rivka

boxofdelights' 16-year-old daughter, who goes by Nixie in boxofdelights' LJ and should probably do the same here, has been staying with us since July 28. She wanted to go to science camp this summer and it didn't work out, so instead she's attending Camp Rivka. She goes to work with me to observe a behavioral scientist in her natural habitat. On the days I'm home with the kids, I've arranged various field trips for her: she went to NASA Goddard and the National Wildlife Visitor Center with wcg, she visited the developmental psychology lab at Johns Hopkins because Colin was in a study there, and she's going to visit a lab that works on developing and testing new HIV tests. Today she has taken the train into DC to visit the Smithsonian.

On top of those things, we've crammed in extra science-related opportunities where we can. She and Michael went to a public lecture at the Space Telescope Science Institute. We all went to the Maryland Science Center. And during a brief flyby visit by my grad school friend David, who is a developmental psychologist, we put Alex through some of the classic Piagetian tasks and demonstrated that she hasn't managed to work out the details of conservation yet.

It will not shock anyone who knows boxofdelights to hear that Nixie is very, very smart. I'm enjoying her sharp analytical mind, and I'm impressed that in such a short visit I've been able to give her work on my study that calls for thought and judgment. In addition to being smart, she's also charming, poised, and easygoing. She's been great company. The kids adore her. I do worry that she's not having as good a time being here as we are having her here, although she certainly seems to be happy.

In a fun coincidence, she told me her first day here that she hopes to go to Reed. boxofdelights either didn't tell her or didn't know that I went to Reed myself. I think Nixie is exactly what Reed is looking for, and I've offered to write a recommendation letter telling them so. (I don't think our contact will be long enough to make me a useful recommender to other colleges, but I think that Reed will value an alumna opinion.)

Nixie will be here until Wednesday. After that my normal life should more-or-less resume, and you'll probably see more of me on LJ. In the meantime, I am reading your posts, but not doing much else.

We got back from Montreal Sunday night, dirty and exhausted but reasonably pleased. It was a good trip.

As far as the ostensible reason for our trip, the Society of Behavioral Medicine conference, the thing that will pay for my plane ticket and the hotel room and a fair bit of the food: it went surprisingly well. My talk was well-attended and well-received; there were more questions during the question period than I had time to answer, and some people stayed to ask me questions afterward or even approached me later in the exhibit hall. I think I did a good job writing the talk and delivering it, especially considering the circumstances.

Last year I didn't enjoy the SBM program very much. This year, I managed to make it to several great program items. It seemed like there were more interesting options and better HIV representation. I particularly enjoyed a symposium on novel strategies for accessing populations of ethnic-minority men ("So it turns out, in our part of North Carolina, you reach African-American men through the churches, but Latino men, no. And then we found out about the soccer league!"), and a keynote address on using marketing and mass communications to disseminate valid scientific information.

The only thing that's bugging me about SBM right now is that it seems like every year there is more and more of an "obesity epidemic" focus. I was never interested in that topic era to begin with, but now that I've read so much that debunks dieting and obesity panic, I find it irritating. I'm fine with the program items about increasing activity level and consumption of healthy foods, because I think those things have independent health benefits, but I kind of want to go to the weight loss intervention panels and ask politely what the follow-up data looks like five years out.

I managed to see three-quarters of most of the sessions I attended. They were mostly scheduled to be 90 minutes long, and somewhere around the 70-minute mark Colin would start to wake up or make sounds. I was hypersensitive to every noise he made, because at a professional conference Colin is not part of the community and has no independent right to be there. So at the second coo or gurgle we were out the door. We got nothing but friendly looks, though.

The non-conference portions of the trip were just excellent. papersky always provides visitors with quality entertainment. One major highlight was a free-flying butterflies exhibit at the botanical gardens. Picture a big plant-filled atrium with thousands and thousands of butterflies swarming about - not just common ones, either, but massive South American specimens. I mean, just walking along you'd find yourself flinching away from the most spectacular butterfly you'd ever seen, trying to keep it from flying right into your face. (Also at the Jardin Botanique, a really neat greenhouse filled with "economic" tropical plants - foods, dyes, etc. I never knew what a black pepper plant looked like. Or the source of the ubiquitous xanthan gum. Alex loved that room.)

The other big highlight was a picnic on an island, on the unexpectedly warm and lovely Saturday. We spread blankets under some pines for the shade and found ourselves in the center of an active flock of red-winged blackbirds. A woodchuck ambled back and forth, sometimes as little as twenty feet away. After a delicious lunch, we went into the Biosphere (not to be confused with the Biodome) - a small museum housed in the frame of a giant geodesic dome. The only great exhibit was a water activity room, but that one was really great, so that was just fine. Plus admission was free for Earth Day. Alex had a wonderful time making rivers and pools and channels and sailing boats and walking across water on pontoons and otherwise getting very damp indeed.

Of course, as is the case any time one visits papersky, we had excellent food. Highlights for me were a Chinese feast the first night, an incredible dim sum spread on Sunday morning, and - oddly enough - the shish kebob dinners we ordered delivered to our hotel room the night that papersky and rysmiel had a dinner party to attend. But really, there was only one meal I thought was just so-so, and that time it was clear that I had ordered the wrong thing.

