There will be brains

Tomorrow, I'm off to Washington, D.C. for the annual Society for Neuroscience meeting. This conference is huge - 30,000+ attendees. My lab has a few posters, listed here. I hope to post highlights of interesting stuff I see, maybe even some photos. I went to SfN two years ago, and one of the greatest parts is the vendor exhibit. They reserve one hangar-size room for biotech, imaging, publishing, etc companies to set up booths and hawk products. These booths are just like those you might find at other conferences (like the Consumer Electronic Show, for example), but instead of big HD TV displays and video games, they have hi-tech microscopes, pipetters, and analysis software. Anyone can browse the goods, and there is a ton of free stuff. I'm hoping for a plush rat and a squishy brain stress ball. There are also scores of free publications, and, as usual, candy, to go around.

There's science to be seen, sure, but conferences are really just big parties. Academic meetings are infamous for illicit hookups and other decadence among Ph.Ds. I probably won't post on what I see of those (at least not pictures). I like D.C., and I expect the city to have a certain energy given the recentness of the election. The G20 summit is also going on, so if I see Angela Merkel, I'll be sure to give her a shoulder rub.

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Update: I know, bad blogger. A dearth of updates the past couple weeks. The conference was fun, but uneventful science-wise. I saw a bunch of posters, met some people, and explored Washington. The past couple weeks have been super busy. I had a presentation, a paper, and a lot of experimental work to do. At any rate, that is subsiding, and I am preparing to leave work for a brief holiday vacation. Hopefully that will mean more blogging.

Continue reading "There will be brains"!

Wednesday, with some bonuses

Long day, busy organizing for an experiment that starts tomorrow morning. It was also hot.

When I got home, two surprises awaited me. One was my latest Netflix movie, I Am Legend. I never got around to seeing it in theaters, even though I wanted to, and now I know a lot of spoilers about the plot, but I'm still interested. One question does remain, however. Does Will Smith say "welcome to earth!" or "get off my car!" to the vampires? I doubt it, but haven't given up hope. Will Smith never lets me down. The second main character appears to be a dog. That's also good.



The second surprise was my new Western Digital My Passport 250 gb portable hard drive (hat tip James Foreman). I've never been responsible about backing up the information on the computers I use. I don't have a system, just data strewn about. Now, with this tiny new drive, I'll have no excuse not to back up often. My back up anxiety stems from an irrational fear of accidently erasing everything, permanently, in the process. I know this isn't as easy as it is in the movies, where people sit down at a computer, hit ENTER, and suddenly a dialog box appears, displaying FILES DELETED. Regardless, I'm getting back up for this backing up. Nick, brother, soon to be world traveller, and, importantly, knowledgeable tech person, has promised support. If I'm not spotted on the internet for a few days, it means my computer exploded and someone should send help.
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UPDATE: I Am Legend is really good, though the third act is a bit discombobulated. Will Smith is excellent. Oh, if I'm ever stuck in NYC in the aftermath of a worldwide viral epidemic, I want a highly trained German Shepherd beside me. No humans necessary. Humans get in the way. Continue reading "Wednesday, with some bonuses"!

Free of distractions (almost)

Chicago was a blast. I explored the city on foot and by subway, taking pictures all the way.


Many more pictures on Flickr.

There were a few good science talks, but I spent most of my time away from the conference, eating, walking, enjoying Dunkin Donuts and museums. The Field Museum, Shedd Aquarium, and Art Institute of Chicago offered a nice diversion from the formal structure of the conference. I tried to soak up a little culture all weekend.

I opted to take a train home, rather than ride with a friend as planned. This was my first AMTRAK ride, first long-distance train ride of any kind. I have to say, as one with some experience riding in airplanes, train travel is orders of magnitude better. Better service, better comfort, better efficiency, better cost, better everything. If train travel can be optimized in such a way that it is more practical for more Americans, I think it can alleviate some of the current stress on the airline industry. This is tricky, in part because of the logistical concerns associated with fast long-distance American trips, but that shouldn't stop investment in better train infrastructure. Picture Japan's system, then multiply by 1000. That's doable, right?

