Here's one I prepared before

Is it cheating to participate in this month's Accretionary Wedge by simply linking one's first ever blog? How nice of them to request a topic upon which I've already written, since I've not had much time for writing recently.

I've been taking time off from geology related stuff--I've had just over two weeks of adventures visiting friends and family in the US after finishing up my PhD project in Tasmania and before heading to Europe for my first post-doc position (the degree itself will be complete sometime in the next few months, after the examiners have had a chance to look over my results and I've had a chance to do any corrections they wish to see). I fly to my new home in another four hours, with luck I'll be posting again regularly soon.

Homophone Phobia

I have been pondering the parallel between text-message abbreviations (e.g. CUL8R = see you later) and puns. Both rely upon the *sound* of the word, either to communicate meaning (the text message abbreviations) or to substitute another meaning entirely with humorous intent (puns). This realization goes a long way to explain why I have always been reluctant to make puns or to use such abbreviations.

When I am reading I convert the word shape to meaning without an intermediate step of thinking about the sounds of the words. There have been many times in my life when speaking when I stumbled when attempting to say a word and realized that I didn’t know what it should sound like—that while the word was part of my vocabulary because I use it in writing, I had yet to hear it used in spoken conversation. Because of my tendency to translate word shape to meaning without thinking of the sound, text message abbreviations look wrong to me. Indeed, I find it frustrating when someone sends me a message using such abbreviations; it requires more effort and is much slower to take the time to read it out loud and decode the meaning from the sound than it would be to simply read a word which is spelled correctly (or, even, a misspelled word which happens to have more or less the same shape as the correctly spelled version of the word).

Likewise with puns, the play in words is dependant upon their sound. In the case of puns they are more often shared in the spoken form and the hearers then think of all of the various meanings which happen to all have that sound in order to “get the joke”. This is not a step I do instinctively, even when I hear words, I tend to translate them directly to meaning, without paying much attention to the individual sounds. Indeed, even from an early age I would often picture words in print when hear them—even in spoken language it is the *shape* of the word which is tied to the meaning for me. This may have a fair bit to do with having grown up with a hearing problem. My hearing is good enough that if I’m not wearing my hearing aids, and you have my undivided attention I am likely to be able to hear you well enough to understand most of what you say, if you are speaking clearly and looking at me while you speak, and you are not too far away, I will probably understand most, if not all, of what you say (assuming, of course, that you are speaking English, which, so far, is the only language in which I am fluent). However, it often happens that I’m not quite close enough to hear clearly what was said, and sometimes I don’t even realize that I’ve misheard the speaker until later in the conversation when other clues make me realize that I’ve responded to something other than what was actually said. Those embarrassing moments are rare now that I wear hearing aids, but I strongly suspect that the embarrassment of having often misunderstanding others when they spoke is a large part of why puns don’t make my list of top ten fun things to do—since they require “mishearing” what was said.

The blessings of free time

A friend of mine recently got laid off from work, as has happened to countless others in the past several months. Many of her friends offered her condolences, but I was inclined to offer her my congratulations. The wish I gave her was: “May you be inspired to use your new free time productively to accomplish what you truly want to be doing with your time, and may you find so much enjoyment in your daily activities that you don't miss working.”

I have occasionally heard people express regret when they are laid off of work, but this approach to life mystifies me for two reasons.

1) While I was growing up I never wanted a "job" or to "work"; because from an early age I'd heard people say that they couldn't come participate in whatever fun activity to which they'd been invited, or work on whatever cool project they wanted to make because they "have to go to work", and it sounded terrible to me to thus miss out on such fun.

2) After my dad retired from the military he joined his brothers working for a Labour's Union in Alaska. They'd get short-term jobs, often in remote parts of Alaska, work for a few months earning some decent money, but have no free time in which to spend it. As a result they would look forward to the seasonal lay-offs which come with such employment so that they could spend some time at home with their loved ones, doing the things they want to be doing and enjoying the fruits of their labour. As a result, I learned that being laid off from work is a good thing (so long as it happened after earning some minimum amount of cash to cover the budget for the next few months).

Yes, I do understand that many of today’s lay-offs are happening to people who do not have sufficient savings to tide them over till next they find employment, and that is sad, but still I rejoice for those who have been laid off for whom a layoff is a gift of time and who choose to make good use of that time doing things which make them happy.

