Blessed by the Potato

I was just sitting here thinking about all the different ways I love grant writing. I mean there’s…

…er…

Ok, not much at all to love.

Well there is that unique state of mind, a seemingly impossible superposition of terrified and stressed into pulling your third all-nighter, while also being bored out of your skull. But the word I would use to describe that would not be “love”. (It’s actually pretty similar to thesis-writing).

I understand the need to justify why you should get money to do research, but it’s a pretty frustrating process. It takes a tonne of time since these grant applications are usually huge (even just doing scholarship apps earlier in my grad school days used to take up a full two weeks out of every year), yet the success rate is quite low, on the order of 10% (or worse!). So it’s especially frustrating to sometimes get rejected and find the reviewer’s comments were, well… stupid. Like they didn’t even read the proposal, or didn’t understand the point of the competition, or created a list of tiny nit-picks, but the criticism was enough to not get funded anyway.

I would much rather just give a 2-hour or whatever presentation to the grant committee, especially since it might let them ask questions, avoiding arbitrary denials due to a reviewer skimming a grant and missing a point, or misunderstanding something. Though I do appreciate that with the low success rate (small amount of funds compared to applications) they seek any reason to burn an application, it is just so disheartening to see a month’s worth of work (and the next 3 years of funding) go down the drain because some reviewer phoned it in.

Anyhow.

There was a little discussion at some other blogs about how we do science. I don’t want to comment too much right now since I don’t really have any good suggestions on how we should structure science, but something does need to be done, at the very least in the personnel department: as discussed on the other blogs, the post-doc system doesn’t really work. We shouldn’t be penalizing people for trying to put down roots and stay in one place, indeed, in other fields that’s called experience and is considered a virtue. I’m attracted to that idea of a scientist position: like a post-doc, where you do science on a day-to-day basis and aren’t a professor/group leader, except an actual job, with security, benefits, living wage, a place in the organizational structure (rather than a not-student not-employee), and a future. I can’t say though if that otherworldly romantic notion is at all practical, or how we get there from here.

Well, my outreach event went fairly well for the morning half. The first class went almost exactly to plan: I went through my prepared material, the kids seemed interested, had a few good questions but were fairly quiet. The second class had a bunch of questions and we kept going off on tangents, so I only got through about 75% of my prepared material, but that was fine because the point was to get them interested in science and learning and engaged, and I think that objective was achieved.

Then in the afternoon, I was just getting going in my presentation when things fell apart. I got to the point where I was talking about feedback mechanisms between the brain and the body, and how if you hear a loud noise and are startled or scared, your heart rate will increase. And just as I finished that sentence, the fire alarm went off.

The teacher was reminding the kids to just get up and go, to leave their stuff. I grabbed by laptop and my backpack, but left the rest of my gear behind, figuring it was probably just a drill.

It wasn’t. There was unfortunately a real fire there, so I didn’t get to do the other two classes. We all had to wait around outside for a really long time — on a fairly cool May day with most people not having their jackets — with no news of what was happening inside. Finally, they let us into the cafeteria and the portables, after the last period had started. It was clear that there was an actual fire, and that the kids weren’t going back to class, but I guess since this is a school district with a lot of buses, they didn’t just release them.

So there we are, cooped up in the cafeteria with basically no news, nobody has their stuff with them to study or do anything productive, so the kids are basically just chatting, playing with their cell phones, etc. Some kids have some paper and start making paper airplanes to throw, and I go “hey, let’s take advantage of this opportunity.” So I start making a different paper airplane and throwing it around, trying to get them interested in perhaps doing something that keeps them interested in learning (that was the whole reason I’m there). I throw it down the length of a cafeteria table (an impressive distance), and a teacher at the other end picks it up, crumples it, throws it in the trash, and gives us the dirtiest look. Another teacher comes up to me and was like “I can’t believe it was a teacher throwing airplanes!” in this disgusted tone.

And I’m like “what?” It’s not like they’re throwing airplanes in the caf at lunch on a normal day. The fire drill has been going on for over an hour at this point. The police arrived to start an investigation, and no one was going back into the school proper. Some leniency in discipline should be allowed in the circumstances. Many schools have paper airplane competitions because they can be fun educational opportunities. Nobody seemed to want to do anything with the time — not tell stories on the stage, not find their class and try to continue a quasi-lesson in the field, it was just a matter of keeping the kids in-line until the buses got there at the normal end of the day.

I think that’s why, despite the fact that I like to teach, I never really wanted to become a high school teacher. Too much baby-sitting, not enough teaching. I have to temper that remark: not all teachers are more interested in getting through their day without trouble than they are in shaping young minds, kids can of course be damned draining on a person’s energy, and if you give them an inch, they will often take the yard.

Anyway, I had to wait over two hours before I could get back in the school (with an escort) to get the rest of my stuff and leave. What a day.

I’ve blown through multiple thesis timelines now. My last one I printed off I thought I’d actually make: submit my thesis on Friday the 13th of May (a nice, ominous day to submit), defend sometime in late June, spend July and August as a post-doc in my current lab while I went job hunting for September (convenient as many academic jobs line up with the academic terms). But here it is dawning on the 12th and despite my most recent string of all-nighters and a location change, I’m still not done this round of revisions — and there are still more to come after this. Forget June, I’ll be lucky to finish by July at this rate. My dad says to relax, a few more weeks/months isn’t going to hurt, and I need to take a vacation. I do need to take a vacation (that was the plan for after I submitted). And as much as I wanted to be done by June, July isn’t that much worse… but I just can’t keep slipping behind.

