK, professors, now take a seat anywhere over there, and try to sit next to someone you haven't met yet, even if they are from a bioscience department.

Introduce yourself to the person sitting on your right (name, department, PhD year/school, h-index), and ask each other What is your favorite dimensionless number? If you feel an egg being placed on top of your head, you must stand up and explain your new friend's favorite dimensionless parameter to the rest of the group.

After you meet your neighbor, I want you take a piece of paper or a personal electronic device and draw a graph that accurately depicts how you feel about advising a typical graduate student, from before they arrive on campus up until their thesis defense. The x-axis is time, but on the y-axis, you can graph any emotion that you want. Add whatever labels you want.

Does anyone have any questions?

Sure, that's fine, you can use a log scale. Whatever best depicts your feelings through time.

Yep, negative numbers are cool, too.

No, I don't think it's a good idea to have your time scale be too fine. If you use 15 minute increments, you won't be ready to share with the rest of the group when we have circle time in about half an hour.

If the red marker is dry, you will just have to use a different color. Yes, you still have to draw the graph even if you don't have a red marker. You can use any color or colors to help you depict your emotions.

If your iPad battery is dead, you are just going to have to use paper. No, you cannot leave now.

Sorry, we do not have real graph paper. No, not even a straight edge. The graph doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to convey your feelings.

Please don't calculate the slope of each line. Just make a picture that you can show and explain to your new friends.

[Results to be displayed tomorrow.]

Can You Top This?

Recently, a colleague said to me:

I just had the strangest interaction with a student.

He was quite emphatic that this was the strangest interaction ever.

Knowing this colleague and many of his students, I was skeptical. Here is what happened:

He was talking to an undergraduate student about the student's summer research results. In mid-conversation, while my colleague was speaking directly to the student, the student fell sound asleep, sitting upright in a chair. This was not in a class; this was a one-on-one conversation in the professor's office.

Did the student faint or have another health problem? No, according to the student.

Did the student stay up all night working (or whatever) and succumb to sleep owing to severe sleep deprivation? No, the student claimed to be "quite well rested".

[Memo to students who fall asleep while in conversation with a professor: It's better/nicer to say you are severely sleep deprived.]

Fortunately, this colleague and I were en route to caffeine when he told me this story, otherwise I would have dropped off to sleep. He has that effect on people. Apparently.

Actually, I was fascinated. It would be weird and disconcerting to have a student fall asleep in the middle of a conversation.

Even so, I expressed my skepticism that it was the strangest student-professor incident he had ever experienced, and mentioned a few spectacular examples from the past. For each one of these examples, he said "Yes, but s/he was crazy." Yes... true.

His point is that this was the strangest experience he had ever had while interacting with an apparently sane and healthy student.

Have any of you ever had a (healthy, non-narcoleptic) student drop off to sleep in the middle of a one-on-one conversation? What did you do? Wake them up? Sit quietly and wait for them to wake up? Walk away? Put an embarrassing sign on their back? Call 911?

Year ago, some friends and I handcuffed a sleeping student to an egg-beater (the manual kind), but I was also a student at the time, so this was OK. Now that I am a responsible and mature professor, I might think about handcuffing someone to an eggbeater, but I wouldn't actually do it.

Please share your stories of strange (but not crazy/disturbing) incidents of professor-student interactions.

I have previously requested examples of the strangest things to happen in class, but now we are considering one-on-one professional interactions between professors and students. I am hoping to be impressed by a wide array of weird-but-not-too-disturbing incidents.

Minty Fresh Face

As I may have mentioned before, this summer has been extremely busy for me. It is the first summer ever that I have not had time to visit my family and the ancestral home.

Those who have read this blog for a while will know that I have mixed feelings about those home visits, but even so, it is strange and disconcerting not to make my annual trek to see my parents and aunts and uncles and cousins and to have various traditional summer adventures in the place where I grew up.

I thought I could power through the summer and early fall, energized by all the cool science my students, colleagues, and I are doing. And, so far, I have indeed been powering through the summer. It is difficult to stay energized all the time, of course, particularly when traveling a lot, but I have been doing fine, having fun, and getting (interesting) things done. It's been great.

Until the recent morning when I woke up very tired, got ready for my day with my eyes barely open, and smeared toothpaste on my face, thinking it was lotion or sunscreen, or something.

