Beyond the Drawbridge

I am a serious threat to society, with my “writing” and my “independent thinking”:

There are several issues that I have to stress and that we need to discuss:(…) Any paper that is written from my lab is done so after I decide it is ready and appropriate for submission. In this case, you wrote a draft without consulting with me first and without me giving you the “go-ahead” to start writing.

I wrote the draft in my spare time, after I left the lab, adapted from a thesis chapter, and I had mentioned several times over the past year that I would like to do that. I have also regularly expressed that I just like writing things down and that I am not after high-impact publications or whatever reason people might normally have to write things down. Nothing has been submitted anywhere. I do not plan to send this to peer review, and I explained about preprint servers and non-peer-reviewed archives of preliminary data and I still got comments like “not every work performed in the lab and described in a thesis does or should be published as a formal paper. This part of your work fall [sic] into that category, in my opinion.” and “the experiments would have to be repeated by someone else to exclude human errors”

Fine, I know that. I know my work sucks, but people – respectable, smart people with valid opinions and tenured jobs – have actually asked to see it and encouraged me to publish it somewhere, anywhere, peer-reviewed or not. And of course I know I’m not allowed to just submit things places without permission,  but I didn’t do that. The whole discussion about submitting is beyond the point, because nothing was submitted. I just wrote it down. No, not even – I took something that I  had already written, and renumbered figures and tables. In my spare time. Because I wanted to.

And that is not allowed.

Just because you’re DVC Research doesn’t give you the right to nick my chair EVERY TIME YOU TALK TO YOUR FUCKING USELESS POSTDOC.

This person is not particularly liked around the place. This

I just used [the gel-doc system] and the person before me had left a puddle of liquid on the glass base.  Judging from the photo taken I presume this liquid would have been contaminated with ethidium bromide.

This sort of mess left on common-use equipment shows a certain amount of laziness and disregard for colleagues, not to mention the potential damage to the instrument.

So whoever left the mess, get your act together and clean up after yourself.  If the box of tissues is empty, as it was when I used the instrument, go and get another box – like I had to.

None of this is all that difficult.

Bleh. Please.

Thanks to the Black Knight for offering me a place to vent things that I’d rather not put on a blog with my name on it. Like this story about the FACS booking system…

During my time at my old lab, I used the hospital’s flow cytometry facility to sort my cells. When we (lab and facility) moved to a new building, the facility merged with that of another hospital, and they changed their booking system.

The old system worked like this:
I would pop over to the facility, and the tech would say:
-“Oh, hi, how have you been? Need to sort? That’s great. I have some time on Wednesday two weeks from now.”
-“Nah, Wednesday is no good for this, can I go on Thursday or Friday?”
-“Well, I can fit you in on Friday, but I’d have to start half an hour earlier. Is that okay?”
-“Sure, thanks! See you!”
And they would write the booking in by hand on a supplier-swag monthly wall calendar, and I’d plan my transfection for the day before my appointment, and everything just functioned.

The new system “worked” like this:
They switched from the wall calendar to an online booking system that was originally meant for something else entirely, and adapted that so it kind of works for booking time on their machines. Everyone who had been using the facility needed to attend a seminar in which they showed us how to use the system. (To be fair, that was a good idea, because nobody could ever have figured it out on their own!) At the training they told us, by way of motivational story, how people at CSHL or Johns Hopkins or some other fancy US institute had to line up at 2AM for their FACS sorting, and we should be glad that we got this new system, which was at least not as bad as lining up at 2AM.
It’s very, very close, though.
Read more »

A certain person used to complain at me for sending frivolous emails to the departmental mailing list: someone would make a request and I’d say something funny, or carry on a discussion for all to see because I thought they might be interested. I stopped doing it in response to the complaint: and now people stop me in the corridor and tell me they miss my emails.

So the departmental mailing list is a bit boring these days, although I do extract as much juice as I can for the labrats. But you’ll be pleased to know that the new gig is likely to provide endless entertainment too. This just in, sent to all 3-400 people at SN:

My plain burgundy cup has gone missing from my desk.
If you borrowed it, please return it.
I want my tea.

I’m helping Jenny edit a certain anthology. And this is appropriate.

I’ll say more once it’s all out of the way…

I whinged, open channel, about a particularly troublesome speaker. He was from the Human Nutrition department, obviously.

What I didn’t mention was how nauseatingly self-congratulatory they were. ‘Of course, we all know we need low GI versions of Kelloggs Cornflakes’ and stuff like that. What was striking was how little adverse or hostile comment there was. Go to a proper science seminar and inevitably someone will throw you a curve-ball. That’s what science is about, that’s peer review.

I didn’t know enough about the subject to ask searching questions (although I did laugh out loud at the one scatter graph he presented:  a straight line through it with an r of about 0.2)—and I refrained from commenting that despite any data to support them, he was making recommendations based on what ‘everyone’ (i.e. the HN dept) already ‘knows’.

And these are the people the meeja worship.

Fucking medics. We’re all doomed.

Brunhilde is agog at some of the language in the latest HR newsletter:

SydneyRecruitment manages the end-to-end recruitment of staff and the on-boarding of new staff.

On-boarding sounds like the sort of thing young, fit babes might get up to at Bondi.

I’m afraid I never read those emails anymore. They’re full of such stuff. I retrieved this month’s copy from the trash and chose a few lines at random:

…cancellation of any sponsorship rights going forward.

SydneyPeople is divided into HR teams that work together to service all your HR needs

advice and guidance to [clients] on strategic and operational human resources issues impacting the University’s performance.

…proactive development of internal talent…

…ensures the principles of workforce diversity and EEO are embraced

..ensuring the University’s overall remuneration strategy meets the domestic and global
competition for talent.

I thought ‘meeting competition’ was a great concept, but I’m worried that I’ve been re-aligned:

With an effective date of 1 August 2008 the HR Service Centre will have re-aligned the support of the University’s groups/schools/units to different HRSC Team Members.

Do you think that might impact my performance to such an extent that I might need to proactively embrace internal talent development and be serviced by HR?

This is what you get when stuff is written by people from the Centre for the Mind. Seriously.

We take great pleasure in being able to invite you to the launch of the
new University of Sydney Institute for Sustainable Solutions […] This new multi-disciplinary Institute will be a focal point for some of the world’s leading thinkers, researchers and
educators in disciplines such as renewable energy, land and water
sustainability; economic development; population growth and public
health; and food and energy security.

Let me see if I’ve got this right. People are worried about sustainability, yes? So they’ve built an institute, yes? To be followed by

a debate on sustainability

Let me remind you that this is the University of Sydney (the Sustainable Campus), which has just spent tens of millions of dollars on knocking down several buildings, digging up a park, and building a new Law Faculty and shiny spaceship admin block. And it’s still a fucking swamp outside Biochemistry.

Does anyone have a spare brain? Mine just exploded.

I am pleased, nay delighted, to read that

Phase 2 of the brand project kicks off this month with the development and testing of several different brand concepts developed from the market research we conducted in Phase 1.

I once worked for a ‘market-led’ company.  Let’s just say that I discovered that ‘market research’ is code for “we’ve got no imagination so we’re just going to get our potential customers to make stuff up, and deliver it about five years too late, by which time those self-same customers will have got bored and bought from someone else”.  You can add in your own thoughts on how much money such exercises leave for things like, oh for example, research and development.  (There’s a rant brewing.  You can tell, can’t you?).

To help us manage this process, we’ve established a network of specialist sub-committees

Eight sub-committees to be precise.  I couldn’t be bothered counting the names, but there are nine on the steering committee. On average, at least five people on each sub-committee.

We are doomed, aren’t we?