Impropaganda

Back "then"

2014-12-12T16:29:00.002-05:00

From a Rosalind Franklin bio at the San Diego Supercomputer Center website:

"Wilkins was away at the time, and when he returned he misunderstood her role, behaving as though she were a technical assistant. Both scientists were actually peers. His mistake, acknowledged but never overcome, was not surprising given the climate for women at the university then."

I started my Ph.D. in molecular biology in 1998 and I find the word "then" in the above sentence slightly odd. From what I've heard, conditions for women in science back "then" were much worse, but the scenario described above sounded quite similar to what I experienced and witnessed regularly during my time as a graduate student.

I hope things progress to the point where one day we can look back at that sort of scenario and really feel that it's all in the past.

Laney the artistic soul

2013-11-08T18:16:00.001-05:00

[fiction]

Laney never tried in school and dropped out before the eleventh grade. She worked odd jobs now and then, but mostly loafed around your parents' house trying to find herself while you worked your ass off in school, got good grades, and had no fun. You eventually went off to business school, where you learned key phrases like "value added" and how to network convincingly with people you can't stand. You did everything right. Laney did everything wrong.

But this Thanksgiving, everyone is ooh-ing and ahh-ing at the brilliance of Laney's success. They are sitting in the living room watching a movie that Laney starred in. Or rather, they are watching a movie clip that features Laney's hands groping at someone who is freaking out and trying to get out of a blind alley. Laney's hands star as a zombie's hands, and everyone is so impressed, they watch the six-second clip over and over. You roll your eyes, but no one notices because everyone's looking at the TV screen.

"They had a closeup shot of my face, where I'm drooling and stuff, but they had to cut it during production to keep the length down."

"I always knew my Laney was an artistic soul!" your mother declares. "My daughter Laney, the Hollywood actress!"

"Probably slept with someone in order to get the role," you mutter. No one hears you. You feel a little bad inside for thinking it, but then not that bad as you see Uncle Trevor hitting rewind to play the clip again.

Science in the Kitchen

2013-10-25T17:04:00.000-05:00

During a relapse of my recurring MOOC-aholism, I indulged in a Harvard MOOC offered on edX called "Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to Soft Matter Science." The combination of science and cooking beckons to the molecular biologist and glutton that I am, at a deep and visceral level. I'm sure that many molecular biologists will agree that after a long hard day of following recipes in the lab only to have your experiment fail, the most logical way to relax is to follow recipes at home and then eat your experiment.

My affair with this MOOC may have to end soon, if I am to follow my pledge to recover from MOOC-aholism and get my life back in order. But I did do a bit of science in the kitchen today.

Watching Netflix's House of Cards, which featured Kevin Spacey's character eating almost religiously at a Southern BBQ ribs joint, made me crave Southern style ribs. I remembered some delicious slow-cooked Southern ribs I learned to make from some friends of friends one Thanksgiving. Here in relatively soul-less Sweden (food-wise), when you crave food from a certain region of the world, your best chance is to make it yourself.

Yesterday, I took to the Internet, hoping to find a new recipe for Southern-style ribs to try. I found this recipe for slow-cooked Memphis ribs on finecooking.com, thawed the pork ribs we had in our freezer, and got cooking. The recipe also includes directions for barbecue sauce. I wasn't enthusiastic about making the barbecue sauce, because I don't like the taste of the "standard" barbecue sauce one normally gets at a restaurant. But I thought "what the heck" and tried the recipe. I was missing a few ingredients (the Worcestershire sauce and the tomato paste) and had to substitute red wine vinegar for the cider vinegar. Also, I couldn't find hot chili powder in our spice shelves, but instead chanced upon an unlabeled bottle of a spice mixture that looked and smelled like it would pass for chili powder, so I used that instead.

The ribs turned out quite good, but the sauce wasn't just good, it was mouth-wateringly delicious. My husband wanted to know what was in the sauce, and when I went through the ingredients, we came to the conclusion that the unlabeled jar of spices I had used was definitely not hot chili powder. Instead, it was a mystery blend of spices someone (likely a family member, although I also suspected a friend who had recently been in Tennessee) gave us that my husband dumped in a jar.

We panicked as we realized we might never be able to duplicate the sauce once our jar of mystery blend ran out.

"Do you want to spend the rest of our lives regretting that we could never duplicate the sauce?" my husband asked.

"No, absolutely not."

Today, I decided to perform a kitchen experiment to see if we could deduce the ingredients in the mystery blend and thereby ensure unlimited future access to the heavenly barbecue sauce. I made the sauce as I had done yesterday, leaving out the mystery blend that I'd used before. Then I split the batch of sauce into two by moving half of the batch into another pan. Then I added mystery blend to one of the pans, and added my own blend of ingredients (paprika, red pepper flakes, ground cumin, ground coriander seed, and cayenne pepper) that I guessed to the other pan.

My husband, blind to which pan contained the mystery blend and which contained my own concoction, performed a taste test.

"The one on the right tastes a lot better," he said.

"A lot better?"

"Yeah."

"You sure?"

"Yeah, the one in the stainless steel pan."

"We're fucked."

He had chosen the one made with mystery blend. I demanded he get on the phone with the relative he suspected of giving it to us. We still do not have answers, as she cannot yet recall what it is.

As I'm a scientist, I think it is only fair to present critiques of this first experiment.

(1) The pans were different: one was cast-iron and one was stainless steel. The sauces simmered for a while after I separated the batch into two, so the pans could have an influence on the taste.

(2) I did not add the final ingredient to the two difference sauces at exactly the same time, since I have only a pair of hands and am pretty slow in the kitchen. So my concoction had less time to blend with the other ingredients in that sauce than the mystery blend did in its saucepan.

(3) The ratios of mystery blend to total sauce vs. my concoction to total sauce might have differed, as I may have not split the batch into two exactly equal portions, and there was likely quite a bit of error of my measuring the amount of mystery blend or my concoction to add.

That said, there was a definitive "bite" to the sauce with the mystery blend that was missing in the other sauce, so we think the most likely explanation is a missing ingredient in the mystery blend that we have not figured out yet.

