tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-192160992024-03-21T16:09:47.974-06:00BrummellBlogTheBrummellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08973380652057861796noreply@blogger.comBlogger585125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19216099.post-65837317327534421962021-06-29T01:11:00.001-06:002021-06-29T01:11:41.110-06:00Book Club: The Scientist's Guide to Writing<h2 style="text-align: left;"> The Scientist's Guide to Writing</h2><h2 style="text-align: left;">Stephen B. Heard</h2><h4 style="text-align: left;">Princeton University Press</h4><h4 style="text-align: left;">2016 <br /></h4><p style="text-align: left;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRcj0tLxMYp1BI5DAoWSoAo1OJAAhIQuEmW4Pu7st_DGun1KmrhfdTMgdgQKqWJaV3zsa_d6abXWXCsMnbYh1YpVDXP1fpqvWorD2JVklYQocJ3Rf8bco9oJd_GktGc3yZVj3B0g/s634/9780691170220.webp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="634" data-original-width="410" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRcj0tLxMYp1BI5DAoWSoAo1OJAAhIQuEmW4Pu7st_DGun1KmrhfdTMgdgQKqWJaV3zsa_d6abXWXCsMnbYh1YpVDXP1fpqvWorD2JVklYQocJ3Rf8bco9oJd_GktGc3yZVj3B0g/s320/9780691170220.webp" /></a></div><br /> <p></p><p style="text-align: left;">I read this book, one or two chapters at a time, months ago. Ironically (maybe), the extensive information Dr Heard presents about motivation, writing momentum, procrastination, etc. did not prevent me falling into a deep trough of non-productivity. Writing this blog post has been on my weekly to-do list for months, never getting checked off. </p><p style="text-align: left;"><i>Something</i> has changed for me recently. It's difficult to point to a single event or conversation or idea, but I think some combination of those plus perhaps some brain chemistry shifts or cycles means I actually have enough wherewithall to write this.</p><p style="text-align: left;">This is the second how-to-write-like-a-scientist book I've read in the past few years, the other being Josh Schimel's <i>Writing Science</i> - I have a "Quotes and Reference Guide" stuck to the wall above my computer here in my office. The two books are quite different in approach, though there is quite a bit of overlap of basic material. </p><p style="text-align: left;">Most chapters end with a set of writing exercises. I have long intended to complete some or even all of these exercises, but even the hippo of writing - a realistic-looking plastic toy hippo that appears happy from the side but infuriated from in front (mouth wide open, big teeth) - has not helped me actually get writing done. The rut is real, but perhaps these few hundred words will act as steps up the side of the rut to someplace else.<br /></p>TheBrummellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08973380652057861796noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19216099.post-73546601474589409922019-03-03T02:08:00.000-06:002019-03-03T02:08:12.636-06:00Birthday Retrospective 41Today is my 41st birthday, and I've been thinking about the last couple of years and how much has happened in my life. A year ago, I was in Qu<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">é</span></span>bec (the city in the province), and a year before that I was in Waterloo, Ontario. Today, I am in Armidale, NSW, Australia. It's been quite a couple of years!<br />
<br />
Being a post-doc is weird; this is something I say fairly often, probably a couple of times per week. I have been a PDF (post-doctoral fellow*) for about four years, and in that time I have done what seems like a pretty broad range of things at work. Besides the frequent moves - this is my fourth post-doc position, and more on that in a moment - I have taken turns working at particular skills that are typically important skills for university professors - and that is my career goal.<br />
<br />
* Technically, I am a Fellow now, but my previous positions since my PhD have been "post-doctoral researcher"; the main difference is funding, in that a Fellow is supported by an award or funding from outside of the lab group or PI (primary investigator; a professor). Here at the University of New England, I have a contract and independent funding and my job title is officially a Post-Doctoral Fellow.<br />
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My first PDF, at the University of Waterloo, lasted about 2.5 years. In the final half year or so I started seriously looking for my next position, and I was contemplating relaxing my standards for advertised jobs I would apply for from strictly tenure-track to include interesting PDFs. The main busy period for such applications is the fall in Canada, but before I really got into a serious search - with a hard deadline for my position at U Waterloo of October 31, 2017 - I was offered a PDF with a professor I had met several times and already had the beginnings of a working relationship with. My U Waterloo PI was Dr. Maria Strack, and Dr. Line Rochefort at Universit<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">é Laval had been one of Maria's PhD supervisors, about a decade earlier and they continue to work together. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">I moved to </span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Qu<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">é</span></span>bec at the end of September 2017, and in the personal chaos I lost track of world events; my first day of work at Laval was the day after Catalan held a referendum to separate from Spain - an event closely watched by many in </span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Qu<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">é</span></span>bec. My contract at Laval was short-term because Line was at the end of her main Discovery grant and had not yet secured funding for the next five-year period. She was applying for two other major grants in addition to renewing her Discovery, and needed a person to divert attention from her so she could focus on grant-writing ahead of deadlines in October and November. My job was largely to work with Line's students and others as the English-speaker: I was the only native Anglophone in a lab dominated by Qu</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">ébecois but with plenty of other nationalities and languages as well. I learned that I quite enjoy helping ESL scientists with the intricacies of technical writing in English.</span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">The grants Line was applying for included funding for a PDF, and the unwritten agreement was that should any or all of the grants be successful, that position would be mine if I wanted it. The dates we would learn about the success or lack thereof of these grants were in late March, and my 7-month contract at Laval was set to end at the end of April. In late January, as I was struggling to make plans beyond that end-April horizon, other professors I had worked with forwarded a job ad to me, at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario. </span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Dr. Nathan Basiliko paid for me to visit Laurentian in late February - about a week after I first spoke with him and other professors at Laurentian - for a large meeting to bring together nearly everybody involved in a large collaborative grant they had been awarded. That was an interesting meeting, and at the end of the two days I agreed to move to Sudbury to work with Nathan. A big part of my decision was the 2-year contract on offer, as well as the opportunity to expand my expertise into different areas of Restoration Ecology.</span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Sudbury is a fantastic place, and I thoroughly enjoyed living and working there. After only a few months in Sudbury, I was made aware of an opportunity in Australia, to work with people I'd met when I visited Charlie in December, 2017. Dr. Romina Rader and Dr. Susan Wilson were willing to Nominate me for a UNE PDF, with the first application deadline in early July. There's a long story there, but the upshot is we were successful at the first stage, and I was invited to complete a full application with a 5-page proposal to replace the 1-page version in the first application, due in early September. We were successful again at this second stage, and a Skype interview was scheduled for mid-October; I was told I could expect to hear the decision in about a week.</span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Around 10 days after the interview, I was informed that UNE was offering me the position. This converted November and December into frantic preparations to move around the world. Charlie had joined me in Sudbury and we had to coordinate this massive undertaking while both of us continued to work - me at Laurentian, trying to wrap up what I could before leaving, and her with the lab work and data analysis stemming from her "summer" job in Sudbury. </span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Somehow, we accomplished everything, and moved out of our Sudbury home and drove to Calgary just before Christmas, 2018. That is another story of its own. We were granted our Australian visas and booked our flights somewhere between Winnipeg and Regina, and flew without further drama on January 8th, and over the International Date Line on January 9th, consigning that day to the Time Vortex and landing on the 10th.</span></span></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Australia has been excellent and wonderful so far, and promises to continue to be so. I baked myself a Birthday Cake today and both Charlie and I have been relaxing and taking it pretty easy all day. On Charlie's suggestion, my Sunday Drives - restarted after a long hiatus in Ontario and Alberta - have become "Sunderday" Drives, a term coined by a good friend of Charlie's in Sudbury. The Sunday Drives were never tightly linked to any particular day of the week, but the move to Saturdays (three such drives have been completed so far) flips the feelings of the two weekend days. Previously, Saturdays often became unpleasant errands-and-chores days, with long hours spent shopping for non-exciting, necessary things and little time to maintain our home with such tasks as laundry or general tidying-up. Now, Saturday mornings are given to shopping for furniture and other necessary things (shops, especially thrift stores, are open limited hours on Saturdays, often closing shortly after noon, and are largely closed entirely on Sundays), with our departure for more fun driving and sight-seeing happening after lunch. This makes Sunday a wide-open day where we can each decide to accomplish as much or as little as we like. Today, for example, I hung an Art on the wall, and baked the afore-mentioned cake. I'll make supper and maybe wash some dishes, otherwise the day is filled with far less useful tasks.</span></span></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">I've been trying to get into a habit of photo-editing, with some success, so here is a recent photo.</span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/49837331@N06/47153249802/in/dateposted/" nbsp="" title="SD 197 Supertele Landscapes 01"><img alt="SD 197 Supertele Landscapes 01" height="530" src="https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7900/47153249802_70411528c5_c.jpg" width="800" /></a><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js"></script></span></span></span></span></div>
TheBrummellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08973380652057861796noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19216099.post-68141235449367377492018-12-12T11:51:00.000-06:002018-12-12T11:51:33.782-06:00Moving to Australia
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I am deep into moving mode, an
emotional state that places a voice inside my head that repeats a few
phrases whenever I ponder a wide range of physical objects: "No!
Do not buy that!"; "Will this be taken with, packed for
storage, sold, or donated?"; "The miniproject you had in
mind for this is gone, a dead dream. Let it go.".</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
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This is annoying, I much prefer my
normal happy-go-lucky approach to possessions, though this current
mood has considerable benefits when it comes to that other major
category of possession, money. I would not say I have ever been very
good at money, in the sense of avoiding or paying off debts
effectively, saving money, and preventing myself from making
probably-ill-advised purchases. Between the increased attention I've
been paying to my personal finances since late summer and the
material needs (i.e., for less material) of my impending
trans-Pacific move, my money situation has both clarified and
improved. This move to Australia comes with another substantial
benefit on this point: a large raise.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
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As a post-doc in Canada, from my
position at the University of Waterloo, through my short half-year at
Universit<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">é</span> Laval, to my
current-and-soon-to-end half-year here at Laurentian University in
Sudbury, my salary has stayed pretty constant, at about $45 000 /
year. My recent improvement in financial self-oversight does not
extend far into the past, but I am confident that I can maintain
something like my current lifestyle on this level of income. The new
position in Australia comes with a salary nearly double that, and
while the cost of living will probably be a bit higher, and the move
itself represents a significant expense, I anticipate being able to
live a slightly more comfortable life there. My current debts would be
paid off by mid-to-late 2019 were I to stay here in my current
existence, so I anticipate greater chances of success in this goal,
even with the currency-conversion and interbank transfer fees I'll
incur paying off Canadian debts from Australian income.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
So that's one reason why I'm moving.
The other, more important reason, is love. Charlie will be starting
her PhD in 2019 at the University of New England (as long as certain
things go reasonably well, which they mostly have already been
doing), and this position for me is in the same laboratory group, so we can STAY TOGETHER! YAY! I
have been awarded a University of New England Post-Doctoral
Fellowship (UNE PDF), a competitive award that comes with a 3-year
contract and considerable support in the form of specific training
for professor responsibilities such as effective teaching and
applying for outside funding; I am very much looking forward to
learning about and practicing both of those.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I think I'll save the application
process story for another post, after I arrive in Armidale and take
up my new position, just to avoid any public-information weirdnesses
- I'll have a chance to clear some things I might want to talk about
with the relevant people there.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The third reason I'm moving to
Australia is of course ADVENTURE. Ironically, Sudbury is an AMAZING
place for EXACTLY the kinds of adventures I am most interested in
having. This isn't the canoe capital of Canada - Atikokan, Ontario,
a thousand kilometres away, claims that title - but it's a very close
second. Greater Sudbury, the coalesced super-municipality of Sudbury
plus a large number of suburbs, includes 331 lakes within the
borders. My office here looks directly out (I mean, <i>directly</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
- the distance from window to water is about 3 metres) onto Lake
Ramsey. Within an hour or two of driving, there are at least half a
dozen Provincial Parks with mapped canoe routes, water-access-only
campsites, and maintained portages; this includes the jaw-droppingly
gorgeous Killarney Provincial Park, which we have managed to visit
only once. We'll be back.</span></div>
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<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">I have
been spending some of my procrastination time browsing the websites of
the State Parks of New South Wales and of Queensland, plus a number
of other similar get-out-and-explore Australia websites. The Sunday
Drives, which have been dormant here in Sudbury since October (not
that I post about them but I do go on them!) will be restarted as
soon as possible in Australia. Like Sudbury, Armidale is surrounded
by some amazing protected areas that I can't wait to explore.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">The
move itself has been (and continues to be) a large and seemingly
never-ending amount of work. We received the Letter of Offer in late
October, so we had about two months to do all things needed for a
move like this. Packing, and sorting possessions into
take/store/sell/donate has taken much of our time, but some things
further from our direct control also require both long times and
considerable effort. The visa application, again without talking
about it in detail given we have not received it yet, is the obvious
example, with published estimates on government websites that our
visa may take two months to be processed, though hopefully much less.
