Yesterday was the closing date for applications on a job prospect that I’m hoping for. I don’t think I’ve mentioned in this space which job this is (I think I’m starting to get superstitious about these things), but it’s an editorial position at an OA journal. The job offer is relatively close to one of Mrs. PA’s post-doc prospects, and therefore it’s just sort of a conglomeration of good things(tm). Of course this makes me even more nervous about the whole thing.

Add onto that the tough spot we’re in. Mrs. PA defended her thesis a few months ago, unfortunately without having a job lined up in advance. Since then it’s been a ticking clock until her contract runs out, which is very soon now. Because of that hard deadline, there is some urgency to resolve the situation as soon as possible. We’d prefer not to commit to living apart for a terribly long time, and the two jobs we’re hoping for here are the first that we’ve found close enough to one another so that we can live together.

The situation has made it tougher for me to get off the fence with my graduate school trajectory as well. I feel like if we had a concrete lead on where we were going next, it would ease my decision on how best to finish up my work here. The nebulous situation that we’re in, without any sort of specific location or date of a move, makes it tougher to set hard deadlines in my own work.

What makes the situation even a little more bothersome is that we might be doing something similar in a few years, when Mrs. PA finishes her post-doc. Once again, this is a selling point of the location that our current prospects are in; it’s a major area, and hopefully she’d be able to find gainful employment there without us having to move again.

There have been one or two other times that I felt we were close to sorting all of this out, and those have all fallen through so far. It makes me a bit pessimistic, but at the same time one can always hope.

There is a date on the calendar I can point to.  As of this writing, on that day:

• We won’t have a place to live (lease runs out on our house)
• Which is sort of good, because our household income will consist of a single grad student stipend

Needless to say, since that date is less than 3 months away, I’m a little nervous these days.

Mrs. PA and I are going into major job hunt mode.  She’s got a few candidates kicking around, but unfortunately I have work to do on getting my grad school situation sorted.  I’ve got a few things out there, but I think it’s (past) time for “the talk” with my adviser, and also a redoubling of my own hunt for a position.

More later.

The time has come to make a decision.  Perhaps it is past time, but here we are.  I’ve been putting this off for some time because it is one of the most important and most difficult decisions I’ve ever had to make: do I try to power through and get my Ph.D., or do I write up what I have and move on with a Masters degree?  The issue is that neither solution is without drawbacks, of course.

I had some tough conversations with several groups of friends this weekend (it just seemed like everyone wanted to talk about it).  These made me realize that I’ve been sort of doggedly remaining on autopilot, when I should have been spending more time thinking about how to resolve my situation.

Since I like to obtain input from as many sources as possible before making big decisions (I research everything to death), I thought I’d lay the situation out and see what you have to say.

(more…)

When Mrs. PA successfully defended her thesis, I thought it might finally light a fire under me to push through whatever I needed to in order to finish up here so we could get on with our lives.  Instead, I’ve found myself in a more or less continuous state of ennui.  I have no motivation or interest to work on my thesis project.  Partly it’s because I don’t really believe that it will ever generate results, and therefore I don’t really see the point of even trying.  I know that this sort of defeatism is not unusual among graduate students, but I’m having a hard time yanking myself out of it.  I can’t even manage to use the reasoning “just finish it and you can get out of here” as enough impetus to apply myself.

On some level I feel like my reserve of “well it didn’t work that time, let’s tweak the parameters and try again” has just run out.  The “reward” from a scientific standpoint is more or less the same whether I actually do the experiments or not, because the experiments never work.

I think this is made worse by my particular situation.  Most graduate students at this stage would have enough data to just sort of drag themselves across the finish line.  Since I had to change projects, I’m left sitting in the middle of a pile of half-completed projects and seemingly intractable problems with each of them.

I really wish I could think of a way to snap myself out of this funk.  I know that it’s not helpful in any way.

Who completed the requirements for her Ph.D. in Microbial Ecology today.

Sagan said it best.