I don't know if you have ever smeared toothpaste all over your face, but in case you have not: (1) I don't recommend it, and (2) I will tell you that you can easily tell that it is not lotion or sunscreen. And if you can't tell easily, I fear for you because, even in my exhausted state, I knew right away that something was wrong.

I still don't have time for a vacation, but I think I will try to insert a bit of relaxation and recreation into my schedule in the next week or two so that I don't completely lose my mind. It is better in the long run to take a break for sanity and health than to work work work until you drop.

Of course, young students and postdocs don't need (or want) such breaks; this cautionary tale refers only to people over 45.*





[* attempt at humor]

The Awesome Lab of Significant Science, and Stuff

A few years ago, I decided to name one of my laboratory rooms. This particular lab is a nice little room, conveniently located. In it, various members of my research group do mundane but essential research activities.

I decided to give this little room an Awesome Name: a long, formal, jargony name that indicated the simple tasks performed in this room in a very impressive way. I made a sign and stuck it on the door. I did it entirely to amuse myself. There was no other reason.

The weird thing is that, although my group had been doing these same basic research tasks with essentially the same equipment for years (with a few modern additions now and then), once the lab had an Awesome Name, I started getting queries from other people about using this lab. I even saw the stupid-joke name of the lab show up in proposals by others who used, or planned to use, this lab.

I never use this joke-name for the lab; in official and semi-official (web) listings of facilities, the lab has a boring, simple name that describes what we do there.

I saw the joke-name again recently in a proposal-related document, and now I wonder if I should take down the sign with the Awesome Name. The joke-name is so over-the-top obnoxious that anyone who doesn't 'get' the joke -- i.e., everyone but me and maybe one of my cats -- must surely think I am a pompous jerk rather than (or in addition to being) someone who makes jokes no one else thinks are funny.

I am fascinated by the fact that (1) so many people think this is a serious name, and (2) the lab got noticed more once it had an impressive-sounding name, albeit a really stupid one.

I have no good explanation for (2), and the most obvious explanation for the lack of humor-detection is that it's really not funny, but I wonder whether a tiny part of the explanation for this is that people don't expect humor -- even of the nerdy, strange sort -- in this setting.

Does anyone else believe that? I know lots of people who give strange names to their Lab Machines and Computers, but these are typically obviously nicknames or the names aren't written down or, if they are, on some informal sign. Or maybe there is an inside jokey name that everyone knows. The Awesome Name of my lab room isn't obviously a joke (clearly) and therefore might be sort-of believable in a stereotypical 'academic' context, although it makes me a bit sad to think so.

In the case of my lab, maybe I shouldn't have pretended that it was a serious name, with a sign on the door for all to see (and write into their NSF proposals), but who knew people would take it seriously and notice it? Obviously, I did not.

My Good Fortune

From time to time, when a "fortune" in a fortune cookie entertains me, I keep the little slip of paper, although I don't always keep track of it after that. Years ago, I was in the habit of taping strange or funny fortunes to postcards and mailing them to friends, but that was back when I sent real mail and had stamps lying around on a regular basis.

Recently, I was looking for something and sort of tidying my office at the same time -- not in a particularly effectual way, but it does look a bit better when the piles of desk-stuff are neater, if not fewer or smaller -- and I found a cache of fortunes that had somehow collected in an office-eddy. I am not entirely sure I meant to keep each of these, but together they represent some important advice about Life and Other Things. If I followed the advice on these little slips of paper, I would be a better person, and I would have more fun.

The fortunes can be divided into categories:

ADVICE: HOW TO BE A BETTER PERSON (or professor)

Your message must focus on the receiver. Ignore yourself.

I remember getting this fortune while I was working on a grant proposal; I think that is why I kept it. Substitute "reviewer" for "receiver".

Slaying the dragon of delay is no sport for the short-winded.

In fact, I regularly slay the dragon of delay, but some people I work with are really really good friends with this dragon and keep it as sort of a pet (you know who you are).

Your wit is sharp and quick. Avoid using sarcasm on an unsuspecting victim.
..... [<-- note that I am taking this fortune to heart right here, right now]


I SEE TRAVEL IN YOUR FUTURE

Ancient sites beckon you to hit the road soon. You will soon be crossing great ocean waters for an incredibly rewarding experience.

I love to travel, I love ancient sites. They beckon.


.. AND GRANTS

Your original ideas will get you well-deserved recognition.

