A Bastion of Sanity in the Land of Oz
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Freethinker’s is packing up and moving out. It’s been a great 5 years, but I’ve come to the conclusion that it is time to shift gears a little. The migration is complete. The archives will remain here, but new content can be found at Ge·knit·ics. See you there!
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Image credit: ibm4381′s flickr stream
For all those incoming freshman.
I started this book in March, the second selection for the 2010 Freethinker’s Science Book Club. It was just before the semester became a long series of deadlines and the book was recalled by another patron of my local library. Once the semester ended, I checked it out again and finished it in a little over a week.
Remarkable Creatures is a collection of short biographies of “adventurers,” starting with Alexander von Humbolt, the Dutch naturalist whose Personal Narrative describing his explorations of South America inspired Charles Darwin. Darwin’s chapter was mostly a rehash of material I’ve read elsewhere, which I would expect given my field. But the remainder of the book, even the chapters on Eugène Dubois (who discovered Homo erectus) and the Leakey family (who combined discovered the majority of hominin fossils in Africa) – whose discoveries I teach in my intro physical anthropology classes – presented richly detailed portraits of some of the pivotal figures in the field of evolutionary biology.
One of the more interesting chapters for me was “The Day the Mesozoic Died,” the story of the discovery of the K-T boundary in the fossil record. Disclaimer: I am an anthropological geneticist, but one of my undergrad degrees is in zoology. I was one of those kids who went through the dinosaur fascination phase, and later considered being an astronaut. So this chapter, with the mystery of the “end of the dinosaurs,” and the radical notion that it had come from outer space, was right up my alley. The formidable accumulation of evidence of an extraterrestrial source of the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous, and rejection of other hypotheses (volcanic eruption), is an elegant account of both the transdisciplinary and skeptical nature of science.
The final two chapters discuss the tension between paleoanthropologists and molecular anthropologists in the quest to understand human origins, and are now dated, due the recent work on the Neandertal genome.
Despite that, the book is a great introduction to breadth of research subsumed in evolutionary biology. The life stories of these remarkable scientists will hopefully inspire a new generation of researchers.
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There are also children’s biographies of some of these explorers (and others), for those who might want to encourage their little scientists.
(Their series on artists and musicians is fantastic, I can’t wait to get these for my younger kids.)***
July’s picks for the 2010 Freethinker’s Book Club are
Happy reading!
Last week, I attended the Midwest Consortium’s annual conference. The goal was to network with other scholars in the region to facilitate collaboration and development of potential grant proposals. I got to meet Dr. Joyce Hunter, Deputy Director of the NIH National Center (soon to be Institute) on Minority Health and Health Disparities. She gave a presentation on different funding mechanisms available at NIH, and described a timeline for applying for those mechanisms depending on where you are in your career. Dr. Hunter emphasized that NIH is moving away from the path of R03 > R15/R21 > R01, and more toward career development awards (F32, K30, K99/R00) as a means of becoming an independent researcher. She noted that her center now has a few R01 funding opportunities available, and that NIH has adopted a streamlining process for new investigators, so that they form a separate pool of applications. Of the 20 R01 grants funded by NCMHD last cycle, 10 were from new investigators. Of those, 8 had had previous NIH funding (many through the Loan Repayment Program).
For those still trying to familiarize themselves with the seemingly Byzantine workings of the nation’s top funding agency, here are two videos from the NIH Center for Scientific Review on what happens at a review panel and advice for new applicants.
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Also, check the NIH Office of Extramural Research for current funding opportunities, grant application basics, and information on forms and deadlines.
One of the tasks most postdocs end up doing a lot of is writing. Articles from the dissertation, posters for conferences, the backlog of articles from your new PI, blog posts. I went down an Internet rabbit hole a couple of months ago , as the semester was winding down and I had several writing deadlines on my calendar, looking for advice on how to write. Translation: I’m not sure how I ended up exactly where I did, but I was happy with the result. Not how to string sentences together into something coherent, but more about the logistics of writing (I have a fellow postdoc friend who is convinced that this part of her life/career is all about logistics). When is the best time to write? How much time out of your day/week should you devote to writing (as opposed to the hundred or so other tasks on your to-do list)? Is it better to write is short bursts, or to block out several hours or more to write effectively?
The answer to all of these questions is, not surprisingly, it depends. On what the rest of your work schedule looks like, other commitments on your time, how much sleep you would like to get in the next two years. But, having said that, Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, is a nice guide/pep talk for budding writers.
I’ll admit, I skipped the sections devoted to fiction writing (chapters on plot, dialogue, and character), since my writing is primarily technical non-fiction. But most of the book applies to any kind of writing. In fact, the title comes from advice that the author’s father, who was also a writer, passed on to his procrastinating son, who had an elementary school report on our feathered friends due at the end of a long weekend. Having put the assignment off for several weeks, he was overwhelmed by the amount of material he was expected to cover and didn’t know where to start. Those who have written dissertations understand that feeling completely. His father’s advice? “Bird by bird.” One piece at a time.
With chapters on short assignments (blog posts fit nicely here), shitty first drafts (everyone, no matter how good a writer they are, has them), how to know when you’re done, writer’s block, and publication, there’s a lot of advice for technical writers. For me, it’s still a luxury to have time to write. I end up squeezing it in around other deadlines, meetings, commuting, dishes, and taking care of the baby. I’m taking the summer off from classes just to get the articles from my dissertation written. One down, two to go! From my experience:
The Natural History of Unicorns by Chris Lavers
Plastic Fantastic: How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World by Eugenie Samuel Reich