Gift recommendation help?

My brother in law is looking for a "marine biology kit" for a ten year old. My go-to place for all nature-related book/kits/supplies is Acorn Naturalists. I love Acorn Naturalists. It's like someone took everything that I think is awesome and put it all in one place.

Anywho, a marine biology kit is a tough one. I couldn't find one from AN that wasn't designed for a classroom, which makes me think it might not exist. Readers (I'm especially asking working through the blue and my friend whose grad student office looks at the ocean), do you have any suggestions?

I'm wondering if maybe the child would like a good book about oceans (maybe this one?) along with some magnets, rubbings plates, or a thematic card game.

Ok, upon browsing their kit section, I did just find three different tidepool kits from Acorn Naturalists, but they're all somewhat location specific (all to the west coast) and I'm not sure where the child lives.

What do you think?

Farewell ScienceWomen!

Yesterday Alice and SciWo announced the retirement of the ScienceWomen blog. The archives will still be around, but I'm sad to lose such influential women from my feed reader. I wish them both the very best in their non-bloggy lives.

DONE!

Today I finished my group project for the term. Hooray! It feels great to not have that hanging over my head anymore. My group crafted an interesting proposal for a project that we don't intend to do, but I really like the idea and I plan to keep it around in case I end up in a position where I need to pull an interdisciplinary urban ecology proposal out of my hat. Seriously though, I'd like to do this project someday (just not for my dissertation).

This may very well be the last course I take in graduate school. I don't think I need any more. That's a liberating thought. Now it's all about finishing the project with my interdisciplinary cohort and (more importantly) my dissertation! I am looking forward to using the rest of the time before the holidays to do some serious thinking about where my dissertation is headed. Oh my.

So my readers can catch up on their blog backlog

I haven't posted much since Thanksgiving. I've just now caught up on blog reading for the first time in about a month. I think this post is just going to be a random bullets.

• After a highly productive Thursday, I didn't finish anything on my to-do list on Friday.
  
• Jon's father and his wife visited us for the first time. It was fun to have them here but I'm glad it was just 2 days. I took them to the museum and showed them behind-the-scenes (this is part of the reason I didn't finish anything on Friday). They loved it. Who don't?
  
• Jon has been sick to varying degrees for the past week. I have had the light version of whatever he has.
  
• We are really, really close to having our marriage certificate framed and hanging on our wall. It's about time.
• I think I'm falling in love with kale.
• I'm having lunch with my friend Cora on Monday :-)
• I'm trying to think about what to write for December Scientiae Carnival:

The days have really been getting shorter, and sometimes winter makes it hard to stay cheerful. In that light, I’d really like to hear what other people like about being in STEM. If you aren’t sure, maybe you could also think about the positive things that get you through the day or week. What makes you happy or makes you laugh? Even a funny story about an experience would be great.

Productive day

I'm awesome. Today I finished everything on my to-do list that can be done today at school. I met with Herb, sent a draft of the short note to Sam, finished my second notebook of data re-entry, and some other miscellaneous tasks. It feels great to have set out a long but manageable list of things to accomplish today and have done it! Everything else that I get done today is bonus, and tomorrow is another day.

Soon I'm going rock climbing, and in a few hours my father-in-law will arrive with his wife. They haven't visited us in Big City yet so we spent a while last night reclaiming our apartment from the disaster zone. Why can't I just stop time for just a little while? I can't believe it's December.

Final report

I forgot to include something on my list of things to get done before the end of the year: a final report for a funding agency. I've got to finish it tonight. I've been working hard on it all day, but I'm still going to be here for several hours. I've got to tell them all about my results, how they relate to their particular focus, and send them some nice photos. The results part is a bit difficult since I haven't even finished entering my data from the summer yet, but I don't think that's really what they're interested in anyways so I'm focusing on the stuff that is going in my short note with Sam even though it's nothing very impressive. It's all about the angle.

Now back to work.

