Siliceous and Delicious

Ben

Progress on Deliverables

Meeting with Charles: didn’t get a chance to talk to him. Something came up Friday afternoon—Andy called a last minute lab meeting, had to read paper! Postpone this for a week or two.

But… did get a very helpful e-mail back from Dan Raboski. Did the coding in R—Dan sent the code, and said he would help Ben (sent lessons from his R course). Got his affirmation of Ben’s ideas. Provided scope for follow-up. Sounds like a good ally! Dan also mentioned that a new palaeo atlas now has scale bars (miracles of science!) Also mentioned the weighing approach to determine silica content—but this requires a lot of picking out and weighing of large numbers of samples.

Successfully set up Dropbox AND blog! Nice work.

Once GANTT charts are complete, might be worth going to see Andy and getting his perspective on the projects as laid out in the charts. Last time they talked was May. Busy right now.

Deliverables

1. Get to grips with R. Dan’s code is uncommented, but he did give a sample which will be helpful. Will take a peek at some of the tutorials which Dan sent through [dependent on completing the planning step (2)].
2. Complete planning using OmniPlan, and start to drill down first plan into OmniFocus.
3. Take a look at the Ohio samples. Add acid if needs be, otherwise figure out how to neutralize the acid (dump in bicarb?), dry them down and put them under the microscope.

Beau

Progress on Deliverables

Thursday was remarkably productive—model ran wonderfully, but none of the agents were doing anything. Spent Fri-Sat working out why that was: turned out there were problems with budgets in farmers, decision options dependent on distance from the Rockies, and size of farm determines diversity of crops available… simple problem in the end. Stripped out a lot of things that represented weeks of work, but were no longer justified. Felt like wasted so many hours of life; depressing. Established in chat with Mo that ideal job for Beau is President of the Universe… essentially just miserable. It helped taking off Sun-Tue.

Now transitioned to working on the ditch managers. Problem now is that diversions are plummeting through time, can’t work out why. Simulation of the state of repair of the ditch is problematic—decay rate is unknown. Initially modeled as exponential, but want to have relatively sudden drop-off as critical systems fail.

Frustrated with how long it takes to come up with these equations. It’s slow progress, B is worried—there aren’t an infinite number of days. Struggling with that, only solution seems to be to do less stuff, make it less complicated. Feels that he’s just no good at it. Hard deadline is CSU presentation—less than two weeks from today. Might be worth doing an OmniPlan as major milestone is approached (November 3rd). End of November: model absolutely needs to be done. There may be more fixes, but there’s no more complexity to be added. Not clear how the rest of it shakes out, how the holidays affect things.

Last week, should have been really happy when the model ran and thus exceeded expectations, but did not produce any joy or pleasure. Just done with it. Motivational issues (really hard to work on Saturday). Has learnt that willpower is not inexhaustible. Is also a question of mortality—can’t work like this forever. The carrot has become a little rotten and mangy—research is no longer the beckoning career. But at this stage manning up and getting it done is the only way forward.

Deliverables

1. As much progress as possible with the anomalies the model is showing.
2. OmniPlan for the final stages of the PhD.

After a couple of days of ludicrous procrastination, setting up my DropBox synchronization system, booking flights to go home for Christmas, and researching a potential move (among hundreds of other diversions), I spent some time today experimenting with a trial version of OmniPlan. It’s a great program, just as easy to use, well thought-out, and powerful as all the other Omni productions I’ve come to know and love. I walked through the help menu’s quick-start tutorial and created an overview for the diatom diversity project with Charles. It worked a charm, but the resulting chart is kind of simple:

The best part is definitely being forced to visualize the entire sweep of the project, from start to finish, and being forced to realize how long the whole thing is going to take as a sum of its constituent parts. Given that the only resource being utilized is me, and I only have so much labor time to offer (one person’s time, that is), it makes for quite an uncomplicated chart, one task after another, basically. This doesn’t justify shelling out for the program, but the thing I’m much more scared of is setting myself elaborate goals and timetables using this thing, and then getting depressed (again) when things don’t happen to schedule. Is that a fear I should avoid, by not planning, or confront and tackle, by planning anyway and reaping the potential benefits (such as paring a project down to realistic size from the outset, or abandoning excessively detailed work in the interest of ‘keeping on schedule’)?

I am tempted, but afraid. How this program would have helped at this time last year, when I spent so many weeks putting together those ridiculous flowcharts in Adobe Illustrator, which did nothing for me other than subtract time from doing actual research. That’s probably what I’m most afraid of: sinking a large amount of time into planning these projects, rather than doing them… Perhaps, then, I just need to set myself a strict time limit on setting up these plans (say, two days), after which I move on to begin work, regardless of how far I’ve gotten. Obviously I’ll need to schedule some time each week to review the plans, see how I’m doing, and make changes where necessary. This might be good preparation for DSA each week.