I was writing a grant proposal when I got that fortune as well. I just don't remember if I got that particular grant. I should be more scientific about this. Do I get more grants after getting fortunes like that one, or do I eat more Chinese food when I am working on a proposal?


BUT SOMETIMES I GET A FORTUNE INTENDED FOR SOMEONE ELSE

Your sparkling eyes shed a healing light on those you meet.

You will advance socially without effort on your part.

ha ha ha ha ha ha

Happy Friday the 13th.

The Cat Scream

The following image has been provided to me through various indirect, circuitous, and secret Cat Channels, so I apologize that I cannot identify the original photographer, but I could not pass up the opportunity to show this amazing illustration:

If I ever have time for a new hobby, a very enticing possibility involves photographing the flanks of tabby cats.

And: Happy eenth Birthday to my amazing daughter!

Measuring Your Nerd Quotient

How many of you have given a pet a nerdy name connected somehow to an academic passion of yours? For example, if you are a scientist, do you now -- or have you ever -- own(ed) a pet named for a famous scientist, a planet, a subatomic particle, a piece of lab equipment, a mineral etc.?

I must admit that I have done this on at least 3 occasions in my life.

Have you ever given a nerdy name to a pet?
	Yes
	No and I never would
	No but I want to
pollcode.com free polls

And here is one for the hard-core nerds: Have you ever given a human child a name connected somehow to an academic passion of yours?

I have not done this, having passed up my one opportunity to do so, but I know people who have done this.

Have you ever given a nerdy name to a child?
	Yes
	No and I never would
	No but I want to
pollcode.com free polls

In the comments, please provide the data: names, species, explanations, rationalizations, discussion of consequences..

Old & Scary

Every so often, when my husband's hair is at a certain length that makes him look like a mad scientist, he gets it cut. He refuses to let me cut it, despite repeated offers -- perhaps because I have no skills or experience with cutting hair -- so he seeks the services of a professional hair-cutter. He typically just stops in at a cheap hair-cutting place near campus.

Recently, he had this conversation with the person cutting his hair:

HC (hair-cutter): Do you want me to trim your eyebrows as well?

Spouse: No.

HC: It will take 10 years off! You'd be surprised!

Spouse: No, I like my eyebrows old and scary.

HC: Oh, you must be a professor.

Misadventure

There has been much blogospheric discussion, here and elsewhere, of (good) ways in which "career interruptions" can be mentioned in grant proposals, so that no one is penalized for a temporary decrease/halt in productivity owing to certain important life experiences (babies, illness, elder-care etc.).

My personal favorite way in which information about Personal Interruptions is requested is in the instructions for writing Australian Research Council grant proposals:

F14.1. Provide and explain:
..
(iv) Any career interruptions you have had for childbirth, carer’s responsibility, misadventure, or debilitating illness;

It's great that this is included in the proposal instructions, and I don't mean to make light of an important issue that has only recently been adopted by large federal funding agencies in certain countries, but I must admit that the request for an explanation of any "misadventure" is rather intriguing.

In fact, I don't think I can wait until December for my usual (northern hemisphere) winter break FSP contest on some (strange) text/document related to academic life. So here is the challenge:

Provide and explain any career interruptions that you have had for misadventure, real or (better) imaginary. Your explanation cannot exceed 475 characters (with spaces). For example:

I was unable to submit any articles for publication between 23 August 2007 and 13 November 2008 because I was kidnapped by pirates and, although I was not otherwise mistreated, I was not allowed access to the Internet. I did, however, scratch out some manuscript drafts on spare pieces of sailcloth using a gull feather and an ink mixture that I made from mussel shells soaked in beer, so as soon as I was released and had Internet access, I was able to resume publishing.

or

Immediately upon receiving tenure in 2005, I was beamed aboard a spaceship on a secret mission I cannot reveal here. At first I was unable to communicate with the life-forms piloting the craft, but over the years I learned their language, customs, and the songs they like to sing on long journeys. Eventually they returned me to my office, and I have subsequently resumed my academic career, no worse for wear but with an unfortunate gap in my CV.

Now it's your turn to describe your career-interrupting misadventures.

Dropping the h-Bomb

Perhaps it was inevitable. Throughout our daughter's childhood, the teenage years loomed ever larger. We heard the stories, we knew what might happen. And then we got there and.. it was fine. In fact, everything has been great. Until a few days ago.

A few nights ago, during dinner, our daughter wanted to know the h-index of each of her parents.