Blogs I am thankful for

I am thankful for all of the bloggers out there from whom I have received insight, entertainment, wisdom, and food for thought.  The least I can do is thank all of you and hopefully send some new readers your way. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Blogs by scientists of one sort or another
FemaleScienceProfessor
Sciencewomen
Uncommon Ground*^
Professor Chaos*
On Becoming a Domestic and Laboratory Goddess
Janus Professor, My Travels in a Two-Body Life
Wondering Albatross*
The Happy Scientist*
Liberal Arts Lady
Twice
Bug Girl's Blog*
Whoop*
What we don't know is A LOT
Muddy Misadventures*
Working Through the Blue*
Postcards from an intellectual odyssey
Pondering Pikaia*
More Than A Permanent Student*
A Lady Scientist
Gravity's Rainbow *
Transient Theorist*^
There's a War Under the Bed*
49 Percent
Academia and Me
Penn*
Journeys of an Academic
Mistress of Science
Ph.D. To Be
All of My Faults Are Stress Related
A Natural Scientist
Grad Ovaries
Academic Ecology
Towards a Ph.D.
The EBB and Flow *^

Other awesome blogs by people who may or may not consider themselves scientists
Bitch, Ph.D.
The Clutter Museum
Professing Mama
Pretty Hard, Dammit
Free-Range Kids

I'll post this in my sidebar in a few days. If you're not on this list and you want to be, comment on this thread.

*= blogger that does some kind of research/education/blogging related to ecology or evolutionary biology (to the best of my knowledge)

^= dude (at least one if the blog has multiple authors- apparently most of my favorite bloggers are women)

Negotiating a non-faculty position for a spouse?

Do you know anyone who has negotiated a staff job (non-faculty) for their spouse? Does this happen? Universities employ plenty of people who aren't professors, lecturers, or technicians. Can staff jobs be negotiated if the other partner is offered a tenure-track position?

My husband isn't an academic, in fact not even close. However, it is possible that a university may have a position that he's ideally suited for. Jon and I were talking over dinner the other night about his dream job. He is a cabinetmaker, and he would love to teach woodworking. High schools have mostly eliminated shop as a class, which unfortunately makes that job more difficult to find. Recently he met someone who manages a university woodshop for design students to make prototypes and such. He would love to do this- discuss projects with students, teach them how to use the tools for whatever project they're working on, keep the shop organized, and work on side projects in his downtime.

Pre-New Year's Resolutions

Janus Professor just posted a list of the things she wants to accomplish before the end of the year, and I've been thinking about this too (I feel accountable because of this post).

Academic goals:

1. Send a short note out for publication. It's nothing big. I'm working on it with Sam. We should be able to send it somewhere in the next few weeks.
2. Submit my review paper. OMG I need to send this somewhere, for my own sake. Herb just warned everyone in the lab he's spending the entire month of December writing his next big grant proposal so he won't look at anything else until that's done. I planned to submit this paper with him as second author (I think people will be more likely to read and find it that way), but since he's busy I'm just going to pull my shit together and send it someplace that it's almost certain to get rejected from, but my goal for this paper is submission by Dec. 31. If/when it gets rejected I'll send it to Herb and he can work his magic and we'll try someplace else.
3. Enter all of my freaking data from the summer (again). I can do this. When I finish this task I will get a massage.
4. Schedule my next committee meeting. Better yet, have a committee meeting. That might not happen until January though.
5. Finish processing raw data for my interdisciplinary group project.

Personal goals:

1. Go rock climbing at least 6 more times.
2. Go dancing at least once (reasonable goals here).

I can't really think of any super high priority personal goals before the end of the year. The academic ones are plenty.

Presentation report

I think our presentation went well. I was seated next to the promient scientist giving the keynote. The talk was awesome. We talked right after. Of course ours wasn't as awesome (few decades less experience I think), but we did get people interested.

Where did this weekend go? It hardly felt like a weekend. At least this is a short week. I sure do have a lot to get done though!

Co-presenter anxiety

This weekend I'm giving a presentation with another person in my interdisciplinary cohort about the project we've been working on. It's going to be a large, mixed audience- some prominent scientists but mostly non-scientists who are enthusiasts about what we studied in our project. We're slated to present between two senior scientists, to an audience of about 100 people. It's a little intimidating.

