ScientistMother was the clear winner in Round 2, moving up from 7th place to take a commanding lead over Gerty. Chall did well too, making up some ground on Gerty and third-placed Beth. There’s just a single point separating Ricardipus and Bob, who are under pressure from Lava and Mod in 7th and 8th place, respectively. But I will be BACK, BABY – my combined Round 3 & 4 picks are in, and I’m hoping that the LA Kings will go all the way, which would make it three years in a row that the Canucks are eliminated by the eventual winners. Which is better than nothing.

ScientistMother also kicked serious ass in the bracket, taking first place from last round’s dual winner Gerty. Cowy and Lava also managed to sneak ahead of Gerty, while ModScientist had a rougher time of it but held on to fifth place. I did much better than last time, rising from last place to sixth, while Beth and JasonDoc struggled and Chall, Rotten and IndyR appeared not to make any picks. I’d usually mock them, but not this time considering my fortunes in the pool…

OK, now GO KINGS! (Or don’t. I actually don’t care all that much. When do the Olympics start?)

I’m not sure I’d trust this app to help me navigate around a foreign country…

As in any network there are some especially connected people who form major “hubs”, as I mentioned on Facebook when I got home from SOVan:

seriously – I only know Alyssa (who lives thousands of miles away) through her blog, and even she knows Dave Kent! Also, I suspect it’s actually only two degrees.

but anyone who’s been here for more than a year or two forms their own hub to some degree. Being about to start my fourth Vancouver job in ten years here, I’m probably approaching Very Important Hub status myself. So, when Beth Snow (who I met through – you guessed it – Dave Kent*) blogged about how you can map your LinkedIn network, I obviously had to follow suit.

Only a fraction of the people I know use LinkedIn, and I tend to only add people I’ve met more than once or twice, but enough of them have at least a basic profile that you can see some interesting features in my network:

Dave Kent is represented by the large pink circle above the “eri” of my name; Beth’s is the grey circle linked to Dave’s, to the right and slightly upwards. The burgundy circle on the edge of the big dark blue cluster represents a regular commenter who I worked with in my industry job, work with on some projects in my current job, and will work with full-time again as of June 1st. The burgundy-orange connections that run through the pale blue dots are also due to a regular commenter, but not a Vancouver-based one. Let’s see if they want to identify themselves in the comments!

The first thing I noticed is that private sector people seem to use LinkedIn much more than academics (look at all that dark blue!), which makes sense. Interestingly, one of the orange circles represents a friend I know from my PhD lab in Scotland who now works in the same US city as our industry collaborators. I stayed with her on one of my recent trips down there and she said she didn’t know anyone at our collaborators’ company, which makes me wonder how that city’s overall connectedness compares to Vancouver’s – she obviously does know at least one person who works (or used to work) there, even if she doesn’t realise it!

The second thing I noticed is that people I know from my current job are represented by two different colours, presumably reflecting differences in their own contact lists. Upon closer inspection the green circles mostly represent people in my current department, whereas most of the burgundy circles represent people I know from elsewhere in the organisation. According to this scheme, a few greens should really have been either burgundy or pink (postdoc department, which is in the same organisation) and vice versa.

And, of course, there are lots of links between the groups of people I know from all three of my Vancouver jobs to date! This supports my paranoia hypothesis that you just can’t ever afford to burn any bridges here – you never know how conflict with a current colleague or collaborator might come back to haunt you a few years or even decades down the line. It’s a good thing I’m so lovely and hard working and nice to work with and modest.

You should run the map app on your own contacts list – hours of geeky fun! I’d be interested to see how maps look in other sectors, fields, and in other cities – and I’m especially interested in seeing Dave Kent’s map

UPDATE: Dave has sent me his LinkedIn map, and says I can post it here. Thanks Dave!

The difference to my network is striking – more contacts, looser clusters, and more connections between clusters.

I bet Kevin Bacon’s looks pretty similar.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~
*I know him from my postdoctoral department, where he did his PhD; Beth knows him through the UBC branch of the Let’s Talk Science outreach programme, in which I participated as a postdoc. I think I even briefly met Beth at one of their pub nights in, ooh, 2003 or 2004, years before I met her properly. This is probably also how Alyssa knows Dave…?

Well well well, what do we have here?

But wait! There’s more!

