Grad vs. Grad – result of unemployment?

I started today on a note of optimism after reading a newly discovered unsurprisingly insightful blog (http://www.dilbert.com/blog/). However skepticism was not far behind. On my way to work, thinking about some of the points Scot adams makes, I could not help but think of what this means. In a list of hopeful world american progress in fields of energy, crime, and healthcare, it is manufacture and education that caught my eye. Basically chinese workers are demanding better hours and benefits and factory robots will replace them anyway as they get cheaper, at the same time average individual is getting smarter and makes it further up the academic path. What does this mean? Unskilled labor sectors shrinking and adding to already large groups of unemployed college graduates. I even wonder if this would lead to swelling of graduate school ranks, which would lead to lower quality of life for an average graduate student. The service industry should do key though. We all need someone to clean and feed us, plus someone has to manage the internet tubes and expanding reach of wireless technology into our lives.
Hopefully as we get smarter and if we succeed in avoiding conflict over employment the need for war will diminish. Thus persons involved in the armed forces may join the ranks of unemployed well educated adults. Maybe there is a way to use the army for something else. Maybe we can use the military for world reclamation purposes. In addition to war on drugs we can declare war on global warming and deforestation. I would love to see CNN images of a Humvee rolling down the arctic beach towards an oil spill clean up site. The army can do what national guar does sometimes.
I think exploration would be of great help, because we have thousands who capable would be explorers. We need a new frontier. I heard somewhere that space is a new frontier, although I do not see humans going there very soon even though it would help with the unemployment issue.

Parts of the grant abstract

 

I recently stumbled upon some data (http://t.co/aWlMYYse via twitter @BoraZ) dealing with relationships between article titles and citation frequency. The main result is that length matters and 40 character titles are the best. This finally motivated me to write up a bit I was thinking about for a while now, grant writing.

I have not written many grants in my life, and I do not wish to talk about whether US scientific grant system (it is the one I am familiar with) as it currently operates benefits or impedes scientific progress. What I have done, like many researchers before me, is looked at successful grants and tried to figure out the rules.

Freedom of information act, or something similarly named, allows public access to all government funded projects. This means that with some effort anyone can read grants submitted to and funded by NIH or NSF. A friendlier way is to simply contact people you like and ask for their grants. I quickly realized that there are no rules that apply to all grant writing. Grants are just to large and they contain to many, although extremely discrete and specific, bits.

I did have some success characterizing abstracts. These can be found through the NSF website. These are also searchable by name, topic, amount, and date. What follows is my breakdown of the scientific grant abstract. I will not go from top of the abstract paragraph down, instead I will focus on bits that seem to be in every abstract and the various shapes they take.

In its essence the abstract has two parts: what author wants to study and what author will find out. Lets talk about the first bit, the what I want to study bit. Successful ones seem to in one sentence identify the topic, show why the choice system is most suited to a study of the topic, and how humans immediately or philosophically benefit from understanding this topic. All in one sentence. Also notice that “human benefit” is not contingent on the result of the study, the author reminds us that the topic of study is important to humans as its own entity. I think an example will serve my purpose here best, the following sentence was crafted by one of my favorites researchers (a great story teller as well) Richard Lenski.

“Bacteria undergo many thousands of generations during human lifetime, and thus they can evolve rapidly with potentially important consequences.”From this once sentence we find out that the topic is consequence evolution, bacteria are perfect because when compared to human (whose evolution we really care about but it is unfortunately is much less tractable) because their generation time is so short. Another way to go about the first bit is “appeal to knowledge” tactic, which makes an argument that as species humans in general value understanding of the natural world. It wold go something like this “Owing to the important roles of X in nature, it is imperative that society understands principals that govern their evolution.”The key is to directly and swiftly place your research within a discrete field and remind the reader that this field is important to humans.

The second bit is all about what you will learn from doing the project. The details may vary, and honestly they seem to not be terribly important here since closing statements are rather general, but what matters is that your project identifies rates, mechanisms, or makes specific predictions. Even if it is interesting to explore X because X is a cool system, I did not find many funded abstracts that rest on that. It seems that when you talk to people you want to tell a cool story, when you write a paper you want informative data and figures, when you write a grant you want to make useful tools.

Between the “what I want to do” and “what I will learn” parts there usually are some details about project goals. Sometimes there are details about the system. I could not see a good trend there, except that things come in threes (3 goals, 3 observations, 3 reasons for doing).

Although here I try to summarize my findings, the exercise of trying to find grant-writing rules was incredibly useful. I suggest you give it a try with whatever structured piece of prose you want to write. As I try to become a better writer, I learn that writing is self-taught through practice because it is to mysterious pass down through words.

Small labs doing Big things – Science Exchange for all

Modern scientists are loving “it”, or at least we should because our professional lives are infinitely easier when compared with lives of our predecessors. Scientific life has been improved in many ways since the informational/technological revolution.  Most obviously the modern information infrastructure has removed the need for unnecessary memorization. Where in the past I may have had to know the name of every amino acid, and its structure, today I can just look it up (thank you google ™ along with wikipedia, openwetware, and NCBI, ISI Web of knowledge and PubMed – just to name a few daily web sources that I reference ).
Although a fantastic resource, the plethora of web-based scientific tools was only the first step in improving science through electronic information-sharing services. The latest advancement was born from a failure of the social trend among scientific communities.
Facebook-like services for scientists, not surprisingly, fail.  We do not have time to keep up with all of our real social demands, and often use technology to avoid them. What we need is technology that connects us  but does not burden with the tit-for-tat social convention. Science Exchange accomplishes exactly that. This new amazing thing is an old idea of a virtual market place, much like eBay – in fact some have called it eBay for scientists (find it here without reading another word Science Exchange ). Scientists need to buy things all the time , but ability to purchase goods is not what makes Science Exchange great – it is the ability to purchase services from large research universities. Let me parrot the pitch – large universities have core facilities to perform costly cutting edge scientific techniques, basically bands of highly qualified well trained professionals to do the same thing day in and day out thus making it cheap. To make things cheap a university must construct a multi-million dollar core (buildings, machines, people , training etc. ). Few universities can do this, and most importantly we do not have to since most scientific needs can be handled by a few well stocked and manned centers. This is where  Science Exchange comes in, it is an easy way for scientists to connect with core facilities.
So, my dear fellow graduate students embrace social marketing and information gathering platforms and with their help dream up experiments using the modern ways. Although your home lab may be suffering from the scientific time-lag, you can move with the times. Dream big and dream often, it is an exciting time to be a research scientist.

read: SciAm blogs

play: Oblivion

watch: The Beast