Getting this presentation ready has taken more of my week than I expected it to, and my co-presenter is making me kinda anxious. I'm pretty sure we'll be great and people will love us, but he keeps bringing up all of the unknowns (What will the room be like? How big will our screen be? What if they mistake us for experts? What if someone asks us a question we can't answer?). I'm just trying to go with the flow. Our presentation is nearly final now, and we're practicing tomorrow evening. He's bringing his girlfriend over tonight and so we'll practice the presentation after dinner. I just want to have fun with this presentation and convince all these laypeople of the greatness of our project.

Money for a plane ticket!

I got another small grant to cover my next plane ticket!!! This email was sitting in my university account since yesterday afternoon but I just checked it. I'm all smiles. Yay!

It sounds like I can't actually get the money until I've completed the proposed work, which means fronting the money for a few months. That's definitely better than not getting reimbursed at all, but once again that makes our money more complicated.

I guess now I've really got to figure out exactly what I'm going to do now that I know I'll be able to get there.

Looking out for each other

I think it's important for grad students to look out for other grad students and share what they know about how things work (or don't) within the department, university, discipline, and academia in general. I certainly make an effort to do this and I've been grateful for useful knowledge gleaned from more experienced graduate students. This morning something happened that reminded me of the importance of this sort of informal transfer of knowledge.

One of my classmates mentioned that her advisor still hasn't commented on a grant proposal that she has to submit in two days. Certainly a bummer, since his name is on the application and, as Dr. Isis says, she can't submit without his approval. Last year I submitted a proposal with a similar application process. There's a whole bunch of administrative stuff that the university has to do, most of which takes a long time. Herb warned me about this. I asked if she'd talked to Mr. X, the accountant who actually needs to press the button to submit her application. She said, "Who's Mr. X?" (alarm sirens go off in my head at this point). I told her to go to his office straight away because she would need to promise homemade brownies and probably her firstborn child (to several different people, nonetheless) to get everything set up for her to submit the grant in just two days. It might not even be possible.

There were two major ways that this last-minute scramble should've been prevented:
1. Obviously, my classmate should have thoroughly and clearly read all of the instructions for submitting the grant and asked for clarification if she didn't understand. However, this process is different than most applications that grad students in our department go through, so I'm not surprised that she didn't know and I don't fault her entirely.
2. Her advisor should've given her a heads up weeks or even months ago that she would need to do some additional legwork within the university system to submit this grant. Ideally this should've happened early in the process of drafting the proposal.

If someone else in her lab or office had gone through a similar process, I hope that the students would alert each other to such potential obstactles. I feel bad that she didn't know about the complicated submission process before today, but not as bad as I'd feel if she wasn't able to submit it at all. At least now she might have a chance. What if she hadn't mentioned it to me in passing? I guess she probably learned a tough lesson about grants.

Those with whom you disagree

Earlier this semester we had an invited speaker who holds many opinions contrary to what most people in the department think. This is precisely the reason he was invited.

I furiously scribbled notes during his talk in an attempt to understand his worldview and how his arguments were constructed. I was also trying to figure out what the heck he was saying. It seemed to me that he mostly said disputatious things to get a rise out of people rather than clearly developing his position in a logical manner. He said some crazy things, such as, "Nothing useful has come from theoretical ecology." When people asked questions using clear examples beyond those he had given, he went off on tangents and didn't really answer their questions. I wonder if he could get away with saying the things he did if he weren't an old white dude with a long CV. I should perhaps note that he isn't a scientist, though he sure does write a lot about science.

Although I think a lot of garbage came out of his mouth, listening to him did force me to think more carefully about my own perspectives regarding approaches to research and its applications.

Elements of a good proposal

I recently heard someone describe the elements of good research proposal. It made such perfect sense that I couldn't believe I'd never heard it before. So, I'm sharing it here.

Proposal= background/context + research plan + effective communication

Without all three things, your proposal probably won't fare well.

The same person also outlined steps for developing a research plan.

1. Start with a compelling question.
2. Generate testable hypotheses.
3. Define your data needs to test the hypotheses.
4. Identify methods of collecting and analyzing those data.

Of course, it's not nearly as simple as that. In my limited experience, a lot of revisiting #1 and #2 happens when data will be too difficult to obtain. Back to the drawing board!