When I moved from a postdoctoral position to a job in biotech marketing in 2005, I thought my publishing days were over. This made me a little sad. Since moving back to academia a couple of years later I’ve worked on dozens of manuscripts (and have been mentioned in many an Acknowledgments section), but never did enough to warrant authorship…

…until last year.

The first paper is the result of a project funded by one of the first grants I worked on after starting my current job. I wrote the grant application’s introduction and contributed to the study design (indirectly, but still) – and then didn’t hear much about it until it was time to write up a few years later, at which point I helped compile some of the data into tables, made a figure, wrote parts of the manuscript, edited all of it, and co-ordinated the submission.

The second paper, being a review, had a slightly lower bar for authorship. I was initially asked just to edit the first author’s draft that she’d written based on a structure agreed upon with her supervisor; as this is her first paper it needed quite a bit of work, and I also suggested adding a sub-section. I sent my edits on to my boss, and the next version came back to me with my name added to the author list.

You wait seven years for a paper, then two come along at once – bloody typical!

When I got married and changed my name (which I consider an upgrade – I gained an extra letter and an extra syllable compared to my far-too-short maiden name), I thought my publishing days were well and truly done (I made the decision a couple of months before applying for my current job). I’ve never regretted making the change, but it did pose something of a dilemma for the two new papers: should I use my new name, which would be confusing to someone (e.g. a future employer) looking up my publication record; or the old one, which would confuse my co-authors and other colleagues, who’ve never known me under any other name? I went with the new name because a) I know a couple of people who changed their name but continued to publish under their maiden name. It seemed like they didn’t get as much recognition of their accomplishments as other department members, because not everyone recognised the name on the paper and therefore didn’t realise that that colleague had been involved in the study; b) it’s easy enough to prove that I “own” all my papers if I need to; c) there are a bunch of other “dunn ca”s in PubMed, but only one other “ennis ca”; and d) I just like it better, damnit. So there.

Anyway. I am officially chuffed. Yay me!

I’d read a lot about Science Online events in London and New York, and was exceedingly excited about Vancouver getting its own version. The first event did not disappoint, despite the unfortunate lack of food or beer for purchase (I think I’ve been spoiled by our local Cafe Scientifique events, which always take place in a pub, as compared to SOVan’s choice of the Science World museum).

The theme was “where do you get your science?”, and we started off with a presentation from UBC researcher and one of Nature‘s ten most influential people of 2011, Rosie Redfield. I’d seen Rosie talk before at a Cafe Scientifique event about evolution, but this time she was talking about her role in debunking the infamous Arsenic Life SNAFU. I’d read a lot about the case at the time, and it was great to hear the story from Rosie herself. Next up was local reporter Lisa Johnson, who covered the original story and some of the follow-up for the CBC. She told us about the hype generated by NASA and the time pressures involved in getting the story out – again, extremely interesting to hear direct from the source.

One of the themes covered in the subsequent discussion – and the main point of this post – concerned the practice of Open Science. Rosie Redfield, who’s been using her blog as an online lab book for years (and described the Arsenic Life saga as her first opportunity to do so “with people watching”), made some compelling arguments in favour of full openness. I can’t argue with the fact that most people don’t know how science is really done and that letting them see the reality is A Good Thing, in principle – nor with the sentiment behind this statement, which many people picked up on and tweeted:

.@RosieRedfield at #soVan: We have more to gain by collaborating than to lose by keeping our work private. #arseniclife

April 20, 2012 3:05 am via HootSuiteReplyRetweetFavorite

@polarisdotca

Peter Newbury

However, I felt that I did need to speak tweet up with my own experience…

I've been scooped, but my project survived. My labmate got scooped a few months later and it killed his project & publication record #soVAN

April 20, 2012 3:04 am via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@enniscath

Cath Ennis

(I don’t know why those tweets have a British time zone date and time stamp, btw. This took place on the evening of April 19th, not at 3 am on the 20th…)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
(Cue cheesy flashback harp music…)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

It happened just over a year into my postdoc, when I was writing up my first paper. I’d discovered that the transcription (activity) level of a human gene is controlled by a piece of DNA (called a promoter) derived from an endogenous retrovirus; characterised the promoter to find out which proteins were binding to it to control the activity of the associated gene; identified a novel alternative promoter that seems to pre-date the insertion of the virus; and compared the activity of both promoters in a number of different human tissues. I was about a week or two away from finalising a submission-ready version of my manuscript when I got scooped by a paper that showed up as a pre-print publication in the online version of the journal to which I was planning to submit. Using a very similar approach to my own, they’d identified some of the same promoter-binding proteins and done similar analyses of the promoter’s activity in different tissues – but hadn’t spotted that the promoter was derived from a virus, and hadn’t looked for the alternative (original) promoter. So it was a partial scoop – around 75-80%, I’d say – but still a huge blow.