UNE has hired immigration lawyers to help us, and Visa Lawyers
Australia (VLA) have been absolutely wonderful. There's a lot to say
in the future about this process, too, but I can say that VLA has been great.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">Selling
things has been surprisingly effective, I had not expected to make
nearly as much money as we have - with more (hopefully) to come -
through Facebook Marketplace and eBay. Large things that are not
worth shipping, mostly furniture, have gone to local people,
organised by Charlie. Smaller things with narrow appeal - mainly my
old camera gear - has gone out through eBay. I have bought a bunch of
things (including old camera gear) through eBay, but until this move,
I had never sold anything. The first to go was my collection of
Dragon Magazines, to a few buyers in Ontario and Quebec. Camera stuff
has gone to B.C., Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, and
Quebec, as well as several American states. In some cases, the cost
of shipping exceeds the cost of the item by up to double, but the
buyers are willing and the post office is nearby.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">That
said, if you feel like browsing what I've got up, there are a few
more auctions left to run before we drive west (next week), search
for "martinb003" on ebay.ca and you'll find me.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">Our
plan for the move, now well under way, is to drive to Calgary for
Christmas, then fly to Armidale by Calgary - Vancouver - Sydney -
Armidale. Qantas flies at least once a week on the critical Vancouver
- Sydney route, and a few other airlines such as Air Canada also make
that trip on most days. We want to avoid stopping in the USA because
while it potentially could be less expensive (though not necessarily,
as we have seen browsing ticket sellers) there is a large and
worrying possibility of all kinds of hassle with US Customs that we
would prefer to just dodge. This
emotional state comes with strong prioritisation to minimize time and
worry requirements in favour of getting stuff done, because there
are so very many things to do.</span></div>
TheBrummellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08973380652057861796noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19216099.post-5304082105101954682018-05-17T15:24:00.000-06:002018-05-18T10:53:45.525-06:00Les mots difficiles<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
This is a list of words, grammar, and writing conventions I put together during my time at<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> Université</span></span> Laval, based on my work there helping students and others with written English, especially scientific material such as thesis chapters, manuscripts for peer-reviewed journals, and grant applications. Most of these are examples from actual pieces of writing I was working on, with some that I did not see but similar situations arose. Most, perhaps all, are based entirely in my own personal understanding of English writing in Science, and I have tried to indicate the parts where subjective considerations such as personal style or the context of a particular phrase outweigh what I might consider to be correct.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
This is a work in progress, though progress is stalled at the moment because I have no non-English-first-language colleagues I am currently helping. Suggestions, corrections, comments, and general discussion are very welcome! </div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
Ameliorate
– in English, this word means “to make less bad”, but in French, “improve” or
“increase”. This makes the sentence “He ameliorated the suffering” mean
completely different things.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
Augment
– this word is rare in English, and is almost always paired with some variation
of “to be” in the subjunctive (yes, we have the subjunctive in English! It’s
just not used very much). For example, rather than “the water level augmenting”
(here, “augment” is a synonym for “rise”; it’s not really a full synonym but is
used this way here), “the water level was augmented” (and the rest of the
sentence would be expected to include a description of what caused this
augmentation – e.g. “was augmented by recent rain.”). </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
Appendix
/ <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Annex</i> – The additional section of a
document after the References (or Literature Cited) is the Appendix; if there
is more than one they are usually separated by numbers or sometimes letters:
“Appendix 1, Appendix 2” or “Appendix A, Appendix B”. The word “Annex” means
something different in English, though the meaning is usually clear.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
Current
/ currently – The English translation of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">actuel
</i>is “current”, not “actual” (and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">actuellement</i>
becomes “currently”). When discussing things happening in real time, or when
describing a situation in the present tense, use “current” or “currently”:
“Current legislation includes restrictions on land-uses of this type”;
“Domestic animals are currently not permitted on the site”. When describing how
things are in reality that may be surprising or contradicting previous facts or
statements, use “actual” or “actually”: “While this belief is widespread,
actual conditions do include grazing by livestock”. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
Global
– it’s not wrong to use this word to describe conditions across an entire study
area or project, but it is rare to use it that way in English. Most often,
global refers only to the entire planet Earth. Or, you could be talking about
global conditions on Mars, I suppose. “All of a big sphere” is a useful working
definition – if your study or project can be thought of as a large ball, then
“global” works well.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
Humidity
– this is a measure (relative or absolute) of the amount of water vapour
dissolved in air or another gas. The similar French word<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> humidit</i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">é</span></i> translates to
moisture, damp (or dampness), or wetness. It is possible to measure soil
humidity, the water vapour in the air spaces within the soil, but it is much
more common to measure the amount of liquid water in soil, the soil moisture.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
Plantation
(and other words ending in –tion) – in English, words like this that end in
–tion are almost always nouns, while in French they are verbs. In some cases,
the –tion form does not exist in English, such as “planification” (corrected: “planning”),
but in other cases a spell-check function will allow the word because it is a
noun in English. “Plantation” is an example – it’s a noun, and means an area of
land deliberately planted with a crop species (such as cotton or sugarcane, or
commercially valuable trees) and the business associated with it. To describe
the deliberate placement of trees or other plants, use “planting”, and use it
as a verb. The noun is also acceptable, when used as a noun.<br />
“Plantation” has some
associated baggage, in that the word is most often used in historical
descriptions of slave-labour economic activity in the time before the abolition
of slavery in countries or regions such as the United States (abolished 1865)
where the word “plantation” often follows a specific crop, such as “cotton
plantation”. For reasons I don’t know, combinations like “wheat plantation” or
“fruit tree plantation” are extremely rare.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
Sensible
/ Sensitive – a ‘false friend’ – the French word <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">sensible</i> translates to the English word “Sensitive”. “Sensible” (in
English) means “full of sense”, usually in reference to a person or idea: “Her
plans are sensible, and her nose is sensitive.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
Realise
/ Realized – often as “thing was realized by method” – this is another
not-wrong-but-not-common word, like “global”. In English, anything can be
realized, but the things most commonly realized are goals, dreams, and similar
abstract concepts, the emphasis is on something that does not exist (a dream of
a better world) becoming real (the world has become better). “Made” is a decent
substitute, and if they fit, “completed”, “conducted”, “performed” are pretty
good, too. If it makes sense to say “made real” then use “realise”.<br />
Realise
is also often used in the sense of a new or previously-ignored piece of
information coming to a person’s attention: “I realized the measurements were
biased by condensation inside the instrument”.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
Repeated
/ Repetitive – A measurement or other phenomenon with clear boundaries in space
and time may be repeated. A task or activity may be repetitive, because it is
boring, simple, and must be repeated many times.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
Resilience
/ Resistance – Resilience is the capacity to survive or remain intact through
some challenge, though damage may occur. Resistance is the capacity to
completely stop the effects of a challenge, sometimes up to some point, after
which comes (perhaps) catastrophic failure. “The weeds are resistant to the
pesticide, and are resilient to drought.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
Species
– the final S is never removed. One species, two species, some species, no
species. This is also a problem for many native English speakers. “Specie”
is a completely different word, it’s the generic name for coins and other
objects used for currency and is very rarely used. The plural of genus is
genera.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
Vulgarise
/ Vulgarisation – in French, this term (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">vulgariser</i>)
is used to describe the way scientists and other technically-minded people
explain their work to the general public. In English, the verb is very rarely
used, but the adjective, vulgar, is used to describe things that are
distasteful or disgusting, or actions and people that are rude or appealing to
the worst elements of society. For example, a celebrity (actor, politician,
etc.) that sexually harassed a member of their staff and then refused to
apologise for this might be described as a vulgar person, or his behaviour as
vulgar. It’s a synonym for “very rude”, usually with the unspoken implication
of not being ashamed of this behaviour.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>There
is no English verb in common usage that describes this activity the way the
French verb <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">vulgariser</i> does, to my
knowledge. In English, we might speak of “creating a plain-language version” or
“rewriting for a general audience”; occasionally people will use the term “lay
person” or “lay public”, a throwback to the difference between communications
within the Church between clergy, and the communications from the Church to the
congregation of regular people, the lay public. Essentially, “lay” is used to
mean “anybody outside of my area of specialisation”.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>The words “disseminate”
or “popularise” can work, but have some implications behind them – disseminate
does not suggest any changes to the information (for example, to adapt it to a
different audience), and popularise suggests some positive advocacy, as in
attempting to convince the audience that this is a good idea, and encouraging
the audience to spread it further. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
Weigh
/ Weight – the verb is “to weigh” (without a T), the noun is “weight”. Compare
“This weighs 3 grams” vs. “The weight of this is 3 grams”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Les autres problems communs</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
Contractions
– Don’t. It’s distracting, isn’t it? They’re not used in formal writing. This
includes formal emails and the like, such as when a student writes to a professor
they do not already know well. English doesn’t have the requirement to elide
words together over vowels the way French does. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
Contrasts
– It is very common to see expressions such as “In contrast”, “Inversely”,
“Conversely”, “On the other hand”, “However” <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">et cetera</i> in scientific writing because often the author wishes to
draw attention to divergent circumstances or results. Detailed usage notes are
beyond the scope of this document, but some such expressions are best placed at
the start of a sentence (e.g. “In contrast”) while others are best in the
middle of complex sentences (e.g. “conversely”). “Inversely” is rare,
“Conversely” usually works better.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
Negatives
and double negatives – most of the time, negatives are easy to use and double
negatives are easy to avoid. Some words can be read as negatives in some contexts,
so it is worth carefully reviewing complex sentences that include negatives in
at least one clause. “Without”, “Instead”, “Beyond” and many others can fall
into this category.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
Possessives
– English provides two common ways of indicating possession: the apostrophe-S
or “the possession of subject” form that is similar to many possessives in
French. For example, it is equally correct to describe the peat’s depth or the
depth of the peat. I have been told that, for a Francophone, using the
apostrophe-S “feels more English”. To an Anglophone like me, the apostrophe-S
sometimes appears more informal than the X-of-Y form, but the X-of-Y form can
appear awkward.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
Since
/ Because – Because “since” can mean either “because of” or “in the time
elapsed between then and now” it can be unclear when read; context determines
which of these two sometimes quite similar definitions is intended. You may
have been taught not to start a sentence with “Because” (I certainly was) but
that rule is outdated and rather pointless. Because of shifting language use
since the turn of the 20<sup>th</sup> century, and the potential for confusion
with “since”, I suggest avoiding “since” and using “because”.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
This / That / It – It
can be difficult to translate French words such as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Ça, </span>Ce, </i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Ces,
Cette, Ceci, </span></i><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">and
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Cela. </i>Context is the main factor for
determining which to use in a given situation. In scientific writing, “it” and
“its” are less common than “that” and especially “this” – when in doubt, the
pronoun you are looking for is probably “this”. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Que</i> and its variations almost always translate to “that” but of
course there are many exceptions.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Were vs. Have been – The
difference between these two forms of past tense is subtle. Things “were”
different; this implies that the time of difference is finished, possibly with
a long interval in between. Things have been different; this implies that some
important event has happened to create the break between then and now. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>For
example, when describing the results of another study, use “has been”, as in
“Strong growth has been reported (Smith et al., 2010)” rather than “was”:
“Strong growth was reported (Smith et al., 2010)”. This is a small point, and
probably shows more about my personal opinions than about widespread practice
in science.</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></i></div>
<br />
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Plurals</span></i>
<br />
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</div>
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<br />
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
Many English nouns are not changed when plural, or are considered plural only in unusual circumstances; these are mass nouns (e.g. “water”, with similar rules in French – « <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">les eaux </i>» <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">est rare</i>). Some are most often plural
but have a valid, if rarely used<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>singular form. Many of these rules are not well known by native English
speakers.</div>
Sometimes, a number greater than one appearing in a sentence does not create a plural. Measurements that describe an object do not indicate more than one object, and can be considered singular descriptors equivalent to non-quantitative properties such as colour or qualitative descriptions of size (“large”, “heavy”, etc.). For example, a bog that covers 50 hectares could be described as “a 50 hectare bog” but not “a 50 hectares bog” because there is still only one bog. If the number and its unit could be replaced by a non-quantitative descriptor (“a large bog”, not “larges”), the unit is singular.<br />
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
Data
/ Datum – A collection of data are “data”. A single point or measurement is a
“datum”. A bunch of data put together in one place with some organisation is a
“dataset”. The plural is “data”, so you can talk about “my data” or “these
data” but not “this data” or “a data”.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
Dice
/ Die – You can roll two or more dice, but if you have only one, you have a
die.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
Fish
/ Fishes – One fish. Many individuals of one species of fish are “many fish”.
Several different species are “fishes”. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
Research
/ Researches – Most of the time, what several scientists are doing would be
referred to as “research projects” or “conducting different research
activities” or some other way to avoid pluralising “research”. “Researches” is
not wrong, it’s just so rare that it is disruptive when reading.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
Information
/ Informations – the only example of multiple informations I can think of would
be a situation in which two or more sources of information were competing or in
conflict. “Information” is a mass noun, like “rice” (“rices” would refer to
multiple strains or species of rice, or to multiple different rice-based
foods).</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
Moss
/ Mosses – same rule as for fish, though because moss individuals are often
difficult (or meaningless) to distinguish between, the singular is used for
continuous properties: “A carpet of moss; Moss covered 90% of the plot.” But
the plural is also widely used: “We identified three mosses and four lichens;
mosses covered half of the plot”.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Les conventions Scientifiques</i></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
Active
voice, as opposed to passive voice, is now widely preferred. The internet is
full of discussion of the relative merits of each, but the consensus seems to
be that active voice is easier to read: “We hypothesize that...” rather than
“It was hypothesized that...”. Active voice is usually easier to write, too,
and passive voice can be saved to emphasize particular concepts or procedures:
“We discovered several problems with this method. It was developed under
different circumstances than the current study, and has several drawbacks as a
result.” The passive voice is still useful, for example, see the first sentence
of this paragraph. Of note, passive voice avoids assigning responsibility or
blame for actions, so you can use it to criticise some thing without explicitly
criticising the person that created or used that thing: “The vehicle was left
unlocked and a number of items were stolen”.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
Adverbs
such as “really”, “very”, “extremely”, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">et
cetera</i> are rare in scientific writing. They contribute little additional
information and are not quantitative unless explicitly defined <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">a priori</i> as indicators of particular
categories. “The water table was very high” conveys no information not present
in “The water table was high”; even better than both of those is “The water
table was 10 cm higher than the expected value”.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
Biological
species names are always <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">italicised</i>,
and the genus name is always capitalised while the species name is never
capitalised. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Homo sapiens</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sphagnum fallax</i>, etc. It is extremely
rare to start a sentence with just a species name without a genus; when using
species names in Every Word Capitalised titles, do not capitalise the species
name: “This Paper Is About<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> Sphagnum
fuscum</i>”. Higher taxonomic orders (Family, Order, Class, Phylum, etc.) are
not italicised but are capitalised when used as a name: “Hominoidea evolved
millions of years ago” and not capitalised when used as a descriptor: “hominids
appear in the fossil record from millions of years ago.”</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>When
a species name will appear more than once, you can abbreviate the genus to the
first letter: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">S. fuscum</i>. If several
species are in the same genus, you can use this to avoid typing out the full
name every time: “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sphagnum fallax</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">S. fuscum</i>, and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">S. magellanicum”</i>. If there are several genera with the same first
letter, distinguish between them with additional letters: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Carex canescens, Calluna vulgaris</i>... <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Cx. canescens, Cl. vulgaris</i>.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
Chemical
names can be written as their chemical formulae for all elements and most
simple compounds: “CO<sub>2</sub>; H<sub>2</sub>SO<sub>4</sub>; Al” as long as
the relevant rules about sub- and superscripting numbers are respected (the
number of atoms is subscripted, the ionic charge is superscripted and is at the
end of the name, minority isotopes are superscripted and are on the left of the
relevant atom: <sup>15</sup>NO<sub>2</sub><sup>-</sup> ).<br />
Longer
and more complicated names can be abbreviated by placing the abbreviation in
parentheses after the first time the full name appears: “Deoxyribonucleic Acid
(DNA)”. Though “DNA” is a special case because it falls into the category of
abbreviations that are better-known than their full names; other examples
include the bacterium <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Escherichia coli</i>
(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">E. coli</i>), and the nematode <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Caenorhabditis elegans </i>(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">C. elegans</i>).</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
Citations are a large
topic and mostly beyond the scope of this document. However, it worth
discussing their general use in typical scientific writing. When using the very
common name-and-date style, there are two main ways, either the author’s name
is inside the parentheses (Brummell, 2018), or outside as in Brummell (2018).