However this story ends later (whether or not our relative will be able to recall what the mystery blend is), it was certainly fun to do a bit of science today.

Morally perverted

2013-10-09T18:41:00.001-05:00

Senator John McCain wrote an obituary for Vo Nguyen Giap (Wall Street Journal, October 6, 2013). The sub-header (unclear if written by McCain or a Wall Street Journal editor) read:

To defeat any adversary, the late North Vietnamese Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap permitted immense casualties and the near total destruction of his country.

This is the most morally perverted statement I have seen in a long time. What sort of twisted logic and self-delusion could possibly lead one to conclude it must be a (negative) reflection on the character of a general on the other side that he "permitted" the killing and destruction that one has wrought upon the other side? That killing and destroying itself is not worthy of moral judgment, but "permitting" it (I guess by not immediately giving into violent coercion) is?

We are treated to more moral pervertedness here, where McCain suggests that Americans are morally superior:

The U.S. never lost a battle against North Vietnam, but it lost the war. Countries, not their armies, win wars. Giap understood that. We didn't. Americans tired of the dying and the killing before the Vietnamese did. It's hard to defned the morality of the strategy. But you can't deny its success.

That's right, focus on the "indefensible morality" of resisting attack by Americans, who "tired of the dying and the killing before the Vietnamese did." So the far greater casualties suffered by the Vietnamese is evidence of - not the ruthlessness of the mighty imperial power that inflicted them - but the ruthlessness of General Giap.

Ooookay.

May Giap rest in peace and may McCain find a conscience.

Missed Connection

2013-10-09T17:40:00.005-05:00

Last week, out of nowhere, I suddenly remembered a comment my parents made to me after they made a trip to Vietnam. They'd met a lot of people, some of whom they'd only known through the Internet before (through literary or political circles). One person whom they met was a close friend of General Vo Nguyen Giap. My parents couldn't stop talking about me, my interest in politics, and my interest in Vietnam's history. Their new acquaintance was touched, because he didn't know of many people in my generation who cared about Vietnamese history. He told them to tell me that if I ever came to Vietnam, he would be happy to introduce me to the general.

"Isn't that kind of random," I thought, both about the offer to introduce me to the general, and my suddenly remembering it. And I thought about how the general was getting old, so I'd likely not have much time to take up my parents' new acquaintance on that offer.

The next day, I found out that the general died. I felt the expected sadness of my missed connection with him. But since I don't actually know him, the bigger sadness for me is the sadness that a piece of history might have died with him. Giap had written a short book called "How we won the war," but it doesn't reveal that much.

My worry now is likely similar to that of my parents' new acquaintance. As Giap and his generation die, will anyone remember anymore? Will anyone care what happened in Vietnam?

Longing for the Newtonian universe

2013-09-26T19:46:00.000-05:00

I am taking a classical mechanics course through MIT’s online educational platform, edX. This class brings up memories of my undergraduate physics curriculum. I took classical mechanics during my freshman year. My classmates and I became intimate with Newton’s Laws. Physics was beautiful, it was math, and it made sense. The next year, we took quantum mechanics. I remember sitting in the first class, excited but uncertain as to what quantum mechanics would bring. On the first line of my notes, I wrote “Everything you know (from classical mechanics) is wrong.

And I was right. All the ways we had learned to describe the physical world, all the rhythm and sense we gained from Newtonian mechanics, could not be scaled down to the quantum world. There were not only new rules to learn, the new rules blew our minds. I was often in denial in quantum class. Could it really be? Is that what our professor is really saying?

Two decades later, I made another uncomfortable leap: moving to another country. To become an immigrant is to make the transition from the classical mechanical universe to the quantum mechanical universe. It seems exciting at first, but then the reality of the utter confusion sets in. Nothing makes sense anymore. Everything I know about what to do or how to be, from how I set the table to how and if and when to talk about myself, is wrong. All the education and experience I have in my old Newtonian universe count for shit. (If anything, they seem to constitute reasons I should hang my head in shame.)

There are new rules to learn, many of them mind-blowing. The most important and most difficult rule to learn is that many rules apply only to immigrants. And some especially to immigrants who “don’t look like an American” (or Swede).

Most of the characteristics that I’ve tried to nurture in myself, which I’d like to believe are positive traits, seem to provoke scorn or at least irritation in others. What made me a valued employee in my homeland, like always being willing to take on extra work and do the best job I can, are unappreciated and even unwelcome in my new home. The new rule here seems to be to do the minimum, lest you make others look bad or feel bad about themselves.

Becoming an immigrant has made me more aware of the privilege I enjoyed as a non-immigrant in the United States. (Although again, some people, Americans and non-Americans alike, judge from my appearance that I cannot be an American). As an immigrant, no matter how hard I try with the language, points are always deducted for not being a native speaker. That no matter how impressive my resume might have been in the United States, I should count myself lucky to have a job at all in the new country. That, by virtue of being an immigrant, I am always to be regarded with suspicion.

I am still in denial. Could it really be? Perhaps it is this longing to return to the familiar, the describable, that has made me want to revisit classical mechanics. If I cannot understand the world of people around me, then perhaps at least I can understand the physical world.

Jantewhat?

2013-08-09T19:38:00.002-05:00

One of the strangest facets of living in Sweden is the concept of "Jantelagen."

Let me explain this Jantelagen thing to you as best as I can so you can be confused about it too. Jantelagen basically says that one should not take pride in individual achievements, or even mention what one does for a living, or where one went to school, or what degrees one may have, because somewhere in the world, some Swede might feel bad about him or herself for not having achieved as much as you. If you do any of those things, you are considered an egotistical jerk who should be left in the forest with nothing but a can of fermented herring to survive. Occasionally, you might even be considered an... and I hate to use bad words in my blog, but - you might be considered - an American. (Cue the snickering evil glare cast at the nearest convenient American.)

The basis of this "Jantelagen" concept is that everyone is equal, so by excelling in anyway, you are a jerk. You can reduce your jerkiness by never talking about any of your achievements and instead by feeling deeply ashamed about it.