I ran straight to my supervisor, who quickly talked me down from my panic and said that we’d “just quickly reformat it” and send it to a different journal (one with a higher impact factor than the one we’d originally targetted, funnily enough, not that she cares much about such things). Of course, it wasn’t quite as simple as that – it took a few days to reformat the text and figures, and we had to cut a LOT of text to get it down to the right length – but we got it done, with help from sympathetic lab mates, and sent it off with bated breath.

I got lucky. The scooping paper hit the print edition just before we got the reviews back (print vs. online was a bigger deal then than it is now!), and both reviewers had clearly read it. However, because our paper was submitted just a few days after the first one came out online it was clearly independent work, and had enough unique findings (and enough of a different focus in the introduction and discussion, i.e. on the evolutionary implications of the endogenous retrovirus vs. native promoter rather than on the function of the gene itself, which was the source of the other group’s interest in the promoter) that it was accepted with minor textual revisions, including a requirement that we mention the scooping paper and discuss it very briefly. I even managed to turn this into a positive by pointing out that they’d identified the same promoter-binding proteins that I had…

…I got lucky.

A year or so later, a good friend of mine and fellow postdoc in the same lab was not so lucky. He’d been working hard for a long time to set up and validate a system in which to test a hypothesis about the function of a different kind of endogenous retrovirus, and was getting very close to being able to start his actual experiments when the big shot lab in the field scooped him completely. They’d even used an almost identical system. He was understandably devastated; when our supervisor gave him the bad news, he pretty much ran straight out of her office and wasn’t seen again for the rest of the day. He did have some other side-projects running, and was a co-author on a couple of other papers from the lab, but that had been his main project and it was suddenly completely unpublishable. It really was essentially the same study.

(A third postdoc in our lab also got scooped at around the same time, but I almost hesitate to mention it due to her weird response. I saw the scooping presentation at a conference and gave her the bad news myself as gently as I could when I returned to the lab, remembering my panic from the previous year all too well. She said “ah, well, thanks for letting me know!”, and just got on with whatever the hell it was she was doing. Not working, that’s for sure. She was already spending more and more time “working from home” by then, although no evidence of any work was ever forthcoming at lab meetings, which she eventually stopped attending before dropping out completely to join an organisation that sues people who call it a cult, so I won’t do that. It rhymes with Sand Bark Zoundation. I will not link to it. But I digress).

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
(End flashback. More harp music)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

So, while I do understand the very admirable and altruistic impulses behind the Open Science movement, I find it very hard to commit to the cause. As long as careers depend on publications and publications depend on novelty, scooping will remain a major problem in competitive fields, a problem with the potential to completely derail young scientists’ careers. As I said, I got lucky – it wasn’t a full scoop, and I was so close to submitting the manuscript that the work was obviously independent – but my friend’s experience makes me exceedingly cautious. The risk of scooping is field-dependent, of course, and a case could be made for opening up your lab books only once the work reaches a certain stage, but sorry – I can’t get on board. Not really, not in the current scientific publication and careers paradigm.

Anyway… Science Online Vancouver really was awesome. The follow-up discussions were all very interesting, and I met some fabulous people (most of whom seemed to know at least one person I know – as I’ve said before, I swear the Vancouver life sciences community only has two degrees of separation). A few of us went to the pub after the main event ended, but wet feet and jeans, a lack of food, and having to get up in the morning for work sadly sent me home after only one beer, and before I could introduce myself to some of the people I’d wanted to meet. Clearly I just can’t keep up with the young ‘uns any more… but hey, there’ll be more events!

Well, guess what?! As of June 1st I will be joining the team I started to envy so much back in 2009!

It’s been a strange few months. In early February my boss called the department’s lab manager, admin manager, admin assistant, accountant and me into a meeting, in which he told us that he might have to make “quite drastic” cuts to the admin salaries budget, and that all our jobs were in jeopardy. The start-up / industry collaboration funds from which we’d all been paid thus far were running out, and verbal assurances from above that our department (created from scratch for my boss to lead when he was recruited to our institution) would eventually be given an annual admin salaries budget had never actually been realised.