So that was our trip. I think I'll probably write another post about traveling with both kids later.

...but how to pass up the opportunity?

As part of the economic stimulus package, the Obama administration has set aside $200 million for "challenge grants," two-year NIH research awards that are aimed to hire a bunch of scientists and pump money into the economy. They have to be applied for immediately. (Well, they've been out for a few weeks, but I wasn't really thinking about grants last month.) The application is fairly minimal - you don't have to have "background" and "preliminary studies" sections the way you usually do, just a 12-page argument for what you want to do and why it's important.

The catch is that, whatever your dream research idea, you have to squeeze it so it fits into one of their approved topic areas. I know what I need to do next: take my research about HIV conspiracy theories and develop an intervention to address the problem. It didn't seem to fit into any of the challenge grant topic areas... except that a couple of days ago my RA pointed out that there might be one that kind of, if you cross your eyes a little, sort of fits.

It doesn't cost anything to query, right? ( Read more... )

Alex participated in another study at the Johns Hopkins Laboratory for Child Development this week. She's done this from time to time, and it's always a lot of fun. This time they were interested in the relationship between preschoolers' counting ability and their ability to compare quantities.

First they had Alex do some straight-up counting of animals on cards. Next they gave her cards with pictures of two kinds of animals interspersed. They asked her (for example) to count the giraffes, count the elephants, and then say whether most of the animals were giraffes or elephants.

If you'd asked me to predict the results before we entered the room, I would've said that Alex would do a decent job of counting but that she would have trouble making a relative comparison of quantities when the numbers were close. When I saw that the animals were scattered randomly across the card instead of being neatly lined up, I figured that she'd have trouble counting them accurately, too. (It's hard for a little kid to remember which ones they've already counted.) I was surprised to see that her ability to count a random array has significantly improved - she made two or three errors, but was only ever one off. And she didn't make any mistakes on the comparisons.

Afterward, the experimenter told me that so far (Alex was the 250-somethingth subject) they haven't found any relationship between counting ability and comparative estimation. Some kids are great counters but can't figure out which one has the most. Some kids can't really count very well at this age, but unfailingly say which are the most animals - even when it's a question of 8 versus 7. So it seems that these two number skills are completely separate developmental processes. Isn't that fascinating?

(Also fascinating, if you are a big old cognitive development geek: this paper (warning: PDF) reporting the results of the last study Alex was in, which shows how ridiculously good two-year-olds are at learning new words, even in challenging contexts.)

Last, but not least, there's been a new development this week that may have implications for this journal. Alex was hanging out by my side while I read LJ. I started to leave a comment in wiredferret's journal, and suddenly a little voice piped up, "Why did you write my name?" Oops. She's been able to recognize her name for a long time, but apparently now she's following along with my typing and picking out her name from a block of text. So that's a little... constraining.

If you're looking for a great way to jump-start a grey and chilly morning, I can heartily recommend an IRB audit. I am feeling very... awake.

The IRB is the Institutional Review Board, the university entity charged with protecting research participants and making sure that investigators follow all possible regulations. Last month they sent me a "self-assessment," a 15-page MS Word form with lots of checkboxes, most of which didn't apply to me. I had to go through and check them anyway. Which, in Word, means double-clicking each one to open it and then selecting the "check box" radio button and then closing it. For hundreds of checkboxes, most of which needed to be marked N/A.

This morning, bright and early, they showed up in my office. They spent about an hour asking me questions. Then they took all my informed consent documents, my regulatory paperwork binder, and my HIPAA (health privacy) forms and disappeared to a vacant cubicle down the hall. They're planning to come back in a little while and look over my "source documents" - the actual questionnaires completed by actual research participants.

I already have a list of things to fix from our friendly conversation. I'm waiting to find out if they have major problems with anything else. If they do - and they shouldn't; I am a careful researcher, and am particularly careful about subjects' rights - they can shut me down.

This is not fun.

Michigan State biologist Richard Lenski has been following an E. Coli population for 20 years, and has produced evidence of a major evolutionary shift in response to environmental conditions.

Some puffed-up "Conservapedia" hacks decided that they were competent to take apart Lenski's conclusions, and wrote to him demanding that he release his raw data for "examination by independent reviewers."

The resulting exchange of letters is pretty entertaining. Here's my favorite bit from the exchange:

It is my impression that you seem to think we have only paper and electronic records of having seen some unusual E. coli. If we made serious errors or misrepresentations, you would surely like to find them in those records. If we did not, then – as some of your acolytes have suggested – you might assert that our records are themselves untrustworthy because, well, because you said so, I guess. But perhaps because you did not bother even to read our paper, or perhaps because you aren’t very bright, you seem not to understand that we have the actual, living bacteria that exhibit the properties reported in our paper, including both the ancestral strain used to start this long-term experiment and its evolved citrate-using descendants. In other words, it’s not that we claim to have glimpsed “a unicorn in the garden” – we have a whole population of them living in my lab! [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unicorn_in_the_Garden] And lest you accuse me further of fraud, I do not literally mean that we have unicorns in the lab. Rather, I am making a literary allusion. [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allusion]

The Conservapedia talk pages are hilarious. My favorite unintentional bit of comedy: the plaintive heading on the talk archive page "Anyone a biologist?" (Answer: sadly, no.)