In case your mind hasn't been blown yet, many Swedes who deeply espouse the Jantelagen "everyone is equal" concept also find nothing wrong at all with the fact that, in this day and age, Sweden still has a royal family that is considered above the law. Their king can literally get away with murder if he wanted. In fact, I first learned about Jantelagen in Swedish class, and in the very next class we were compelled to discuss in nauseating detail the Swedish royal family. Our teacher found it to be a logical topic transition.

Also to pile on the confusion, while it is definitely not okay to talk about things you have actually accomplished, it is perfectly okay to show off about things you have not accomplished, say you are "good at" something, or call your place of work a "Center of Excellence." In fact, you should do this a lot. As long as you're a Swede. But definitely not if you're an American.

Four of the Many Puzzling Questions You Will Get When You Are Pregnant

2013-06-20T21:12:00.001-05:00

1. Was it an accident?

Images of broken condoms come to mind, and then you can't help but imagine the question-asker imaging you having sex with your partner, and then you really want them to stop. Like right now.

2. How did it happen?

You have a hard time understanding why an adult would still be unclear on such things, and an even harder time understanding why they expect you to educate them about something their parents should have long ago. Oh never mind, abstinence education explains it all.

3. Was it planned?

It is unclear what is meant by "planning" to have a baby. Did they imagine that you and your partner picked a certain day to make a baby and then did it that very day?

4. Are you happy about having the baby?
What would they expect you to say? "No, I'm not happy but I'm still having the baby."?

Unsung Hero Complex

2013-05-26T00:26:00.002-05:00

A personality disorder characterized by an overwhelming desire to expend a lot of energy doing unnecessary things, at least some of which is in fact counterproductive, in order to whine about: 1) how tired one gets, 2) how one has too much to do and can't manage to do the things one really needs to do, and mostly 3) that fact that one's doing of such unnecessary and counterproductive things is unappreciated.

Some features of Histrionic Personality Disorder are usually present. Namely, the Unsung Hero also feeds on constant drama and will create such drama out of mundane matters. A constant state of panic over ordinary things and imagined difficulties is also highly indicative.

People with unsung hero complexes tend to have deep insecurities, while also believing that, if it weren't for their tireless efforts at doing pointless things, the world might stop spinning (or at least their grandchildren might die because one's children and children-in-law don't buy one's grandchildren enough toys). Unsung heroes also tend to believe that others who do not constantly live in a state of panic must be incompetent at basic things such as cleaning their own house or paying their bills.

Some thoughts on Boston

2013-04-20T18:08:00.001-05:00

Boston was my home for a long, long time. I came to the city in the summer of 1998, wanting to get a few months of getting used to the city and working as a research assistant before starting a graduate program at MIT. After I graduated many years later, I stayed in the city working in the patent department at a law firm. I did not leave the city until the end of 2010, when I followed the love of my life out of the country.

People come and go in Boston, so during my 12 and half years in Boston, I made friends with different "waves" of people and become a part of so many different families - the biology graduate community, the political activist community at MIT, the MIT Sport Taekwondo community, and the patent law community at my former law firm. "Friend" was not an adequate word to describe many of the relationships I forged. Some "friends" were so close, I felt like they were my family.

When I first heard news of the bombing at the Boston marathon, my heart stopped. I knew it would be some time before information would come out about the victims. Then I felt relief when I found out that my close friends were okay. But it was an uncomfortable kind of relief. Whether I knew them or not, the victims and their families were suffering an unimagineable grief. An eight-year old child lay dead while his mother and sister were seriously injured, while his grieving father was hounded by reporters at his home.

Then came the events later in the week at MIT and Watertown. My friends were holed up in their homes while police sought the second suspect.

These events shocked me because they hit somewhere I had called home for a long time. That said, I couldn't help but cringe when someone I followed on Twitter bristled at the notion that we should be reminded that much greater* scale violence is an almost every day occurrence in Iraq. That this week's events touch us Bostonians (and former Bostonians) more than other events makes sense. That we are the only ones entitled to sympathy, or grief, does not make sense to me.

It is not my intention to say that we ought to remind ourselves of the violence that others in the world face (some, nearly every day) in order to belittle the tragedy that happened in Boston. It's the belittling of other people's tragedies elsewhere in the world that really bothers me. It's the "how dare you" response to even *mentioning* the violence others regularly face.

*While I mention here a "greater" scale of violence, I do not mean to say that you can measure grief and say that a father's grief in Boston is less or more than a father's grief in, say, war-torn Syria (from which at least one picture and message of sympathy for Bostonians has been circulated). In fact, I am mostly having a problem with the notion some have that the grief experienced by others in the world is somehow unmentionable.

Book-nerding it with the Da Vinci Code

2013-04-07T10:04:00.001-05:00

I (finally) read Dan Brown's "Da Vinci Code"and then re-watched the movie. Unsurprisingly, I turned into the annoying book nerd who paused the movie every now and then to say, "That's not how it happened in the book!" While I don't expect movies to be entirely true to the book, several of the changes from the book to the movie fit a familiar, annoying theme: make the lead male character look smarter and make the lead female character lead look stupider.

**MOVIE SPOILER AHEAD***
For example, there was a scene where the trio (Robert Langdon, Sophie Neveu, and Leigh Teabing) uncover a text written in a strange-looking script. In the movie, before Teabing or Neveu begin to make head or tail of the text, Langdon instantly recognizes the trick one needs in order to read it.

In the book, neither Langdon nor Teabing can figure out what language the script is written in. They rack their brains talking about possible ancient languages. Neveu, on the other hand, instantly recognizes the script as simply being the mirror image of a cursive English text.

Similar changes were made in other scenes throughout the movie. The movie version of Langdon is given much more credit for solving puzzles or providing background knowledge than he'd been given in the book, while Neveu's role shifted more toward the dumbfounded female who just looks pretty standing next to the bright guy.

Now one might say: this was a Hollywood movie; such adaptations are standard to make the lead character more interesting or awe-inspiring. But those adaptations didn't even make sense in the story. Neveu is a trained cryptologist who had grown up all her life being groomed by her grandfather in solving of puzzles and cryptic messages. Her adeptness at solving codes is a main part of the plot. It makes much less sense for Langdon to be the one to figure out puzzles most of the time.