Well, it was all a bit of a panic. We knew that the boss was doing everything he could to guarantee our positions, but it was all very scary and the atmosphere was tense, to say the least. Given that Mr E Man’s salary is highly variable throughout the year and we have a substantial mortgage, I knew I had to have at least a part time permanent position, possibly with some freelance manuscript editing or similar work thrown in to supplement it. I wondered if volunteering to go part time would save my position from being completely abolished, or if that would make me look less than fully committed and thus result in me being axed first. The person I would usually ask about such things was on the chopping block too, so I didn’t really feel like I could talk to them about it. Everyone was on edge, constantly asking the others in our sad little group if they’d heard anything, and everyone thought they themself would be the first one cut (except for the accountant – we all agreed that she was safest, because no-one else in the department would know how to even start taking over her duties, whereas senior postdocs and techs could conceivably have taken over some of mine and the lab manager’s, respectively).

I immediately started to update my CV and LinkedIn contacts list, emailed various people to ask if they would provide a reference (different references would be needed for different types of job, and all options had to be considered at that point), and – most importantly – contacted the person in charge of the project management / grant wrangling team at this other division of our organisation.

I’ve worked with the leader and several members of this team on various grants and other projects, have quite recently started to attend their weekly team meetings (and also some of their lunches / after work drinks), and already knew that applying to join them would be my most likely next career move – although I’d set myself the rather arbitrary target of being in my current job for at least five years before moving on (I’m going to fall five months short of that goal!) Having a large team makes it possible to specialise or otherwise evolve the role, and also to eventually move up the hierarchy – two benefits that just aren’t possible when you’re a team of one. (It also means not having to cover every single deadline for a whole department by myself, giving me much more flexibility in terms of when I can take time off). I knew that there was also a budget and paid time off for members of the team to take work-related courses, as long as they come back and share what they’ve learned with everyone else – something that just isn’t possible in my current job. Combining these advantages with better long-term financial stability than our organisation’s other departments made joining this team my best career development option by far – and the news about my current job not being safe really just accelerated my plans.

I knew from attending the team’s meetings that an 18 month maternity leave cover position was opening up, and so that was what I applied for. A couple of weeks after getting the scary news from my current boss, I met the other team’s leader informally to discuss the process, and we set up a time a few weeks in the future for a formal interview. I told my boss that I’d applied, and he replied that he was glad I was thinking of these things and would be happy to provide a reference. I was still losing sleep worrying about the situation, but not quite as much as in my zombified state of the last few weeks, and I gradually untensed a little bit.

Soon thereafter, I learned that the funding for my current job was “probably” safe for “about a year”. I knew that my boss had worked very hard to secure that position, and felt horribly guilty about the fact that I was still interviewing for the other job. I tried to just keep my head down and focus on my work, but the situation was exceedingly bizarre and awkward. I was still going to the other team’s meetings and social gatherings, attended a workshop led by my potential new boss, and was also going to meetings related to my current job that were attended by the leader and/or other members of the team I was trying to join. I basically felt like the whole few weeks were one extended job interview where everything I said was subject to scrutiny. This was quite possibly all just in my own head, but that didn’t make it any less stressful or weird.

At the interview (for which I’d taken a day off work), I learned that I wasn’t actually being considered for the mat leave cover position, but rather for a new position that had just opened up when a grant got funded. It’s as manager of a huge 5.5 year grant in an field I know something about, having worked on several related projects and grants with my current boss, who collaborates with the PI of the grant I’ll be managing (as does my postdoc supervisor. Post about the Vancouver life science industry’s Two Degrees of Separation coming up soon). 5.5 years is as close as you’re going to get to a permanent job in science, short of getting tenure…

Well, the interview obviously went well, because I soon heard from one of my references that the team leader had contacted him. The next necessary step was to have a very, very awkward conversation with my current boss about the whole process, during which I explained about the 5.5 years and the team and the specialisation and the courses and the chances for promotion, and that I thought he was doing super-awesome-cool research (he really, really is) and hoped that I’d still get to work on some of his projects in the future (he collaborates with various PIs from my new department on almost all of his various projects). He said we could maybe discuss how my situation could be improved in my current post, but we both knew that the advantages of the new role that I’d just described to him were not in his power to offer me if I stayed.

