Aha!

Maren L. Friesen at WordPress

Incredible Mandelbrot Videos

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Printing From File on a Mac

Just found this tip online--great for printing out a dozen quality score plots at once!

In system preferences, drag the printer icon to your desktop (dock doesn't seem to work, but desktop does). Now, drag the file **OR LIST OF FILES** onto the icon and they will print.

Pacific Dogwood – PHYLO: THE TRADING CARD GAME

Pacific Dogwood – PHYLO: THE TRADING CARD GAME

An open-source game where you build ecosystems! Must print this up and play it.

Advice for academics: Part I

The following advice is distilled from the 4 (yes, 4) conferences I attended this summer. I love conferences, you get to talk about science and life as a scientist with the people that will be your colleagues and closest friends for the rest of your life.

1. Apply, apply, apply

Q: "How do I get a job?"
A: "Well, have you applied for jobs?"

The same is true for grants. If the funding rate is 10% and you submit 10 grants, are you guaranteed to get one? The binomial distribution says no way, 35% of the time you will still get zero.










Probability of receiving x grants out of 10 submitted with a funding rate of 10%.

2. There seem to be a few successful career strategies for those who love science:

• "The Rock Star" : Someone who manages to publish a lot as a grad student and get hired as assistant faculty right away. Since I graduated 2 years ago and am still a few weeks from submission of the bulk of my PhD work, I am a bit late for this one.
• "The Typical Scientist" : Someone who does a PhD, does a post-doc with someone either with their own post-doc funding or working on a professors project, then applies for jobs.
• "The Soft-money Scientist" : A "typical scientist" who is a really really good post-doc and decides they don't want to be faculty. These highly trained people get to work on a variety of problems depending on the lab they work in, are usually co-authors on a lot of projects, and get paid without having to teach, attend faculty meetings, or submit grants [they do have to help their PI get grants though, or else they're out of a job].
• "The Institute Scientist" : Someone who would rather do science than teach, though some do both through joint positions at a university and an institute. Many institutes have federal funding, such as the USDA, NRC labs in Canada, the Max Plancks, KAUST, JCVI, and various other 'hardcore' science places.
• "The Industry Scientist" : Someone who wants to do a lot of science with a ton of resources and make the company they work for rich in the process. Some of these scientists are "rock stars" that have especially desirable skills, such as breeding rice, and some are "typical scientists" that didn't land a job and don't want to write grants.
  

Of course, people move in and out of faculty positions and from industry to academia, but there seem to be some movement rules:

1. On the Academic track you go from BSc->MSc->PhD->Post-doc->(xN)->Post-doc->Junior Faculty->Senior Faculty. You are not allowed to go backwards on this track.
   
2. You can branch off of the "typical scientist" track into industry at any point, but it is easier at the post-doc level and below. I do not know any Junior Faculty that were recruited into Industry.
3. You can also enter the resting state of "Technician" at any point before Junior Faculty.
   
4. If you have been a "Technician" for not too many years you continue on the Academic track, or move to the Industry track.
5. I do not know what the Industry track is (presumably it varies with company) but I know that the entry point after a BSc can involve scrubbing out giant tanks of hamster cell cultures.

It would be interesting to model funding for academics to try to optimize your career route. The big question right now for a lot of people is whether to apply for an assistant faculty position now/in the near future. I wish I could write a simulation of my life to optimize my productivity and happiness, but right now I need to actually do some science! More musings to come.