So the rest of the world is wide awake now and I’m still not in bed. Overall, not a particularly productive day in an absolute sense, but in a relative sense (vs. the last few weeks), quite productive indeed, even if it did end with a rousing game of chase-the-kitty. Which was hilarious because she ran like 5 steps into the bathroom then realized her mistake, trying to scramble out of there. I could totally see her going “Ahh! Not in there, it’s all dead ends and bathtubs!”

Anyway, I can’t believe how much work there was still to do on this thing. I thought when I finished the draft at the beginning of April I was in the home stretch and it would be all downhill from there.

It’s been another rough few weeks over here. I have revisions to make to my now-complete first draft, and though there aren’t that many, they’re taking me forever. I had hoped to be done these almost two weeks ago. I seem to have serious issues concentrating (also why there haven’t been many blog posts here), and my stress levels are once again through the roof. But it’ll be over soon (just months now!) and then I can worry about what to do with the rest of my life. To try to get my science groove on I’m even going out to give some rah-rah science! outreach talks at high schools soon, which I hope goes well.

Mother’s day seemed pretty hectic here, with dinners and brunches and last-minute shopping. I ended up getting a new pizza cutter for myself while I was at Caynes. I’m impressed enough with it that I had to give it a quick mini-review: it cuts through pizzas way better than my old ones. That might be because it’s new and sharp, but even then it seems to do a better job than they ever did: I’ve always had to go back-and-forth to get a clean cut, but this did the job in one swipe. It has a rather heavy handle (vs. the cheap plastic or wood handles of my other two), and the blade disc is held securely with no play: the other two both had fairly significant wobble in the roll of the cutter.

I was recently interviewed by a reporter from the Globe & Mail, and had a brief mention in an article as a result… but although it was my website and Potato identity that brought me to his attention, the article had no mention of either. So at least my quasi-secret identity remains safe, and I don’t have to write a tedious “welcome, G&M readers” post. However, if my understanding of comic-book lore is correct, this reporter is now in grave danger, as those who possess the information of a person’s secret identity — especially reporters with privileged sources — are abducted with uncanny regularity: whether by targeted schemes or pure evil happenstance. Fortunately, I believe the last time I updated my arch-nemesis page I selected “the geese who block the bike path by the river” and they are not the hostage-taking sort of villains.

Rob Carrick agrees with my earlier post that TD’s e-series funds are great, but hard to buy. I think it’s really weird that the fund you have to trade online requires faxing/mailing in an application to open an account, but weirder still that people like me have to write third-party user guides on how to actually manage the things.

CC weighed in before I got around to publishing this post, saying that he didn’t find the e-series that hard to set up. I don’t find it that hard from the instructions either, and have helped people set them up… but Wayfare did run into issues, mostly with the branch staff being clueless and trying to sell her on higher-MER funds, and with that conversion step not going through right away. Plus some of the other steps (like withdrawing under the HBP) are a little less clear, as Krystal found out. As much as I love the e-series funds for average investors, something’s not right when the best instruction sets and knowledgeable people are outside of TD. Anyway, I’ll repeat my best advice: use TD Waterhouse.

Deliquencies are rising in Alberta as the housing market there flattens out. I consider it more evidence that delinquencies are a trailing measure, so not very relevant in a discussion on the health of Canada’s housing market, but take it however you want (i.e.: too small to be meaningful at all is also a good way to take it).

A little article on Home Capital Group also points to some more warning signs: “He said the company is being cautious when considering loans that will go toward properties in Vancouver or downtown Toronto, because the markets are showing signs of overheating.”

Canadian Business revamped their website, breaking the RSS feeds and leading to many 404 errors for old links to their articles. The ability to comment also seems to have disappeared. But, I’ve found Larry MacDonald again, and now he seems to be moving towards believing that Vancouver at least, is in a bubble.

I’m a bit late on this, but Freddie Mac actually reported a profit this quarter. The preferreds I own (a very small speculative bet) are actually in the black now by over 30% (given the timeline though, still no better a performance relative than the index). I still don’t expect a final resolution for years yet, and this only suggests that rank insolvency is perhaps not as much of a risk — but political risk still looms large, as it didn’t look like the conservator allowed them to repay any significant portion of the bailout. Despite the recent run-up, they’re still only trading for 10 cents on the dollar, quite a reasonable discount given the return to profitability. Though I was tempted to buy more on the news, I figure I’d hold pat with my thimble-full of exposure. There’s still lots of risk here, and I don’t need to bet any more than I already have.

A short post by Saj Karsan on learning from your history, but not letting randomness influence that. I can’t dig it up now, but Michael James had a similar idea some time ago: a good decision is not necessarily the one that lead to the correct outcome in the way things played out, but one that made the most sense given the information available at the time.

A cute tongue-in-cheek site about the benefits of coal-fired electricity.

Way, way back in the fall, I was trying to hammer my thesis out in record time to be able to finish for the fall term, and not have to pay tuition. I laid out a very aggressive timeline, with the aim to finish my first draft before the last leaf fell from the trees.

I missed by a mile.

But now, I’ve finished the draft before the last snow melted!

Time for a nap. Still a long way to go, of course: revisions, revisions, and more revisions, then the defense itself… but I’m feeling pretty good right about now.