Beau

Deliverables

(1) Continue debugging, working towards having a one-year model run to present to CSU folks.

Ben

Deliverables

(1) OmniFocus review.

(2) Test OmniPlan.

(3) Talk to Charles about ongoing projects (diatom morphospace and diversity), touch base and reconnect.

(4) Set up blog.

(5) Set up DropBox.

Beau

Last Weeks’ Deliverables

(1) Methods chapter writeup

Finished it, sent out, Larry got back and said it was good, couldn’t be much clearer. Mike never commented on anything (no surprise), Dawn wrote insane email. Basically a complete. Beau checked email on a Sunday night, had meltdown. Emailed Larry and Mike, can’t handle this type of critique. MIT policies and procedures covers verbal harassment, under which Dawn’s behavior falls. Larry said Beau is entitled to remove her from the committee. Because Dawn is just a reader, removing her is easy (no repeat of colloquium). Options: Jim Westcott (Prof. of Islamic Architecture, but originally an engineer), knows all the people Beau works with. Met with him a week later, yesterday after no word from Mike emailed him directly — agreed to be on committee. Suggested a few changes in lit. review, but no word on areas Dawn was hypercritical of. Relief!

For Beau, this puts the nail in the coffin for academia — this sort of behavior has no consequences. Frustrating. Takes so long to resolve. Done now, though, and past caring. Only thing that matters now is graduating. Completely shut down email for a week for the first time in years. Stressful anxiety over not knowing. Relief now that it’s worked out.

(2) Finish CSU model

Next 3 weeks will be getting that done. Once all the changes are made, will need some runtime debugging (1-2 weeks). No biggie if it’s not working smoothly by the time of the meeting.

Now making good progress. Simplified a lot. Ironically, Dawn is getting what she wants in some ways — the best thing she said is to simplify things as much as possible. Now working towards early November workshop with CSU professors. Go through model bit by bit to see where he’s off / on target, esp. from the agricultural simulation side. Then start to simulate things in December, write up in Spring. Gotten into habit of not thinking more than four weeks ahead. Beau says he’s used up his “last life” on this. Spent a lot of years not seeing Gran, need to get something for it. Need to graduate. Dawn has destroyed any sense Beau had that the project was any good. Hard to remember that it has any validity. Beau still working on Reclamation consulting project. Economists elicit visceral diatribe response now… Nice distraction in any case. New coding philosophy: code as long as it takes to get to 5:30 pm, then you’re done. Whatever doesn’t get done gets deleted, and a little note made to justify the decision. Good philosophy! Indicator of Beau’s project status: was able to finish 20-minute presentation slot at group meeting in 8 minutes.

Ben

Sample collection in Australia: collected a big piece of shale. Much of it was silicified and so unlikely to be useful. Difficult to collect big samples from core. Replacement structures in sample – will work with JC to see what other fossils can be obtained. Radiolarian project: need to start getting going on this, get some samples. Zoe F project: last minute job… she ended up writing most of it. Contributed some paragraphs and a figure or two. Will be an author on it. Probably submitted to journal by now. No more contributions on this, apart from working with Zoe on revisions. Sample prep: started crushing and dissolution process, but had to go to Aus. Will pick up where he left off. Needs to process many dozens more by the spring. Needs to go through the list of papers and writing off to people and getting some samples. May still need to get to Ohio – a couple of trips, to do some more detailed work as per Andy’s request. Need to put samples in sedimentological and geological context – requires a little more attention.

Going away gave Ben some perspective. Some consolation in seeing that JC’s work is full of just as many dead-ends and challenges. Kind of inspiring to see the way she adapted. Helped Ben to not feel so stressed out about it. So much of lack of progress is tied up in feeling bad about it. Nice to get some distance and realize that it doesn’t matter if things are not “up to standards”, etc. Burden of personal history on this. Also a reminder that doing the work can be a lot of fun! Put Ben in touch with the science.

Deliverables

One major goal: get bearings, recover from jet lag and come up with a plan to carry through Christmas.

Reflections from Beau

You seem in great shape, particularly given the hellish experience you had coming home… It also seems that the time away was very productive in a non-traditional sense. There’s nothing like achieving a sense of perspective. Just as many of your comments have helped me to recognize better the value of taking time away from work, I think your wanderlust gives you space to breathe and think. It’s quite an achievement to get that paper published, regardless of how little you think you might have contributed (and I’m always suspicious when you say that, anyway, since I’m sure you put in more than your fair share). Make sure to pat yourself on the back for that! Now that you’re back and determined to make some headway – newly emboldened by the realization that no, you’re not expected to get things right first time and that everyone else is in the same boat – I look forward to tracking your progress!