Ironically, one of the themes of the book is how the history of a very important woman (Mary Magdalene) was "re-written" by men so that her true role was hidden under the cloak of "prostitute."

It seems that the scriptwriters of the "Da Vinci Code" movie missed the point of the book.

Then and Now

2013-03-17T01:06:00.000-05:00

Then:
On-campus male:female ratio was 3:1.
Now:
Household male:female ratio is 2:1.

Then:
Late-night nerding is interrupted by period shrieking from 17-18 year olds up to no good.
Now:
Late-night nerding is interrupted by period shrieking from 9 month old who is up way past his bedtime.

Then:
I didn't need an alarm clock during Finals Week because The Ride of the Valkyries was cruelly blasted every morning at 7 a.m..
Now:
I don't need an alarm clock, like ever, because The Cry of the Infant is blasted every morning at 6:30 am.

Then:
I sometimes spent free time thinking about the one cute guy on campus.
Now:
I spend a lot of time looking at or thinking about the one cutie pie in my life.

Then:
I totally knew Maxwell's Equations by heart.
Now:
I totally know the entire text of The Very Hungry Caterpillar by heart.

Then:
Constant sleep deprivation led me to do things like bike home for a 5-minute nap in between classes and fall asleep standing while listening to the TA in chem lab.
Now:
Constant sleep deprivation leads me to do things like... just always be tired as I balance work, home, and personal nerding activities.

How to Piss Off a Nine Month Old Baby

2013-03-07T00:07:00.001-05:00

A Guide for Complete Strangers

1. Ignore the parents when they explain that the baby needs time to get used to strangers, and that as a stranger, one should not be all in his face right away.

2. Laugh when the baby cries at your loud, in-his-face, manner.

3. Quickly and uninvitedly grab the baby out his mother's arms and swing the baby back and forth violently, saying "whee!" as the baby cries even more loudly.

4. Reluctantly return the pissed off baby to his mother.

5. Not notice that the baby continues to cry and cast angry looks in your direction.

6. Talk about how all kids love you because you're such a "charmer" around kids.

Common Decency Aptitude Test

2013-02-27T22:07:00.001-05:00

1. When the bus/tram/subway is somewhat crowded, but there is more space in the middle of the bus/car, you should:
a. plant yourself defiantly close to the door, thereby blocking the way so that people can't get to where there is space and forcing them to squeeze themselves in an unsafe and uncomfortable space near the door.
b. move your ass out of the way.

2. When the bus/tram/subway is crowded and there is an empty seat next to you, you should:
a. leave your bag on the empty seat while others are struggling to find standing space.
b. block the way from the aisle to the empty seat so that no one can actually access the empty seat.
c. move your stuff off of the seat so someone can sit down.

3. When you see someone fall down badly on the snow and ice and struggle to get up, you should:
a. point, laugh, and move on.
b. say "Oy yoy yoy yoy yoy" with a heavy Swedish accent and then keep walking.
c. help the person up.

4. If you really don't like someone at work, you should:
a. pretend that you two are best friends at coffee and lunch breaks, but bad-mouth her behind her back to everyone else.
b. pretend that you two are best friends at coffee and lunch breaks, but then be rude in work meetings.
c. both a and b
d. be polite, but not fake, when interacting with her.

5. When there's a queue, you should:
a. cut in line in front of other people, rationalizing that you are more important than everyone else.
b. cut in line in front of immigrants only, rationalizing that you have more worth as a human being than immigrants in your native country do.
b. respect the queue.

6. If you don't want someone to come to a work meeting, you should:
a. invite her to the meeting on Outlook, not say anything when she accepts the meeting, stare at her when she actually comes to the meeting, and continue to not say anything to her, but do your best to make her feel unwelcome and hope she leaves on their own.
b. not say anything to her even though it's clear that she was expecting to attend the meeting, wait until just before the meeting, and then instruct her colleague to inform her that she is not welcome at the meeting.
c. do not invite her in the first place, or tell her directly but politely in advance.

5:30 am moment of surreality

2012-10-25T08:53:00.002-05:00

All quiet on the domestic front. I am pumping milk while the rest of the household is still sleeping. It is a rare moment of peace. I know that sometime between 12:30 am and now, I had gotten up once in the night to tend to my son. Yet strangely I feel rested.

I think of the times I have heard the saying “why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free.” I think of how I pointed out that I, and my sisters, are not in fact cows. Somehow that really blunt point was still lost on some people and was met with empty, confused looks. The fact that women are human beings just does not compute with some people. I think I’m still Facebook friends with some of those people. Should I unfriend them or leave them on so that I can occasionally remind myself of how glad I should be that they are no longer part of my real, analog life?

I think about the time that my husband and I visited a cow farm on the countryside in Sweden. The cows were herded into a carousel, where they were hooked up to a milking machine. Our guide unhooked the apparatus on one cow to let me hand-milk the cow. I felt like an intruder as my fingers grasped the cow’s nipples and squeezed. The cow didn’t seem to notice, and milk came readily. Now I squeeze milk out of myself.

When we exited the carousel area, there was a huge smear of cow dung on the gate. Despite seeing it, I somehow got it on my arm and then somehow (really, I didn’t mean it) got it on my husband too. Luckily we were both wearing extra “cow farm” clothes that the farmer lent us. We rinsed off and changed our clothes.

Somehow these memories – of the people who would say things like “why buy the cow...” juxtaposed with the memory of the cow farm in Dalarna, juxtaposed with the quietness of the house as my loved ones sleep, makes me remember for the first time in a long time just how completely happy in my life I am.

Nerding for the new mom

2012-09-26T14:55:00.000-05:00

I'm fortunate to enjoy a generous government-sponsored, work-is-totally-okay-with-it maternity leave here in Sweden (as will my husband when my gig is up). Before I became a mother, I planned on using the leave to brush up on or acquire new skills, for example, through classes and self-study. What I hadn't realized then, however, was the impracticality of taking classes (daycare for a few-months infant is non-existent in Sweden) and the relative lack of time I'd have where 1) both my hands would be free and 2) I'd be awake enough to think.