Starting a sentence with a citation is acceptable: “Brummell (2018) provides a
large amount of useless advice”. Author-inside citations are most often at the
end of a sentence (Brummell 2018) but can be placed between clauses or phrases
(Brummell et al., 2018). It is rare to use citations in a form like “According
to Brummell (2018), everything is terrible”; instead use forms like “Everything
is terrible (Brummell, 2018)” or “Brummell (2018) suggests that everything is
terrible”.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>When
using author-outside citations, be careful about how the work is described.
"Brummell (2018) describes some examples, and found some conclusions." Note verb
tense: “describe” is present tense even if the citation is old, “found” is past
tense even if the citation is very new. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>For numbered citations,
follow the rules for the specific journal you are writing for; some will
require square brackets [1] and may require the citations to be subscripted<sub>[2]</sub>
or italicised or otherwise formatted in a particular way. Using a numbered
citation to start a sentence can still be done, but those rules from the journal
will become even more specific.<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
Contractions
are to be avoided in scientific writing. With a few rare exceptions, published
papers do not include “it’s”, “can’t”, “won’t” <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">et cetera</i>. Apostrophes most often denote possessive, and that is
also mostly rare. Note that the possessive for “it” is the exception to the
apostrophe-for-possessive rule: its similarity to “it is / it’s” means the
apostrophe is dropped. “Its” is one of the few possessives commonly found in
scientific writing.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Figures and Tables must be mentioned in the text in numerical order. So, Figure 1 is mentioned in the main body of the text before Figure 2. It’s usually best to mention the entire figure before mentioning panels or parts of it, and panels / parts should be mentioned in their numerical or alphabetical order: “Water table varied over the growing season (Figure 2), with the highest levels found in Eastern area (Figure 2A) and the lowest variation in the centre (Figure 2C).”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
Tables get a short descriptive title that does not normally include the word “table”. Similarly, don’t name a figure by the type
of graph, such as “Figure 1. Boxplot of soil and air temperatures”. Just name it for the main variables or the part of the study it’s for: “Soil and air temperatures at the plots closest to the pond”; if it’s for the entire study, just the variables or the analysis is fine: “Model simulation output when vascular plants were excluded”. Figure captions go under the figure, and nothing
goes above the figure. Tables can have a few lines of text explaining abbreviations or the meanings of symbols used in the table under the table: “*significantly different at p < 0.05; ** significantly different at p < 0.01”. One major exception for figure naming is multivariate statistical visualization techniques such as PCA and NMS – the figure title is often something like “PCA of species characteristics from the primary study site” because without some guidance the output of a wide range of very different analyses all look the same.<br />
<br />
Your data are used to create your figures and tables; figures are visualizations of data, and are used to aid interpretation of data. Do not interpret your figures or tables, interpret your data and refer to your figures and tables in this process. “According to Figure 2, Blue is more abundant than Red” is incorrect. “Blue is more abundant than Red (Figure 2).” is correct. You created your figures and tables, you did not discover them buried in a peatland!<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
Fonts and style choices are up to you, but some journals specify a particular font or short list of fonts they prefer; often this includes very widely used choices such as Times New Roman, Calibri, and Arial. You can read up on the differences between fonts, especially the split between Serif and Sans Serif fonts if you’re interested. Whatever you choose, be consistent. All text throughout a document should be in the same font, including the text within figures and tables (e.g. map legend, axis labels, numbers). In MS Word, you can select the entire document with CTRL-A, then set the font from the drop-down menu on the Home Accueil tab.</div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
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Formality – Scientific papers tend to be written in a highly formal style. It is easy to go too far, and write something that resembles a historical document from centuries ago; old-style English looks more formal (forsooth!).<br />
<br />
New names are one area where most other rules do not apply. You are free to name your study sites, novel equipment created by you, and other unique items anything you like. This makes a good joke (well, good to a certain sense of humour) when particularly clever, especially if the name can be linked to an usual citation or an obvious pun (or both).</div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
Numbers are written using the numerals unless 1) the quantity is a whole number between one and ten, inclusive or 2) the number is the start of a sentence: “Five hundred people attended the concert.” For numbers that are immediately followed by a standard unit (g, cm, mol, s-1, etc.) or include a decimal (3.8; 0.99), use the numerals. There are some borderline cases, mainly dealing with time – years, days, minutes. In general, if the number and unit are only going to be used together once in a paper or chapter, follow the above rules: “Five years”. If the unit is included in any calculations or combined with other units, use the standard abbreviation and use the numerals: “5 kg yr-1”. Always use the numerals in figures and tables.<br />
Scientific notation is preferred. Microsoft products have introduced the convention of using a capital letter E to denote a (base 10) exponent. This is not suitable for scientific publications; show the base, and the exponent is superscript: 4.8 x 103; 1.99 x 10-6. Place the decimal after the first digit: “17.4 x 106” is incorrect, it should be “1.74 x 107”. SI units have standard prefixes for every third exponent level – K, M, G (for 103, 106, and 109), m, μ, n (for 10-3, 10-6, 10-9) but mixing these prefixes with exponents is unusual: “1030 μg” or “1.030 mg”, rarely “1.030 x 103 μg”.<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
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Parentheses ( ) are used for in-text citations in many journal citation styles (Smith and Wong, 2016), to separate measurements within tables and figures (± SE), and within mathematical formulae, though sometimes square brackets [ ] are used in these ways. In scientific writing it is extremely rare to use them to make a tangential point (or explain a detail, or provide an example) within a normal sentence. Most in-line tangents (like here) can be easily replaced by commas: Most in-line tangents, like here, can be easily replaced by commas.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
Parentheses break up the flow when reading; many readers are in the habit of skipping everything inside parentheses because they usually indicate that the words inside the parentheses are unimportant details of interest to only a tiny minority of readers (that is, most parentheses contain citations, and I will look up only one or two citations in most papers that I read). Placing a single word within a parenthesis pair (example) is disruptive and usually does not help to explain the concept. Just write normal sentences (please).<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left; text-indent: -0.5in;">
Proof is extremely rare in science. This is a matter of the philosophy of science; under strict Philosophical Materialism, nothing can be proven, but hypotheses can be disproven. Avoid using the words “proof” (noun) and “prove” (verb) and their variations (e.g. “proven”). Even the word “disprove” is rare, because most authors do not spell out the results of their experiments in such terms, they usually assume the reader can follow along with the line of evidence that conclusively favours one hypothesis over another.</div>
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Previous studies provide evidence or found interesting results, they did not prove your point for you.<br />
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Quotations are rare in scientific writing, but common in other academic disciplines. Using a quotation indicates the exact words are important. Using a citation indicates the concept is important, not the exact words used to express it by another person. Because in science we usually care more about the concept than how it was first described, we cite information presented in our own words. English uses the superscript, double-inverted-commas style for indicating quotations, while other languages have their own conventions. The use of non-“English” quotation marks – even for quotations in another language – is ‹‹ highly disruptive ›› “when reading„.</div>
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Scientific instruments and specific materials can be mentioned in a scientific paper, typically in the Methods & Materials section. The name of the manufacturer (not the brand) follows inside parentheses, with the city and country where that manufacture (or its head office, for large multinational companies) resides. Do not use ©, ® or TM to indicate the copyright or patent status of an item or idea, credit the copyright-holder or inventor by naming the person or company that produced it – the point is to show other scientists where they can get similar materials in order to replicate your work. Use the current full legal name of the corporation: “Thermo Fisher Scientific”, not “Fisher”; “MilliporeSigma Canada Co.” not “Sigma” or “Sigma-Aldritch”. Sigma is a tough one, their corporate structure is unclear. If you bought something from their Canadian distributor, it’s “MilliporeSigma Canada Co.”, if you paid in American dollars, it’s “Sigma-Aldritch Corp.”.<br />
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Slang – Avoid slang if possible. This includes common expressions and the broad array of words that might be considered excessively informal by some audiences. Much of this comes down to personal style. If you think you can get away with it, it can be fun to sneak a bit of slang into a manuscript. “On the other hand”; “Top to bottom”; “Back of the envelope” and many other expressions are in a grey area of mostly-informal expressions that can help ameliorate otherwise boring subject matter.<br />
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Statistical significance is another large and complex topic, but there are a few common mistakes that can be addressed here. “Significant” is a special word in scientific writing, and almost always comes with a specific and clearly-defined numerical threshold, often (but certainly not always) p < 0.05. When reporting results of statistical tests, do not just say “statistically significant” or “significantly different”, instead describe the direction of the difference (“Red was significantly bigger than Blue”) or the effect size when appropriate, using the p-value (and other necessary details) of the test to allow the reader to evaluate significance: “Blue was 20% smaller than Red (paired t-test, p=0.045, n=30)”.<br />
Differences, patterns, and other results may be significant, but treatments, experiments, and procedures are not described with that word. “The control treatment was not significant” is a meaningless statement. “The was no significant difference between the control and low-dose treatment” is correct. The p-value you are using to evaluate significance is associated with a specific statistical test, not the structure of the data the test is applied to. As an aside, an experiment with three treatment levels (e.g. low, medium, high) plus a control (zero) has four treatments.<br />
“Trend” is similarly a precisely-defined statistical term, and always means “A non-zero slope” and is most often applied to something like a regression or an ANOVA with treatments that can be organised in some obvious semi-quantitative way, such as increasing levels of addition of some substance. It is not correct to describe something as “a non-significant trend” or “a trend that was not significant” – if it’s not a significant relationship (with a p-value smaller than your previously-defined alpha), it is not a trend. <br />
Similarly, statements like “Blue seemed to be larger than Red” are meaningless. If the difference is real it will be significant and you will have the p-value (and other details) to show it. If the difference is not significant, it is not real.<br />
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Software can be mentioned either as any other commercial product (“Scientific instruments”, above) or in some cases with a paper citation. The software package R is a good example of the latter (R Core Team, 2013). SPSS (IBM, Armonk, NY, USA) is treated like any other scientific tool that was purchased. You do not need to cite basic, widely-available software used to organise, analyze, and visualize data; don’t cite MS Excel or the drawing program you used to make a figure unless there’s something very special about how you used it (such as a custom-made macro or plugin) or there is a special consideration about using that software to perform the tasks you used it for – the big example here is complex statistical analysis in Excel, which many scientists will tell you to avoid. Different statistical software programs have known concerns with some types of analyses, which is one reason why the stats software is almost always mentioned. Also, the community of R users are very fond of telling the rest of us about the program.<br />
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Tense of verbs can vary throughout a document, and within paragraphs as needed. However, in general verb tense should not change within a single sentence, though of course there are exceptions. Typically, the Introduction is a mixture of present and past: “This remains an open question, while previous studies in this area have shown that... “ Material and Methods is entirely in past tense except a few sentences that may explain the consequences of particular choices in either present or future tense: “Without this control, water levels can rise beyond safe limits”. Results is typically entirely past tense as well: “Red was significantly larger than Blue”. Discussion sections have the most freedom in this regard, with paragraphs often switching from past “Prior experience led us to hypothesize that... “ to present “Blue is bigger than Red” and to future “... Blue will continue to grow bigger than Red” even within single sentences. As usual, consistency is key, if you choose to write in a particular way it’s best to continue that style where appropriate.<br />
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Units are placed after the numbers, either with our without a space; be consistent is the rule here, if you leave a space for “2 cm”, also leave a space for “400 g” and “3.8 x 10-6 mol”. In English, the . period is used for the decimal place, not the , comma.<br />
There are a few exceptions, for special units that are placed before the number. In scientific writing, isotope numbers are placed before the atom they modify in chemical formulae: “15NH3”; when spoken, the number is said after the number: “N-fifteen”.<br />
The dollar sign $ is the most common symbol to appear before the number in non-scientific writing (along with the symbols for other currency, such as £ (UK pound), ¥ (Japanese yen), € (euro), and regular Latin-alphabet letters used for some currencies like the South African Rand, R, and the rarely-used symbol for cents ¢ is placed after the number like most other units; if you use ¢, do not include the leading decimal “35¢” not “0.35¢” (unless you are actually talking about fractions of a penny) and only use cents for quantities less than one dollar; for a pile of change, spell out the word: “I found four hundred and thirty-three cents under the couch.” One situation where this might come up in a scientific paper is if a photograph includes a coin for scale: “One of the plots in our study with 25 ¢ piece for scale.” In peer-reviewed publications, the audience is international so many readers will not be familiar with common Canadian or American coins; a scale bar is preferred. <br />
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Vague, qualitative terms like “several” or “some” are best avoided; use actual numbers instead. Semi-quantitative words like “majority” or “negligible” have built-in assumptions (“more than half” for “majority” and “too few / too small to be important” for “negligible”) and are usually acceptable. If in doubt, use a number. This can be a simple quantity (“Some” becomes “Seven”) or a fraction or percentage (“Most” becomes “30 out of 40”).</div>
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TheBrummellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08973380652057861796noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19216099.post-57124841839675945862018-04-12T09:44:00.000-06:002018-04-12T09:44:54.726-06:00The Surprising Breadth of a PhD<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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I recently served on the committee of a PhD student who
defended their Proposal, near the end of the first year of the PhD. The student’s
Proposal ended up being rated less-than-satisfactory, despite a letter grade
for the graduate course somewhere in the A- / B+ range. The major reason for
the requirement to edit the document and add material was a perceived lack of “thinking
at the PhD level”. This is a hard to define yet widely-agreed phenomenon among
the professors I have spoken with, and that attitude has certainly percolated
down to post-docs and PhD students and other members of the Academy as well. I
do not disagree with it, generally, though I expect to continue to argue
minutiae about what is and is not included in any given specific case.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Rather than trying to do that for either boring hypothetical
cases or clumsily attempt to maintain anonymity for real cases, I’d like to
talk about a related issue, that of the surprising breadth of a PhD. I myself
was surprised to discover that core competence and skills development as
directly related to my PhD project was necessary but not sufficient for a PhD.
