Blessed by the Potato

I just got back from seeing Jorge (interestingly, it doesn’t rhyme with “George”) Cham of PHD comics give a talk on the Power of Procrastination here at UWO. It was quite a good talk — funny, entertaining, and maybe a little bit inspirational too. If he’s coming by your school, I recommend you stop by (this means you, UBC readers!). There was a bit of time for questions-and-answers at the end, which was to my surprise a little slow (not many questions), so I stuck up my hand and asked if there was an update to the economy and grad school enrollment graph to reflect the recent economic troubles. I got dissed for daring to ask a question of the PHD comics guy while wearing an XKCD T-shirt. It was fun.

Note that this is not the question I had burning in my mind going in, but rather “Who writes Cecilia’s blog if she’s a fictional character?”

Anyhow, take-home points:

-Powerpoint is cool.

-Bulleted lists are cool.

-Those are probably the 2 most useful real-world skills you will learn in grad school.

-Grad student mental health is not good: 95% report being overwhelmed (what about the other 5%?), 67% feel depressed, 10% contemplate suicide, 0.5% attempt it.

-In the US, the average grad student makes $15 more per year than a minimum-wage worker at a California McDonald’s. Based on the new $9.50 minimum wage (next week!), at 48 weeks/year an Ontario McDonald’s worker could take home $17100 pre-tax; a PhD student in our department without an external scholarship gets $15050 to live off of.

-Guilt is a big problem for grad students. Even though we have the freedom to mosey on in to the lab at the crack of noon and run experiments all through the weekend (depending on equipment availability and our own inclinations — or to even blog while running experiments on the weekend — I have someone in the MRI right now, BWAHAHAHAHAHA), the flip side to that is that there’s never a point where you shouldn’t do work, so you always feel guilty when doing something else. At least people with real jobs often get to leave it behind at the office.

-Procrastination is needed since people are less creative when stressed or forced to do something, etc. Procrastination is what you do when you’re doing what you want to be doing (or what your OCD demands you do), so you need those breaks.

-Procrastination is not laziness. Laziness is when you don’t want to so something. Procrastination just means you don’t want to do it now. And of course the whole concept of grad school is one of procrastination: the process of putting off joining the real world. Laziness is something you need to watch out for.

-Eventually something will come along that will spur you to finish: a job offer, a family issue (wife moving, kid on the way, parents’ disappointment), or just getting sick of being a grad student. At that point your motivation will come back and you’ll rush to finish.

-Everyone is eventually in a rush to finish. No one is 100% happy with their thesis. Git ‘er done.

Jorge has a great understated comedy delivery method. He makes good use of his powerpoint slides, but doesn’t rely on them like a crutch; they’re more like a good team. He has good comedic timing and likes to let the audience fill in the blanks sometimes (sometimes we’d yell it out, sometimes just think it and cry). It was a lot of fun. It may seem like I may have stolen some of the better points that stuck out in my mind here, and so now have spoiled it so you don’t need to go… but it was an hour long lecture, so there’s lots more in there and well worth the price of admission. Be sure to wear an XKCD shirt.

The Western Research Forum that preceeded it wasn’t quite what I was expecting. It’s sort of a mini conference on campus where grad student showcase their research. I figured there would be undergrads and junior grad students in attendance as well as members of the public to see what kind of research was going on (and for undergrads, who to apply to for summer research positions/volunteer positions)… but there was nobody there who wasn’t speaking as far as I could tell. In fact, they didn’t even seem to pretend that other people would come, since the rooms we were in were barely big enough to hold the speakers of each session. Since it was a non-specific conference all the presentations were kept quite general so that a non-specialist could follow, and everyone in my session at least gave a quite good, enjoyable talk.

Well, these are interesting times.

On the work/school front I got a bunch of MRI time for the hospital for my project on the weekends, so I’ve been scanning like crazy. Assuming that I don’t have to go back and increase my sample size for statistical purposes and that not too many people stand me up, I should be finished the scanning part next week for this phase of the study. That’ll give me a month and a half or so of data analysis to do; hopefully I’ll be ready to start the next phase within a month or so so that there will be a bit of overlap and we’ll get things done a bit sooner.