Then, on Thursday, while I was sitting in my new team’s weekly meeting eating the cake one of them had provided to celebrate a difficult task being completed with everyone’s help and wondering when I’d hear back about the job, a letter of offer hit my email inbox! I talked again to my current boss before signing it (although it was never in doubt), and he was so cool about it – he said congratulations and that he knows that people need to think about their own careers and that he thinks it’s a good move for me. We both thanked each other for the last four and a half years, and off I went to officially accept the offer.

Despite all this, however, it was still a bit weird and awkward when I went out with my new team for a celebratory drink last night, and my current boss was sitting two tables over…

I’m so happy and excited. I get to be part of a team again – a team that includes two good friends from my 2005-2007 industry job – and I get to take on a new challenge. I’ve learned a lot – a HELL of a lot – in my current job, and enjoyed it most of the time, but this is a great move for me and a good time to move on: a couple of big projects I’ve been managing are winding down; two papers that have been taking up large parts of many people’s time and efforts for the last two years have just been published; and the only two colleagues I would truly call friends were, sadly, casualties of the budgetary crisis. (I’m in the process of becoming friends with a couple of others, which will hopefully continue – I’m only going a few blocks away* and will still interact with various members of the group).

The new job will be somewhat similar to my current one, but with much more emphasis on project management and much less on writing grants**. Oh, and I get to go to Montreal in July, where I will attend the kick-off meeting for my new big project, and also hopefully take some new photos to replace the ones from my last trip there, which all have my ex-boyfriend in them!

I’m also just enormously relieved to have this stressful period of my life behind me. I’m fine with change – I like change – but I’ve never been very good at dealing with uncertainty; I’m a planner. It hasn’t been fun, but it’s over now and I’m more than ready to move on – after I slash and burn my way through the rather intimidating “to do before I go” list I started writing yesterday!

Before I finally close this rather epic post (as you might be able to tell, it’s been killing me not to be able to blog about any of this!), I’d like to say a massive THANK YOU to all my online friends who’ve provided support, advice, and just listened to me freaking out over the last couple of months. It’s been hard to talk to people at work about this, and Mr E Man and my non-work friends in real life have been lovely but don’t really understand how science careers, funding, and other aspects of the industry works. Having a community of people who understand the industry but don’t know the people involved has been enormously helpful – Eva in particular gave me some wonderful advice about how to approach an interview where you know all the interviewers – but you’re all wonderful! THANK YOU!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

*actually, to the same building where I worked from 2005-2007… and right now I work in the same building where I did my postdoc… this’ll be my fourth job in Vancouver and I’ve only ever worked in two buildings about three blocks apart.

**less time spent writing about science at work should mean more time spent writing about science in my free time – the benefits of having a career skill that’s also a hobby! I started this blog during my industry job, when my science writing itch just wasn’t being scratched at work at ALL, and it became much less sciency when I began my current job and started doing a lot of de novo science writing at work. The blog might get a bit more sciency again, but I’m going to try to channel that itch into some other long-term writing-for-fun projects instead… once the initial brain overload caused by starting a new job subsides, of course!

The pool contains everyone from the regular season pool except Mr E Man, who got his ass kicked by a bunch of girls and non-Canadians and has gone home in a huff decided it was all too much like hard work.

Nice work by Gerty there! It’s a fairly even field so far, with the possible exception of Mod and Lava. I’m frankly astonished I came third, given that I’d picked the ill-fated Fleury and Howard as my two goalies – but when Mod shared some of her picks via Twitter, I a) guffawed and b) realised my choices weren’t quite that bad.

The bracket challenge league contains a subset of the above players plus assorted friends and family of Mod and Lava:

And Gerty wins again! VERY nicely done, Gerty!

As for the rest of us, our performaces suggested the following hypothesis:

“The ability to pick high-scoring individual hockey players is inversely correlated to the ability to predict the outcome of individual playoff match-ups”

Preliminary data: the comparative scores of six female players of assorted nationality

Trend line added by Excel. So sue me.

Being a good scientist, I obviously excluded Gerty, who is a freak clear outlier:

I shall be writing a grant forthwith to study this phenomenon further. The budget request will include playoff tickets for myself and a select group of trainees, plus copious amounts of beer to allow me to observe participants in their natural environment and state. Can’t go wrong, really.

Round 2 picks due today, folks!

(from the Canadian Common CV FAQ page)

(I missed the last two weeks due to Good Friday and then a day off last week. Oops – bad blogger!)

