Blessed by the Potato

Well, Toyota has just announced that it’s lowering the price of the 2008 Prius by $1900. If you’re planning on getting one, do it now: except for the cars that are already on dealer lots or in transit from Japan, there will be no more 2008’s. And the federal EcoAuto rebate is only good for 2008 model year cars — so this price drop is really a $100 price increase for next year, except for those lucky few that can grab one of the last 2008’s. And I have to say, it almost makes me want to just run out and buy one right now. After all, saving an extra $2000 is pretty decent, and while it would be nice to get all the value out of the Accord, it’s really not worth $2000. Of course, from that financial standpoint, it makes sense to buy right now… but it would be a stretch to our current budgets to have it now (and the timing is bad, as I just invested the down-payment I had saved up in this shitty stock market). Hopefully after I graduate, it will be easier to afford when I have a real job, even if it is $2000 more (and even if I spend probably an extra $2800 on gas and repairs for the Accord in the meantime).

Besides which, it might be downright irresponsible to buy the Prius now and send money off to pay for the car and insurance rather than have it go into savings, because if I ran into another Year X situation (or Year XX, or Year XXX) where my funding ran out but my degree wasn’t finished, well, that would seriously suck… even if the numbers do look like I could afford it now (barely).

On another thought, I find it rather surprising that Toyota has, reportedly, already transitioned to the 2009 model year at the plant. There’s all kinds of benefits to letting the government continue to subsidize their cars to the tune of $2000 each, so why not keep producing 2008s right up until December 31? AFAIK, there’s no real reason why they can’t keep calling the ones that come to Canada 2008s even if they call them 2009s in the US and other countries — it is just a carry-over model year anyway.

Recently the opposition parties passed a bill from the Liberals making RESP (Registered Education Savings Plan) contributions tax-deductable, as RRSP contributions are. This was a huge gift to parents of kids who are college/university-bound, so much so that it threatened to overshadow the recent TFSA gift unveiled by the cons. In full-on “pay attention to meeeee” pre-election kitty mode, the cons couldn’t just seem to let that stand. So now they’ve threatened to turn it into yet another confidence motion. These kids are seriously itching for an election, and have been for some time now.

Under current rules, there is no immediate tax reduction for RESP contributions, which are allowed to compound free of capital-gains levies. Instead, the government matches a small percentage of parents’ contributions up to a maximum of $7,200 over the lifetime of the plan.

I’m actually a little torn on this issue. On the one hand, this is a really nice tax gift to parents and something that will help further the affordability of higher education for people that… well… could probably afford it anyway. On the other hand, this is getting to be too generous. The RESP already allows money put away for education to compound tax-free, and when withdrawn are taxed in the hands of the student (who is often in a lower tax bracket than the parent) and contributions get some matching money tossed in by the government to boot. Adding a tax deduction on top of that makes it hands-down the best place to put your money if you have a university-bound child.

I feel dirty for potentially agreeing with something the dirty, crooked, heartless cons might say, but I think that this tax break for RESPs might have gone too far. Of course, I’m not all that concerned with Flaherty putting the blame for losing the surplus on it — he’s blown far more money on far less worthy causes — but rather because I fear for the future of higher education, especially if the cons get another term. This improvement to the RESP (and lost tax revenue from the deductions) would give them just the sort of flimsy cause they need to proclaim that getting a university education is more affordable now, and cut back on government support, letting tuitions rise. This would of course hurt the low-income students who don’t have RESPs the most (for the rest, it may be zero-sum), and be a serious bummer to those who get advanced degrees and have to pay for extra years of tuition beyond what their parents might have saved for…

On the gripping hand, “Canada’s New Government” is being ridiculously juvenile by making yet another piece of legislation a matter of confidence. I can only hope that when the election eventually happens (we’ve had so many false starts in the last two years that I’ve stopped expecting anything) that the cons get soundly trounced.

Edit: What I’m trying to say here is that the tax relief for the RESP is really only going to help those families that already could save for their children’s education, it’s not really going to make higher education more affordable for everyone. Since this is going to cost the government in lost tax revenue, I think that money would be better spent in direct tuition relief or in a straightforward beefing up of the matching grants for RESP contributions.

Well, I had a disappointing day: I found out that a large SPSS file I was working on was somehow corrupted or had a data entry error all along. Basically, in a file with something like 8 rows and 500 columns full of data, about 200 rows down the data got all mixed up across the columns. I don’t know yet if it’s gone wrong in a predictable way that can be undone, but even if it has I’m still going to have to manually comb through all of that to make sure it’s right now before I can finish analyzing it and getting a paper out.