Perhaps I’m even more focused upon the value of time than I was in my youth. Having finally completed and submitted my thesis I have just come off of a couple of month’s worth of concentrated effort. A period in my life wherein I was the one turning down social engagements in favour of working on my thesis so that I could finish before the deadline imposed by plane tickets to leave the country. However, as intense as that period was, and as odd as it might seem to those who have known me for years for me to give up working on sewing projects, evenings of dancing, and reading fiction, I found it easy to do knowing that it was for a limited time only. Since printing the thesis I’ve had nearly two weeks of holiday, traveling to see friends and family in the US. I’ve done dancing, I’ve started new sewing projects, I’ve picked up books to read for pleasure, and I’ve loved every moment of it. I’ve nearly one more week of vacation left, and then I’ll commence my first post-doctoral position. From what I know of the job, it should be fun, and I think I’ll enjoy it. However, I am glad to know that they will only expect a “full time” commitment—an eight hour work day still leaves plenty of time in life for entertainment unrelated to one’s occupation, and, after the past few months of “finishing up”, that will seem like a generous plenty of “free time”.

Seeing the “constructive” part of constructive criticism

Summarizing three+ years of research and talking about the significance thereof can be a daunting task. Needing to do so in a very short amount of time because one has a firm deadline, in the form of plane tickets for departure to take up a post-doctoral position makes it an interesting task. I’ve found that my reaction to this situation has varied from day to day, ranging from extreme writer’s block to highly inspired. Fortunately, when the writer’s block struck I still had other tasks to turn to such that I was still being productive with my time by gathering yet more drawings, charts, and graphs, and assembling them into ready-to print versions of the figures for thesis. Eventually, a good week later than I’d wished to do so, I completed a first draft of my final chapter, the “discussions and conclusions” part of the thesis (note: in Australia the term “thesis” is used at the PhD level, rather than “dissertation”, which is what they say in the US—I don’t know what terms are used in other countries). Oh, the joy I felt when the e-mail was sent, and I could resume working on the corrections he’d suggested to the earlier chapters.

Fortunately for me, I had reason to head into town on the next business day, and stopped in my advisor’s office that afternoon, as he was just finishing up a reply e-mail to me with his comments on the chapter. I sat and talked with him for a good hour, as he filled me in on the important points I’d not yet addressed, and why he felt that they were important. I explained that when I’d sent it to him I did feel like, perhaps, it wasn’t perfect yet, but I knew that I needed to say *something*, because it is far, far easier to edit/change text, than to write the first paragraphs on a given topic. I left that meeting feeling inspired and ready to go. As a result, when I saw his e-mail and read the comments in the chapter itself, I was ready and able to immediately work on doing the expansions he thought it needed. However, looking at the e-mail itself, I think that if I had read it before having the conversation with him, I would likely have been devastated. There is something about the thought that one’s effort isn’t deemed worthy, for whatever reason, which can either be crippling or inspiring. How easy it is to let a negative opinion on one’s work ruin one’s day, but how much better it feels when, instead, one hears the constructive, helpful suggestions one has been offered and is able to run with them, putting the suggestions to work to improve one’s efforts. This time the latter was easier to do because of the conversation. I hope that in the future, should it happen that I receive such suggestions from a mentor or colleague without such a warning conversation, I shall be able to appreciate their help and act upon their advice straight away, without any “someone doesn’t like my work” feelings standing in the way.

The tool I learned to use today, and what I discovered when I applied it

My life recently has reduced itself to not much more than working on the thesis in progress, or taking the occasional walk for exercise; I’ve even chosen to miss out on social events I would have otherwise attended in my push to “finish”. However, as I work I keep discovering new things I need to learn in the process. I once heard that the learning curve on a PhD project is exponential, and, truly, I believe it—it seems to me that I am learning ever so much more every day now in this very late stage of the project than I did in the early months of working on it (and, for the record, during those early months, I was astounded by just how very much I was learning compared to my prior rates of information acquisition).

One of this week’s new lessons was how to apply a t-test in an Excel spreadsheet. When my advisor gave me back chapter five, with comments and suggestions for improvement, one of the things he said was that the variation of some of the abundances for some of the trace elements in the monazite for the grains which grew in the Cambrian looked on the graph like they might, perhaps, vary by age of the grains. The “vary by age” we are talking here is very minor—these crystals grew ~505 Million years ago, give or take a handful of million years. How long did that growth period take? If it was fast it might have been just a couple million years, but if it was slow it could have taken tens of millions of years. In the latter case, it would be possible for there to be changes in the growing conditions (temperature/pressure) over the time period. If there were changes in the temperature and pressure during the metamorphic episode it is possible that during that period different minerals would be stable at different times during the event. It is known that how much of any given trace element is incorporated into monazite is based, in part, on what other minerals are growing or breaking down at the same time the monazite is growing. Since monazite tends to be a small mineral (generally <> 1 mm, and sometimes > 1 cm)) tend to out-compete it for any elements they are fond of if they are growing at the same time, or if the large mineral is breaking down, they tend to release trace elements, which the monazite can then incorporate into its own crystal structure.