Comment(s) of the Week

Apr 20 2012: Michael McCarthy for “What do you call a blind antelope?
No idea.

What do you call a blind antelope with no legs?
Still no idea.”

Pika for “How do you put a giraffe into a Fiat 500?
Open the door, put giraffe in, close the door.

How do you put an elephant into a Fiat 500?
You can’t, there’s a giraffe inside already.”

Prof-like Substance “I’m sure this will play out like all of these transitions do – initial screaming by the constituency, followed by screams returning to baseline levels in a year or two. The issue is that funding agencies have to do something to solve some major problems. They are not always going to get it right, but they have the money, so they make the rules. We can complain (and probably will), but it is what it is. Adapt or fall behind.”

Nina for “Come on Cath, at least you had a shower at all. Some weeks ago they turned off ALL our water at work without telling anyone and so I didn’t have a shower after cycling, no glass of water, and no cup of tea.
Or the time when the fire alamer went off when I was in the shower. Or the time we had a major earthquake and two of my colleagues were in the shower. Always bring a towel that is large enough to cover all your precious bodyparts.
The internet-thing is really realy stupid though.I suppose they will still bill you for the weeks without internet, as any self-respecting internetprovider would?”

Mermaid for “I hate the long wait time for Shaw. When they cancelled our cable two days after moving in (activating the previous owner’s disconnect request two days AFTER activating our connect request) they initially told us it would be 4 weeks for it to come back on. In the end, after a combination of complaining that we couldn’t work from home when needed and pointing out the Shaw technician who disconnected us was technically on our land without our permission, they came out in three days. Took lots of complaining though. Perhaps some whining. Might have been a spot of yelling (no, I am not proud of that).”

and Richard Wintle for “new poll result – “1 in 5 fans accurately predict Canucks playoff run!””

Apr 27 2012: Ricardipus (2011-2012 Regular Season Hockey Pool CHAMPION!!1!) for “That was really tense – 5-point margin on a total of 1,091. Quick, someone do some stats to prove my win isn’t statistically significant!

Thank you everyone, fun as always, and mod definitely had me sweating there (who gets 14 points out of a goalie in a single week?!!!!).”

Mike for “Well, as a big United fan (that is Dundee, as distinct from the wee Uniteds down south), the mid to later 80s were a time of constant disappointment for me. A string of Scottish and one UEFA cup final(s) have instilled a near permanent sense of impending doom in me. I’m still not completely sure we’ve really won the Scottish cup twice since then. Ya dancer!”

Ricardipus again “The problem is, you’ve set your sights too high. If you were a Torquay United fan (and I use that word advisedly) like me, you’d never expect to win anything. Less disappointment that way.”

Chall for “(Let’s see if I can remember how to write about anything other than hockey!)
Why? It’s the PLAY OFFS!!

and SB for “A few people from my new lab commented that they don’t attend these seminars because “jumiping genes” are very confusing to them… and I’m thinking: hold on, you expect non-stem cell biologists (i.e. most of the department) to understand your limit dilution setup on a tertiary transplant of virus transduced blood stem cells, yet you can’t get your head around a few basic molecular techniques?? Excuses.

The people I feel REALLY bad for are the bioinformaticians, because they put in ten times the amount of work into making their talks comprehensible to people outside the field, yet few people show up to actually hear them.”

May 4 2012: Silver Fox for “I didn’t know there was a way to automatically turn the font red for added sections/words and use strikeout on deleted portions, so once did that by hand for a long draft I was editing. It was impossible to read, but my boss wanted it (sodid it and kept my own clean copy).”

Nico for “We very occasionally get asked by author to track all changes in we make in a manuscript. We don’t, not because we’re all high and mighty, but because every single line of the manuscript is covered in changes when we’re done with it! eXtyles does that, it is much simpler to just make the changes and trust us (you can, really, we’re quite careful…).
[...]
I can’t stand Comic Sans, but my better half has it (or some similar derivative) as the default font on her phone. I think that’s a ploy so that I don’t touch the thing.”

Eva for “Is the answer “Download another browser”? Because it should be.”

Mike for “I rather hope the answer would be “jump in your jalopy and speed on into the 21st century.”

Or “still using IE4? Get the hell out of academia.””

and Grant for “yes, the correct fix is “for goodness sakes get a current browser for the love of everything sane”.

Besides Safari, Apple’s own browser (which is available for Windows) comes with the OS. Nothing to do – just use the existing browser.