It’s a real bitch to have that sort of thing happen, especially after massaging a data set for a while to try to plumb the depths of its secrets. It’s a lot of wasted work. Drawing a simple scatter plot for myself might have been enough to catch the error earlier. Of course, if it wasn’t for the fact that one data point went way above any value that column should have had (a 91 in a column that should only have numbers 1-60 in it), I probably would never have noticed the scrambling in the first place. If the data was a little less screwed up, it might very well have gone on to get published in that state. Then we’d be stuck trying to defend that dirty data (assuming anyone read the paper). It makes me a little afraid working in science knowing how many little unconscious mistakes can potentially go into an experiment to really change things around. The (external) replication step seems even more important now.

I spend my Saturday afternoon at a workshop for science PhD students who may have an interest in working in industry called “Does your science degree prepare you for industrial careers?“. The workshop was to focus on “transferable skills” — that is, when a newly minted science PhD goes to work in industry, they are rarely hired for the specialized knowledge they gained in the course of their thesis. Rather, they are hired on the basis of their transferable skills, which can be applied to other subjects. For example, a PhD student whose thesis was on the migration patterns of unladen european swallows will probably not find a job directly relating to the migration of swallows, but may be able to apply their ability to analyze data, observe group behaviour, or load/unload small birds to other subjects of a more useful nature.

This is all stuff that I pretty much knew already, and that was present in the workshop description. I already knew that if I didn’t go into academia, that I could go do research in industry. But I didn’t know what other options were out there in industry. This workshop was part of a day long conference on teaching, so I thought that it might be useful in pointing out opportunities within industry to apply teaching skills, or where those skills might be valued. Sadly, the workshop seemed to have been designed for morons who didn’t even know that industry existed, because there really wasn’t any information provided beyond what was already in the course description. It was a slow, painful process of saying things like “well, if you do computer simulations of plasma, then you know how to use and program a computer, and that’s a transferable skill. If you volunteered as a lifeguard, then you know first aid and emergency management, and that’s a transferable skill.” I would have to say the workshop seems like it was designed for high school students or undergrads (especially since the pre-printed worksheets had examples like what transferable skills could you say you had from volunteer work or working in a restaurant, or what transferable skills would be gained from classes such as PSY131). It wasn’t the least bit specific to science, to PhD students, or to industry, despite the title and description.

I should have known that nothing good comes from waking up early on a Saturday. Ok, there was one interesting tidbit: a slide about the impressions that business leaders have of people with science PhDs:

Strengths:

• Lateral thinkers
• Problem solvers
• Quick learners
• Communication skills

Weaknesses:

• Fear of risk
• Time is not valued
• Priorities not valued
• No “big picture” perspective
• Poor people skills
• Failure to move beyond personal curiosity
• Poor project management

This was quite interesting to see. They’re the perceptions of business leaders, so it gives PhD students an idea of the sort of biases they have to push through. So rather than being moronic like the facilitator was suggesting and saying things like “my experience in this field shows that I’m a quick learner” or “my thesis work gave me X particular laboratory skill” or “I got a 99% in a class presentation which proves that I’m good at communicating” [I cringed when she suggested to the ESL kids that they say stuff like that in interviews to prove things] — one could leave those things mostly alone unless one really need to sell oneself. There’s a good chance that the business person already thinks some of those things about a PhD student, and instead one must push to show that they have strengths (or do not have weaknesses) in the other areas.

Some of those biases may be inherent to doing a PhD: it’ s a pretty risk-averse and time-wasting path to take. If you had a big picture perspective and good long-term planning and thus knew you wanted to work in industry all along, you probably would have gotten an MSc and a job. So for me, I think that means that I’ve got to focus on building a record of good people skills (d’oh!), project management, and moving beyond personal curiosity to… err… well, what exactly is there beyond personal curiosity? :)

It’s been a rough new year, and I haven’t been able to shake a vague feeling of being “loser-ish”.

First up has been paper rewrites. This one has been particularly grating since I’m a good writer, damnit. I was supposed to have finished this while at my parents house over the break, but didn’t even look at it there. In the process of writing the paper the first time, I had to keep it very succinct so a lot of stuff from the first draft was cut out. After being rejected from the first journal, I should now stretch it out to about double the length so it’s an appropriate length for our second and third choice journals. However, it’s not a simple as just going back to the first draft and cut & pasting some of that information back in. For the most part, I was convinced that what was cut should have been cut, and I don’t like that text any more. I also need to tailor the text to the audience of our target journal, which means I largely need to pad out the introduction and include some topical references, and that’s the part of scientific writing that I’m the worst at. Particularly since I don’t have the references I want to cite handy, so I’m doing literature searches at the same time. All this is complicated by my peculiar “publication performance anxiety”. I don’t seem to have any problem giving presentations of my data to large groups or leading classes, but as soon as it comes to submitting my stuff to a peer-reviewed publication I get all panicky. I worry and obsess over the fact that my work is now going to be part of the body of scientific knowledge in a very indelible way, and fret constantly over my data and arguments, because any mistake is going to be out there for years, misleading scientists who follow in my footsteps, and dangling in front of my detractors as proof of my fallibility. It’s worse with rewrites of course, because I hate rewrites. I’ve always been a one-pass writer. Often, I don’t even read what I write here, just trusting that it came out of the keyboard making some kind of sense, and hoping that no errors creeped in. So wordsmithing a paper to get that exact subtle meaning, to include exactly what we want to convey and waste no words on anything extra can be quite painful for me.

