Five side effects to being a postgraduate student

There are many wonderful things about being a postgraduate student. A personal computer! A sandwich toaster! Bakeoffs! Bliss! However, we've thought of a few side effects that we've come across in our efforts to get educated. We're sure you can think of more!

1. Judgement based on your subject area. I study platypus venom, which is strange and obscure, so it naturally follows that I am a little odd, and at risk of becoming an eccentric-professorial-type later in life.

2. Novelty T-shirts. It’s your birthday coming up. Your friends can’t afford to buy you that art deco teacup/Shetland pony you’ve always wanted. Instead, “Great, he/she studies X”, your friends think, “why not get him/her a novelty t-shirt?”*. Luckily, when I describe my area of study no-one has yet listened past my description “I study platypus venom...” to hear the next bit “...genes”, or else I would be at risk of drowning in a sea of double helix tops.

3. Your subject area everywhere. On birthday cakes (especially if you study cars, squares, or cakes, or if your friends are very clever like mine are (see pic). More difficult if you are studying pi or Greek furniture of the 3rd century).
On statues (especially if you are studying an Australian animal/explorer, or any fruit. Again, if you are studying pi then you might be ok). You won’t be able to get away from it!

4. Unstructured days. Sure I can go shopping on Tuesday. Whoops, I slept in and it’s noon and I’m still in my PJ’s, is it even worth going to uni?

5. Becoming an expert in procrastination. As an undergraduate, you thought you were pretty good at this already. But you thought wrong! Until you became a postgraduate, you were a most productive individual. In fact, this is such a big facet of postgraduate life we feel that an entire procrastination-themed blog post is due in the near future.**

*Author's note: You know I love the platypus t-shirt you gave me, Kao!
** No, reading The Appendix does not count as procrastination.



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Proof that we are better than trained monkeys

We have heard several PhD students over the last few years complain about how a trained monkey could do 95% of their work. Happily, Jo Griffith has pointed us in the direction of this book excerpt, which begs to differ.

Extract from Complications – a surgeon’s notes on an imperfect science by Atul Gawande, (2002, Picador: New York) on training surgeons.

"As one professor of surgery put it to me, given the choice between a PhD who had painstakingly cloned a gene and a talented sculptor, he'd pick the PhD ever time. She, he said, he'd bet on the sculptor being more physically talented; but he'd bet on the PhD being less "flaky." And in the end that matters more. Skill, surgeons believe, can be taught, tenacity cannot. It's an odd approach to recruitment but it continues all the way up the ranks, even in top surgery departments. They take minions with no experience in surgery, spend years training them and then take most of their faculty from these same home grown ranks.

And it works. There have now been many studies of elite performers - international violinists, chess grand masters, professional ice-skaters, mathematicians and so forth - and the biggest difference researchers find between them and lesser performers is the cumulative amount of deliberate practice they've had. Indeed, the most important talent may be the talent for practice itself. K. Anders Ericsson, a cognitive psychologist and expert on performance, notes that the most important way in which innate factors play a role may be in one’s willingness to engage in sustained training. He’s found, for example that top performers dislike practicing just as much as others do (that's why, for example, athletes and musicians, usually quit practicing when they retire). But more than others they have the will to keep at it anyway."
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Are dog breeds actually different species?

Discussed here in the Scientific American.
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Why you (a scientist) should use Twitter in your work

Postgrads are people that have gone back to uni to do an advanced degree. We're not paid much, and we're nerds. Outside of our work at Uni, I like to think that we all have friends and family that aren't academics... or know one or two non-scientists, at the very least.

Despite this, we show an amazing divorce from mainstream culture, and especially from the way most people communicate with one another. Most of the postgrad students that work next to me are Generation Y. You'd never know it though - one is an avid fan of Radio National, another does craft in her spare time, and out of the twenty or so that I see most regularly, exactly one has a Twitter account that she opened without being paid to do so.

WHY? That's the question. There's no point in finding a cure for cancer if you don't tell anyone about it! In the Vet Faculty, where we work on animal health, it seems especially strange that we don't usually use mainstream communication channels to let animal lovers know what we've found.