There are obvious requirements at the start of a PhD: learn the skills for the
methods, learn the knowledge of the relevant current and historical literature,
collect the data, complete the analyses, write. Some aspects within that list
become clear through time and are not surprising, such as requirements to gain
fluency in certain software programs, or to be able to visualize one’s data in
useful and insightful ways. Plus the never-ending quest to improve one’s
writing abilities.</div>
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<br /></div>
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The surprise – and this is universal among PhD students in
my experience – is the requirement for skills and activities (and effort and
time and capacity to discuss) far outside of one’s project. “Leadership”
abilities, which are <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">extremely</i> poorly
defined and vague. “Well-rounded” qualities, which almost always appear to be
irrelevant trivia or useless distractions from the “real” work. Qualitative
judgements rather than quantitative evaluations, both of and by the student. And
a wide range of so-called “soft” skills that go so far beyond “don’t screw
things up for your labmates” and “don’t piss off your professor”. </div>
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<br /></div>
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The first reaction to this surprise, coming as it usually
does on the heels of some negative evaluation, is a mixture of anger and
denial. What the hell does pondering “big questions” have to do with my
measurements? No, I disagree! I study <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">X</i>,
which is completely unrelated to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Y</i>.
And so forth. I’m not going to argue that everything dropped on a student in a
difficult and emotionally draining committee meeting is important for this
nebulous demonstration of “PhD thinking” but I do argue that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">some </i>of these things are important.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Start with the negative, to get it out of the way. I have
yet to read a philosophy of science piece – book, blog post, newspaper article,
whatever – that I have found interesting or useful. There was a philosophy of
science book on my reading list required for my first attempt at a PhD, part of
my assigned work prior to my Comprehensive Exam. I read it, because it was
assigned, and I took notes and tried to read it carefully because I expected to
be asked questions about it during the Exam. I can’t remember if any questions
directly related to that book were asked or not, but I do remember not being
impressed by the book. The author spent almost the entire time discussing
hypothetical situations that Galileo might have found himself in, and how his
invention of the Scientific Method would have translated into some chain of
logic or series of actions that this person who died several centuries ago
might have carried out. It was long-winded, even at less than 200 pages, and
felt entirely irrelevant. My feelings on that have not changed, but I think I’ll
save dumping on philosophy of science for another time. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
On to the positive, then. The actual relevance of leadership
skills and other away-from-project activities was explained to me by my PhD
advisor in a context that made their utility immediately clear: scholarship
applications are evaluated in a structured, pre-defined way that includes
significant weight for such things. I did some activities that I found
enjoyable in any case, and then happily discovered that writing about these
activities was a good way to fill in a useful section on scholarship
applications; I wrote a paragraph about helping to bring a public speaker to a
locally-hosted conference, and another paragraph about some of my photos that
have been published in a few places. I believe these two paragraphs, and
others, were instrumental in my successful application for the NSERC CGS-D
scholarship I was awarded.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
A few years ago, <a href="https://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2015/03/10/blogs-are-dying-long-live-science-blogs/">Jeremy Fox requested more advice</a> given to
people at earlier stages of an academic career. I suspect he was mainly
thinking of his faculty colleagues, but I just read his piece today and this
concept of a surprise inside every PhD occurred to me based on my recent
committee experience, which was interesting for a great many reasons beyond
this. </div>
TheBrummellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08973380652057861796noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19216099.post-83951001398120115392018-04-06T11:10:00.000-06:002018-04-06T11:10:18.794-06:00The Death of the Scientific Paper<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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I’m sitting in my office at Universit<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">é</span> Laval, waiting for an opportunity to speak with my
professor, and procrastinating revising a manuscript. My procrastination,
almost always, is to read the internet, and today I’ve found a new article from
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Atlantic</i>, “<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/the-scientific-paper-is-obsolete/556676/">The Scientific Paper is Obsolete</a>”. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The main thesis of this article is that the scientific paper
as we know it today has outlived its utility. The author, James Somers, opens
with a description of the niche the scientific paper was invented to fill: a
short, incremental advance published as widely as a book but as readable as a
letter, and permanent where a lecture is ephemeral. I’ve had conversations with academics in social sciences or humanities disciplines who express
their surprise that books, which for argument’s sake are publications longer
than about 100 pages, almost never appear in the list of citations in my
scientific publications. I list 11 publications – scientific papers – on my
C.V. with me as an author (always one of several, I have no sole-author
publications) and I’m first author on 7 of those; this means I did most of the
actual writing. I feel this experience gives me some perspective to evaluate
the article in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Atlantic.</i></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There are the expected jabs at the style and perceived
readability of scientific papers, a criticism so widespread and consistent that
I now mostly ignore it. I get it, you don’t get the enjoyment of reading a
scientific paper that you get out of reading something else, and you put the
blame largely on the abundant jargon and dense prose of typical scientific
papers; James Somers also adds some mentions of “mathematical symbols”, which
is indeed one major feature of many scientific papers that separates them from
written works intended for a wider, non-specialist audience. But that’s the
point – the intended audience of a scientific paper is not the general public,
it’s other experts in that discipline. Know your audience. I guess James Somers does - scientists and non-scientists decrying the difficult prose of scientific papers to non-scientists is very popular in popular science articles.</div>
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<br /></div>
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This isn’t to say that a scientific paper cannot be or
should not be highly readable to non-specialists and other members of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the general public, but to approach a
scientific paper as a non-specialist and then complain about the jargon is to
miss the point. I think one has to approach a scientific paper from a position
of self-knowledge, in that I have to read a paper outside my area of expertise
in a different (and more difficult) way compared to reading a paper that might
cite my own work.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Another major difference between a scientific paper and
something like an article in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Atlantic</i>
– and these two categories are of similar word-count, on average – is the
abundant citations in a scientific paper. Every fact, every suggestion, every
piece of information in a scientific paper that is not derived directly from
the study itself will be cited; credit is given to the prior work that
established those facts or provided those suggestions (unless the fact or
suggestion is obvious or already widely known and established; we don’t cite
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen">Scheele and Priestly (1772)</a> when
talking about oxygen, for example). I find myself wishing for some citations
and outside attributions while reading this <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Atlantic</i>
article because James Somers makes so many claims that I would like to dispute.</div>
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<br /></div>
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For example, here’s the third paragraph of the article:</div>
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="MsoNormal">
The more sophisticated science becomes, the harder it is to
communicate results. Papers today are longer than ever and full of jargon and
symbols. They depend on chains of computer programs that generate data, and
clean up data, and plot data, and run statistical models on data. These
programs tend to be both so sloppily written and so central to the results that
it’s contributed to a replication crisis, or put another way, a failure of the
paper to perform its most basic task: to report what you’ve actually
discovered, clearly enough that someone else can discover it for themselves.</div>
</blockquote>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
Are papers really longer in 2018 than they were, on average,
in 1998, or 1978, or 1888? Are they more “full of jargon and symbols”? Are the
majority of analytical computer programs “so sloppily written”? </div>
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And what replication crisis? Mr. Somers, have you not read
<a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/03/08/1708272114">the recent counterargument</a> to the crisis-in-science narrative by Dr. Fanelli,
recently published by PNAS?
</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Moving on, one major criticism is that scientific papers are
not a good way to express and describe complex results. Animations, something
computers are quite good at, are useful tools for visualizing such complex
concepts but are very difficult to express on a static sheet of paper, which
the modern PDF (Portable Document Format) emulates. I agree, but I do not agree
with the follow-up point that this renders the PDF hopelessly useless. A
scientific paper is about the words, not the pictures or other visualizations.
It’s about the information. Expressing that information in a way the audience
can understand and use is the key skill of writing a scientific paper, and is
distinct from the skills that create written material intended to be read by as
wide an audience as possible. A scientific paper relies heavily on absolute
honesty, and presenting all of the available and relevant information to allow
the reader to independently decide to agree or not with the author’s arguments
and conclusions. A magazine article pushes a particular interpretation of some
phenomenon. A scientific paper pushes the phenomenon and then describes one (or sometimes more) possible
interpretation of that phenomenon, usually in light of similar phenomena and
potential alternative interpretations. A graph is not data, it's an expression of data. An animation is not an argument, it's one support for an argument.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Visualization is a technique, a way to take obscure numbers
and show the patterns they contain. I struggle with it, constantly. The paper I
am procrastinating working on right now has some decent figures* in it and I don’t see a need for a great deal of work on the
visualization side of this paper. I have another project I’m working on that is
at a much earlier stage and my current activities there are primarily concerned
with visualization. I’m at the “data exploration” stage, where I throw the
metaphorical spaghetti of the data at the metaphorical wall and see what
sticks. That means lots and lots of images, mostly graphs I get my computer to
make for me, and some scribbles on paper in my notebook.</div>
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<br /></div>
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*A figure
is any image in a scientific paper, a photograph or map or, most commonly, a
graph illustrating the mathematical relationship between two or more
parameters. I tend to write papers by making the figures first, but that's a personal style and subjective workflow thing, and certainly not universal among scientists.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Back to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Atlantic</i></div>
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="smallcaps">It’ll be some</span> time before
computational notebooks replace PDFs in scientific journals, because that would
mean changing the incentive structure of science itself. Until journals <em><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">require</span></em>
scientists to submit notebooks, and until sharing your work and your data
becomes the way to earn prestige, or funding, people will likely just keep
doing what they’re doing.</div>
</blockquote>
<br />
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This is more interesting to me than the preceding description
of competing formats for “computational notebooks”. I have seen suggestions
from other people that concentrate on changing other aspects of scientific
publishing, often the abolition of for-profit publishing companies (e.g. <a href="http://variable-variability.blogspot.ca/2017/10/earth-sciences-pre-print-manuscript-server.html">Here</a>),
but these suggestions and discussions do not express a dissatisfaction with the
basic unit of scientific communication, the scientific paper. What would my job
look like if both scientific papers and the way in which they are disseminated
were to go away? Would I just be uploading lumps of code and datatables to some
institutional server, whenever I feel like my analyses have answered some tiny
question? Does my "Literature Cited" section just become a link-dump?</div>
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<br /></div>
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="MsoNormal">
“At this point, nobody in their sane mind challenges the
fact that the <em><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">praxis</span></em> of scientific research is
under major upheaval,” Pérez, the creator of Jupyter [one of the competing
calculation notebooks – MB], wrote in a blog post in 2013. As science becomes
more about computation, the skills required to be a good scientist become
increasingly attractive in industry. Universities lose their best people to
start-ups, to Google and Microsoft. “I have seen many talented colleagues leave
academia in frustration over the last decade,” he wrote, “and I can’t think of
a single one who wasn’t <em><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">happier</span></em> years later.”</div>
</blockquote>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
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I had to look up the definition of “praxis”; I think it’s
exactly what I was talking about, what does my job look like if the scientific
paper and scientific publishing are drastically changed? Dr. Pérez apparently
thinks my job would not change much. I’m not so sure.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There’s also a problem in that paragraph with a possible
logical fallacy: confirmation bias. Lots of sad people leave, and then you find
a few of them later and they’re happier. Well, good! Happier people is a good
thing. But to then claim that it was the act of leaving that made them happier,
and then extend that by implication that everybody should consider leaving, is
to stretch beyond the available information into unsupported (and idealistic)
speculation. If the only people who left were the unhappy people, then what
about the happy people who stayed? Would they have also become even more happy
had they left? Did the people who stayed unhappy, or became more unhappy after leaving avoid talking to you?</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
At this point I’m wandering away from the discussion about
scientific papers. And I think the article did, too. It concludes with a weak
suggestion that maybe some new tools will be useful (who could disagree with
that? Tools are useful by definition) and that, hey Galileo, right? </div>
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<br /></div>
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I remain unconvinced in the impending death of the
scientific paper. What I got out of this article was a description of some computer
programmers and physicists with generally poor social skills but good ideas and
skills related to generating and analyzing data. And that somehow this means the
time I spend teaching ESL graduate students how to write better English that is
also in the demanding, highly technical style of current scientific
communication is somehow wasted.</div>
TheBrummellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08973380652057861796noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19216099.post-21706271488569151712018-03-08T11:05:00.003-06:002018-04-12T09:45:39.759-06:00Alternative Academic Careers<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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Today I read <a href="https://www.universityaffairs.ca/career-advice/responsibilities-may-include/time-tackle-culture-question-phd-programs/">this article</a> on University Affairs, about
the culture of PhD programs and the unspoken assumptions about careers. It’s a
well-written article and it made me think, always a good sign. It was not until
I reached the end of the article and saw the author’s photograph that I
realized I know Angela in real life, in a professional capacity. Dr. Rooke was
(still is?) the post-doc office. I mean that she was the sole employee of the
University of Waterloo whose responsibilities were 100% devoted to the
post-doctoral fellows (PDF, in the lingo) at the University; her boss (as I
understand it) is the Dean of Graduate Studies and Research, an office – at many
universities – that has been primarily concerned with graduate students rather
than PDFs. This is an artifact of the relative novelty and ongoing unstable
nature of the position of PDF, a topic of uncertainty that is beyond what I
want to talk about today. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The main point that Angela makes (I’m going to refer to her
by her first name from here on out, because I feel like she and I have already
established that level of professional interaction (in)formality) is that the
culture of academic PhD programs is excessively focused on the singular outcome
of PhD students graduating and becoming university faculty, to the expense of
other potential career outcomes for successful PhD students. I have been
embedded in such a culture for most of my adult life, I’m still in it, and my
personal Plan A is still aligned with this culture: I wish to become a
professor. I agree with most of Angela’s description of this culture and how it
manifests in the offices and hallways of academia (though I have not had an
experience like the unthinking rudeness of her PhD advisor at her convocation –
that was unacceptably boorish of him, regardless of one’s opinions of PhD
programs). What I don’t necessarily agree with her about is “ought” part; the “is”
seems solid. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Clearly, there are some problems within graduate-student
education that can be traced directly to the dominant cultural attributes of
PhD programs and career-support activities. Again, I think Angela hits the nail
on the head with her description. The expectation that PhD students are working
towards an eventual faculty position, with the implication that alternative
career paths are in some way less valuable or represent a form of failure, is
certainly the main cultural milieu I have experienced as well. Statements to
this effect are not rare from professors, administrative staff, students, and
sundry others (i.e. PDFs – jobs and related issues are basically all we talk
about). Angela argues we should be pushing for change here, and explicitly
describing non-faculty career options – so-called, alternative-academic, or
alt-ac careers – as of equal value to the longstanding central priority. I
think this is unlikely to happen, and I’m not sure it’s worth expending my
effort on. I’m not going to tell anybody else what to do, this is an explanation
for myself, and what I feel about this issue.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Start with why I think it’s unlikely, or at least very, very
difficult to alter this aspect of academic culture. Rudeness is not covered
here – dumping on PhD graduates after they gain some satisfactory (to
themselves! don’t justify your choices, you don’t need to!) employment because
they did not achieve a faculty position is just ugly behaviour. Don’t do that. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
With that out of the way, I’m imagining the mental
gymnastics a shift like this might require of a faculty member advising a
graduate student. You, the student, are discussing career options with me, the
professor, in this hypothetical situation. You ask me what I think of alt-ac
careers in general, or one possibility you have discovered in particular. My
response is likely to be positive – there are indeed many excellent options for
PhD holders, and adding some skills you think will be attractive and useful for
such jobs is a great idea. But then you ask me if that job is one I hold in the
highest esteem, I have to say no. I *like* my career, and my job. I expect I
will like my job as a professor should I ever succeed in this endeavour. And I
do regard anything else as a failure, because that’s what I call a goal
unachieved and abandoned. I have abandoned goals I had previously worked hard
to achieve but did not, and I call those my failures. What do you call it?</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Let’s stick with me as this hypothetical professor (I like
this little daydream). I have followed this path, the academic career path from
graduate school through post-doc positions and now on the tenure track. This is
the path I know. This is the path I wanted to take, that I worked deliberately
to take. I’m not going to tell you that I regret my whole life, and wish that I’d
found an alt-ac job instead. A PhD has been intended as a critical step on the
way up the Ivory Tower for a long time, so questioning why somebody would go
through the abundant downsides of gaining a PhD if they indicate they are
uninterested in this goal is appropriate (as long as these questions are not
done with the great rudeness so often seen). It’s like asking why anybody is
working towards a goal they don’t have. If the goal is clarified to include (or
be primarily about) a career and a life that would still benefit from the PhD but
is not a faculty position, then the question is answered.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Angela specifically mentions disparaging comments about
university administrators as one of the manifestations of the PhD-leads-to-Prof
academic culture. I have heard such comments. And I have seen much discussion
about the large increase in university administrators concurrent with the
decrease in tenure-track appointments as teaching responsibilities are
offloaded onto ill-paid short-term contract lecturers. Dumping on admin is a
popular pastime at universities. Angela’s job is an administrative position, so
I understand her objections when profs and others make broad, negative
statements about her position. I have direct experience of excellent, highly
positive interactions with Angela in her profession. I think she’s very good at
her job, and that her job is useful and necessary at the university – the University
of Waterloo employs hundreds of PDFs, they need to have somebody with
responsibility for serving those people. But her job is new, and was created in
a era of ballooning administration at universities. Why have so many positions
been so recently created? Are all such alt-ac jobs good and necessary, and are the
changes in university faculty appointments and teaching responsibilities unrelated?