What to do? She has asked us some difficult questions in the past, like when she wondered which parent is more famous (short answer: neither), but this question was somehow more.. personal.

We told her. My husband's h-index is higher than mine.

Will this affect how she views us? Should we have told her?

Is revealing our h-index a gateway to future nerdy questions? Will she now wonder how much grant money we each bring in? Will she start begging for chemical safety training, and then demand the keys to the lab?

I guess we will just have to keep doing what we've been doing: wing it. Despite a shocking lack of preparation for being parents in the first place, we will try to navigate the eddies and shoals of the teen years. Perhaps it is even time for us to start talking to our daughter about the importance of having an updated CV, but I'm not sure I'm ready to have that conversation yet.

What Would John Stuart Mill Do?

This is one of the stranger (but not the strangest!*) anecdotes in Higher Education?, a book by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus:

"When faculty members do have power, they often use it to resist. When [Colgate University president Rebecca] Chopp tried to enlist faculty to invite students into their homes so they could see professors in another setting, she found few takers. "They have tenure," she said, and sighed, "They do whatever they want."

Drat those tenured professors. There they go again, abusing the power that tenure confers. It would be much, much better if they had to fear for their jobs and felt they had no choice but to allow students into their homes.

Just because some professors work 60 hours a week and might want to keep some separation of home and work, doesn't mean they should be allowed to do this. And who cares what significant others and offspring (and pets!) might think about this? If you're related to a professor, their job is your job. Deal with it.

Haven't we all heard stories of legendary professors whose homes were open to their students at all hours of the day and night? Why can't we all be like that?

If we truly cared about our students, we would want them to come to our homes, gaze at our off-campus lives, and meet our families (and pets!) in situ. That way, we would not intimidate them so much and they would feel more comfortable coming to our office hours.

There are some professors, tenured or not, who enjoy having students routinely visit their homes and be "one of the family". Others want their home to be a respite from work, even if they do quite a bit of work at home.

I really don't see the reluctance of some professors to open their homes to student visits as a convincing argument against tenure or as supporting evidence for how little professors care about their students.


* My vote for the strangest part of the book is the paragraph in which the authors describe a "workingman" who "jumped on a subway track to rescue a child who tripped and fell." The workingman didn't think; he just did it. The authors posit that professors on that same platform would not have jumped on the track to save the child:

"We wonder if, had some professors been on the platform, would they have paused to ponder how John Stuart Mill might have parsed the choices?"

I wonder if that is a sane thing to wonder. Of course the professors would save the child. What better way to combine broader impacts, a synergistic activity, and outreach?

Bed Bugs v. Grandma

The academic year is still young, but already there is a new trend apparent in Reasons Why Students Can't Take The Exam (on the scheduled day) or Turn In The Homework (on the scheduled day): bed bugs.

Colleagues teaching large intro classes report having students with bed bug crises just before exams.

I personally would believe these students and deal with the make-up exams in my usual way. In fact, it is my policy to believe the students, no matter how many deaths, illnesses, court cases, or insect infestations they have to deal with in a term. I have mentioned before that both of my grandfathers died within 3 weeks of each other; in certain circumstances, it doesn't sound believable, but it happens.

Nevertheless, it is remarkable that my colleagues report no grandparent deaths yet. This is one of those strange little academic pseudo-factoids for which I wish I had more data. Lacking a good mechanisms to poll vast numbers of college and university teachers, the best I can do is ask you, my readers, if you have noticed any bed bugs v. grandma trends in your own classes.

A quick glance at a bed bug map of the US shows some geographical variation in bed bug reports, and there are also likely to be local variations depending on the housing situations of students at different universities. It's possible, however, that bed bugs are the new grandma.

So this is what I am wondering today:

How are grandparents doing relative to bed bugs in the lives of your students this year?

By the way, this is a test. Unlike in my real teaching life, I do not give make-up exams here. I just gave you the essay question, and there is also a multiple-choice question:

This photograph best illustrates or symbolizes which one of the following:

a. Cats at a faculty meeting. (Note: Ignore the presence of comfortable seating and focus only on the salient features of the photo)

b. Feline delusion. Older Gray Cat (right) thought he would be safe lying next to the World's Largest Kitten (left), who was apparently deep in slumber after a long night of stealth, intrigue, and rodent pillage. Older Gray Cat was wrong.

c.The US 2010 elections, with one cat representing the Democrats and one the moderate wing of the Republican party. Cats are depicted debating the issues. Not shown: Tea Party candidate.

d. Taxidermy.