When I actually became a mother, I got lost in a blur of sleep deprivation and constant breastfeeding. I grudgingly realized it would be harder than I thought to use my actual time off in the way I'd planned.

Enter my discovery of free online courses offered through Coursera (a venture out of Stanford) and edX (an MIT/Harvard/UC Berkely partnership). Through Coursera, anyone with a computer and an internet connection can take however many classes they would like for free. A large number of universities (including, for example, Stanford, Caltech, UC Irvine, Georgia Tech, U Penn, Johns Hopkins, and U Toronto) are offering courses through Coursera. The course selection spans many disciplines. There are a lot of computer programming and data analysis courses (or maybe those are the ones I'm geared toward most right now).

Aside from viewing video lectures, students also submit homework problems and take exams online. For most courses, homework and exams are graded by computer online, and students with a passing grade will get a certificate or statement of completion. Although students won't be able to get university credit for these courses, the courses are taught at the same level of rigor as the real-life counterparts at the host universities.

Coursera and edX have taken online education to a whole new level. These online classes are highly interactive, and the way in which they engage students works especially well for my learning style. It's hard to explain how amazing the sites are. You just have to try out a course.

For edX, MIT students had voluntarily added features before the site launched. So edX has really cool features like a side box with a transcript of what the professor is saying in the video lecture. Videos on both Coursera and edX allow the option of speeding up or slowing down the pace of the lecture. In some video lectures on Coursera, short multiple choice questions are integrated in certain parts of the video lectures to test understanding before moving on to the next part of the lecture.

I love that I don't have to arrange for daycare to take these classes. I can watch the video lectures at my convenience, for example even while breastfeeding. Then after the little one goes to sleep, I can work on the homework problems.

Man forced to think about breast in a non-sexual way for five seconds; survives ordeal

2012-09-14T16:59:00.004-05:00

[Impropaganda News Service exclusive]

A New Brunswick man is reported to have survived a non-sexual encounter with a human breast. Jason Salaziole, a 19-year old pre-law student, was going for a jog in the public park when he encountered a woman nursing her baby on the bench. Salaziole could not actually see any part of the breast, which was covered partly by the baby’s head and partly by the woman’s shirt. Nonetheless, he quickly realized what the woman was doing.

“I felt violated. She was clearly breastfeeding,” Salaziole told reporters after he was revived from fainting from the shock.

Although Salaziole felt deeply traumatized by the incident, doctors confirmed that he is in stable condition and that he suffered no lasting damage.

Breastphobics’ rights advocates quickly used the incident to raise awareness about their cause.

“Our organization’s goal is to prevent incidents like these from happening again,” Citizens against Mammary Indecency president Trip Balfore explained. “We support even public exposure of breasts as long as the context is an appropriate one, like at Mardi Gras, or any of the myriad of examples in videos like Girls Gone Wild. However, feeding a baby is clearly not an appropriate situation for the breast to appear. ”

Balfore quickly added that even though the woman’s breast was not technically exposed during the incident in question, “[s]he essentially forced Salaziole, an innocent passerby, to think about the breast in a non-sexual way.”

Does "free speech" include the right to adopt a highway?

2012-09-14T08:21:00.000-05:00

Reuters reported today that the ACLU of Georgia is representing the Ku Klux Klan in its suit against the state of Georgia for refusing the KKK's bid to adopt a stretch of highway. There are no details about the ACLU strategy, but it appears that the ACLU is framing this situation as a free speech issue.

I'm failing to see how this is a free speech issue. The KKK is not being prevented from voicing its opinions by not being allowed to adopt a highway. It seems to me that the adopt-a-highway program would have the right to reject an application in the same way that a newspaper can choose to refuse to run an advertisement that an organization would like it to run. Is there a different fact pattern here because the adopt-a-highway program is a state government program?

If we were to run the facts over a different scenario, say in which the Department of Transportation of the State of Georgia would refuse to allow a marriage equality organization from adopting a stretch of highway, I would in all honesty be really pissed off but I still wouldn't feel that there is a free speech issue. There isn't a constitutionally-guaranteed right to be able to place your advertising wherever you want it. Free speech, as far as I understand it, means that you can't get thrown in jail or otherwise legally punished for expressing your opinion, no matter how unpopular that opinion may be.

Any thoughts, legal or otherwise?

Things I wish I'd known about grad school

2012-09-03T15:19:00.003-05:00

When I was a first year grad student, I never listened to advice that any of the older (read "disgruntled") students or postdocs would give me about grad school. If I had to go back and do graduate school all over again, I still wouldn't listen to that advice.

That's because no one actually gave me advice that was either actionable or even enlightening. What they really gave were either depressing views of the future like "one day you'll be just as bitter and demented as I am" or thinly-veiled attempts to cut down on their future competition such as "if I were you I'd quit grad school now before you waste too much of your time."

Even though it's been several years since I've graduated, grad school still literally gives me nightmares (like the one in which I couldn't stop kicking someone in the head). But now I can look back and occasionally have brief periods of calmness during which I can synthesize some of the lessons I learned. There are things I wish that someone had told me before I started grad school, and that either I was smart enough to keep on my whiteboard at all times, or lucky enough to have someone repeat to me over and over.

(NOTE: My program was in molecular biology, so some of the advice below is specific for that type of program, where lab work is the focus.)

1. Working hard is not the same thing as being perceived as working hard.

Not everyone falls into the trap of thinking that they need to see you at your bench for you to be actually working, but unfortunately many people do.

You may work on a project/ in a sub-field that requires many hours of lab work away from your main bench (for example, in the animal facility, in the microscope room, at another lab borrowing their equipment, etc.). Or you may prefer to analyze data and do big-picture thinking away from the lab, where you can work unperturbed by lab imps and the like.

It may therefore be inherently obvious to you that someone who is not always physically present at their desk or lab bench may in fact be working very hard. It is not, however, inherently obvious to people who have limited cognitive skills, and these are often the people who are judging you the most. (See point 9 below.)