These are big-picture, broad-trend kinds of questions and for me are
essentially rhetorical right now.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I’m not trying to argue Angela’s job is somehow unjustified
or redundant. I’m talking about the thoughts that occurred to me while reading
her article. I still want to become a professor, and I want to work at a
university that respects and supports all of the other employees and students. I
don’t want Angela’s job for myself, but I do want her job to continue to exist
(and be occupied by her for as long as she wants to). I want a different job,
one that lots of other people seem to want me to achieve – and are helping me –
yet I find myself in an awkward position. I had to push the boulder up the
mountain, as far as this ledge. I can push it further up, but my frustration
largely stems from the apparent height of my mountain compared to the other
mountains around me. This is a silly metaphor – the other mountains are the
careers of other people on similar career-tracks. Honestly, I’m sitting in a
comfortable office, no rocks nor mountains nor literal paths are within sight.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
That brings me to why I don’t see myself expending much
effort to push a cultural change. I’m still on Plan A, I’m still trying to
become a prof, so if I tell people about other career options, I’m telling them
what I think they should do, not what I want for myself. If I tell people to
pursue alt-ac careers, it’s because I see some reason for them to do so. This
could be because somebody has expressed a desire to escape the Ivory Tower. Or,
less charitably to myself, it could be that I think of some person as a rival
for scarce academic positions, a competitor to sneakily exclude from future
competition. I hope I don’t do that. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
That’s not to say that alt-ac careers are inherently less
valuable than my personal Plan A. I agree with Angela that we should change this
way of thinking, raising these excellent career options to the same level as
Plan A for graduate students and PhD-holders. I feel like it would be dishonest
for me to be pushing this change, because I want Plan A for myself, and I have
heard many, many people tell me my dreams are foolish. I’d rather my dreams are
not also causing problems for others.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I’m now reading too much into Angela’s article. She didn’t
tell me I’m foolish, I just imagine these implications in my mind. Please don’t
tell me my failures are not failures. They’re not your failures, they’re mine.
I’ll keep them, and my not-yet-failed-nor-succeeded for as long as I can.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
TheBrummellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08973380652057861796noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19216099.post-70858883354667098212016-11-26T20:30:00.000-06:002016-11-26T20:31:04.700-06:00Book Club: The World Until Yesterday<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">The World Until
Yesterday</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Jared Diamond</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Penguin, 2013</div>
<br />
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDO0TlSLNLjODjb-RD8hkZEfhlSzPrF_VNwEcY_SJixWzKFP0n1O44zXljo-Wt5XLqswvCoWjL1xHUzwe4pxzKrdLEQek61VHagNPqAF2YZ_7yjTRA0_9-jRUR7Og_c0E3qtPcbA/s1600/World+Until+Yesterday.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDO0TlSLNLjODjb-RD8hkZEfhlSzPrF_VNwEcY_SJixWzKFP0n1O44zXljo-Wt5XLqswvCoWjL1xHUzwe4pxzKrdLEQek61VHagNPqAF2YZ_7yjTRA0_9-jRUR7Og_c0E3qtPcbA/s400/World+Until+Yesterday.jpg" width="261" /></a></div>
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
"What can we learn
from traditional societies?" is the subtitle of this book by the
author of one of my favourite books of all time, <i>Guns, Germs & Steel.</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> Dr. Diamond is a
biologist and geographer employed by the University of California,
Los Angeles whose fieldwork has included decades of interactions with
members of traditional societies, particularly in Papua New Guinea. </span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">Unlike
an anthropological investigation, the subtitle's question is not
"learn about traditional societies" and invites us - those
of us who don't live in a traditional society - to take what we can
from lessons of observation. The book is divided into sections that
cover major ways in which traditional societies differ from civilized
societies, such as child-rearing practices and settling disputes and
conflicts.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">The
term "civilized" may be controversial and Dr. Diamond
mostly avoids using it (I use it in the literal sense; the word means
"city builder"). He defines "traditional societies"
not in opposition to those of us who live in cities and nation-states
with books and processed food and tall social hierarchies, but simply
as societies that closely resemble how all people lived until the
dawn of agriculture. Hence the main title, in reference to the fact
that something like 99% of the time of human existence has included
no agriculture and no cities. He repeatedly makes the point that the
very broad diversity of traditional societies and how such people
accomplish basic human universal tasks represents a natural
experiment; we can observe the 'results' of these experiments and
gain useful knowledge to improve the organization and daily life of
our own societies.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">The
enormous diversity of traditional societies makes it difficult to
draw broad generalizations except by defining the term against
non-traditional societies. Dr. Diamond describes a hierarchy or
social-development pathway (while reminding the reader that societies
can and have moved in the opposite direction) from bands to tribes to
chiefdoms to nations, separated by increasing levels of population
size, subsistence, political centralization, and social
stratification. Most currently-extant traditional societies are very
small, qualifying as bands or tribes, because most of the world is
owned by nations. The categories grade into each other rather than
having firm boundaries, so it could be argued that some of the
smallest modern states or sub-state nations (I'm thinking of the
semi-autonomous republics of the Russian Federation here) are
chiefdoms, but the historical pattern has been one of nations
annexing or destroying smaller societies. </span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">The
basic idea of the book, to present examples of ways in which various
traditional societies may do things like care for the elderly and
then attempt to apply some of those methods to our own societies, is
intriguing and I think useful. There isn't one optimal way to live,
and there is a wider array of choices than most people may be aware
of. On the other hand, many of the things that traditional societies
do that we might wish to emulate are embedded in a drastically
different culture. Simple things, like carrying a small child so the
child's face is close to the adult's eye level, facing forward and
able to observe the world while in physical contact with a parent (or
"alloparent", a non-related adult caregiver) may be easy
enough to implement. Dr. Diamond is a little pessimistic about that
example, suggesting that social disapproval in a modern society may
lead such adventurous parents to abandon these attempts, but among
the parents of young children I know, caving to social pressure like
that doesn't seem particularly likely. </span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">I
either disagreed with or was apathetic about many of Dr. Diamond's
suggestions for changes to modern society. Many of his examples,
comparing how some particular traditional society did something to
what he's seen in Los Angeles seemed to me to be maximized
differences by comparison to LA or the broader culture of the United
States; comparison with other modern societies such as Canada or
various European cultures might not make the difference seem so
stark. </span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">Other
examples ignored one of the most important differences between
traditional and modern societies - the risk of death at any age. It's
facile to compare causes-of-death between the two categories of
societies and imply that intertribal warfare or infected wounds have
simply been replaced, one-for-one by modern car accidents and heart
attacks. Yes, those are the leading causes of death in most modern
societies - and Dr. Diamond does devote considerable text to the
questions of non-communicable diseases such as heart disease and
diabetes - but the every-day risk of dying in an automobile collision
is drastically lower for a member of a modern society than any
potentially-corresponding hazard faced by traditional societies. </span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">The
consequence of our modern lack of death is dramatically different
demographics. Unfortunately, Dr. Diamond does a very poor job of
describing these differences. He relies heavily on the
often-misunderstood concept of expected lifespan. Given his
scientific training, I do not think Dr. Diamond fails to understand
this concept, but he fails at clarifying it for his readers.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">The
most commonly cited measure of life expectancy, period-specific life
expectancy at birth, is based on a number of factors and does not
apply in many situations that many people try to use it in. For
example, in his book </span><i>Alone Against the North</i><span style="font-style: normal;">,
modern-day Explorer Adam Shoalts discusses hypothetical, historical
aboriginal populations in northern Canada as having a life expectancy
of less than 30 years, and therefore there would have been no elderly
people at all in those societies. THAT'S NOT WHAT IT MEANS. Sorry, I
get frustrated by this stuff. A life expectancy of 40 years, to use
an example that appears several times in </span><i>The World Until
Yesterday</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, does not mean that
nobody much older than 40 is to be found in that society. It's an
AVERAGE, a mean value based on counting how old each person was on
the day they died. The period-specific part comes in when
discussing societies that experience PROGRESS, which I'm going to
define as the long-term improvement in human lives driven by
intentional and accidental changes to human societies through time.
Traditional societies, more or less by definition, do not experience
progress - every day is much the same as every previous day,
stretching back through thousands of years - so the different life
expectancies of modern Canadians born in 1950 vs. in 2000 are not
relevant here.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">A
life expectancy of 40 years </span><i>at birth</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
could be created through a wide range of factors, but the most common
among humans is a high death rate for infants and children combined with a lower and fairly steady death rate for ages higher than early childhood. Extreme
values - those that are far from the mean - have high 'leverage'
because they have a large influence on the value of that mean. A
population in which large numbers of people die shortly after birth
but those who survive typically do not succumb until much older will
have a mean life expectancy that few people would be expected to actually die
at. A society with a life expectancy of 40 years probably has many
people much older than 40 and many dead children, who conveniently get
swept out of sight and out of mind. Societies with many dead children
also probably have many living children, hence observers tend to miss
the fact that in the absence of child-killers like periodic famines
and the various diseases that cause catastrophic diarrhea there </span><i>would
be</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> twice as many children
teeming in those quaint villages as what you see. A life expectancy of
40 means an individual is expected to live 40 years on the day they
are born. A year later the dice have already been rolled for many,
many events that </span><i>could have</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
but <i>did not</i> kill that 1-year-old. This is true for everybody still
alive, so their subsequent life expectancy is considerably higher
than the at-birth population level expectancy, especially in
societies where children die at much higher rates than adults - which
is all societies, though modern societies have considerably reduced
that difference (see Progress, above).</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">These
demographic factors mean that modern societies differ from
traditional societies in a few fundamental but apparently invisible
ways - we expect our children to grow up, even premature babies and
others with (sometimes severe) risk factors present on the day they
are born. We expect to become old, to retire from our jobs or careers
and then enjoy some time alive beyond that point. Obviously,
retirement is a concept largely absent from traditional societies
because their older people continue to "work" even if
they're not walking a zillion kilometres a year through the bush. And
we moderns famously have little experience of death, despite the
trivially obvious fact that everyone dies. But with our low death
rates at every age, the only civilized people who have much
experience of dead and dying people (besides medical professionals)
are the very old, whose memories compress the deaths of everyone
they've known through their long lives into a short subjective
period. Yes, everyone you knew is dead - but that process took
</span><i>decades</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. For a child without playmates because of a sweep by cholera, that process took <i>weeks</i>.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">Getting
back to the concept of progress, it is that which I believe separates
modern societies from not just traditional societies but also
separates us from pre-scientific societies in history. I struggle
with a concept I call the "Wall of History" - I find it
very difficult to empathize with or comprehend the lives of people
who lived before effective cures for diseases or the ability to
travel long distances </span><i>and then return</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
existed. I </span><i>constantly </i><span style="font-style: normal;">think
about how tomorrow will be different from today, but a pace of change
fast enough to make that relevant (i.e., significant changes within
an individual's lifetime) was missing from everywhere until
approximately the Industrial Revolution. That's just me, I'm sure,
but when I read Dr. Diamond's suggestions for improving modern
societies by picking and choosing aspects of various traditional
societies I stumble over objections based on microbiology,
macroeconomics, or engineering. There are certainly some good, or
even great ideas here, but I need more convincing.</span></div>
TheBrummellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08973380652057861796noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19216099.post-89272933163809396822016-08-20T13:30:00.000-06:002016-08-20T13:30:13.910-06:00Lab Girl<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Lab Girl</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Hope Jahren</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Alfred A.