Teach for a Cure?

Has anyone studied the biochemical changes experienced by teachers while they are teaching? I guess it would be difficult to stick wires all over someone's head and body and still reproduce a normal teaching environment (in most cases). I am curious about this, though, because I had a weird experience recently with the effect of teaching on my health.

Not long ago, I was quite ill. I had seen a couple of doctors, had some tests done, and was scheduled for more owing to concerns based on the initial test results. In the meantime, I had to go about my life and work, although I was in some pain and feeling quite weak and shaky.

During one particularly horrible day, a phone consultation with my doctor resulted in her telling me that I should go immediately to an emergency room to get checked out. I said OK, I would.

But first I taught my class.

I was kind of worried about that. How could I do a good job teaching when I felt so awful? How would I be able to speak lucidly for 50 minutes? How could I walk around the classroom as I like to do? How could I even write on the board? But at the same time: How could I miss class?

I don't know what happened, but while I was teaching, I felt fine. I even felt really good; the best I had felt in days. I thought to myself, as I was covering the board with science hieroglyphics, "I am feeling so much better, I don't need to go to the hospital."

Then I finished the class, talked to the students who had questions after class, and went back to my office. I still felt good and decided not to go the hospital.

Then I crashed, and my husband rushed my collapsed self to the ER. It ended up being a very bad week overall.

Aside from the fact that the post-teaching crash was extremely unpleasant, thereby eliminating the possibility of patenting a Teaching Cure for Certain Physical Ailments, it was kind of interesting how I was temporarily able to stave off the pain and weakness by teaching. Of course, I don't really know what the students thought -- perhaps I was saying and doing bizarre things and didn't know it -- but I think the class went well.

Certainly I have had also the opposite happen while teaching, especially if I teach with a severe head cold or sore throat. In those cases, the teaching hour can be excruciating (perhaps for everyone in the room).

I would not teach if I had a serious contagious illness, but in general, it's difficult to cancel a class for a routine ailment or even a more significant affliction if the class is at a critical time (e.g., first week of the term or just before an exam).

Has anyone else felt biochemically/biophysically affected in a good way while teaching a class? Can teaching be a temporary miracle cure for what ails us?

Tenure/Snake Dilemma

Last week's post on Tenure and how certain media outlets choose to portray the issues related to tenure reminded me of an incident and made me wonder about the role of tenure in our daily lives.

My decision to write about this incident and cast it in a tenure context also made me wonder whether I may have finally reached a pinnacle of bizarreness with this blog, but I shall not let such concerns deter me from presenting, for discussion, a Tenure/Snake Dilemma. My secret desire is that this anecdote will one day become part of the "ethics" training most of us must now endure.

Some context: Numerous media outlets seem to like to portray the Pursuit of Tenure as a very delicate undertaking, possibly undermined by the slightest of slights against a senior (voting) colleague. If we don't laugh at their jokes, share their hobbies, agree with their opinions on topics of debate in and beyond faculty meetings, and do their bidding when it comes to committee work, research collaborations, and/or teaching, our chances for tenure are doomed, or at least seriously imperiled. If tenure can be denied for such petty and political reasons, tenure must be a flawed concept that is harmful to so-called 'academic freedom' that is frequently mentioned as the reason why professors need tenure.

This view of tenure does not match my experiences nor that of any of my close colleagues at a wide range of institutions. Perhaps it happens somewhere (in fact, someone I know in an education-related field is having tenure-pursuit experiences that would be surreal in my department or related science/engineering departments), but I don't think such situations are the norm.

Even so, before we get tenure, we do make decisions about our activities and speech in the context of being as-yet tenureless. Even though we know that we don't actually have to sit and politely listen to a senior colleague tell us how tanned and muscular he looks without a shirt [true story], and we would still (probably) get tenure even if we retched on his (leather) shoes, we may nevertheless be a bit more polite, quiet, and nice before tenure is secured.

With that in mind, consider the following real but not-entirely-serious situation, and decide whether you would make the same decision about the given scenario before vs. after tenure:

A particular person, who is professor of a non-biological science, is extremely phobic about snakes.* This person is terrified of snakes and, although appreciating from afar the valuable role they play in the ecosystem, does not ever want to see one or knowingly be within 50 m of one, not even if the snake is secured in some sort of escape-proof snake habitat. This person cannot even look at pictures of snakes without shuddering and feeling sick.