Disclosure: I no longer know what browser I prefer as I think that while all of them render pages well, have decent user interfaces, etc., they all perform terribly under heavy loads or, in particular, low RAM. (Personally I smell an OS issue, but what gives?)”

May 11 2012: Nina for “Now I understand why there was only hockey updates for so long …! Not that I don’t like hockey, but it’s hard to connect when you’re in rugby-land.”

Richard Wintle for “The new job will be somewhat similar to my current one, but with much more emphasis on project management and much less on writing grants**.

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I’ll wait for the 5.5 year retrospective post to see just how much grant writing you *didn’t* get involved in…”

Grant for “As an independent computational biologist (i.e. a consultant), I can understand your happiness at being part of a team again. There’s that difference between working for a team, even if possibly being quite closely involved with them, and being part of the team. It’s a small difference in some ways, but a huge difference in others.”

Massimo for “First of all, congratulations. To me, someone like you is a bit the bellwether of how things are out there. If a person as talented and resourceful as you have proven to be, were one day truly unable to find employment, then we would know that things have gotten really, really bad. Fortunately it is not like that — yet.

Secondly I do not understand your misgivings and feelings of guilt, really. Where do they come from ? Why is it that it is OK for bosses to tell employees point blank “sorry your position has been/will (likely) be eliminated”, while employees have to walk on egg shells when it comes to firing their own employers ? You are on soft money, being told by your boss that at any moment your job may be no more, and you feel “guilty” about looking for something, anything to stay afloat ? I say you do what you gotta do, and if your boss should resent you (which I am sure he won’t), !@#$ them. Supply and demand must work equally in both directions, it cannot always be the employee to take the shaft.
Your soon-to-be-former boss may be the greatest person in this world, but if he cannot afford you, he has to settle for less, simple as that. The only chance to go back to a reasonable job market, in which mission critical individuals are hired as they should be (i.e., permanently) and paid as much as they are worth, is precisely by making employers realize that unless they put more on the table, they are not getting the performance.

So, you have the perfect job now. You know what I say ? Say, hypothetically, you get a phone call tomorrow from someone else — heck, your current boss, telling you that a permanent position may be available for you if you are interested — are you going to “feel guilty” about telling your new employer that you are quitting ? I sure as hell hope not.
If someone out there is willing to offer you more (either by way of better salary or stability), it means that that is what you are worth in a market economy. So, why should you settle for less ? If you want to do charity, I can name many worthy causes before either your current or past employer, believe me.
I don’t know, maybe I have gotten disillusioned with unions, but I do feel that unless employers start getting burned by employees leaving, things won’t get better.

[...]

Any employer demanding undivided loyalty of employees should commit 1) never to lay off anyone (unless the employee commits a crime) 2) always to beat any competitive salary offer and/or pay better than prevailing wage.
If they don’t, they are delusional and/or bullying thugs.”

Heather for “I like Massimo’s comment about the non reciprocity of the power structure. But I think there is nothing to be done except to be so good as to get some practice in asserting your choices.”

Richard Wintle again for “In the C. elegans world, there was for many years (and maybe it still exists now) a newsletter type of journal called The Worm Breeder’s Gazette. People would submit all kinds of unpublished things to it, in a format more or less like meeting abstracts. It was not, of course, peer reviewed. It served as a community publication so that people could know what everyone else was doing and spur discussion and collaboration, in the best spirit of the worm community, which has always been a very collegial bunch (in general).

Sounds great, right? Well, it was… to a point. It also, of course, served as a sort of virtual pissing post, so that people could essentially stake their claim to certain research areas and implicitly discourage others (or, if you like, encourage them to do something else). Yes, it kept people from duplicating efforts, thereby avoiding scoops. But it also meant that those researchers not playing the WBG game could sit back on the sidelines and keep an eye on what their competitors were (quite publicly) up to.

So – as an “open community” approach – same old same old. If everyone plays nicely, it’s great. But we all know that science doesn’t work that way.

Last related point – there are many examples where full-on competition has sped things up (public Human Genome Project vs. Celera; the Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, CF and retinoblastoma genes, structure of DNA, you name it). It doesn’t stretch the imagination much to think that fully open science could actually slow a lot of discoveries down, rather than speed them up.”