Knopf, 2016</span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhV8heNFg7Fep9i5ShF_LkipU4cAHO5Ye3SKrkppd0AIhIoh_zFLWHsrjguWZ0xrgnQsIuAbrjlL2yu2-iwDONZcWIGsFdhmHKcp-_N8WwSau-01_F5enFY6yqT09MGr0ivSKWD0A/s1600/Lab+Girl.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhV8heNFg7Fep9i5ShF_LkipU4cAHO5Ye3SKrkppd0AIhIoh_zFLWHsrjguWZ0xrgnQsIuAbrjlL2yu2-iwDONZcWIGsFdhmHKcp-_N8WwSau-01_F5enFY6yqT09MGr0ivSKWD0A/s400/Lab+Girl.jpg" width="267" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Hope Jahren
is a scientist and a professor and has a blog (www.hopejahrensurecanwrite.com)
that I started reading a couple of years ago. Mostly she blogs about her life
and her work, which includes plenty of rants about sexism in science and
related subjects – she’s a woman scientist, and this isn’t an easy thing to be.
This book is her autobiography, potentially Volume I of a series because she’s
far from the end of her career and/or life at this point so I assume there are
many more stories to be told. But Hope <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">sure
can</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">write</i> so I’m quite optimistic
that she’ll keep us updated as she sees fit.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">This was a
highly-anticipated book among the other bloggers I regularly and semi-regularly
read. It was also an anticipated book among many of the people I know in real
life, who may or may not have their own blogs but many of whom are women and
scientists and women scientists. I bought this book in the Chapters in West
Edmonton Mall in May; I was at #WEM with my post-doc advisor, Dr. Maria Strack
and when I showed her my purchases I promised her I’d loan her the book when I
had finished reading it myself. I’ve just loaned it to Charlie so Maria will
have to either wait or buy her own copy.</span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">I read Lab
Girl in a single weekend. I haven’t read an entire book start-to-finish in a
weekend like that for a long time – the last time I’m sure I did that was with
Jurassic Park, and I was about 16. I think there’s something about some books
that just hooks me at the right age; when I was 16 that hook was in Jurassic
Park, when I’m 38 that hook was in Lab Girl. So my opinion of Lab Girl is very
positive. But Book Club blog entries have never been about just reviewing a
book, they (should) always be about other ideas that flow from reading a book.
Such as this idea of age-dependent hooks in books (rhyming is good and fun).
Oddly enough, Lab Girl was certainly not written for me, so the hook in it that
got me counts as by-catch.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">I say that
because there is so much in Lab Girl that’s inspiring as a scientist, that gets
right at what I want to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">do</i> as a
scientist. More than once, Dr. Jahren describes walking out into an ecosystem,
and just letting the environment and her mind interact at some subconscious
level until she comes up with a Research Question (capital letters denote
things that are more permanent than the daydreams I romp through almost
continuously). She kneels in a peat bog in Ireland until an Hypothesis
regarding ecohydrology occurs to her, then she starts collecting specimens. She
helps a colleague unpack samples and then spends half a decade running fossil
carbon through her mass spec. But while I love those stories, they’re not for
me – they’re for somebody <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">like </i>me but
who has experienced things I have not, things like sexism and manic-depressive
mental illnesses interacting with pregnancy. </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Having said
that, there’s actually less sexism and discrimination and injustice in Lab Girl
than I was expecting based on my reading of Dr. Jahren’s blog. My impression of
her blog is that she is angry – completely justifiably! – about the
institutional sexism and high-level bullshit that infests academic science. That
anger is present in Lab Girl, but it’s very much in the background. She may
have made her blog about it, but she didn’t make her life about it. Her book,
in other words, is not a product of her blog; both her book and her blog are
products of her writing, which is itself a product that passes through many
filters and checkpoints on its way from her life and her mind. At least, that’s
my meta-impression of what of hers I’ve read. I intend to read her scientific
papers (well, some of them – at one point in Lab Girl Dr. Jahren mentions a
mid-career total in the neighbourhood of 70 peer-reviewed papers) for another
look at her overall writing but also because I find myself in a related field.
The parts about water-use by plants is especially interesting at the moment.</span></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">There are a
couple of small errors, and while I <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">really
really like</i> Lab Girl, I feel like I need to point them out. The most
glaring is a description of DNA and chromosomes as protein. She’s describing
the genome of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Arabidopsis thaliana</i>,
that workhorse of plant genetics, and in two separate paragraphs talks about
the length of protein unraveled from each cell. No. Chromosomes do include
plenty of protein, but genomes are made of DNA. </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">In another
part of the book, a shocking (to me) casual negligence toward automobile
seatbelts is described. Look, just wear your damn seatbelts, OK? Every. Time.
Complaints about “Grizzly Adams” field scientists not taking her seriously are
much less impressive after reading her laissez-faire attitude towards field
work. If you’re going to tell me you don’t feel safe around that creepy
post-doc, don’t follow it up with multiple stories of car crashes and heads
bouncing off windshields. The creepy post-doc might have legitimately been
terrifying, but he didn’t give you a bloody nose and a concussion the way bad
car decisions did.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The last
thing in Lab Girl I didn’t like – and in a discussion like this I feel I need
to remind myself that this is a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">really
good </i>book, like top 10 lifetime books I’ve read <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">GOOD</i> – is a description of what amounts to a “teachable moment”.
After her misadventures in Ireland, which culminated in all of her meticulously
documented samples being disposed of by an Irish customs agent (Get a permit.
It’s not that hard. But I digress), Dr. Jahren has come up with a test of new
graduate students that aims to simulate that crushed distress upon having one’s
recent hard work destroyed. She describes an exercise in which a new student,
somewhat insultingly referred to as a “noob” (LOL OMG BBQ) is made to carefully
label a large number of sample vials in anticipation of an upcoming field trip.
Then Dr. Jahren and her long-serving research partner (that’s a relationship
for a separate Book Club, it’s too big to tackle here) play a game of “Good Cop-Bad
Cop” that ultimately results in the entire set of vials being unceremoniously
dumped in the trash. This is, on a certain level, a simulation of the end of
their Irish trip. But the intent is entirely different, and intent matters.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The intent
of the Irish customs agent was to enforce the law, a law that Dr. Jahren <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">should have</i> known about, and Dr. Jahren <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">should have</i></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></i>had a permit to export plant material from
Ireland. There was a bit of an aside in there about checked vs. carry-on
luggage and I don’t think she learned any lessons there; she did claim to have
learned the lesson about permits, even if only at the “I’m sorry I got caught”
level rather than the truly “I’m sorry for what I did” level. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The intent of Dr. Jahren and Bill in their test-the-noob
exercise is to see if an A+ student is really an A+ student or is really a B+
student. The difference, and this is my taxonomy not hers, is that the A+
effort includes something well above-and-beyond expectations, some action that
counts as Outstanding. She slyly describes a student who “passed” this bullshit
secret test by pulling the vials out of the trash and cleaning them, making
them potentially useful for another field trip. There’s so much wrong with
that, but I’m going to just focus on the stupid bullshit of a secret test – and
that’s all a “teachable moment” is. I went through one or two during my time as
a grad student and they were always completely unjust and unfair. If you need
me to do something, I’ll do it. If you need me to learn something, I’ll learn
it. But don’t “cleverly” combine the two and ruin both. Please. Please, Dr.
Jahren, please stop doing that label-vials / good-cop-bad-cop exercise. It
shows considerable contempt on your part towards your student, and is a
violation of trust. Cut it out.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">I would be
very happy if pretty much everybody I know could read Lab Girl. It’s a damn
good book, a series of great stories told with considerable skill and pushed
together into something much bigger than the sum of the parts. I especially
want a handful of individuals I know to read Lab Girl; I’m looking forward to
presenting this book, this individual copy of a mass-produced hardcover to
Maria. And I want to buy more copies for other people. It seems like a mild
violation of privacy to describe any of these other future-gift-recipients by
name here, but I can plug the wonderful, horrifying, terrifying, fantastic
writing of my internet-friend Elise the Great here, and Elise, please read Lab
Girl. I’ll send you a copy or an Amazon gift code or something.</span></span></div>
TheBrummellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08973380652057861796noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19216099.post-66912254844571811022016-06-10T20:40:00.000-06:002016-06-10T20:44:58.058-06:00My Leatherman<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">7 Years</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I had my Leatherman tool, on my belt, for seven years. My soon-to-be-PhD-advisor-at-the-time, Dr. Steven Siciliano, gave me a Leatherman Charge TTi - a top-of-the-line multitool - before my first field season with him and his research group in 2009. He gave it to me around March or April of that year, and I've worn it on my belt nearly every day since then.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">That's around 2500 days of that lump of complex, hinged, bladed metal on my left hip. I've gone through three sheaths and I don't know how many subconscious hand-passes over my belt to make sure its still there.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Early this year I accidentally tried to take it through security at Pearson International Airport, on my way to visit Charlie in February. The security personnel were quite nice and polite about it, and let me mail it back to myself in Waterloo; it was waiting in my mailbox when I returned a week later. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">At the end of my 6-week-long bookended-by-conferences early-summer-2016 fieldwork I sent it in to Leatherman's facilities in Burlington, Ontario, for warranty repairs. Before I flew from Calgary to Fredericton, I went to Canada Post and sent it to Ontario. Tonight, it has been returned to me.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Or rather, an updated substitute has been returned to me, and my Leatherman is no more. Because the Charge TTi has been replaced in the Leatherman Inc. lineup by the Charge Titanium, that is what I now have. This new Charge Titanium is a thing of beauty, a tool of vast utility that fits perfectly with the accessories (sheath, screwdriver bits) I was instructed not to send in. But it's not my Leatherman (yet).</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The knife blade is flawless, not the chipped, scratched, and haphazardously-sharpened blade I used to cut ludicrously-fresh tomatoes and pears on the top of an Arctic mountain.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The saw blade is perfect, not the scratched, difficult-to-open tooth I used to cut branches and an uncountable number of zipties (using the sharp hook on its tip) on seven years of Arctic expeditions and Prairie Rivers canoe trips.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The file - both sides! - is clean to the point of optical illusion along its cross-hatched surface, and bears no trace of the steel soil-gas probes I filed and filed and polished and cursed before fitting their machinist-perfect but field-work-distorted hammer-cap on to drive into the rocky soil of the Arctic polar deserts. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The pliers are smooth and shiny, not the sticking, misaligned grip I pulled endless nails from endless boards with.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Even the scissors, tiny and sharp, are quite excellent, and not the cutters I pushed and squeezed through paper, string, cardboard, and plastic over the majority of a decade.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I'm going to enjoy and appreciate this tool over the next seven years - or more! - but I do feel like an old friend has been lost, and a concrete symbol of my PhD has disappeared.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Thank you, Leatherman, for making such fine tools. I hope my use of this new multitool lives up to the legacy of the previous one. And thank you, Dr. Siciliano, for sending me down this pathway seven years ago.</span>TheBrummellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08973380652057861796noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19216099.post-56847389977892985912016-05-07T17:12:00.000-06:002016-05-08T21:29:38.633-06:00My Boring-by-Comparison Fort McMurray Story<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">My summer 2016 schedule is a bit different from last year's. Instead of staying in one place, working at a single site for four months, I am spending this summer travelling to several different sites. My job this year is primarily to help the graduate students in our lab get their field work established, and set up a side-project Maria and I came up with that adds a little bit of extra work to the day-to-days of the students and research assistants. I give a bit, I take a bit.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Summer field work in Canada south of the Arctic Circle often gets started in May, or late April if conditions allow. There are four sites in northern/central Alberta where I'd like to do some science, and two conferences to bookend this early-summer setup season, so I created a plan back in February / March to spend around one week at each site, covering the last week of April through to late May.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The first site to visit was Fort McMurray; we're continuing work with Suncor on their wetland reclaimation / restoration project, and we have a handful of "reference" sites in the area. Sarah, a master's student in our lab, was planning to spend the entire summer working at Fort McMurray on these sites, and because her work is largely focused on hydrology (especially the transport of dissolved materials through the study systems), she wanted to get some instruments into place as early as possible. In an ideal year, that would have included snowmelt, but given how weird 2016 has been pretty much everywhere, we had to satisfy ourselves with the last week of April.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I flew from Munich, Germany (my weekend in Munich will be the subject of another post, sometime) to Calgary on Monday, April 25, stayed with my parents one night - a too-short visit by far! - then picked up my rental car Tuesday morning. I drove up to Fort McMurray, an entirely uneventful 7-hour drive up the middle of the province. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">We had our Kickoff meeting - a general overview of the project, with an emphasis on safety with our contacts / immediate supervisors at Suncor - on Wednesday morning, then Sarah and I got to work installing her runoff collectors and carrying out other beginning-of-field-season type work. I've had to explain these tasks in varying levels of detail to a range of other people - safety folks at Suncor, passers-by, other researchers, etc. - and to be honest, the details have kind of blurred together at this point. Digging and playing with soil, for the most part.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Suncor has tight rules regarding photographs at their property, and while I do have a valid camera pass, I have to submit any photos I plan to share with the world (websites, scientific conferences, etc.) to a manager at that company, and at the moment I think they have higher priorities to worry about. I have lots more to say about this issue, but not right now. So, no pictures of Sarah's experimental apparatus, or anything else at Suncor.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">We can only work at Suncor on weekends if we really need to, and we didn't, so we had a chance to visit the reference sites on Saturday and Sunday. My side project, a look at the effects on greenhouse gas exchange (especially methane) of the cutlines so abundant in the Canadian boreal forest, needed to get started. Sarah and I went to Saline on Saturday, expecting a modest day - maybe 6 hours of work - and a need to work fairly hard given the still-frozen soil in many places and the long walk in to Saline. Saline is, as the name suggests, a fen (a wetland with a direct connection to groundwater, <i>contra</i> a bog, without such a connection) with high levels of dissolved ions in the local water supply. The vegetation community is dominated by sedges and reeds, with very few mosses able to tolerate the high salinity.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/49837331@N06/26271346493/in/photostream/" nbsp="" title="Saline April 2016 1"><img alt="Saline April 2016 1" height="424" src="https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7110/26271346493_2ccc1f2941_c.jpg" width="640" /></a><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js"></script></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The Saline Fen. The pipes sticking up in the front-left are a nest of piezometers, used to measure water flows through this fen.