This same person is very fond of cats.

This snake-o-phobe, felinophile has a senior colleague who is also a neighbor. That is, these two people work in the same department at the same university and also live near each other.

They occasionally trade cat-care when one of them is away. The snake-o-phobe adores the colleague's cat and is happy to take care of this very affectionate and charismatic beast.

Imagine that at a particular time in the summer, the colleague planned to go away on vacation and needed some cat care. The felinophile agreed to take care of the cat.

Then, almost as an aside, the colleague sends an e-mail that says: "Oh by the way, we also now have a snake. You will need to change his/her water** and you may also need to go to the pet store and get a freshly killed mouse to feed the snake."

Question for discussion, keeping in mind the intense level of snake-phobia of the person in question and imagining that this is you, even if you think snakes are beautiful and interesting and you long to get a pit viper as a pet (and/or you already have one):

Do you take care of the snake despite your horror of it? Does your agreeing vs. declining to take care of the snake have anything to do with your tenure status and your wish to be agreeable to your senior colleague?

Is there anyone who would say yes if you did not have tenure and no if you did? Or would you say no, even if untenured, because you don't believe that the tenure system is so warped that refusal to take care of a colleague's snake would make him turn against you in the tenure vote?

Sorry, but saying yes because you are really eager to work on your snake phobia and/or you just want to be a good neighbor is not a realistic or acceptable answer in this situation. You can, however, say yes and then find someone else to do the job for you, but that answer would be boring, even though it is what the person in question actually did.


* As a youth, this person did not mind snakes and even sought them out, thinking they were kind of cool. This person then had a sustained experience living in a place with many many poisonous snakes, some of which entered the home of this person on a routine basis so that s/he never knew when there would be lethal snakes under the bed or sitting on a chair, as happened from time to time. A snake phobia, acquired during this time of extreme snake interaction, became well entrenched through multiple terrifying encounters with snakes and the observation of horrifying things that happened to friends and neighbors who were bitten by snakes, and it has not abated over the years.

** This is not some weird "let's not specify the gender of the snake" thing; the neighbor-colleague wrote "his/her" because he does not know if the snake is a he or a she***.

*** Comments explaining how to tell male from female snakes are not welcome.

In Which I am Thanked for not Being Biased Against Men

An alternative title for this post is:

Now I've Seen Everything (in a review)

To explain:

One possible example of a broader impact that can be mentioned in an NSF proposal is the extent to which the proposed research activities broaden the participation of underrepresented groups.

A topic of past discussion in this blog is whether to list yourself as a broader impact, if you are the PI or co-PI and are a member of an underrepresented group.

I don't mention myself as a broader impact in proposals anymore. At an earlier stage of my career, on at least one occasion I included myself, as one item in a list of BIs, and I got slammed in review for it by someone who took it as evidence that I was using my gender as an unfair tactic to get a grant. Never mind that I wasn't telling anyone anything they didn't already know (i.e., that I am female) and that it was therefore not a particularly clever tactic; including this factoid as an item in a list enraged at least one reviewer.

I stopped listing myself, not because I was afraid of getting such a negative reaction again, but because I changed my approach to the BI section. I used to adopt a comprehensive approach of noting all BIs relevant to my proposal. Now I just focus on what I think are the most important BI activities or elements of my proposed research.

Also, I got older, and it's not clear whether a tenured female professor fits the BI goal of broadening participation etc. anyway, except in a rather indirect way.

That brings us up to the present situation:

In one review of one of my recent proposals, I was thanked by one reviewer for not mentioning myself or other women involved in the project as a broader impact. The reviewer was very happy to see that my proposal was therefore not obviously biased against men.

OK... you're welcome.. but you know what? Even if I wrote in the BI section that the proposed research involved female investigators and therefore in some way helped broaden the participation of an underrepresented group, this does not demonstrate bias against men. It would be stating something that is part fact (I am the female PI whether I mention it in the proposal text or not) and part opinion (my involvement in research broadens the participation etc.); no men were excluded or oppressed to produce this proposal.

I think the reviewer was mostly expressing relief at not having to read what is apparently an annoying/enraging statement about the underrepresentation of women in Science; clearly the reviewer has seen such statements in other proposals. The reviewer comment was meant as a compliment, but I think the comment was inappropriate in a review and makes me wonder at the reviewer's comments in proposals by women who do mention that they are a broader impact. If I had mentioned in the proposal that women investigators were involved in the research, would the reviewer have rated this proposal lower, just because this obvious fact was explicitly stated?