Unfortunately, I’ve also been hit with a bunch of other work (abstracts, papers, committee meetings, phase 3 prep, etc) that all sort of came together this month in the perfect storm. The last day off I had was January 24th, and I was hoping to take this Tuesday off to give my brain a break, but I just found out I’m going to have some MRI training all week (I was told only “it starts monday at 9am” and assumed it would be one day, until I got the schedule on friday), and then more scans for my project on the weekend… so by the time I do get a break I’ll have gone 27 consecutive days. I’m pretty sure that’s against the labour code (actually, I looked it up, it is… but grad students don’t count). Ah well, science does always seem to go in fits and bursts… hopefully this craziness will clear my plate enough that I can have a few extra relaxing days on the patio when the weather turns nice.

Plus they’re not necessarily short days. Yesterday I was here in the MRI for 15 hours… and I couldn’t even leave; I had so much food in my bag I swore I was going to rip it open, and even then I ran out by 5 pm and my stomach was just growling by 2am when I finally got to leave. Speaking of yesterday, it was not a good day. Ok, good in the fact that hey, I scanned 5 people (almost 6!) in one go, which is a decent dent to my project (and another 5 today in just 13 hours). However, it started off with me waking up to the sound of water dripping into the back room. The weird thing is that the water was coming in through the frame of the window, and it’s not exactly like the snow was pressed up against it on the other side, so it’s leaking through the walls somewhere and then coming out the window. With the scans I just didn’t have the time to deal with it so I just threw some towels down and hoped for the best. I was having visions of the whole back wall of the house melting away while I was at work, but not much more water came in through the day than was there when I woke up. The glacier on top of the house also seems to have cleared up. As much of a pain as that was, I’m really glad we finally had a bit of a spring thaw: that snow has been building up since before xmas, refreezing harder and harder each night after we had a sunny day.

I had one subject just not show up for her MRI. No email or call to let me know, just stood me up. And the sad thing is that that’s not uncommon. WTF? Have some common courtesy. Other than that the day went fairly well up until my last subject at midnight. Just as we were getting set up the power went out and the scanner put up all kinds of error codes (ok, just the one, but it was bad), so I sent him home to be on the safe side, but still ended up staying until 2am just trying to reset the system and make sure everything was still working. As far as I can tell I haven’t been making any mistakes (aside from grammatical) with the sleep deprivation and the “always-on-ness”, but I’m definitely starting to feel my age. I’m also really glad I’m essentially just running a computer (3 actually, but same difference) and not performing surgery on somebody.

In the world at large the economic news has not been good. So far through all of this mess I’ve been stupidly optimistic: I figured it was a crisis of confidence, a liquidity problem, an issue of essentially worthless mortgages and commercial paper that would lead to some losses around the board, but that the economy as a whole would survive, and that there would be bargains to be found in the stock market to throw money at… and that the housing market would turn around at its own glacial pace and come back to earth. As time has wore on I became convinced that we were going into a recession (and are now in one), but again, that things would come around.

Then the unemployment numbers for January came out and I nearly shit my pants. Check out the picture at the Big Picture. That’s for the US, which lost ~600k jobs in January; Canada lost ~100k, more proportionately than we should have by population alone. The recession is catching up to us, big time.

Look above: I’m getting some crazy MRIs in; my project is actually making progress, which means at some point (probably early 2010 if all continues to go according to plan) I’m going to leave grad school and need a real job. This is scary stuff, and isn’t likely to be over in 6 months to a year.

At least it’s finally warm out.

The peer review process is one of the most important parts of sharing scientific findings: before a paper is published, 2-3 (or more) scientists are contacted by the journal to anonymously tear the article to shreds. This process is what helps ensure that references to peer-reviewed publications are respected more than references to newspaper articles, websites, self-published books, and Wikipedia. As a scientist I’ve had the opportunity to be on both sides of the peer review process now, and while it can be a bit of a pain as an author if a reviewer is very nit-picky or worse yet, doesn’t understand something and wants to make drastic changes from the wrong point-of-view, it can help fix some common errors that can be very misleading down the road. There have been some truly terrible papers come across my desk — so bad that I often have to wonder why they weren’t stopped by an editor before even getting to peer review — but anonymity and letting mistakes that do get corrected slide is a vital part of the process. So instead I’ll just talk about a few generalities:

