Please excuse my brevity

Why do people (myself often included) feel the need to make excuses or ask forgiveness for our e-mails? If I take a day or two to reply[1], or if my message is short, what is there to forgive? Would an immediate, hair-trigger response really be preferable? Would twice as many words really do a better job of conveying my message?

I think the answer is No.

No, a faster response is not necessarily better. No, a longer response is not necessarily better. No, I don't need to apologize for taking time to consider my words, for saying my piece in something shorter than a lengthy epistle, for doing the work I have that is not reading and replying to e-mail. And I certainly don't need to append such an apology to every message I send.

[1]: to a non-urgent matter

On Failure

The definition of insanity [1] is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

I hate that saying. I much prefer:

If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.

Why? Because things rarely work the first time, and because “the same thing” is almost never exactly the same thing.

In research we try to account for all the variables, and to hold as much constant as possible. But we can't control everything, and we don't even necessarily recognize all the variables: different time of day, different batch of materials, different weather, different container, different attitude, different anything. And any one of those different things may cause the experiment to fail.

And it may fail again, and again, and again before all the right conditions are met.

Experimental scientists [2] fail a lot. We fail all the time, even most of the time. We learn from our failures, dust ourselves off, and “try, try again.”

Think about that saying:

If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.

It's not “if at first you don't succeed, give up,” or “if at first you don't succeed, you're stupid,” or even “if at first you don't succeed, try again.”

Try, try again. And then try again after that. Once isn't going to be enough.

Don't trust the scientist who has never failed; they're probably lying. Failure is a part of research; it's the challenges and obstacles you puzzle over, work around and overcome. It's the majority of the problems in “problem-solving.”

But it can be demoralizing to fail.

It's pretty easy to conflate “the experiment failed” with “I failed,” and “I failed” becomes “I am a failure” all too quickly, as the tally of failed experiments grows.

Here is the gateway to self-doubt, hanging wide open. Don't walk through; it'll snap closed behind you, and it's hard to climb out.

Laboratory courses, even those founded on “discovery-based” learning, do not teach students to fail. Failure of an experiment is a failure of the student. If classroom demonstrations always have known outcomes and go smoothly, if teaching labs punish failed experiments, aren't the students trained to fear being wrong and trying things that might not work? Of course, it's helpful to illustrate a concept or demonstrate a trend with a successful experiment, but what is the price of this success? A student who fears failure and then begins a research project is unprepared for the “try, try again” part.

Doing something over and over and looking for a different result is not the definition of insanity, it's the definition of experiment.[3]

[1] Sometimes “stupidity” is used instead of “insanity.”
[2] I make no claims about the rest.
[3] experimental : based on untested ideas or techniques and not yet established or finalized

 

Gender bias and names

I just read "Science faculty's subtle gender biases favor male students," from a recent edition of PNAS. They make a decent case for their conclusion that science faculty are biased against women (despite the title, the conclusion is not pro male, but anti female).

They sent a supposed application to ~160 faculty (at 6 institutions). Half of the faculty were men, half women. Half of the purported applicants had "female" names, half had "male" names. The faculty (both male and female) perceived he female applicant more likeable, but less competent and less hireable. They offered her a significantly smaller salary, and less mentoring. Sounds pretty bleak and biased.

I see a flaw, however. Before I'd gotten even halfway through, I was asking myself "Which names did they choose?" What about gender-neutral names, like Lee? What about perceived nationality or regional differences? What if they called the girl Jennifer?

I like names, and it amuses me to play around with the NameVoyager site, watching the rise and fall of trendy names. I have three Aunts named Barbara, and my husband has another. I have met one woman named Barbara who was born after 1975, and that was while I was living in Germany. My mother has an "old lady name." She has met few women who share her name, and all them have been at least 20 years her senior. And then there are the names that trickle down from the pretentious to the great unwashed. "Freakanomics" (or was it its "Super" successor?) has a great chapter on baby names, perceptions, and the economic status of the name-givers. NameVoyager has a list of poll questions for each name, to gauge (and then report on) perceptions of names. Do they sound smart? Do they sound attractive? Is the name associated with someone famous? Famously unsavory? Based on the kinds of responses there, I doubt there are many Americans naming their daughters Bertha today.

So I thought about all of these name-y things as I read the paper. What names did they choose? The authors insist that the only differed between the applications was the gender of the name, but what about the perception of that name?

Well, they chose John and Jennifer. Yes, Jennifer. I feared as much. The authors say they chose names of similar likeability. I don't think they are names of similar seriousness. Now I know a fair number of Johns and Jennifers, and I certainly won't say they have been the same in abilities, personalities or looks. Still, if you were to ask me for adjectives describing a John, I'd say ordinary, reliable, solid. For Jennifer, I'd say bubbly, cheerful, friendly.