I usually take the weekend off from blogging and RSS reading, preferring to play really obscene amounts of EVE Online. This usually means that I spend a fair amount of my Monday morning just catching up on the pile that accumulates in my “unread items” list in Google Reader.

Here are some highlights:
Harold Varmus’ interview on NPR’s Science Friday was a nice public discussion of Open Access.  He talks about the background of PLoS, the new NIH delayed release policy, and the OA movement in general.  As others have noted, the very first listener question asks about peer review in OA journals.  Also as noted in the link above, peer review and OA are entirely separate issues, and I think Dr. Varmus could have been a bit more clear here.  He also at the end of his answer throws in a sentence or two about the source of funding for articles which is a bit misleading.  Regardless, I think overall it was a positive interview, and I recommend listening to it if you haven’t already.  Also, the ScienceCommons blog has a few more related links.

Next, take a break from reading for a bit and watch Bill Maher interviewing Richard Dawkins (via Greg Laden)

Also, if you have some time, check out this screencast on Open Notebook Science from Jean-Claude Bradley (via The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics):

This commentary from the excellent Chronicle of Higher Education decrying the lack of knowledge of college students is getting some play on popular social news sites.  From the article:

In recent years I have administered a dumbed-down quiz on current events and history early in each semester to get a sense of what my students know and don’t know. Initially I worried that its simplicity would insult them, but my fears were unfounded. The results have been, well, horrifying.

We’ve heard this before - it seems that at least once a month a major news outlet runs a story discussing the inability of U.S. students to place states on a map, or locate countries, or name foreign leaders, what have you. It’s clear that if we want our students to know this information, we are failing to teach it to them.

The author goes on to place the blame for this at the feet of the media, an argument that has been made many times before. He argues that the emphasis of “infotainment” over “actual news” - the environment where what is going on with celebrities is more important than what’s going on in Afghanistan - reduces knowledge of important world affairs. “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart is as close as many dare get to actual news.” He goes on to say that blogs are not a proper replacement for “real” news sources (that is to say: news agencies still actually reporting world news), and that with the explosion of content on the internet, many young people simply don’t bother keeping track of world events.

As I’ve said, this is a common complaint, but I haven’t seen many people really talk about some of the more critical causes, or methods to correct it. In my opinion, one of the real concerns is grade inflation, tied with a seemingly widespread opinion among primary school educators that history/civics just aren’t as important as reading and math. It’s far easier for the high school civics teacher to drill a few facts into the heads of the students, test on those facts once, and allow for that knowledge to atrophy. Everyone passes, they don’t complain about how civics is such a tough class that they can’t study for their math test, and the teacher doesn’t have to deal with irate parents and concerned administrators. The problem is that when courses are taught this way, the students aren’t batteries for storing the knowledge - they are capacitors. They are pumped full of information which they release onto the test page, and it is out of their concern thereafter. This is why the introductory journalism students can’t say what country Kabul is in.

To be fair, this practice takes place to some degree in every class. There is always a sense of “I’ll never have to use this in the real world, so why try to actually comprehend it” on the part of the students. I was always amazed when people in my classes would attempt really remarkable feats of rote memorization of facts rather than attempt to just understand something.

I think that this will only be solved when we can figure out a way to teach a comprehensive understanding rather than a list of bullet point facts.  There are many people in education research (mostly at the college level) who are working on this, but I have to say I’m not sure that they’ve found the right way yet.  We also have to put a dampener on grade inflation.  I can’t stress enough how perilous I think the situation is in this regard.  For too long, teachers have been reducing course content and test difficulty under pressure from administrators and parents to put on a facade of educational success.  We have to return to an educational regime in which failure is an option.  Only by facing the failure head on can we develop new methods and tools to improve the system and better teach the next generation of students.

I already linked this story over on the shiny new microblog, but I can’t resist reposting here.

PZ Myers, writer of (probably) the most popular science-related blog on the internet and outspoken Atheist, attempted to go see the Intelligent Design-pushing movie Expelled last night in Minneapolis.

He was turned away from the theater by security.

The end of his tale, however, is so delicious that I can’t spoil it for you.  Just read his post.