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/49837331@N06/26841414046/in/photostream/" nbsp="" title="Saline April 2016 6"><img alt="Saline April 2016 6" height="424" src="https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7063/26841414046_55f4d4c5ea_c.jpg" width="640" /></a><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js"></script></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">We use 60x60cm collars to isolate patches of ground and measure greenhouse gas exchange. Ours are constructed of steel, and rust rapidly in the salty peat of the Saline Fen.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/49837331@N06/26807983061/in/photostream/" nbsp="" title="Saline April 2016 8"><img alt="Saline April 2016 8" height="424" src="https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7448/26807983061_6c6f0a80db_c.jpg" width="640" /></a><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js"></script></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">My new collars (actually, just relocated old collars that were not too rusty), on the cutline that cuts right through the Saline Fen. I'm not sure why this cutline was constructed; possibilities include to provide a winter road or temporary access to areas beyond the fen, a seismic survey looking for buried deposits (in this part of the world, oil), or some other reason.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/49837331@N06/26808005321/in/photostream/" nbsp="" title="Saline April 2016 10"><img alt="Saline April 2016 10" height="424" src="https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7025/26808005321_e438b39981_z.jpg" width="640" /></a><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js"></script></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The cutline, continuing on to parts unknown.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/49837331@N06/26782195782/in/photostream/" nbsp="" title="Saline April 2016 11"><img alt="Saline April 2016 11" height="424" src="https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7132/26782195782_6a9a207042_z.jpg" width="640" /></a><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js"></script></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">On our way out - surprisingly early, we were back at the truck by 11:30 - we spotted a couple of caribou (<i>Rangifer tarandus</i>).</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/49837331@N06/26782189892/in/photostream/" nbsp="" title="Saline April 2016 13"><img alt="Saline April 2016 13" height="640" src="https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7618/26782189892_4ba9140078_z.jpg" width="424" /></a><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js"></script></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">One seemed a little curious about us.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">We returned to the house in Fort McMurray rented by the University of Waterloo, and had a few small tasks to complete mostly concerned with getting ready for Sunday, with a visit to Poplar, a tree-covered bog.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/49837331@N06/26875715805/in/photostream/" nbsp="" title="Poplar Cutlines 3"><img alt="Poplar Cutlines 3" height="424" src="https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7317/26875715805_487950b97a_z.jpg" width="640" /></a><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js"></script></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Poplar Bog. Both the "Large" and "Small" cutlines are visible here, along with the patch of "undisturbed" bog between them where I placed my reference collars.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Despite a greater number of collars to install and more difficult soil conditions - ice was close to the surface at Poplar, and abundant tree roots made cutting into the peat especially challenging - we were again finished before lunchtime. My plan was to drive to Peace River, a road distance of nearly 700 km, on Monday so I could attend a required safety training course in Peace River on Tuesday morning. Sunday afternoon was thus spent in quiet relaxation. Later in the afternoon we noticed the smoke plumes to the south and to the north, indicating wildfires. Wildfires are not particularly rare in the boreal forest, and given the hot, dry conditions the area had experienced all April, such a fire in the forests near Fort McMurray was not surprising. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">We treated the circling firefighting aircraft - we saw at least three water-bombers plus at least two helicopters carrying buckets and one "birddog" control-and-direction airplane - as a pleasant and interesting diversion on a sunny Sunday afternoon. I was a pretty enthusiastic airplane nerd when I was around 10 years old, and I snapped a few pictures.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/49837331@N06/26876310045/in/photostream/" nbsp="" title="Sunday Afternoon in Fort McMurray 1"><img alt="Sunday Afternoon in Fort McMurray 1" height="424" src="https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7346/26876310045_41d9217ca0_z.jpg" width="640" /></a><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js"></script></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/49837331@N06/26272033623/in/photostream/" nbsp="" title="Sunday Afternoon in Fort McMurray 2"><img alt="Sunday Afternoon in Fort McMurray 2" height="424" src="https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7056/26272033623_0ff15596fc_z.jpg" width="640" /></a><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js"></script></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/49837331@N06/26270918024/in/photostream/" nbsp="" title="Sunday Afternoon in Fort McMurray 7"><img alt="Sunday Afternoon in Fort McMurray 7" height="424" src="https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7443/26270918024_ea31cf44ca_z.jpg" width="640" /></a><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js"></script> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Suburbia-and-smoke shots</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/49837331@N06/26876305675/in/photostream/" nbsp="" title="Sunday Afternoon in Fort McMurray 3"><img alt="Sunday Afternoon in Fort McMurray 3" height="640" src="https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7395/26876305675_40177887ec_z.jpg" width="424" /></a><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js"></script></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">It's hard to see, so I've highlighted the water stream, but a neighbour a few houses down was watering their lawn. I took this picture thinking it made an amusing contrast, but in hindsight it takes on more of a futile-gesture feeling.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/49837331@N06/26603288330/in/photostream/" nbsp="" title="Sunday Afternoon in Fort McMurray 11"><img alt="Sunday Afternoon in Fort McMurray 11" height="640" src="https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7304/26603288330_ea70c28f10_z.jpg" width="640" /></a><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js"></script></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I snapped this shot off at an awkward angle, but it shows the red stain from the firefighting foam this airplane has been dispensing. I saw none of the famous <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadair_CL-215">Canadair scooper-type</a> waterbombers, and these 'planes need to return to an airport after dropping their loads. The advantage of the foam over water is greater wetability - water isn't actually that wet, especially when splashed onto burning trees. And, I'm not certain that a scooper would be able to operate effectively around Fort McMurray - the Athabasca river has very few straight parts, I don't know how deep it is, and there are few large lakes in the area.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/49837331@N06/26782965942/in/photostream/" nbsp="" title="Sunday Afternoon in Fort McMurray 15"><img alt="Sunday Afternoon in Fort McMurray 15" height="424" src="https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7711/26782965942_2b041665fc_z.jpg" width="640" /></a><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js"></script></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/49837331@N06/26782943872/in/photostream/" nbsp="" title="Sunday Afternoon in Fort McMurray 19"><img alt="Sunday Afternoon in Fort McMurray 19" height="424" src="https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7725/26782943872_1362b8f354_z.jpg" width="640" /></a><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js"></script></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/49837331@N06/26808699071/in/photostream/" nbsp="" title="Sunday Afternoon in Fort McMurray 27"><img alt="Sunday Afternoon in Fort McMurray 27" height="424" src="https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7008/26808699071_8a962615f7_z.jpg" width="640" /></a><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js"></script></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Sunday night was quiet - I don't think waterbombers usually operate at night - and Monday morning included a heavy haze of smoke over the city. I dawdled my morning, sticking around long enough to wash and dry the sheets from my bed, and triple-check I wasn't leaving anything behind.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Conditions cleared up completely once I was about 15km south of town, and my drive down the infamous Highway 63 was about as calm and uneventful as is possible. Highway 63 is infamous because of the high death rate during the peak boom years, about 4-5 years ago. The news across Canada would periodically cover the more spectacular crashes, most of which were generated by young men with large incomes and powerful cars beyond their abilities to properly control driving at ridiculously high speeds and making dangerous passes on the two-lane undivided highway. Last summer I saw intense construction activity all along Highway 63 from its junction with 55, about 250 km south of Fort McMurray; this year, they appear to have completely twinned the highway except for one short section that feels like a normal construction zone. I stopped for fuel in Wandering River, and continued on my way.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The rest of that drive is more interesting, but I'll save that for another post. It wasn't until Tuesday evening that I realized the wildfires I had seen near Fort McMurray were actually forming an existential threat to the entire city. Sunday afternoon we'd joked about the smoke, asking each other how far away that fire might be, and I remember saying something like "It must be pretty far away, they'd pull out all the stops if it gets too close to the city. There's no way they'd let Fort McMurray burn." The amazing damage to the city and the total evacuation puts the lie to my confidence in the unlimited abilities of northern Alberta firefighters. This fire - apparently now named "The Beast" - is beyond any normal human efforts, and I can only salute the crews working to minimize the damage from my safe vantage point.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Peace River is living up to its name, in stark contrast to the catastrophe I accidentally avoided.</span>TheBrummellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08973380652057861796noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19216099.post-77673361554501064902016-04-23T10:12:00.000-06:002016-04-23T10:12:27.792-06:00Book Club: Near Death in the Desert<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Near Death in the Desert</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">True Stories of Disaster and Survival</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Edited by Cecil Kuhne</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Random House, 2009</span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyypdsldnoHodufWst8cZwDdX4ZYXl8Va8jrJoA1htBUR0FODtMHwsBkK4bCB7aXlnb9BxDGwszHZksgW96MGjtKigXC0Me9mfAD1oJBHyLAXlOcpP6-JCq8MXQ8gh0jBvvlNhQg/s1600/neardeath-cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyypdsldnoHodufWst8cZwDdX4ZYXl8Va8jrJoA1htBUR0FODtMHwsBkK4bCB7aXlnb9BxDGwszHZksgW96MGjtKigXC0Me9mfAD1oJBHyLAXlOcpP6-JCq8MXQ8gh0jBvvlNhQg/s1600/neardeath-cover.jpg" /></a></div>
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I picked up this book in a used bookstore not long ago, realizing the useful niche between fiction and long-form non-fiction a set of short non-fiction stories like this occupies in my reading-for-entertainment habits. Cecil Kuhne has also edited a series of apparently similar volumes, listed in the front matter of this book with titles like "Near Death in the Arctic".</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I assume Cecil Kuhne, in addition to choosing stories to include and separating out parts he wished to include from longer works (i.e., the work of assembling this volume) wrote the 1-paragraph texts that introduce and post-script each story. He does a very poor job at this, over-sensationalizing all of the stories (as much as the title does - few disasters are involved anywhere) and, more seriously in my opinion, opening one story with a bit of frankly racist nonsense. The oldest story fragment here is from the account by J.W. Powell of the 1869 expedition to explore the Colorado river and a part of the Grand Canyon. Kuhne states "Major Powell set out from Green River, Whyoming, to explore territory and rapids <b>never before viewed by human eyes</b>." (emphasis added by me) The story, which I can only assume Kuhne read, includes multiple mentions of the discovery by Major Powell of the remains of native American habitations, and plenty of description of such artifacts found <i>overlooking the river</i> as abundant broken pottery and the outlines of house foundations.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Overall, this wasn't a great read. The variety of voices was a strength, certainly, but despite covering adventures separated by more than a century (the most recent story takes place in the early 1980's) I found more in common among these authors than their voyages across hot sand and rock: none of them were particularly likeable or relatable. I think it's probably a hazard of this kind of extreme travel-writing that the author-adventurers start out as people of a tiny minority, who feel such a strong wanderlust that they set out on near-suicidal and deeply uncomfortable voyages (the squidgiest part of this book for me was the description of attempts to remove lice from clothing). They don't relate well to most "normal" people in their home societies, so they don't come across as particularly relatable in their day-to-day concerns or their long-term goals to most "normal" people, either. I don't consider myself particularly "normal" in this sense, and I like to imagine that I am actually closer to these authors along some hypothetical "stay-at-home / see the world" spectrum, but I don't like them. Perhaps I'm subconsciously worried that I will fall into some of their more unpleasant habits as I pursue my own adventures (lice aside, there is a general acceptance among these authors of some pretty blatant human-rights violations happening around them. Sure, what can a foreigner do, especially alone in a strange culture? But, that to me does not extend to <i>slavery</i>).</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I'm leaving this book in the informal library at the hostel I'm staying at in Munich this weekend, perhaps one of my fellow travellers here will enjoy it more than I did. </span>TheBrummellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08973380652057861796noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19216099.post-3674154871201777072016-03-26T16:32:00.002-06:002016-03-26T16:32:55.509-06:00Betty Crocker Cookbook #39 Cuban Pork Sandwiches (pg. 451) - 160218Rather than buy roast
pork, or make it in the extremely limited time we had available,
Charlie suggested we use the pulled barbeque pork out of the previous
night's slow cooker.
<br />
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
No pictures, again, but
I can blame the pickles for that - a fine addition to nearly any
sandwich!</div>
TheBrummellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08973380652057861796noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19216099.post-79206018676500326432016-03-26T16:29:00.000-06:002016-03-26T16:29:05.666-06:00Betty Crocker Cookbook #38 Pulled Jerk Pork Sandwiches (pg. 157) - 160217<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
When I visit Charlie, I
tend to buy a nice big piece of meat for her freezer and her slow
cooker. This time, it was a pork shoulder. This recipe calls for a
2.5 pound boneless shoulder, but those are hard to find in Regina so
we ended up with a 4 pound bone-in shoulder. This worked quite well,
and the resulting sandwiches were fantastic. No photos, because
apparently I get easily distracted by great food.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
This also supplied
"roast pork" to the Cuban Pork Sandwiches we made for lunch
the next day.</div>
TheBrummellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08973380652057861796noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19216099.post-81672893537128946102016-03-26T16:20:00.000-06:002016-03-26T16:21:16.421-06:00Betty Crocker Cookbook #35: California Black Bean Burgers (pg. 504) - 160215For my first foray into
the Vegetarian chapter of the Betty Crocker Cookbook, Charlie helped
me make burger patties out of black beans. The "California"
part of the name comes from the salsa used as garnish during final
assembly; I gather that such non-standard burger toppings are
stereotypically associated with the hedonism of The Golden State.
<br />
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I took no photos of
these burgers, mainly due to the extreme mess that results from
trying to force a fairly wet bean paste into a coherent patty. They
were also excellent, so I didn't put down my burger to pick up my
camera.</div>
TheBrummellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08973380652057861796noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19216099.post-90971317743676235162016-03-26T15:59:00.003-06:002016-03-26T16:21:02.768-06:00Betty Crocker Cookbook #36: Chicken and Broth (pg. 434) and #37 Quick Jambalaya (pg. 433) - 160216I
visited Charlie in Regina over reading break in February, and
together we completed enough recipes in this project to add
considerably to her store of frozen meals.