(Near the end of my graduate school time, for example, I had to come in around 7 am every day to take a time point and / or run some experiments with equipment borrowed from another lab. The lender himself needed the equipment back by 10 am. So from 7 am to 10 am I often worked in our lab's mouse facility, and then around 10 am I would come back to my desk and bench in the main lab. I was then taken aside from a labmate who told me that not getting to work until 10 am was contributing the perception of me as a lazy person.)

2. Being perceived as working hard may be more important than you'd like.

Although the perception of how hard you work won't create data for you, it may influence a lot of things that ultimately affect your success in graduate school and beyond. Your advisor's perception of how hard you work, for example, can influence how they perceive the value of the data you do have, whether you "deserve" to be a co-author on labmate's research paper, whether you "deserve" to graduate, whether (s)he should tell your committee members to give you a hard time on your preliminary exam, whether (s)he will ask you to co-author a review paper with her/him, whether (s)he will send you to an international conference, whether (s)he will call up her/his colleagues and tell them that they've got to take you as a postdoc or give you an award, or whether (s)he will think of you when opportunities come up that could enhance your career.

And don't discount how your advisor's and co-workers' general attitude day in and day out can affect your overall happiness and productiveness. If you're working your ass off and are still being perceived as being lazy it can lead to feelings of self-defeat.

I am not suggesting that you barge into your advisor's office with a pipettor in your hands at every opportunity in order to let your advisor know you're working hard (though some of my former colleagues certainly used this tactic), but it may be worth thinking about ways to communicate that you're working when you're not physically there. Perhaps leaving a note at your desk letting people know where you are if you spend long hours working in a different location will be somewhat helpful. It saddens me that you should have to do this sort of thing for a research job where flexibility and independence is supposed to help offset the low pay and long hours, and where most of the time people don't really need to be able to reach you.

3. Working harder can be a trap that decreases productivity

I know how easy that trap is to fall into. Your experiments don't work (see point 8) and you think "well if I just work harder, I will get this experiment to work so that I can finally have good data to publish."

That's only sort of true. You will have to repeat experiments, but it's not good to keep banging your head against the same wall. If you just work non-stop, you're likely to end up in an often non-productive loop of repeating experiments that may be pointless, inappropriate, poorly designed, etc.. You likely won't realize it until after you've wasted a lot of time since you never stopped to take a step back to think about what you were actually doing.

Allowing yourself the coffee break, short walk outside, evening off, weekend off, or whatever it is you need to do to recharge will do more for your productivity than going into mindless robot mode. Believe it or not, it's often during these pauses that breakthrough ideas and inspiration will hit.

4. Thinking about the big picture is really important.

In order to do this, it's best if you're not actually doing experiments 100% of the time. Thinking about the big picture (asking yourself what questions you're actually trying to answer, reading about papers in your field, etc.) is actually part of your work, but many people don't recognize it as such. Some molecular biologists don't think you're working unless you have a pipettor in your hands. Spend time being pipettor-less anyway. Avoid the endless "repeat experiments" cycle mentioned in point 3.

5. Most of your colleagues and professors in molecular biology don't know how to analyze numerical data.

You will probably hear the phrase "statistically significant" or "p-value" uttered about a million times by people who have no idea what either of those really mean. You probably will not ever hear the phrase "error propagation" by people who should be doing it.

I don't know that there's much to do about this one unless you want to spend a lot of time campaigning for reform in the basic education of molecular biologists. Realistically, all it should take is, say, a mandatory one-semester course to provide the basics of data analysis, which each scientist should supplement with self-study / other coursework as appropriate later on. But implementing such a requirement requires that those who run molecular biology graduate school programs 1) realize there is a need (hard to do if the professors / education administrators themselves don't know how to analyze data), 2) give a shit, and 3) put in the effort.

Nevertheless, if you at least realize this one point early on, it may buffer the disappointment or shock when you see how data is misinterpreted and statistics abused by your fellow molecular biologists, even in publications in peer-reviewed journals like Nature or Science.

6. Your advisor isn't necessarily going to advise you.

In my program, the word "advisor" was in and of itself an oxymoron. Graduate students who expected their advisors to do any advising were ridiculed as naive. In some places, "advisors" apply for grants, (ostensibly) run the lab, and nag you for data. That's it. You want advice? Most people say you should figure it out yourself.

I say you should try to learn as much as you can, whether it's from other people or on your own. You're in graduate school to learn. If you already knew everything, why would you be in school? The whole idea that you should somehow contribute an original piece of research completely independently without any advice from other scientists is absurd.

Just because the "advisors" at your institution don't generally advise, it doesn't mean you should flounder on your own. Everyone gets help in some way or another; not everyone admits it. Most people would rather believe that science is some holy meritocracy where the successful people got where they are due to a pure combination of innate talent and hard work. Don't fall into that trap.

7. Mentors exist, but they won't wear a name-tag that says "Mentor" on it.

They won't necessarily identify themselves as mentors to you, so you have to identify them and reach out to them. I don't mean that you should look professors up randomly and ask if they'll be your mentor. What you need to do is be on alert when you have interactions with anyone - and this includes people aside from professors as well - who might have experience that you could benefit learning from.

You may have interactions with someone, for example, by TA-ing for them, having them on your committee, learning techniques from them, being in the same journal club, etc. Pick their brains when you can and if it seems they are open to it. Even in a relatively hostile environment there are usually some more experienced people who are more than flattered to be asked for advice and willing to extend a hand to a more junior scientist.

(Just as a small related story, my research institute's yearly retreat once featured an outside guest who was a well-respected Nobel laureate. At the pre-dinner reception, everyone including all the professors at my institute wanted to talk to him. But I could tell that a lot of them were nervous about approaching such a big shot, so they stood awkwardly across the room and glanced over at him repeatedly. My friends and I, all lowly first year graduate students at the time, approached him and struck up a conversation. He was super-friendly and delighted to talk to us. Much to the chagrin of the professors who were dying to talk to the Nobel laureate, he sat down at our table for dinner and not theirs. So don't assume that because someone's a big shot, they won't give you the time of day.)