My trip to Chicago (and other brief, recent departures from Ann Arbor - one to a wedding, another to an art show) provided generous distraction from the ever-increasing pressure of graduate school. Summer is now in full swing, and I have three months to produce solid work before teaching and classes begin in September. With my mini-vacations over, I have no more excuses to put off digging into this work. I'm happy about this, actually, because as exciting as those distractions were, they were never powerful enough to rid my mind of guilt over not working. They gave me an easy out, an excuse for putting off the inevitably time-consuming effort I will have to put into my upcoming projects. Now, hopefully, I can focus on my current experiment, fellowship applications, and the writing of a review paper that has been on the back burner for two months.

I say my distractions are over, but that's not true. This weekend, family and friends are scheduled to visit, and they will certainly keep me from thinking about data. Instead, I will be hard-pressed to come up with fun things with which to entertain them. I take this responsibility seriously, even if my guests don't care. Though my head will be racked with grad-school guilt, I will also know that my worries of procrastination aren't totally legitimate. Such distractions - vacations, events, visitors - no matter how intrusive on my science goals, are nevertheless essential to my overall sanity. One thing I have decided is that I do not want this program to rule my life when it doesn't have to. I can take the time to maintain friendships, visit family, and venture out of Ann Arbor from time to time. If that means sacrificing the occasional opportunity to work, so be it. Continue reading "Free of distractions (almost)"!

Elements of a good evening

Finals are approaching. I studied all day and rewarded myself.



Otherwise busy with more end of term nonsense. Frak! Undergraduate interviews, experiment planning, conference scheduling, advisory-committee forming, meetings...

Some quick notes.

Today is the 76th birthday of Cheeta (aka Jiggs), the oldest non-human primate. Cheeta appeared in some of the Tarzan movies, Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla (which sounds amazing) and the original Doctor Doolittle. There are plans for a ghost-written autobiography.

This article from The Atlantic critiques the state of education in America and offers some suggestions in the spirit of Horace Mann. It's one of those problems without a clear solution and I don't think we're to see any change soon. At least not until unscrupulous, out of touch baby boomers are gone from local school boards and teacher unions. Study your maths, kids!

There is a vacancy at the post of London Underground announcer, and people want David Attenborough to fill it. The woman who has provided the vocals for the "mind the gap" and other Tube voice overs years past was sacked a while back, partly over spoof announcements posted on her website, such as "We would like to remind our American tourist friends that you are almost certainly talking too loudly" (its true, the gits).

Cheers Continue reading "Elements of a good evening"!

One more thing I can blame on George W. Bush

I didn't get the NSF fellowship. No, it wasn't some demented April-Fool's joke, I tripled checked the list for my name. Today I've oscillated between vague annoyance and bitter resentment, but thankfully this has little bearing on my future in graduate school. Contrary to popular belief, life is not all about the Benjamins. I also maintain eligibility for the fellowship this fall, so I can reapply if I wish. The experience wasn't a complete waste of time, however, as the NSF politely awarded me an Honorable Mention (read: better luck next time, sucker!). This is actually a nice distinction. It means I was in roughly the top 20% of applications, just missed that elusive It Factor, that hook.

Jeremiah, fellow first year, received one of the awards. He totally deserves it (though, so do I), but of course I can't help feeling a little competitive. This is how I imagined everything would play out. I assumed one of us, if any, would get it. Given the limits placed on federal research funding over the past few years, these organizations are left with fewer awards and growing applicant pools.

So today, I am the bridesmaid, the wingman. I am Barney Rubble and Fred Mertz. Continue reading "One more thing I can blame on George W. Bush"!

Drainage issues, E-pubs, and Cheese

Walking through campus the other day I came across something unexpected. The path ahead was awash in six inches of water. Ann Arbor has a problem with residual snowmelt. Anytime a foot of the stuff falls, the city is all over it with plows, salt trucks, and snowblowers. Once that snow melts, however, the infrastructure falls apart. Puddles, muddy puddles, are everywhere. This makes my journey from home to lab treacherous. An example of one of my obstacles:



When I lived in Morgantown this never happened because of the mountainous topography; everything drained into the river. Ann Arbor is unnervingly flat. Yet another graduate school adjustment to make.

Speaking of academics, my paper from undergrad is finally available as an electronic publication online. I am now searchable on PubMed, the principle database for biomedical scientific papers. This is cool but, sadly, a little anticlimactic.