Unfortunately, there's a very strong culture in science that drives home the message "If you can't prove it, don't say anything". This is a very damaging point of view, because it contrasts so strongly with the way the rest of our Western culture works. Earlier today, I read about some Patti Smith - or somelike her at least - you know, very cool and not, on the face of it at least, a complete idiot - getting injections of black sheep fetus to make herself look younger. WTF??? There was some deranged quote about how she thought it made sense that injecting young tissue would make her look younger. (Leaving my main topic on a tangent, but why did she not go on to think that it's going to make her black, or look like a sheep, or cause her to grow wool??? Maybe she really has done too much blow.)

Science has to compete with the fraudulent clinic that sold poor Patti this stuff. That means we can't wait until we're sure! We need to loudly and constantly declare "SCIENTISTS SAY: To the best of our knowledge, injecting yourself with sheep fetus is IDIOTIC and probably DOWNRIGHT DANGEROUS!". If, by some twist of fate, this turns out to be AOK, it's perfectly OK to update the message: "SCIENCE ADVANCES! Injecting yourself with sheep fetus is just fine and it DOES make you look younger!!!"

So, to answer the questions in the title directly:

Twitter: with messages of just 140 characters, young scientists can learn to keep it short and sweet. A laboratory Twitter channel would be the perfect place to put updates about equipment condition, who's around and who's away, new primers, that a protocol did or didn't work, that you found a piece of the puzzle, had mysterious results, or even that you've just got a paper published in a scientific journal...

REMEMBER: there's no point in doing science if you don't tell people what you found!!!
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Imagine being one of 100,000 fully sequenced people

What they say:

"The Personal Genome Project is an open-ended research study that aims to improve our understanding of genetic and environmental contributions to human traits. We are enrolling members of the public who are willing to share their genome sequence and other personal information with the scientific community and the general public."


Although I know some people will leap to point out the privacy issues that could come as part of this project, it seems like an incredible opportunity to contribute to our understanding of biology, way beyond the personal sacrifice of lost privacy about health data. And without having to work hard either! They're only requesting USA-ians at the moment, but I for one will be keeping my ears open in case this goes world-wide at some point.

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Expand the gene pool

No, we're not advocating gettin' jiggy with it, instead we're talking about a new competition that is being run in conjunction with Evolution - The Festival, which is being held to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin.

Join project Gene Pool, where you can creatively explore what evolution means to you either in any medium or by attempting to "mutate the ABC archives". We're not exactly sure what this means but, like evolution, who know where it might lead? Entries will then be naturally selected (ha, ha). Bad puns optional.
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Best and brightest (that's us!) kept dirt poor

A piece this week in The Age newspaper has revealed that this year's budget has done little to alleviate the financial woes of PhD students:
http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/clever-country-our-brightest-are-kept-dirt-poor-20090513-b3bz.html?page=-1
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It's just a little bit of G-T-C-A...

Remember last year we posted about the "Dance your PhD competition"? How about going one better and adding some catchy lyrics to give you this year's hottest dance song? Ok that's an exaggeration but it really is a giggle... see it here. Turn up the volume and get grooving, labtastic people!

If you come across any other great youtube videos we'd love to see them. What's one more item for procrastination in a PhD student's life?
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2009 Science and Innovation Awards for Young People

• Do you have an innovative idea that will boost Australia's rural industries?
  
• Do you need up to $50,000 for make your idea reality?
  
• Do you want to kick start your career and build professional networks?
  
• Do you want media training to help promote your ideas?
  

For more information and to download an application form, visit www.daff.gov.au/scienceawards or the Science Awards Manager on 02 6272 5039.

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Animalwatch bucketlist #1 Numbat

New regular segment, as inspired by Garbutt et al (2007) “100 animals to see before they die”.

Aliases:
• Myrmecobius fasciatus
• Walpurti
• Banded Anteater

Under 25 words:
A colourful 20-30cm marsupial found in Western Australia with a pointed muzzle and bushy tail, their days are synchronised with their main food source termites.

To see a Numbat …
By car…
1) Drive 12 hr 33 min (1150km) from Usyd through Sturt Hwy to Scottia Sanctuary (south of Broken Hill, near the border of SA/NSW)
By plane
2) $199 one-way to Perth 2hr, hire a car ~$30, drive to Perth Zoo, $16 entrance,
Total cost ~$450

If you have taken a photo of a Numbat, please email it to theappendixblog@gmail.com so we can tick it off the appendix bucketlist!

By Quintin Lau
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