Statistics and their misuse are the number one weakness that otherwise good papers have. Usually it’s minor things, like saying p = x.xx instead of p < a. That's just a distinction that you typically threshold your statistics, so you choose to accept that two populations are separate when the chance of their means being that different is greater than 5% (or some other percentage, but 5% is the most common)... you don't typically say that the chance that two samples having mean differences that large coming from the same population is 4.5% or 5.1% or what have you (no matter how close to your 5% threshold 5.1% is, there are other ways to report that). Often parametric ("regular") statistical tests are run on measures that should be tested with non-parametric ("fancy but less powerful") methods. This is a pretty fine distinction as well, and we try to not usually get our heads up our asses about it (especially since many readers are only familiar with the "normal" statistical tests, so reporting those makes it easier for them to grasp... we just like to see the non-par tests done as well when it's appropriate). But there have been a few doozies, where the authors apparently learned how to do stats from the excel help files. Things like running hundreds of t-tests: roughly speaking, if you're looking for differences that have less than a 5% chance of occurring by random chance alone, and then test 100 differences, you should find about 5 "significant" results by chance alone. One paper in particular tried this trick, then had the balls to cite a (non-peer-reviewed) book justifying the move. I showed it to the statistician here, and when he got to that part he threw his keys across the room. "What the fuck!" was all he could manage to say until he calmed down. I suppose you'd have to be a statistician to feel that strongly about it. Anyway. Sometimes papers are well-written, with good references and stats, but are doomed from the start because the experiment just wasn't done very well. This happens a lot with "let's just see what this does" type studies, where no control group is included. It can also happen when systematic errors or artifacts creep in, in cases where what you're doing something (testing a drug or whatever) that affects the thing you're trying to measure directly, rather than through the mechanism it's hypothesized to. Unfortunately if someone is set on deceit it's very difficult to root out scientific fraud when all you're given is a manuscript, so the peer review process is not good at anti-fraud (and it wasn't really designed to do that, despite the burden some would like to put on it). Sometimes I'd like to see the peer review process encompass things like visiting a lab in person, and better yet to have independent replications arranged for nearly every paper published. Unfortunately the realities are that it's difficult enough for an impassioned scientist to get funding to do their project once, so it's pure fantasy to think that funding would appear to do studies twice over for replications to be done as a matter of course.

Not many people outside a university know this (and not many within, either), but there are a lot of research studies out there yearning for human participants. I’d know, since my own study is in desperate need of a few healthy brains — but I’m not supposed to advertise the fact that you can make $50 for 2 hours of lying still or that you get a CD with images of your brain on it so you can have the coolest facebook profile around. So instead I’ll limit myself to talking in generalities.

First off, paid research studies aren’t quite like you’d see in the Simpsons — they’re not going to inject you with untested drugs and pit you against chimpanzees. Most studies involve a short psychological or physiological test of some sort, possibly combined with some kind of tool to look at what’s happening in the brain (MRI, EEG, etc). They’re not necessarily painless — some do give a bit of pain, or draw some blood, or have you exercise one part of your body until it cramps up, or show you grotesque images from wars and holocausts to measure your reaction. Some are inconvenient, requiring an hour of your time at the same time every day for a week or something like that… but they generally pay at least minimum wage, and usually higher for ones that are more inconvenient, which is not bad for a university student (or as bonus income for anyone that wants it, really).

A volunteer recently asked me why it was so hard to get people “These studies are a great way to make a few bucks, and the posters are all over campus. How can people miss them?” Unfortunately they do somehow, perhaps because the recruitment posters are a little bland, and don’t prominently feature the money aspect (or often mention it at all). After all, volunteers are supposed to be doing these studies for their love of science, to be part of history in the making: the financial kick-back is supposed to be just an incidental bonus. After all, it would be unethical to have people participate in a study just for money, especially if they put themselves at risk in the process. It’s an ethical dilemma I don’t fully grasp: we allow people to put themselves at risk for altruism, but not if they make a risk-benefit analysis with money? Of course, I have to say that there is the issue of paid subjects telling us what we want to hear, or doing the minimum to try to get paid (whereas those with an interest in the study might be more willing to hold their damned heads still).

If you are in the UWO area (or any university for that matter), have a closer look at some of those “volunteers needed” posters on the various designated bulletin boards. You may be pleasantly surprised at the rewards, and help a needy PhD student finish off their degree. If you’re in (or going to visit) the London area and want to know what research studies are going on, send me an email and I’ll hook you up!

An email I just got from the hospital administrators:

[the new MRI is] expected to be operational by January 26. The [current clinical MRI], meanwhile, will be up and running again by January 12.

Optimism!

(I’ve told anyone planning on coming down for an MRI to not expect anything until February; we’ll see how that goes…)