Thanksgiving & Its Perils

This past weekend was Thanksgiving, a holiday filled with food, family, and *ahem* Black Friday shopping.  Due to weather concern I spent my Thanksgiving in Milwaukee instead of with my family in Minnesota but I did make some traditional Thanksgiving fare (sweet potato casserole, pumpkin pie, toffee cookies, and dinner rolls) so I didn't completely miss out on the food portion of the holiday.

While I love shopping, I chickened out this year for participating in Black Friday.  It was very very cold outside!  The original plan was to hit the outlet mall at 10 PM Thursday night.  After a large temperature drop in the middle of the afternoon on Thursday I decided my plan was rotten and that I should just go shopping on Saturday instead.  Yes I could have gone out Friday still, and yes you can (for the most part) get all the same deals online that are to be had in stores, but I didn't really need anything to warrant the crazy shopping.  All I really need are more clothes to replace the ones that I've destroyed working in the lab.

Thanksgiving sure does have its perks.  It's on a Thursday which pretty much guarantees that one will have Friday off from work and maybe Wednesday as well.  When I was working on my bachelor's and master's degrees these days off meant nothing to me as I would have had final exams the week before and the whole week of Thanksgiving as a "break."  Now that I'm in the working world I just get Thursday and Friday off from work but as a graduate student at a big, semester schedule school I no longer have a break.  I had my microbiology class on Tuesday like normal, but my once-a-week Thursday class was moved to Tuesday to account for the day off.  There went my normal Tuesday afternoon work in the school lab time.

On a trimester schedule the week of Thanksgiving was nice because I didn't have to worry about anything school related.  No exams, no homework, and nothing upcoming!  Not so much now.

The peril of having a four day weekend is that now the likelihood that I'll have a lengthy to do list is high, and the likelihood of my accomplishing anything from that list is low.  Sigh.  Today I have a test in microbiology, my part of a grant proposal due, a meeting with my advisor, and some lab work that I've been putting off.  Today is going to be busy.

Darkness

It gets so dark so early these days.  It's hard to stay motivated when I go to work in the dark and come home in the dark.  Plus it's freezing (literally) outside and all I want to do is stay home on the couch with hot chocolate.  This was the view outside my lab on Tuesday at 4 PM.

It should not be this dark this early.  There is one more month ahead of me just like this until the winter solstice. I need to move closer to the equator.

In Class Experiments

One of the classes I am taking this term is called Pollutant Dispersion Processes.  It's the class I like the least of my two, mostly because the few assignments I've had involved MATLAB.  I'm still not very good at MATLAB but I am better than when the class first started.

Anyway, back in October we got to do a fun little in class experiment that involved trekking over to the Milwaukee River and releasing some (EPA approved I believe) red dye.  The main goal was to measure the amount of "pollutant" that passed through the center of the river.

Since I wasn't one of the people do got to don waders for the occasion, I stood on the river bank and recorded this little example of what went on:



I like this type of class activity.

And Then You Edit

So you've written a paper. Phew.

You diligently carved out time every day to sit down and pen a few lines of prose. You paced the floor, you muttered to yourself, you bounced ideas off your colleagues, you did your best to manipulate Microsoft Word into doing your bidding. But before you submit the paper, before you hand it over to someone else to read, you've got to edit it yourself.

After I finished writing my thesis for my masters I was exhausted. Hours were spent hunched over my keyboard pecking away. Candles were burned at both ends. Cliches were tossed about. But read my own thesis?

"I know my thesis like the back of my hand! Why would I need to read it?"

Well...I tend to write like I talk. I think most people do this, it's fairly common in the age of social media/internet. Unfortunately, the writing-like-you-talk style of writing is not ideal when it comes to things like papers for publication...or my thesis. So of course I needed to read my thesis but I honestly didn't do that great of a job reading through it. It's tough to read your own work when you feel like you have it all memorized.

When I saw this article on the Chronicle of Higher Education's website about editing yourself I was psyched. "Perhaps I can find some tips for the paper I'm having a tough time crafting," I thought. And I did but not as many as I had hoped for. The two main tips from the article are in italics below, emphasis mine.

All I can do is urge [you] to pay attention to well-written works in [your] own field, to read not just for content, but also for the nuances of style, and to steal the tools and tricks that good writers use.

I recently read a great journal article about microbial desalination cells whose text seems to follow such a logical manner I can't help but admire it. I could probably do something similar for my topic.