Gerty-Z for “Adam, I’m sure that [if everyone is open, no-one gets scooped] is true in some fantasy world where everyone has everything in the open. And also there is no one that would see your “open” work and instead of being all warm and fuzzy collaborative decides to speed up their work in the same area to beat you to the punch. But in the real world, that is not how it works. It seems ridiculous to ignore that. Do you want to be the one that sacrifices their ability to publish (and perhaps your career)?

Open science is an interesting idea, but I’m with Cath here–I can’t really get on board. I’m a junior faculty member, so I need to publish in order to keep my job. And my grad students and postdocs need to publish to advance in the careers that they want.”

Casey for “In almost every case I know of where one group scoops another, each group could have benefited from the collaboration. If you think about it, the only way this can’t be the the case is if the final papers contain exactly the same data. Is it really a good strategy to fund two, or more, labs to do the same research? In my mind, it’s a no-brainer that the cause of science would be advanced greatly if scientists worked together.

Of course, it sucks to get scooped, and no one working on p53 in HeLa cells would be wise to do it. If the field began to recognize the contributions that each scientist made to a project, instead of characterizing them simply as “first author”, “senior author”, or “may-have-done-slightly-less-work-than-first-author-or-may-have-just-done-a-couple-ligations” it would help a lot.”

Zen Faulkes for “There’s a another issue here, which is the underlying reason why “scooping” is a problem.

We place too much priority on being first and not enough on replication.

You would think that two labs arriving at the same conclusions independently should be reason for both papers to be published as complementary findings. It would show that the finding was rock solid.

The arsenic life story was also a good example of how completely ambivalent people are to replication, even of a big, high profile claim.”

and Austin Elliot for “What Zen said -replication is important, and underestimated.

If two labs do arrive at something simultaneously, so much the better. Less chance it’s wrong.

It is also a major way fraud is uncovered, I would have said.

Re ‘too much priority on being first’ I once had the experience of publishing a idea nearly at the same time as another lab. One of our more bitter professional rivals took exception to our later being credited with ‘simultaneous but independent’ in a commentary, and wrote to a journal editor (!) who’d published the commentary, pointing out our paper had been submitted a month later than the other discoverer’s. Coincidentally, other discoverer and bitter rival were friends.”

Post(s) of the Week

Apr 20 2012: Prof-like Substance for “In writing, your audience matters” and “Is there room in a review for grantsmithing feedback?”, and Sylvia McClain for “Why can’t we write like other people write?” (a theme, this week! Three great conversations about the definition and importance of good scientific writing)

Massimo for “Give him a chance? Sure, as long as…” (now that Canada has a new leader of the official opposition, does the end (getting rid of Harper) justify the means (a move to the centre)? Massimo and I disagree, but what do you think?)

Steve Caplan for “Accountable anonymity” (cyberbullying and the blogosphere)

and Jennifer Rohn for “In which the light bulb’s on the other foot” (last week we found out how many Belgians / Torontonians / engineers / psychiatrists it takes to change a light bulb; this week we find out how many light bulb changers it takes to break into a Tab-Seal closure full of isopropanol)

Apr 27 2012: Charles Pelkey, guest posting on the “Breast cancer? But doctor… I hate pink!” blog for “Tits-on-a-boar: a male’s thoughts on his own breast cancer” (one man’s story of a disease that’s rarely discussed)

Ann, usual author of the same blog, for “This surreal life” (beautifully written post about “mourning your own life while you’re still living it”)

Stephen Curry for “What’s your favourite colour?” (I agree with the commenters who argued that X-rays aren’t a colour, but also agree with Stephen that they’re pretty damn cool anyway. Great comments section on this one, too)

Jenny Rohn for “In which necessity’s a MoFo” (excellent examples of MacGyvered lab equipment)

Richard P. Grant for “Gonna build a house” (Yes. This. SO MUCH this.)

and Eva Amsen for “Hoping they’ll lose pinterest” (does every new medium need to be used for scientific messages?)

May 4 2012: Stephen Curry for “Eyes on the prize are blind to reality” (would replacing the current impact factor system with post-publication review and prizes for the best papers be better for open science?)

May 11 2012: Athene Donald for “Conferences and courage” (the importance of women asking questions at conferences – and of everyone asking good questions)

Nina for “Noho Marae” (interesting post about Maori culture, including musings on the meaning of “home”)

and Erika Cule for “You’re turning into your supervisor” (is it inevitable that trainees will inherit some of their supervisor’s habits and even personality traits? If so, is that a bad thing?)