Do those descriptions look gender biased? Certainly. I'd say they match up pretty well with the "subtle bias" the authors are talking about. But does that mean that I would prefer a man over a woman? No. It means I might prefer a John over a Jennifer.

What names might I find more even? How about Jacob and Bridget? Paul and Ann? I'm keeping along the traditional English line that the authors' picks conform to. Why not Mohammed and Saria? Jose and Magda? Horace and Gertrude? Deshawn and Dominique?

They used just one name per gender and then said the perceptions of those two names could represent the perceptions of their respective halves of the population. I find that suspect.

Don't get me wrong: they're still probably right, and it's probably not a good sign that John and Jennifer create such different expectations.

"I'm not a feminist, but..."

A friend of mine started her sentence this way as we discussed the Akin "legitimate rape" debacle. I wanted to laugh and ask her just what she thought a feminist was. I didn't, we kept talking, and she sounded about as feminist as I am, which is to say, Votes-for-Women! feminist, but not Who-needs-men? feminist.

Feminism has a skewed reputation. Until a year or two ago, even I thought "feminist" inherently referred to combat boots and a ban on skirts. I happen to like skirts (and wish I could find a lab-suitable skirt as practical as my blue jeans), and I happen to like being a Mrs. John Smith. Still, I now call myself a feminist.

There's a catch to that. I don't announce that I'm a feminist. Most folks just don't understand, and they'd peg me as a stereotype, or insist that I don't fit said stereotype, so I couldn't possibly be what I say I am.

All the same, I'm a feminist.

As I said before, I'm a Votes-for-Women! feminist. An "anything boys can do, girls can do too" feminist. I believe in equality, not supremacy. I believe in individuals. Let (strong) women be firefighters, and do not pass them over for weaker men. Let men raise their children without the surprise or scorn of their neighbors. Judge each person by the content of their character, not what hides between their legs.

I am a feminist because I believe in women, and I believe they, as a group, haven't yet gotten their due.


Perhaps a better term would be "equalist." I believe in equitable treatment for all. Our strengths, weaknesses and experiences differ, but when a stranger meets me, I should be treated the same as the next person, without prejudice. I should not have to fight against false expectations based on my appearance.

Printers and Ink

Our Epson printer (a two-year old Epson Stylus NX420) is a printer-scanner combo. It's been a very useful flatbed scanner, but its track record as a printer is mediocre. It's quite the thirsty little beast, drinking up ink and howling for more.

This afternoon I tried to print a half-page form allowing UPS to deliver a package while I'm at work on Monday. The printer was out of cyan ink. It didn't care that the page was in black. It was out of cyan ink. And it told me so over and over again. It was out of cyan ink.

To the Internet! I searched for a way to convince my stubborn electronic companion that it was okay to print in black alone, and Epson's own support pages had an answer (which I happened to find in the printer settings on my own about the same time). There is a driver option to allow the printer --temporarily (and this was emphasized)-- to print in black only. Just check a hidden box, set the page to print in grayscale and simplify every other possible setting. I followed the instructions, but the printer would have none of it.

Perhaps there's a way to change those settings on the device itself? Maybe it just needs hardware and software to agree at both ends? No. Once the printer is convinced it is out of any color ink, that sole idea consumes its digital mind. I pressed settings. It was out of cyan ink. I pressed clear. Can't do that. It was out of cyan ink. Even if I lifted the lid, as if I were about to replace said ink, it persisted in proclaiming it was out of cyan ink. After a few go-arounds with this, it would grudgingly slide the cartridges over for inspection and replacement, but there was no fooling it. I could try all the old tricks that once worked: take out the cartridge and put it back it, take out the cartridge and shake it in the hopes the ink would pool near the nozzle, turn it off and on again, try to manually feed a sheet of paper in. Nothing worked. It was out of cyan ink.

Reading reviews online (in the hopes that someone had stumbled across a solution and posted it in a grumpy review), I saw the Amazon page for this printer. The ratings were overwhelmingly ⅕ stars, and most of them had titles that started with things like "beware" or "scam." That's not very consoling. Some pointed out (and I verified this myself) that you can't even scan a document from the device when any of the ink is out. (Yes, you can still scan from the computer, but not by pressing the "Scan" button on the device's panel. It will tell you, as before, that it is out of cyan ink. Of course.)

This is like having a car that won't let you turn on the stereo if it's out of gas. Or perhaps it's like a car that won't start unless its stereo can pick up a radio station. Foolishness. One activity does not depend on the ability to do another.