Therefore, to test this, part of my day was spent going back to the results of my monazite analyses, sorting them by age to get all of the ones from the ~505 Million year old growing episode together, then sorting them back out into their individual samples again, then sorting each sample by first one, and then another trace element, then doing a t-test for each element to compare all of the analyses from a single sample which are high in that element with those which are low in that element. If the “t Stat” number reported is larger than the “t Critical two-tail” number then I can say that, yes, there is a statically valid difference in the ages of the two groups. However, for the samples from the first region I’ve tested, I can’t say that. Statically, the ages for those analyses high in these elements are indistinguishable from those which are low in those elements. Therefore, the factor which is more likely to effect how much of each of those trace elements wound up in the monazite is probably just a simple “how close was each grain of monazite to the other minerals which were either giving off, or taking up, those elements?”.

Having done all of that for this region, I next need to repeat the process for the other regions, write up the results (in less general terms!) in the thesis, and move on to the next task on the list…

There will always be just one more sample you will want to analyze, no matter how close the deadline. When this happens, just say no.

Once upon a time, before I started my PhD project, my advisor did some analysis of the mineral monazite in various samples from across Tasmania, to determine the age of the grains. When I started my project some time there after I was unable to obtain training on the use of our microprobe the first year I was here, because our microprobe operator had been hired away to Edinburgh, and it took a while to find a suitable replacement and get him the appropriate visas to start work. So, to keep me out of trouble, in addition to looking at 100+ thin sections of the various Tasmanian rocks that had been collected by previous UTAS students and faculty over the years, to determine which ones would be good candidates for detailed petrological analysis, he also put me to work writing a paper summarizing the results of the monazite dating he’d done before I arrived. For most of the samples I wrote the sample description myself, since I had the thin sections in my office. However, one of them, which had been collected in 1962 from an area which is now under a dam, wasn’t in my office, and my advisor couldn’t find it in his office. Undaunted, I searched the 1962 thesis (which didn’t have a table of contents—so I created one for it) and found the original sample description, and adapted that information for our paper.

Years elapsed. UTAS hired a new microprobe operator. I learned to use the microprobe. I engaged in my own analytical work, both my own monazite dating of other Tasmanian samples, and analysis of other minerals to do calculations as to what temperatures and pressures these minerals must have grown. Eventually, I slowed down on my data acquisition and commenced writing up my results. During this process, I noticed a familiar sample number occurring in the list of “standards” being used for each and every session of monazite dating. Yes, that missing sample from the paper has been living in the microprobe lab all this time. It gives remarkably consistent results. It has had more than 170 different analyses (some samples have had 15), and they all give more or less the same age, and have pretty much the same composition. Indeed, the graphs for its monazite composition show considerably less variation than those for the other samples.

Today it occurred to me that I should look at the sample, to see if I can relate the pattern of its composition to any other details in the sample, so I went and borrowed it from the microprobe lab. Now that I’ve seen it, I so wish I’d have seen it years ago. It is full of lovely albite porphyroblasts with inclusion trails at an angle to the foliation of the matrix minerals. There are tiny garnet grains, and biotite is present. In short, all of the minerals needed to do the pressure/temperature calculations, plus plenty of structural details visible in the sample to make for an interesting story. And here I am, with only three weeks to get my thesis finish, printed, bound, and submitted. There is just no way that I am going to be able to analyze this sample and do the calculations, since I am out of time and budget with which to do it, which is a pity, because it looks as though it would have been a lovely addition to the story.

the final push is underway

Not too long back I received an offer on a post-doctoral position in Europe. Before receiving that offer, I thought that I had already reduced my life to pretty much nothing but working on my thesis and basic “take care of myself” tasks like food, exercise, sleep, and checking in with my mother so that she knows I’m still alive. Since receiving that offer I’ve discovered that there is nothing like a solid job offer with a specific deadline when it comes to being a motivator. I did, in fact, have other places on my daily schedule that could be converted to time for “uni work”, and progress proceeds apace. Assuming that all goes well with my achieving my deadlines for submission, and with the paperwork for visas and everything else involved in such a move, July should see me in a new country, starting a new job, but there are a number of tasks yet to be completed to achieve that goal.

One word of advice for anyone else coming down to the end of a major project with a hard deadline: any time you need to take a break, be it to sleep for the night, or just to go grab a quick bite to eat, be certain you know what specific task you will be doing when you return. I find that is ever so much easier to procrastinate if I am thinking in vague terms of “lots to do”, and that it is ever so much easier to start working if I’m thinking in terms of “one specific, reasonably easy to accomplish” task to undertake next.