8. Experiments will fail. Again and again.

Anyone whose experiments "work all the time" is faking data. In a field like molecular biology, the science you do is basically modern voodoo. There are protocols and sometimes a bit of troubleshooting gets things working, but mostly you just follow the steps and hope that the molecules were in the right mood and touch each other in the right way so that you get a faint band on an autoradiograph a few days later (just as an example). When they don't work, it doesn't mean that you're an awful person or that you're stupid or incompetent. You will have to repeat experiments whether they work or not (to validate them). Just see point 3 above and try not to beat yourself up about it when experiments fail.

9. Institutional prestige and the possession of advanced degrees do not equal intelligence.

So don't equate them. And don't equate the prestige of your institution with intellectual rigor, definitely not when it comes to graduate school in molecular biology. I'm sorry to say this, but most of the actual work in graduate school in this discipline ends up being monkey work (even though it shouldn't be). So don't be surprised that a lot of people who have Ph.D.s in this field nevertheless aren't particularly bright. Being bright isn't required to earn a Ph.D..

Becoming a postdoc somewhere usually involves applying directly to a given lab. In such cases, usually only the professor decides if a given applicant should be allowed to join the lab as a postdoc. There's no universal "standard" that is met by postdocs at a given institution, even the so-called elite ones.

Therefore, you may well meet colleagues (and professors) who can't handle diluting a 10 M stock of hydrochloric acid to get a 1 N working solution, or who think that by mixing together 4 different deoxynucleotide tri-phosphate stocks at 25 uM each, he can get a 100 uM stock dNTP solution. (Just to give two examples taken from real life.)

But ability (or lack thereof) as regards skills that should be essential for scientists aside, a lot of people (including professors) you meet in graduate school are, simply put, not that bright. Unfortunately, I've observed that the ones that are less bright are nevertheless the snootiest, perhaps because they're not actually bright enough to realize how limited their capacities are.

10. There are sketchy people at your graduate school

There are people who aren't trustworthy when it comes to professional interactions, for example, people who try to steal credit for other people's work, steal data, etc.

There are people who aren't trustworthy when it comes to personal interactions.

There are misogynists, racists, bigots, you name it.

It's just like the rest of society. Somehow a lot of people equate the academic research world with ascetism. But there's no reason to expect that because you're in an academic research institution the people around you are somehow ethically superior to those in the non-academic research world. In fact, in some ways, many may be ethically worse, because they're so desperate for a paper.

Even if I had the money

2012-08-30T22:06:00.002-05:00

Every time either of my alma maters sends me a letter asking me for a donation, I think, "Seriously? Why are you asking me for money? I've got much less than you do." As for my grad school alma mater, not only do I get donation requests from the Institute as a whole, I also get letters from the head of the department of which I was a part. The most recent letter from the department enclosed a short newsletter highlighting the achievements of the department, including pictures of various professors getting a reward.

To me, the fact that a school begs their alumni/ae for money is a strong argument alone to treat their students well. I am not talking about extensive woo-ing with nice fancy dinners (which most graduate student programs do when you're interviewing but instantly drop the minute you enroll). I am just talking about treating their students as adult human beings, rather than either as children or sub-human beings. Enough people in positions of power at my graduate school alma mater failed to treat us well. I remember several distinct instances of being infantilized by various professors and administrators, and several times where they couldn't even hide their outright disdain for me. Overall, grad school felt like one long emotional trauma.

So when I get these letters from my grad school alma mater, I sometimes fantasize about writing back, perhaps to say that I see they're still employing the egotistical assholes that made my and my friends' lives miserable, that grad school still gives me nightmares, and that even if I had the money, I wouldn't give it to them.

Possible development in civil suit against Strauss-Kahn

2012-08-24T20:29:00.001-05:00

CNN reported on August 23, 2012 unconfirmed rumors of an out-of-court settlement [1] in the civil suit against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the IMF and former French presidential hopeful. The civil suit was brought by Nafissatou Diallo after the related criminal case for attempted rape was dismissed last year. Strauss-Kahn, from the time he became aware of DNA evidence implicating himself, has maintained that any sex with Diallo was consensual. [2]

Strauss-Kahn had earlier reminded everybody that he used to be a big shot and therefore had diplomatic immunity, because asserting diplomatic immunity is how innocent people normally behave when accused of rape. A Bronx judge was unmoved by Strauss-Kahn’s ties to former greatness, ruling in May that Strauss-Kahn did not enjoy diplomatic immunity. Judge McKeon pointed out that Strauss-Kahn was no longer head of the IMF by the time the suit was filed. Also, Judge McKeon reasoned, the “absolute immunity” of the 1947 Specialized Agencies Convention cited by Strauss-Kahn’s lawyer isn’t widely accepted as international law. The only sort of diplomatic immunity that Strauss-Kahn might be entitled to would have to relate to things he did as part of “official acts,” not his personal conduct. [3] (What?! It’s not part of official business when you have allegedly consensual sex with someone even though it isn’t consensual to her?)

A few days after Judge McKeon’s decision, Francois Hollande became president of France [4], thereby cruelly reminding Strauss-Kahn that he is not and likely never will be. Strauss-Kahn then counter-sued Diallo, claiming that her accusations damaged his reputation and cost him his career. The counter-suit asked for $1 million in damages [5], because suing a poor hotel maid for $1 million will do wonders to improve your reputation.

Sources:

[1] David Ariosto, “Strauss-Kahn settlement talks under way, source says,” CNN, August 23, 2012.

[2] Ed Pilkington, “Dominique Strauss-Kahn DNA 'found on maid's clothes',” The Guardian, May 24, 2011.

[3] Decision dated May 1, 2012 by Hon. Douglas E. McKeon for index number 307065/11, Supreme Court of the State of New York, Bronx County.

[4] Angelique Chrisafus, “François Hollande wins French presidential election,” The Guardian, May 6, 2012.

[5] Colin Moynihan, “Strauss-Kahn Sues Housekeeper, Saying She Hurt His Career,” New York Times, May 15, 2012.

(Cross-posted on the community blog at feministing.com.)