So I'm done with this printer and its $15 vials of ink. My old printer (a Canon Pixma iP4200, four years older than the Epson) likely hasn't been used more than twice since we bought the printer-scanner. I wasn't sure it had any ink, either, but it printed the page on the first try.

Canon won me all over again, and Epson can bite me.

Redesigning the US Postal Service Website

Every time I want to mail a small package, I check the USPS website for the cost, in the hopes that I can use stamps already on hand, and not have to spend my lunch break standing in line at the post office. I purchase Forever Stamps fairly regularly, but it seems the cost of a stamp goes up every 3-6 months, so not only do I need to find the cost of shipping my little package, I also need to look up the current value of my stamps.

These two simple things -- things that the fellow at the post office counter can usually tell me off the top of his head -- are surprisingly hard to find the USPS website.

When you go to usps.com (Isn't it a government organization? Why isn't it usps.gov?) there is a list of "Quick Tools" on the left, including a link to the postage calculator. In order to find out the cost of a regular stamp (you know, the price you'd expect to hear if you asked "How much are postage stamps?"), you must enter two ZIP codes, pick "Letter" from the Shape selection, and enter a weight. Well how much does a typical letter weigh? I'm not sure, but if you say 1 ounce, you're then prompted with four envelope choices. If you choose the basic, regular old letter envelope, you get a list of 23 delivery options spread across four categories. The first item on the list is Express Mail, and today that option is listed with a "Post Office Price" of $21.30. Down at the bottom of the list is what I was actually looking for: the cost of a basic letter (dubbed "First-Class Mail Letter") at $0.45.

It took three pages, entering unnecessary information (ZIP codes, weights, shape), and looking at the bottom of the list to find out that a regular stamp today is worth $0.45.

The good news is that it's hardly any more complicated to calculate the cost of shipping an oddly shaped package to Timbuktu overnight than it is to get the cost of a basic letter, but I think my point still stands: it should be simpler to find the cost of a stamp.

Now, there is an alternate way to find the cost of a stamp. Instead of going through the postage calculator, you could choose "Buy Stamps" from a dropdown menu. Thankfully someone thought to update the menu on that site so that the Forever Stamps choice is now phrased "Forever/45-Cent Stamps," cluing the observant visitor in to the current cost of a Forever Stamp. All the same, I think that information should be front and center on the postage calculator site. For that matter, I think it ought to be on usps.com.

In my mind, the postage calculator ought to tell me not only how much it costs to ship something, but how many stamps (of the standard values) it would take to cover that cost.

Response to 'Awards for Women'

Awards for Women

Psh.

That was my response. Something between a derisive snort and a laugh.

Highlighting mine:

Programme aims to boost scientific participation for women from 81 developing nations. Five early-career female researchers from Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean are to be honoured with US$5,000 Elsevier Foundation Awards in a programme to encourage women to pursue science in nations that lack scientific expertise, resources and gender equality. “They are not given the opportunity to do good science,” says Peter McGrath, a programme officer for co-sponsor TWAS, the academy of sciences for the developing world in Trieste, Italy. “This is a way to bring their work to the international forefront.” Nominations for researchers from 81 eligible nations who earned PhDs in the past 10 years will be accepted until 30 September.

Point the first: five people receiving $5,000 each is a pittance. Really? $25,000 is all you can muster? Come on, Elsevier, you've got to be bringing in more than that, considering the ridiculous costs of your journals.

Point the second: $5,000 will go a lot farther in, say, Burma than in Baltimore, but I'm sure there are other places on the list of 81 nations where $5,000 would get used up very fast.

Point the third: will $5,000 each to five women really be enough to "bring their work to the international forefront"? Somehow I don't think so.

Response to 'Colleges Struggle to Respond'

Colleges Struggle to Respond

I think they (both the colleges and the author) missed a key point here. All of these suggested responses are reactions to existing stresses, but a number of the "major concerns" listed at the end of the article could be prevented (or diminished through prevention). The obvious –yet surprisingly overlooked– answer to me is to work toward a better graduate school culture.

What does this better culture look like? Faculty advisors need to set clear, reasonable expectations: when are working hours? How many days a week? How many hours a day? How much time off? How easy is it to get time off? (I mean really, not just on paper.)

Yes, a lot of the burden of change will fall on the faculty.

The comment by mj_zorro is particularly on point here:

I am surprised and disappointed by the focus on the medical needs of [students], to the exclusion of the active role that some faculty play in their students' problems. ... There are undoubtedly students whose fragile mental health is independent of the behavior of their mentors, but there are also far too many examples of faculty who publicly humiliate their students, or dismiss the idea of wanting eight hours of sleep and time with one's family as laziness, as opposed to healthy human behavior and basic self-maintenance. ... Abusive supervision is detrimental to performance, as well as student health, but people who have learned to be productive in these kinds of environments often fail to understand the damage it does, in part because it is widely tolerated in academic environments.

