Networking

I loathe the term networking. Not as much as “synergy” mind but it’s close. Yet the activity itself is vital to a scientific career and the shortest path for most of us to breathing into a paper bag.

Bob Williams, our Bullitt Lecturer had some interesting insights into the social mechanisms of science. He was adamant that a personal interaction is the gold standard. One-on-one science discussion and interaction. I agree. But he also correctly identified that this has a ludicrous onus on people and (thanks to airmiles travelled) environment.

So how to supplement or replace it? I suspect supplement. I use Twitter in part for this. Engage in new things that people have done is okay but it lacks a little in depth of interaction. A big plus can be that you had a mild interaction over Twitter and so IRL introductions become a little lower threshold? On the downside, friend-on-Twitter is less familiar than people (e.g. me) tend to think. 

Like most astronomers of his generation you can best reach Bob best via email. Something he checks and responds to religiously. But that is hardly true for more recent generations (ahem eg students). Skype or google hangout or Zoom can certainly replace a lot. Especially for committee meetings for example. 

So interact initially in person and keep up and active over electronic means as may be appropriate. Vague but then again it’ll be different person to person. In academia, no one checks linkedin, but outside it's a vital tool. You may even have to pickup the phone, dial the number and talk that way. 

The issue remains unresolved. In part because science is a mix of personal and generational preferences in communication. Key remains to take initiative. Junior people to contact the expert they want to talk to.

Workflow

Do you have a system for new todo items? I do. Sort of. One is implemented as part of inbox 0. And I know that that’s not really helping with the actual amount of work but that has helped me tremendously with the anxiety over missed items. Email remains “a system where anyone in the world can add todo items” (K. Mack, somewhere on Twitter).



But I still make paper todo lists. That’s partially motivational: feels good to strike off items. Those are for single days or the week maybe. Ideally they’d be organized by energy-I-have-left and urgency. I also have one on my phone. So it’s a bit of a mush. All of them have drawbacks (lost paper, I don’t check my phone todo list).

I was thinking of this since we’re mid-semester and the pile is growing out of control. This is the hardest thing to accept: the amount of work will inevitably grow beyond my ability to do even if I have “magical” days from here till the end of the semester.

Which brings me to “crudburner days”. These are days where from the start I try to knock off as many of the todo items, preferably stale ones. Decision time. Which mean quite a few it’s “well too late now” and remove. The feel good moment is when I halve the number in today/week/month pile.

Keystone Habits, Science Coffee, and the Hubble Deep Field

The Hubble Deep Field and topic of the 2019 Bullitt Lecture

I am reading “The Power of Habit” and it talks about Keystone Habits. An institutional habit that encourages the whole place to be and get better at what it is supposed to do. This first astronomy related one that I can think of is the morning coffee. Famously instituted at Leiden Observatory and The Kapteyn Institute by Oort and his students, this early morning mixing of caffeine, science and some social interaction has resulted in a lot of good ideas and improvements.

Case in point: the Hubble Deep Field. Basically started as a discussion during science coffee at STSCI between Harry Ferguson, Mark Dickinson and Bob Williams. Exactly how such a science coffee is supposed to work. This was part of the Bullitt Lecture by Bob Williams (on youtube) and in his book, Hubble Deep Field and the Distant Universe.

So science coffee (the name alone nothing sciency about the coffee, it was often terrible coffee) and the shortened connection between early career researchers and the director. This latter part I think is key. If the Director is just right there, it's a lot easier to pitch an idea.  

I think this is an excellent example of a cornerstone habit for a scientific institution. Of a certain size. What would be a good one for a smaller institution? 

Confirmation Culture

I keep running into a subtle issue switching from Dutch to US culture: confirming an appointment that I was sure I had already agreed to. Everyone does this, the dentist, my colleagues, students.
And I am realizing this is a Northern European and possibly just a Dutch thing: you said a date, I agreed, it is in our agenda and it is a bit rude to assume I'm not enough of a grownup to use a...calendar.

All of use have been suffering from the "why are they calling about this again?" feeling but the worst part is where my brain has gone "done, date has been picked" only to realize that the other party saw this only as a suggestion. And it annoys my inner Dutchie. Oh boy it does. And of course if I am annoyed by this, sitting by myself, fuming that the other party is a no-show

Institutional Knowledge

I was the primary organizer for a public event just now and it’s a lot of work. Nothing particular hard so if you mess up the response is mostly incredulous “how could you forget to...etc” but the actual job is extremely amorphous. There are social expectations and norms that have simply grown over time. And any deviation is perceived negatively. It is very stressful. 

And it’s mostly logistics. Having the right phone number and placing the call in a timely manner. NBD. But a lot more work to find out that it needs to happen and then also how to make it happen.