<br />
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Several
of the recipes we chose - chosen as we drove back to Regina from
Cypress Hills - were set up as prerequisites supplying key
ingredients to subsequent recipes. In this case, the Chicken and
Broth supplied chicken broth to the Quick Jambalaya; we also added
some of the cooked chicken that resulted, despite not being called
for in the Jambalaya recipe.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/49837331@N06/25987820221/in/dateposted/" nbsp="" title="Broth"><img alt="Broth" height="331" src="https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1689/25987820221_0cab404dd5.jpg" width="500" /></a><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js"></script></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Some
of the broth from the Chicken and Broth. I felt like we were using
this simple recipe in the way the authors of the cookbook intended -
this recipe doesn't produce a meal, or a component of a multi-dish
meal, it provides ingredients to further recipes.
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/49837331@N06/26028241886/in/photostream/" nbsp="" title="Quick Jambalaya"><img alt="Quick Jambalaya" height="331" src="https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1461/26028241886_ae0d6e8f3d.jpg" width="500" /></a><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js"></script></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
We
didn't have frozen brown-and-serve sausage links as called for, and
our shrimp still had tails, but we substituted regular sausages and
added most of the smaller chicken pieces. I couldn't convince Charlie
to dive all-in to this project and get instant rice, so we just
simmered the jambalaya for longer and used regular brown rice.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Absolutely
delicious!<br />
<br />
***<br />
I had to go back and change the recipe numbers when I realized we made the California Black Bean Burgers Monday, and these recipes Tuesday. </div>
TheBrummellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08973380652057861796noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19216099.post-79929782227954901432016-03-26T15:36:00.000-06:002016-03-26T15:36:45.673-06:00Betty Crocker Cookbook #34: Glazed Carrots (pg. 457) - 160207
Hey,
look at that! I'm close to two months behind on my blogging already!
Oh well. Hopefully I can remember the relevant details for these
recipes.
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/49837331@N06/26053747285/in/dateposted/" nbsp="" title="Glazed Carrots"><img alt="Glazed Carrots" height="400" src="https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1641/26053747285_46777031c8.jpg" width="500" /></a><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js"></script></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I'd
chosen glazed carrots as a way to get into the Vegetables chapter,
then felt mildly intimidated by it, because it's pretty far from my
"normal" diet. In any case, it was far simpler and took
much less time than I had expected, and the flavour was quite nice.
</div>
TheBrummellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08973380652057861796noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19216099.post-51139468190404216222016-02-27T19:27:00.000-06:002016-02-27T19:27:57.540-06:00Betty Crocker Cookbook #33: Spiced Corned Beef Brisket with Horseradish Sour Cream (pg. 156) - 160204I
chose this recipe to use up the rest of the very-salty "navel"
beef I'd bought for recipe #21. I washed the beef chunks in running
water for about 10 seconds to remove some salt. As with nearly
everything I put into my slow cooker, everything emerged after 9
hours that same colour of brown, and quite soft.
<br />
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/49837331@N06/25203217132/in/photostream/" nbsp="" title="Corned Beef Horseradish"><img alt="Corned Beef Horseradish" height="331" src="https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1653/25203217132_9a4c4e1f4f.jpg" width="500" /></a><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js"></script></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Despite
my slow cooker's tendency to colour everything the same, the taste is
more robust. Especially salt. This was still pretty salty. Also, I'm
now convinced that I have, at some point, completely ruined my
ability to taste the hot/spicy part of the flavour of horseradish. I
glopped a huge amount of the horseradish sour cream on this, and it
was delicious but completely non-spicy.
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<hr />
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Also!
I finally bought a freezer. $60 from a person moving out of a house
in Cambridge.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/49837331@N06/25203214752/in/dateposted/" nbsp="" title="Freezer"><img alt="Freezer" height="800" src="https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1550/25203214752_e7ed6cc3c5_c.jpg" width="530" /></a><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js"></script></div>
TheBrummellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08973380652057861796noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19216099.post-71137773979653436272016-01-31T21:52:00.001-06:002016-02-03T21:08:24.635-06:00Betty Crocker Cookbook #32: Beer-Cheese Soup (pg. 440) - 160131After my heavy
breakfast with sausages and eggs, I was happy to tick off a meatless
soup for supper. Soup generally goes well with bread, anyway, and I'd
bought some lovely beer at the <a href="http://waterloobrewing.com/">local brewer</a><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null">y</a> in growlers.
<br />
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/49837331@N06/24447267690/in/photostream/" nbsp="" title="Beer-Cheese Soup"><img alt="Beer-Cheese Soup" height="500" src="https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1570/24447267690_2a5921f4a6.jpg" width="500" /></a><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js"></script></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I used Waterloo Dark
for the beer, though I'm not sure how much of a difference that
makes. The celery didn't soften as much as I expected. It wasn't
crunchy, but it was more firm than I'm used to. Of course, most of my
celery consumption comes out of my slow cooker, which turns most
vegetables into brown paste regardless of starting characteristics.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The last ingredient is
"Popped popcorn, if desired". I don't normally desire, but
I have a bit of regret that I did not pick up any popcorn in
anticipation of this recipe. Presumably there are other recipes that
call for this American staple, so I can correct that oversight.</div>
TheBrummellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08973380652057861796noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19216099.post-27321158800528085252016-01-31T21:41:00.000-06:002016-01-31T21:41:45.621-06:00Betty Crocker Cookbook #31: French Bread (pg. 84) - 160131
My first yeast bread
from this recipe book for this project! I decided to make this, as well as do some needed
household chores, instead of going for a Sunday Drive this week.
Every recipe in this book comes with a time estimate, usually broken
down by major stages: prep, cook, stand, etc. The totals, however,
can conceal a pattern of work / rest with more steps than simply
"prep", "rise", and "chill". Betty
Crocker's French bread suggests 25 minutes of preparation, 3 hours 15
minutes of rise, 4 hours of chill, and 20 minutes to bake.
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
These totals are
probably accurate (except the bake time). There are three rise
stages, each about an hour long, separated by blocks of preparation.
I've baked bread a few times before, so I consider myself to know my
way around kneading and yeast-handling. The big variant here is the
repeated applications of sprayed-on water, and the pan of water in
the oven during baking. This helps to develop a crispy crust,
apparently.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The baking time was
described as "18 to 20 minutes" but I think my oven
struggles to acheive and maintain high temperatures, so I left the
loaves in the oven for about 30 minutes before they looked the right
colour to me.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/49837331@N06/24624994292/in/photostream/" nbsp="" title="French Bread 1"><img alt="French Bread 1" height="500" src="https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1665/24624994292_b610b96f7b.jpg" width="331" /></a><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js"></script></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/49837331@N06/24375141029/in/photostream/" nbsp="" title="French Bread 2"><img alt="French Bread 2" height="331" src="https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1520/24375141029_63932c4a26.jpg" width="500" /></a><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js"></script></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I goddam love fresh
bread. I couldn't wait, so I cut one loaf using an oven mitt to hold
the hot loaf and smeared butter on the cut pieces. Fantastic!</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
TheBrummellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08973380652057861796noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19216099.post-46708231007408783152016-01-31T21:31:00.003-06:002016-01-31T21:31:56.199-06:00Betty Crocker Cookbook #30: Mexican Scrambled Eggs (pg. 221) - 160131<span style="font-style: normal;">I
think the easiest recipe in this book is Scrambled Eggs, so I took on
the variant, Mexican Scrambled Eggs. This is very similar to the
breakfast burritos I sometimes do - scrambled eggs, stir-fried onion
& pepper, wrapped in a tortilla with cheese - but with some
chorizo sausage added. The sausage wasn't really "chorizo",
it was whatever sub-category the sausage the Mennonites sell at the
St. Jacob's farmers' market falls into. There are Mennonites in
Mexico, and I didn't go for the garlic sausage, so I'm going to call
this substitution "close enough".</span>
<br />
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">No
photo, so I can't show you how I made a rather large breakfast for
myself. I was pretty stuffed.</span></div>
TheBrummellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08973380652057861796noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19216099.post-26832777827645537482016-01-31T21:23:00.004-06:002016-01-31T21:24:33.178-06:00Betty Crocker Cookbook #29: Broiled Fish Steaks (pg. 243) - 160129I bought enough basa
fillets for about four meals (at least!) so I decided to make more
room in my freezer, still lacking a stand-alone unit, and broiled up
a trio. I don't yet have a broiling pan, an oversight I covered with
my metal trivet balanced on a cookie sheet, but I'll need to get a
proper one before I tackle any other broiling / roasting recipes. The
variant for this recipe is fillets, and the instructions are nearly
exactly the same as for fish steaks.
<br />
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/49837331@N06/24742804185/in/photostream/" nbsp="" title="Broiled Fish"><img alt="Broiled Fish" height="331" src="https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1537/24742804185_483f00b566.jpg" width="500" /></a><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js"></script></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
These were actually
kind of bland, but that's not really surprising, they were seasoned
only with butter, salt, and black pepper. Still, not bad and nearly
as quick as advertised. I'd picked up some sweet-potato oven fries and broccoli at the grocery store, mainly because I had the realization in the frozen isle that I hadn't bought anything that could be described as "prepared food" since I began this project. Frozen pizzas were a prominent part of my diet last year, and I'll probably break down and buy one or two eventually but so far I'm not really missing them.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
TheBrummellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08973380652057861796noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19216099.post-27446077776259992832016-01-31T21:17:00.001-06:002016-01-31T21:24:25.674-06:00Betty Crocker Cookbook #28: Pecan-Crusted Fish Fillets (pg. 243) - 160127It took me a while to
make up my mind regarding the fish to purchase when I was at the
grocery store this week. Most fresh fish is pretty expensive around
here, but I settled on Basa fillets (boneless and skinless) because
they seemed suitable and were not nearly as pricey as (for example)
the tilapia or the Atlantic cod. One aspect of this project I'm
really looking forward to is the fish and shellfish chapter, because
I eat very little fish normally. Aside from the occasional bit of
tuna, I almost never eat anything from the sea or freshwater.
<br />
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The reason it took me a
long time to choose the basa was mainly because it is not included on
the list of fishes on page 242 of Betty Crocker - there's a helpful
table for classifying fish. Mostly it comes down to the texture of
the meat. Some recipes call for "medium-firm texture",
others for "delicate to medium" or "firm". I
gather these differences would affect cooking times and temperatures,
and the ways one might handle the fish pieces during cooking. A bit
of googling reveals that basa is southeast-Asian catfish, farmed in
the Mekong river. There's actually a fair bit of discussion regarding
basa online, and I'm not sure I'll buy it a second time. This is part
of the reason I so rarely eat fish: I don't want to contribute to an
industry that has so many harmful environmental impacts across so
many different ecosystems.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
No photo this time,
because somehow it completely slipped my mind. Chopping up the pecans
took a bit of time, and only about half of them stuck to the
egg-dipped fish fillets. So some of the pecans ended up fried
directly in the pan, which was fine, it's not like nuts go soft in a
frying pan or anything.</div>
TheBrummellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08973380652057861796noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19216099.post-73861923335670564032016-01-31T20:56:00.002-06:002016-01-31T20:56:38.582-06:00Betty Crocker Cookbook #27: Orange Smoothie (pg. 63) - 160126<span style="font-style: normal;">This
is labelled both "Fast" and "Low-fat", but I
think the second one depends on the use of vanilla frozen yogurt,
rather than the alternative built into the main recipe (this actually
has no variants) of vanilla ice cream.</span>
<br />
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">As
usual, this recipe makes enough for multiple servings, in this case
four. I cut it down to a single serving because a) it's just me and
b) I only had a little more than 1 cup of vanilla ice cream anyway
(and no frozen yogurt of any flavour). </span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"><a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/49837331@N06/24375139749/in/photostream/" nbsp="" title="Orange Smoothie"><img alt="Orange Smoothie" height="500" src="https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1446/24375139749_3b1f63554f.jpg" width="331" /></a><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js"></script></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">This
was very sweet, but pretty tasty. Too sweet for me for breakfast,
really, but this would make a pretty good dessert. Especially, I
suspect, with frozen yogurt.</span></div>
TheBrummellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08973380652057861796noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19216099.post-57349199984341027992016-01-31T20:49:00.001-06:002016-01-31T20:49:50.404-06:00Betty Crocker Cookbook #26: Skillet Calzon (pg. 525) - 160125I
played Pathfinder with my friends on Monday night, starting about an
hour after I got home. I threw together this meal from the "20
Minutes or Less" chapter, and even though it actually took
closer to 30 minutes (this is a pattern for me) it worked quite well.
Fortunately, I can mute my microphone through roll20.org, the website
that lets us play this "tabletop" role-playing game (RPG)
online: nobody else had to listen to me chew.
<br />
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I
guess you can buy mushrooms in little jars in the USA, because this
is the second recipe I've done from this book in which I've
substituted a 10-oz can of mushrooms for the called-for 4.5-oz jar. I
like mushrooms, so it was no problem. The basic idea is to cook up
this tomato / ground beef / vegetables sauce and slather it on some
toasted French bread with Parmesan cheese. The instruction "French
bread" is a little vague, though, I think they must be using
much larger loaves than what I bought. I used what amounts to a
baguette, though at some local grocery stores I know I can sometimes
buy "French bread" that's wider.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/49837331@N06/24447263110/in/dateposted/" nbsp="" title="Skillet Calzone"><img alt="Skillet Calzone" height="331" src="https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1612/24447263110_b728a5839a.jpg" width="500" /></a><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js"></script>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
This
handily made enough leftovers for a second meal. I'm not sure where
the name comes from, as a calzone is a kind of stuffed pastry and
this doesn't involve anything like that. Also, the use of a 10-inch
skillet seems wildly inappropriate, the volume of sauce - even
accounting for my excess mushrooms - is far larger than would
comfortably fit in my 10-inch frying pan, and a quick Google Image
Search suggests I'm not wrong in thinking "skillet" is a
synonym for "frying pan".</div>
TheBrummellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08973380652057861796noreply@blogger.com0