I don't know, but, at the very least, thanking a woman PI in a proposal review for not mentioning that she is female is kind of weird.

Psychic killer qu'est-ce que c'est?

The service described in the upper right of this sign is a bit chilling, no?

The Strangest Thing

Eventually I will finish a post that contains my thoughts on What Should Be Done to train new professors to teach, but it's not ready to go yet. So, in the meantime, inspired by a comment from Kim, I will ask my readers a question:

What's the strangest thing you have seen in a classroom while teaching?

I don't think I have seen anything too bizarre. I recall one student who needed to have a little stuffed animal on her shoulder during every class. She sat near the front, and I found the scruffy little dog a bit distracting. It just sat there, but for some reason its beady little eyes looked evil to me. [I just made that last part up; I thought the dog-on-shoulder thing was bizarre, but it didn't really bother me.]

The Secret Life of Deans

At some point in the second hour of listening to what was supposed to have been a 45 minute talk, I happened to glance at a distinguished professor and Dean who was sitting near me -- a gray-haired, 65-year old gentleman in classic male professorial attire. And then my attention was diverted, but not by the talk.

No, I became riveted by this sight:



The distinguished professor had a Hello Kitty! Band-Aid on his leg, just visible above a sock when he crossed his legs.

Therein lies a tale, I am sure.

I considered, and rejected, various ideas for how to work Hello Kitty! into a post-talk conversation with him. One of the better ideas (in my opinion) was to fake a minor injury (perhaps on my leg) and ask him if he had a Band-Aid. An even better idea was convincing a colleague to do this instead of me, but he refused to do it, although admitting to being deeply intrigued.

I suppose I will never know the reason for the Hello Kitty! Band-Aid on the deanly leg. Who knew that Deans could be so mysterious?

Ayn Rand Beach Story

A few weeks ago, I was stunned by the interest in my casual mention of having an Ayn Rand Beach Story. Mostly I used the phrase in a previous post because I liked how it looked, but I do in fact have an Ayn Rand Beach Story.

It's still (barely) August and I was recently at the scene of the Ayn Rand Beach Story incident, so it's time for the story. My apologies if the actual event is anti-climactic.

I don't remember exactly how old I was when this happened, but I was likely between the ages of 15 and 17. One summer day, I was sitting on a beach near my family's house, alone, reading Atlas Shrugged.

I was not reading Ayn Rand because of some teenage Ayn Rand phase. I was working my way through the somewhat meager but not-too-bad collection of literature in my town's public library. I'd already consumed much of the available pre-20th century literature, including Russian literature (which I'd enjoyed, so big books did not dismay me), and was then reading my way through the collection of 20th century American novels. Inevitably, I got to Ayn Rand without really knowing much about her or her philosophy.

I was reading Atlas Shrugged at a very small beach, with only a few clusters of other humans, mostly older people who occasionally arose from their beach chairs to put their toes in the water.

As one of these people -- a man -- was leaving the beach, he stopped by where I was sitting and asked: Have you gotten to The Speech yet?

I did not know what he was talking about, so I figured that either I had not gotten to The Speech yet or that The Speech was not very memorable.

I replied: No, not yet.

I don't remember if we conversed further, however briefly, but I have always felt vaguely embarrassed about the interaction. My fear is that he asked me what I thought of the book so far.

If he did, my reply was likely not very positive. I might have mentioned something about how I thought it was a bit overwrought or that the characters were kind of one-dimensional. I might not have been very articulate.

In any case, he walked on.

His companion, a woman, then came over to me and said: Do you know who he is?

No, I did not know.

She informed me: He (nodding in the direction of the man) was her (nodding at my book) best friend.

She left.

That was it, a small incident, but one that had a profound effect on me, namely that, to this day, I am totally paranoid when I read a book in public. In fact, when I was reading a book on that very beach recently, I checked to see where the author was residing now and was somewhat unnerved to learn that the author had moved from Malaysia to the US, vastly increasing the chance that the author, her relatives, or friends could be on that very beach at that moment watching me read that book, which I didn't particularly like.

On that little beach long ago, when asked what I thought of the book I was reading, I don't think I would have changed my answer to a more glowing one had I known that he was her best friend, but ever since, when asked by random strangers about a book I am reading, I always wonder if they have a hidden agenda.