I think we'll find that stress levels go down (and anxiety, too), when we treat others humanely and can expect the same in return. Stay up all night doing research if you want to, or if it makes you happy, not because Boss said so, or implied it.

Let's all work with nice people by being nice people.

mj_zorro concludes:

Yes, graduate students need access to mental health services, and we need to make it easier for them to feel comfortable taking advantage of those services, but we also need to do a much better job of training faculty to respect the humanity of their students, ands [sic] encourage their development in a positive way.

See also the comment by not4nothing, especially:

I suggest that part of the problem is what my advisor referred to as the "Paris Island Syndrome." It was done to me, so now I get to do it to you. ... I say the abuse ends here with me. I will not confuse bullying with academic rigor. I will not pass it on. I refuse to subject my students to what amounts to institutionalized hazing.

Yes, yes, yes! This! This is why I chose my advisor as I did. I chose someone who treats people as people, rather than robots.


In contrast is graddirector, who, based on the name, one might assume is coming at this from "within the system" so to speak, and who offers a few defenses:

While there are some abusive mentors out there, the students in my program who were experiencing true mental health issues were often not in that handful of labs, instead [sic] were working in quite nurturing environments. ... I have seen students "stressed" by the workload but in reality were [sic] basically doing nothing at all.

Forgive my eye-rolling, but apparently distress is not a "true mental health issue." I also find it odd that, as graddirector presents it, the students with "true mental health issues" were better able to avoid the abusive mentors than those without. It sounds like Spider-Sense to me, which is to say, malarkey. Mental health issues can be totally invisible. Plenty of people cope with things well enough not to let on, and that doesn't mean that internally things are hunky-dory. I'd guess there were (as a percentage) just as many students with mental aches and pains under those abusive mentors as elsewhere. Perhaps they were bullied into hiding it, or bullied out of their places.

The commenter continues to argue along the "distressed grad students are actually lazy and ineffectual" line with this:

Some folks just do not have the ability to be productive enough to even be minimally functional in the profession.

Well then why did you let them into grad school? That sounds like poor admissions to me. Read: excuses, excuses.

Then it takes an odd turn:

Both behavioral modification and being in over your head does cause anxiety. However, what is the alternative?

Grammar issues aside, those two sentences irk me. Behavioral modification? This sounds right in line with the position that it's entirely the grad students' fault if they are uncomfortable in their current environment. And what is the alternative? If the environment is hostile, how about we change the environment?

And while I'm at it, one more uncomfortable comment from graddirector:

I do agree that positive reinforcement is the way to go, ... however a subset of students progress best with ultimatums and threats (these students will even say they work best to a "deadline" which I personally can not understand but whatever works for them.) [sic] ... Even if someone has perfect credentials on paper, sometimes their personality does not allow for productivity when working independently (procrastination is a big problem)...

This from the same person who later admits:

... I am procrastinating from working on editing one of my doctoral students papers we are preparing for publication ...

That crap just gets under my skin. In my mind, Merlin Mann is asking "Are you the kind of hypocrite you can live with?" Maybe this person is fine with that flavor of hypocrite. I'm not.

And mention of Merlin Mann brings me around full-circle. The problem of distress does not come out of thin air. Some of it is baggage brought along by the individuals present, sure. But some of it comes from –or is aggravated by– the hostile, toxic environment. The work culture. And that's something that colleges aren't addressing yet.

Yellowstone Garbage Cans and Internet Security

Yellowstone National Park has quite a challenging garbage problem. A garbage can at Yellowstone needs to be complex enough that bears and raccoons can't get into it, yet simple enough that pictographic instructions can clearly explain its use to any given visitor, no matter what language he or she speaks. Very simple and yet very complex.

After reading about how a writer at Wired had his Amazon, Gmail and iCloud accounts hacked recently, I thought of the Yellowstone garbage cans. It seems to me that Internet security is very similar: you want a system that is easy for Grandpa Uncle Joe to figure out, but complex enough to keep out the bears (or trolls). Current best practices for passwords are becoming more and more complex, but I fear that poor old Grandpa Uncle Joe is easy to stump, and those bears are pretty damn clever. So what we have is a garbage can locked with fourteen combination locks, a confused old man with a worn out house key, and bears who can fool the park rangers into leaving the gate open. There has to be a better way.

On Access

Supposedly, scientific journals exist to share research conclusions with others scientists. Subscription journals are typically paid for by universities and other research institutions, rather than by individual researchers. Why, then, do they make it so difficult to get to the research papers?

I want to skim the headlines, get the PDFs of a select few articles, and do all of this with as little hassle as possible.