An upcoming assignment in my statistics class involves multi dimensional scaling. Don't ask me to describe what that means in depth, but it is an analysis technique for visually examining similarities and dissimilarities among data. MDS might be used by a marketing department to determine how consumers categorize their products into perceptual groups. Sprite and 7Up, for example, would cluster closer than Sprite and some variety of root beer. It's also used for more serious ecology or computer science research.

This is a group project, so I'll be working with the other first-year students from my area. Our subject will be cheese, as per my suggestion. Today I compiled a tentative list of the cultured curds for analysis. Once we finalize this and do our similarity tests, I will post the results, along with some cool graphs. Cheese! Continue reading "Drainage issues, E-pubs, and Cheese"!

Blog contribution, and the internet will bring us together

I was recently asked to contribute to a discussion group on Nature Network, this social network site for scientists/enthusiasts run by the Nature Publishing Group. I picked a cool article about drug craving. My post is here.

Social networking is everywhere. The nice thing about a site like that is that you can talk about research with some anonymity and no social repercussions. If you look like an idiot, no problem, the person you're arguing with is probably on the other side of the country/world. I'm starting to worry though. At some point, I'm going to to know more people through internet sites than I do in real life. Speaking of avatars, there was an article in the New York Times the other day about the death of Dungeons and Dragons creator Gary Gygax, and how the game served as the foundation of so much mainstream role playing that occurs today.

Now we need a Twitter service specifically for graduate students. This could be sample stream:

8:40AM - a rat bit me

8:45AM - just received reprimand from advisor

10:00AM - feeling inadequate

1:30PM - fell asleep at the colloquium!

11:00PM - leaving lab

1:00AM - no time for updates, busy crying myself to sleep Continue reading "Blog contribution, and the internet will bring us together"!

Publication (hopefully) forthcoming

In college, I spent a year in a lab researching effects of caffeine in rats. I also helped write the manuscript based on that work. It was fun, and good experience. Now, we are in the throes of the publication process. The manuscript has been submitted, returned, revised, and is now ready for resubmission. Early next week, the graduate student I worked with will send it on to the journal Pharmacology, Biochemistry, and Behavior. How exciting!

It's a nervous situation, though, because there is no guarantee they will accept this time either. We've addressed the original reviewer comments, hopefully adequately, but there is always more that could have been done.

If it's accepted, fantastic. Having a journal publication this early is still fairly uncommon. I'm afraid that if it is accepted, I will become uncontrollably excited. Seriously, I may paper the walls of my apartment in reprints. Continue reading "Publication (hopefully) forthcoming"!

Graduate School: Week One

After five days to acclimate to Ann Arbor, I officially started graduate school this past Tuesday. So far, my week has consisted of running around the psychology building locating classrooms, labs, offices, and the keys to open them. Nothing notable has happened, though I did get to mount rat-brain slices today. It will be even more satisfying when they are my rats.

For the next several days, I will be busy reading papers, hoping to gather more explicit ideas for a first year project. More on that later. Continue reading "Graduate School: Week One"!

New Society for Neuroscience President-Elect: "Hey, I know that guy"

Well, sort of.

He's Dr. Thomas Carew, chair of the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at the University of California-Irvine. I met him during an interview with the program last February. Dr. Carew was formerly the chair of the psychology department at Yale and even more formerly the student of esteemed neuroscientist (and Nobel Prize winner) Eric Kandel. Dr. Carew flew in the face of the stodgy academic stereotype. During our brief meeting, we barely breached the topic of my research background, instead, Carew talked lovingly about Southern California, and surfing.

Kandel (and subsequently, Carew) became famous in the scientific community for his research on the cellular and molecular mechanisms of memory in the sea slug Aplysia. This work has greatly expanded our understanding of habituation, sensitization, and conditioning forms of learning.

This kind of research really got me interested in neurobiology. Particularly with Aplysia, complex learning behaviors can be distilled down to the interaction of several molecules across synapses. To think that the cellular mechanisms of long-term memory consolidation in a sea slug are more or less conserved in humans is astounding. For me, it lead to a sort of "ah ha!" moment that motivated my graduate school focus.

Even though I ended up in a different program doing different research, I still think my meeting with Dr. Carew ( and understanding of his work) was important. We all have people we aspire to imitate, whether in career accolades or otherwise. So remember that favorite author, artist, or actor, and draw inspiration where you can.

Anyway, here is a cool picture of a sea slug:

Continue reading "New Society for Neuroscience President-Elect: "Hey, I know that guy""!