(Via Pandagon)

Edited to add: Wait, wait, here's another favorite bit from the talk pages: "I asked Zachary Blount to clarify his statements about whether evolution of Cit+ (citrate-eating) E. coli bacteria was a goal of the experiment. He answered by asking me to go on a wild goose chase by reading the whole paper, which has 8 pages of fine print -- this is called "bibliography bluffing." And when people balk at going on these wild goose chases, they are accused of not wanting to learn."

Man. I can't believe that charlatan Blount expected that anyone wishing to argue about the merits of a scientific paper would read all eight pages of the paper itself. Why would you set up such ludicrously rigorous standards? Only if you have something to hide...

I'm applying for a program designed to help early-career psychologists develop as independent researchers in the field of HIV and communities of color. One part of the application asks for an honest assessment of the "strengths and weaknesses of the applicant's current capacity" in this area.

I did a little brainstorming, and here's what I came up with off-the-cuff:

Strengths:
Experience
Population access
Clinical acumen with research population
Broad involvement with/knowledge about many research areas within HIV
Communication and writing skills
Cultural competence working with African-Americans
R21 – already funded in this area for an exploratory/developmental grant
Developed research ideas

Weaknesses:
Isolation at my current institution
Weak statistical background
No prior experience in intervention research
White as a freaking piece of paper

...Okay, so maybe that last item shouldn't make it into the final edit of the application. But it's something that I'm acutely aware of, and I'd be kidding myself to say that it won't be a disadvantage. I like to think that I have the skills and awareness to do this work well, and yet.

I wonder how the Great Cultural Appropriation Debate extends to research.

It's time for my first ever performance review as a faculty member. (I was promoted to the faculty in July, as you may or may not recall.) I just filled out the self-review questionnaire, which happily skips over all the things I got evaluated for as a staff member, like "work habits," and cuts to the chase: publications, grant funding, teaching, mentoring, service.

At the end, there's a section titled "Summary of major accomplishments during the current academic year," followed by a section where you list your goals for the upcoming year. And hey, when I write my accomplishments out? I look like I had a damn good year. It's kind of funny, because I don't feel as professionally successful as the summary makes me look... and yet, there isn't anything there that isn't true.

( blatant self-promotion under the cut )

In conclusion: Damn. *I'd* hire me.

( How much money is it, and who's paying? )

( What are you actually studying? )

( What will this mean for your career? )

So this is a Big Deal for my academic career. But also: I think this is an important project which has the potential to make valuable contributions to science. I think this is research that Should Be Done. I am so excited to have the opportunity to make that happen.

It occurred to me this morning that I was supposed to hear about my grant application at the end of January.

As you probably won't recall, back in November I got an ambiguous score from the scientific review committee - on the border between the low end of fundable scores and the high end of unfundable scores. I believe that the exact words my Program Officer used were "not outside the realms of possibility." Then she talked to me about how I could revise the application to make it stronger.

So this morning, remembering that I ought to have heard by now, I checked NIH's electronic research commons. For the longest time, my grant had the words "Pending Council Review" next to the title. This morning? I was flummoxed to see, next to the title, the words "Pending Award."

Pending Award.

I clicked through to the detailed information page. The Council was recorded as having met on February 13. There was no other new information about the status of my application.

Pending Award!! I didn't quite believe it, having not actually heard anything, but as I headed off to the clinic to run subjects I let my mind linger on how totally awesome it would be to actually have my own funding.

When I got back to the office, I sent a little query to my NIH Program Officer, in which I tried to restrain my excitement as best I could. Then I googled "NIH pending award." And immediately found:

"For example, some applicants get excited when they see a "Pending Award" status for their application. But that doesn't mean an award is in process. Even some applications that are ultimately not funded will show the "Pending Award" status in the Commons for the remainder of the fiscal year. Read more about deferred applications [...]

And from there, I learned that some applications - usually ones just on the "payline," or the cut point between funded and unfunded scores - are deferred until the end of the fiscal year, when the various Centers know how much money they're likely to have left.

Oh.

It's still better than a rejection, of course, but my momentary excitement deflated like a balloon. "Pending award" doesn't mean that an award is, actually, pending. It means that they're still making up their minds. Which is totally better than having them say no outright, mind you. It's just not what I briefly had the luxury of thinking it was.

Sadder but wiser, I started to write up this post. In the middle of it, I got an e-mail back from my Program Officer. (Have I mentioned that she's a lovely woman? She's marvelous.) It said:

"They often say pending award, but in your case it is a real possibility. Have you sent in your JIT yet? If not, I think you should."

So. Welcome back aboard the Merry-Go-Round of Hope! I hope you enjoy your ride, and that the nausea you experience is only mild.