If you don't remember the basics—like what a semicolon does—you might want to remind yourself. If you don't know the difference between further and farther, lay and lie, figure it out (or go lie down until you do). If you are prone to comma splices (as I am), be aware of that and make conscientious choices. Those are not trivial issues. If we don't take the form seriously, the content of the message won't get delivered. There's no point in writing if you're not going to be understood.

Over the weekend I reviewed a paper that was full of mistakes. On one hand the writer of that paper was an English as a second language person and an undergraduate student. I'm not saying that ESL or undergraduate students don't know how to write, I'm saying that I think it's harder to write a paper in that situation. On the other hand a lot of the mistakes were formatting ones (e.g. "Figure 1.title of figure here" vs "Figure 2. The blah blah shows blah.") which I would consider mistakes that anyone could catch regardless of language or years in school.

I've been using Guide to Technical Editing: Discussion, Dictionary, and Exercises as my go-to style guide but that's simply because it was the book that the "Writing and Editing for Technical Publishing" class I took last year used. This article recommends The Elements of Style (4th Edition) plus Style: Toward Clarity and Grace (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing), and a four-and-a-half star Amazon rating can't be too far off. The article goes on to name other reference books for writing and editing such as Economical Writing, Second Edition and On Writing: 10th Anniversary Edition: A Memoir of the Craft.

These five books aren't the only ones out there. Are there any must-have style guides that you use?

Origin vs Sigma Plot

Poll time! Which do you use for making your publication-ready graphs/charts/tables: Origin or Sigma Plot?

I honestly haven't made much progress in my paper writing though I have finished off one of the grants already. What I have done however, is assemble a bunch of data that I can turn into publication-ready figures...as soon as I figure out which software to use.

This would look good in a paper...right?*

My advisor uses Sigma Plot, a co-worker uses Origin. At this point I'm leaning towards Origin because they have a student version that I could purchase for $50/year. I didn't see a student version for Sigma Plot, in fact the cheapest version I saw was $499 (ouch!). Ideally work would get me a license for creating publication quality figures but at this point I'm going to assume that I will be footing the bill.

So, what should it be: Origin or Sigma Plot?

*Not actual data. I know it looks good (ha) but I really made this in Paint in less than five minutes.


UPDATE (6/14/2011):  I've had some time to use both Sigma Plot and Origin now (my Sigma Plot license expired any my company decided not to renew it) and I wanted to give some more information that someone will hopefully find helpful.  I've only created very basic graphs with both software, graphs one could create in Microsoft Excel but look better in professional software.

I found Sigma Plot easier to use right off the bat.  I was able to copy and paste my MS Excel data into Sigma Plot and create a graph within a matter of minutes without reading the manual - pretty awesome.  When it came time to stack graphs, make a secondary axis, add error bars, etc. I had to pull out the manual and found the process rather painful.

Origin I could not use without reading the manual.  Time consuming and tedious, it took me a ridiculous amount of time to get my data in Excel and an even longer amount of time to figure out how to plot on the secondary axis.  Origin isn't all bad - once I got the hang of it, Origin was really simple to use.

Hectic Day

In one of my recent posts I mentioned that I respond well to bribery, especially in the form of cookies. I probably should have mentioned in that post that all the students in the lab received cookies shortly before our advisor flew to Mexico for a week.

The cookies were the incentive to keep our microbes live and well, not to mention have a bunch of stuff ready to share in the weekly meeting. My weekly meeting occurs every Tuesday afternoon for an hour. It takes the full hour because I either have an experiment that goes really well (which gets my advisor very excited about what I can publish) or one that goes really poorly (which confuses my advisor and causes us to spend significant time troubleshooting the problem).

My advisor came back yesterday. Regularly scheduled meeting was today.

I have two different experiments running right now: one is doing great, the other not so much. The two experiments, combined with the fact that I was out of town since last Friday and didn't get a chance to assemble my data over the weekend like I normally do (I got back in town last night at 11:30), meant that I was frantically sitting in the lab all morning trying to put together information to show my advisor. I finished just in the nick of time by looking through my lab notebook during class and skipping breakfast & lunch.

The hectic pace of earlier today has left me feeling unmotivated to continue working on a take-home midterm I have due Thursday. I must pull myself together! While I'd love for this midterm to complete itself I doubt it will happen.

City View

The nice thing about my lab is that is has windows. Lots of windows. A whole row of windows in fact!

The bad thing about the windows is that they're high off the ground. In fact, the bottom of the window is just above my eye level. Most of the time I can only see sky when I look out the window...but if I climb up on the lab bench then I get views like this:

At night.

During the day.

Pretty! Especially now when all the leaves are changing color and with Lake Michigan such a nice blue in the background.