Willke: I can do math with numbers I made up

2012-08-23T20:35:00.000-05:00

The views of the doctor behind Todd Akin’s screwed up understanding of biology, John C. Willke, have been dismissed by ob/gyn experts. [1] Nevertheless, Willke’s claim that pregnancy from rape is rare continues to be cited as medical fact, despite evidence from peer-reviewed studies to the contrary [2].

Out of curiosity / masochistic tendencies, I took a closer look at the Willke’s 1999 article, “Rape Pregnancies Are Rare.” The article was published in Life Issues Connector, a newsletter of the Life Issues Institute. It is not a peer-reviewed publication, and Willke’s article would never see the light of day in any respectable medical journal. It is an agenda-pushing screed dressed up in math with unsubstantiated statistics.

Willke’s shady math uses a lot of numbers for which no sources are listed. Among the salient errors of Willke’s article are:

- Citing “approximately 100,000,000 females old enough to be at risk for rape in the United States.” No source is cited for this number, and Willke doesn’t define what age he believes would make a female “old enough to be at risk for rape.” The fact that he’d even use this phrase shows how little he knows about rape, as victims include both infants and the elderly.

- Factoring in that “[o]f the... women who were forcibly raped, one-third were either too old or too young to get pregnant.” Again, no source is provided, and since Willke doesn’t describe how he comes up with this ratio, it’s not possible to examine his underlying assumptions to assess their validity. What ages did he consider “too old” or “too young”? Did he assume that the ages of rape victims were evenly distributed (a common error for calculations like these)?

- Adjusting incorrectly for infertility in men and women. Willke cites a figure of 15% of men being infertile and 15% of women being infertile, and adjusted his calculations by deducting 15%, and then deducting 15% again from the resulting figure. (No source is provided for these infertility rates.)

The Mayo Clinic cites a rate of 15% infertility for couples, with male infertility playing a role in about half of these cases [3]. Thus Willke adjusted twice for a 15% reduction when he should have adjusted only once.

- Counting things twice. One overall problem with Willke’s simple math is that he lists different factors/ statistics and adjusts for each item in a serial fashion as though they are completely independent of each other. Thus he over-adjusts, for example, when he also factors in “the fact that it takes 5-10 months for the average couple to achieve a pregnancy” by dividing by 5 or 10. But he’s already separately adjusted for the percentage of time a woman is fertile during each of her periods, which is interrelated with how long it takes for couples to achieve pregnancy.

- Making up numbers entirely, like “20% of raped women miscarry.” He also slaps on a 50% reduced chance of pregnancy due to the physical trauma of the rape, without any justification whatsoever. Although he doesn’t even pretend to know that these numbers are correct, his final calculation and conclusion of “extremely rare” rely on them.

Other numbers (e.g., for proportions of women who are sterilized or already pregnant or on the pill) are also cited without sources or any details. So it’s not possible to check that he’s using the correct numbers and avoiding mistakes like double-counting.

A good science article shows you where the numbers come from and states the assumptions, so they can be properly assessed. What’s sad is that while reasonably educated people who take the time can see through Willke’s number-fudging, his false conclusions have taken hold and continue to be propagated as medical fact among GOP and other extremists.

[1] Belluck, Pam: “Health Experts Dismiss Assertions on Rape,” New York Times, August 20, 2012, accessed at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/21/us/politics/rape-assertions-are-dismissed-by-health-experts.html

[2] Holmes et al: “Rape-related pregnancy: Estimates and descriptive characteristics from a national sample of women,” American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology, Volume 175, Issue 2 , Pages 320-325, August 1996. Abstract available at: http://www.ajog.org/article/S0002-9378(96)70141-2/abstract

[3] Male infertility, Mayo Clinic website: http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/male-infertility/DS01038

(cross-posted on the community blog at feministing.com)

Who are the "right" people to be having chemical and biological weapons?

2012-08-20T16:54:00.000-05:00

The New York Times reported that President Obama has threatened military action against Syria, and the basis of the threat relates to Syria's stock of chemical and biological weapons.

“We cannot have a situation in which chemical or biological weapons are falling into the hands of the wrong people,” said Obama.

My question is, who exactly are the right people to be having chemical and biological weapons? Are there people who are responsible enough not to use them, so they can be trusted to have them? And if so, why would they need to have them if they're not going to use them?

Seriously, who asked YOU?

2012-08-20T04:39:00.000-05:00

Have you ever been to a party where you're having an interesting conversation with the person sitting to your right, and the person to your left keeps interjecting every few minutes and trying to insert him or herself into the conversation, even though you and the person to your right are clearly talking about something that the person on your left knows nothing about, and the person to your left has nothing interesting to say? And every time the person to your left interjects with something idiotic or irrelevant, you just think, "seriously, who asked YOU? Can't you see we're trying to have a conversation here?"

That is how I feel every time I'm trying to nurse my baby from the right breast and the left breast keeps spraying milk every few minutes. Seriously, who asked YOU, left breast?

Do your market research, yo!

2012-08-10T17:07:00.000-05:00

While I was researching baby carriers, I came across a demonstration video for the Close baby carrier. There are many baby carrier products out on the market. One of the purposes of the video is to market the Close baby carrier as one that is easy to use. The woman in the video demonstrates how to use the carrier with a doll.

I had to laugh when I saw that video. Did the manufacturers do any market research? Most parents viewing the video know that handling a live, wriggling baby is a completely different game than handling a lifeless, fully cooperative doll. The fact that they didn't choose to demonstrate with a real baby made me wonder if they didn't because it's not that easy to use with an actual baby. As a marketing tool, the video wasn't convincing.

The video reminded me of a commercial I once saw for a feminine hygiene product that supposedly remained leak-proof even during "athletic activity." The commercial showed a woman dancing by gently swaying her hips. Again, it seems that someone has failed to do market research. If they had interviewed menstruating, athletic women, they might have realized that being able to gently sway one's hips without worrying about leaks is unimpressive. They might have realized that a truly impressive product would allow one to, for example, confidently execute axe kicks while wearing a white Taekwondo uniform and not worry about leakage. That would have been a more convincing marketing strategy.