So instead of about two hundred emails to various people and dozens of phone calls it would be LOT easier if this amorphous knowledge base had been collated in a single document. This is what I’m doing now. It’s something I learned from my LEAPS organization: a single google doc, easily shared with the next person or for myself next time round.

That is institutional knowledge. If you encounter something that was mostly a pain to figure out how to do, make a playbook for it for the next person. Or yourself in a year’s time. It should help with anxiety at least. 

The cost of forced obsolescence

Two developments in astronomy have focused my attention on the topic of forced obsolescence, a favorite of the tech industry. This has crept into the astronomical world. The first instance is the slew of 1m telescopes that got retired during my PhD years. Of course there is a lifetime to everything and planning a retirement is a good thing.  

Now we are finding ourselves at the point where IRAF and its wrapper pyraf are relegated to obsolescence as well as the Astrophysics Data Service (ADS). Both are effectively forcing the astronomical community to switch over. I have been in two minds about it. 

The switch to python 3 and therefore all things in python and astropy is motivated simply by the fact the python 2 language is being phased out by the python project itself. With that reality it is inevitable. This is causing quite a number of issues since not every observatory and workhorse instrument has a few FTE lying around to re-code and test all their code again. So I think the compete deprecation of IRAF is bad. The astropy project simply has not kept up with replacing the toolset. But at least what’s in there works. Is reasonably tested and pretty well documented. Where to find the right software tool is still a mess but that’s equally true for IRAF. 

A worse example is happening with ADS. This has been the mainstay tool for astronomers to search the literature. Astronomical libraries are gone at most places and google.scholar does not fill the same niche. So it is critical it works. It has worked so far. So well even that no one even thought about it much. Almost too well one could say. 

Enter “better”. The old interface is clunky, the codebase (whatever the f that is) needs to be better. So a new version has been in the works for years. That’s okay. But not the switch is being made. And I have made an honest to god attempt to stay ahead of this and switch early. 

Short version: I don’t trust it. 

Missing results, variable return, unreliable loading, weird non-astronomy results. Let’s take my ADS results. A lot shows up. And I have a pretty unique name. Not just my dad’s physics papers of years gone by (fine, funny, nice to see) but hydrology?! After I mark “astro only”. 

I sat in a cool talk by a PhD student and I wanted to get both her papers. Nope. One was stubbornly missing from the new ADS results. Not that may have been a fluke but enough of this sort of thing and I stop trusting the service. And we are a few months out till it is our only option, the new ADS we have problems with and not trust in. 

But both follow a common pattern. The change is announced, it is often not followed by a good short reasoning as to why and people who are upset about are dismissed as stick in the mud and not willing to innovate. 

What I think is missing is the realization on behalf of the innovators that they are destroying “career capital” for people used to working on the older version. They spend significant amounts of time learning them and now that knowledge is useless. And to do the same thingagain, they’ll need to relearn how. Often in an environment where encouraging faculty to learn a new thing is not encouraged (because no direct benefit to scientific productivity, narrowly defined as paper production). 

This seemingly callous destruction of your career capital is what annoys people the most I think. That and the fact that the trusted thing is now untrustworthy. 

But we gotta.  If only so we do not teach our students obsolescent skills. I’ve switched over to python 3 completely. And I’ll teach myself how to rotate and add images in it. Again. 2min work in IRAF imcalc and imrot. But I need to teach it to my grad student. And we need it to work 3 years from now. 

The Passion Bane

I have been on a Cal Newport binge read with first his book about Deep Work. He has an earlier book, “So Good That They Can’t Ignore You” a Steve Miller quote he is clearly fond of. There is a central premise in this book that a generation has been told to follow their passion to a fulfilling job and this is deeply flawed. See the evidence of everyone being very unhappy at work. I feel he skates over the whole issue that salaries have not kept up with expenses and despite a tight job market the attitude of many employers is “5year of job experience and right out of college”.

So I think that his whole premise has some obvious and big holes in it. But that does not mean that his identification that “passion” is a bane on today’s knowledge worker is off the mark. In academia the plague of passion has been around for a while. You’re passionate right? So you’ll do this extra thing. The ever present expectation that academics will work 60+ hours a week. Sacrificie family life etc etc. You come across it constantly.

Now combine this with this study that shows that people who are perceived passionate about their job are given more and more demeaning work. No wonder an academic studied this...

And this brings us to the inherent contradiction in academia: passionate enough to do all that work yet disciplined enough to slip into Deep Work immediately. And so administrations figure they can always add “five more minutes of your time” to the load.

Academics defense: be busy. Or give off a constant aura of over work.

I think I’ll cultivate the attitude of Nobby Nobbs: “duty would not find him wanting...it would not find him at all...”