I’ve got two other drafts to work on as well, though neither one is really even at the “outline” stage yet. Plus some short story ideas I could work on. Usually having a number of things to flip between works well for the scatterbrain spazzy writer inside of me, but this week it just seems to be paralyzing me. I don’t want to write any of them, so I stare at my word document, like a deer in the headlights, then decide to let that one go and open up another one, just to also draw a blank.

The weather hasn’t helped much. To stave off winter, the hospital keeps the heat on. Really, really on. Most days in the office I’m so hot even in just a T-shirt that I can barely think straight. Oddly enough though, I don’t sweat through it like I do in the summer. At home though, I’ve been getting cold, which is very unusual for me. Usually Wayfare gets so cold so quickly that the thermostat creeps up enough that I’m quite comfortable in a T-shirt at home, as long as I have nice thick socks on. The last few days, I’ve been layering up in sweaters and blankets in front of the computer, which doesn’t help fight the desire to put my head on my desk and take just a little nap.

That loser-ish feeling hasn’t been at all helped by the other things in my life, either. I’ve been really sucking at curling in the new year (though admittedly, one night I was so tired I could barely stand, let alone curl). This is particularly disturbing since it was not too long ago that I was starting to think of myself as really hot shit out on the sheets, even thinking I was good enough to try out for competitive curling. I thought I made a decent showing at the varsity try-outs, and while I didn’t make the team, I figured with a bit of practice I could have a real good run in a few spiels. This week though, I can’t even hit the house, let alone the button. To think, they used to let me teach new curlers the sport!

At work, we had a very important grant rejected. I don’t know how much I’m allowed to say, but suffice it to say we were not impressed with the tragically mis-informed reviews we got back on the proposal.

And of course, the stock market has been an absolute nightmare in the new year, yesterday in particular. I feel pretty stupid for buying on the way down and not listening to conventional wisdom about catching falling knives. There were a few stocks that looked like they were priced at more than fair valuations last week (TSE:RUS and TSE:YLO.UN in particular) that I snapped up, only to watch them fall much further just a few days later. I spent some time researching the financial sector and came away really liking TD, especially at the $65 price point it was at over a month ago… after buying it I was proven right by a decent rally, only to find all that and more wiped out yesterday. My dad says that I picked the right company for all the right reasons, but the “macro environment” is just hammering financials, and the good ones are going down with the bad. And the pain is not over yet, with indications that today is going to be just as bad. I’m trying not to panic, to stay the course, and to remember, as Wayfare tells me a few times a day, that it’s just a paper loss. As long as the Accord doesn’t die on me I won’t need the money for at least a few years, and by then the market should have rallied. However, that doesn’t make it hurt any less when I look at the sheer magnitude of that “paper loss”, or when I look at my portfolio update and see nothing but red numbers all the way down the column… nor does it make me feel any less stupid for seeing that my most recent buy, at what I thought was a great value, is one of the worst stinkers in the lot.

Buying opportunities should be ahead, and for those who aren’t in the market with some cash, and a long investment timeline (i.e.: the young people who actually read my rants) this might be a very exciting time. I’ve decided to pace myself much more than I have been. I’ve cancelled most of my “bargain basement low-ball” standing bids which turned out to be a little too optimistic about the bottom of the market. I put a sticky note on my monitor with the word “patience” on it. I was in a “stock picker” mentality last week when things were looking pretty bad but figured I could find the gems with real value in there, the stocks that may have been unfairly oversold. After yesterday’s crash across pretty much the entire board, those TD e-series index mutual funds are looking a lot more attractive again. While they make up a small part of my portfolio, I’ve been steadily buying them up every 4 weeks here (with my 3rd round of buying due in ~2 weeks), $100-$150 into each of the Canadian, US, and International indexes. For the long haul, I think those are pretty good bets, and the small, steady buy-ins save me from some of the pain of the markets going down and at making any effort to call the bottom.

Remember: even if I may spout advice, it is generally useless. This is particularly true for financial advice: while I’m learning fast, I’m terrible at this. Don’t listen to me, just go off and do your own research or consult a proper advisor. For those curious, the “lowball” bids I haven’t cancelled are NAL.UN at $12.50, which I might very well get today, GE at $27.20, which I doubt I’ll get. Feel free to laugh at me for being foolish, either right now or in the coming months.