Siliceous and Delicious

A thoroughly enjoyable, though exhausting, weekend with the in-laws—fantastic to get the mind off work, but overwhelming to come back to it and realize just how much there is still to be done. Did some emails, some OmniFocus-reviewing to get the career tasks lined up and out of my head for the week, and then promptly spent a good hour procrastiwebbing away as a surge of anxiety hit. Oy vey! Having all this job hunting/career exploring stuff going on is wreaking absolute havoc on my research productivity. It’s a good experience, I’m learning a lot (including, increasingly, what I don’t want to do—cf. Friday’s consulting nanocase about the Brookline Library). But man, it’s taking it out of me. An book review on NPR.com today I think sums up quite nicely the source of tension and anxiety…

Anywho, I eventually rallied and dug up a few Mike Foote papers that I hoped would inspire me to figure out what sort of analyses to do with my morphospace. Before delving into that, though, since I had promised Andy a meeting today, I tried to finish off the code that would place raster images of my diatom genera alongside the morphospace plot to show their morphology, a task that I’d started on Friday.

Settled down at Darwin’s this morning to stay out of the rain and away from the office, where that uncertain new officemate awaits (or might await, who knows). Caught up on scheduling my week, decided not to go to the graduate consulting club this evening (it’s just not me—I don’t want to be on campus for an event starting at 7:30 pm unless it’s something I’m really passionate about, and I guess consulting case prep just isn’t one of those things). Decided that since Google is the one employer coming to the career fair on Friday that I’m seriously interested in working for, I’d look into what branches of the business I’d actually be interested in.

They have a /edu section to their website, which touts a variety of products and applications but did not give me the sense that there was an actual business unit dedicated to education or education-specific technology. In a blog post about their Boston office there were, likewise, several educationy-related activities outlined, but they mostly seemed to be something the resident engineers and programmers did on the side, rather than as their main job function. Read through all the job postings in Boston—it seems what they’re looking for here is experienced salespeople for management positions, or computer programmers. That’s not me. Not clear where or how their google.org type of jobs actually exist, and whether there are actually any positions dedicated in an educational direction. Hmmm.

The exploration left me a little bit disillusioned, although it’s always possible to take the sort of approach that Evan suggested, those many months ago—choose the company, and decide what position they need to create for you… I’ll have a chat to the Google person on Friday and try to scope them out a little.

Eventually did a bit of work, though interrupted by a horror story from second year Steven Jaret (who just failed his quals) and another rub-it-in defense by a fellow G6, Jenny. Found that, though time, there is basically no pattern in the expansion of morphospace. Fuck a duck. Yucky, yucky, yuck. Makes me sick. Here’s the depressing plot:

Well, that’s not good. I’m going home. What a steaming pile of dung.

Time to take it down a notch. After yesterday’s distractions, I took a moment today to reflect, inspired by Beau’s thoughtful comments. It makes no sense to try and push through a three-day push when I’m distracted with other tasks, and not able to fully get into it—it devalues the three-day push and robs it of its very essence, the motivation that makes it work. So, I’ve learned from my mistakes, and put off the three-day push until such time I’m actually able to devote my energies to it.

I spent the morning instead reading Dave’s manuscript, which appeared in my inbox yesterday. It kicked me back another notch, because it’s a spectacularly negative piece of writing—essentially, it’s a punishing 42-page tractate on why the microfossil record sucks ass, and consequently can’t be used for macroevolutionary studies. Not the most inspiring thing to read when you’re working on a thesis mostly focused on using the microfossil record for macroevolutionary studies. It carefully goes through all the reasons why the record of microfossil diversity—well, basically Neptune—doesn’t represent the real history of microfossil diversity: incomplete preservation of species, collection of occurrence data for only a subset of the species actually seen by micropaleontologists (because, in essence, they’re checking presence/absence boxes on a list of biostratigraphically informative species), reworking of older fossils into newer sediments, lousy age-models, and a taxonomic system that artificially inflates species counts. Then he goes on to wax poetic about how bad this all is, and how it screws everything up. Finally, he promises to present a glimmer of hope in a last section entitled “solutions”, but this turns out to be more of a critique of why approaches taken to date don’t work. The final straw, in the “Discussions, General Recommendations and Conclusions”? The microfossil record is great, but to fix our problems we have to go back and reanalyze an entire composite section from one of each biogeographic province, this time counting every taxon that’s there. Crazy? Yes.

Had a very helpful chat with Andy on a round trip to the coffee machine—complained to him at length about this paper, and he seemed to agree with me that it was unnecessarily negative. He suggested that I could certainly encourage Dave in my comments to balance his critical eye with more positive points on the sorts of studies that can in fact be done with the record as it is.