Archive for the 'bad supervisors' Category

Rebel, rebel

Posted in bad supervisors on March 17th, 2009 by The Doctor

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.

wankfest

Posted in bad science, bad supervisors, doom, wank on September 14th, 2008 by Black Knight

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.

Corporatization

Posted in annoyances, bad supervisors, corporatization on April 3rd, 2008 by Black Knight

One of our fearless administrators (and actually, she’s one of the good guys) is trying to reduce costs and simultaneously yet more importantly actually get stocks of a certain consumable into the building.

The consumable in question? Lab notebooks.

We’ve been using these rather nice notebooks that have places for signatures, page numbers and whatnot: they also come with the University crest. But the University has not been able to supply them for nearly six months. So GoodAdmin went to the supplier and found that she could get larger (as in more pages) notebooks without the crest (but otherwise identical) reasonably quickly — and more cheaply. She asked the Cage if that’s what we wanted her to do.

Yay! We cheer.

And then, MediaWhoreProfWhoGivesStudentsUselessProjects says

To tell you the truth, I think we should be spending a bit more and branding the lab books with MMB and USyd logos (other departments do) – to give the students something to be proud of, that also informs them a bit about the value of IP (intellectual property) etc etc. Am I the only one who thinks like this?

It’s taking a great deal of willpower to not write back

Yes

or even

Only if your grant pays the extra for all of us

(Pippadog: Does she even have any grants? Or is it all thirty pieces of silver from the Meeja?)

It’s this kind of lunacy that made leaving industry less painful. I can just imagine this argument from my 8 year old: Sociology brand their lab books, why can’t we?

Note added in proof: Just don’t get me started on why she needs all those things in her .sig … on an internal mailing list.

Shitty science

Posted in annoyances, bad science, bad supervisors, shit, students on March 5th, 2008 by Black Knight

I’ve wibbled about the Honours talks, and the reaction to them (also here, for those of you who don’t know about it). In that post I mention something darkly.

Last year there were a couple of proposal talks where I distinctly remember thinking something like ‘What the fuck are you thinking?’. More precisely — what was the supervisor thinking? My reservations were borne out by the end of Honours talks, in which the killing (although the student, under instruction from the supervisor, probably said they were ‘sacrificed’. As if that makes it better. Or true) of several dozens of pigs and mice were described to zero scientific benefit. This year, although I attended possibly less than half of all the talks (if only because I am fed to the back teeth with LIM domains), one talk sticks out as being particularly whisky tango foxtrot.

The student actually seemed a fairly smart guy, which makes the project even more of a travesty.

So this guy’s project is to take stool — no, let’s say it, shit — samples, shake (some of) them in broth to grow the facultative aerobes, and then streak them on arbitrary antibiotics to see to what they’re resistant. And then repeat this at some undefined timepoint (from the same shitters) to see if it (i.e. the antibiotic resistance) changes. In this way he will see if the population of the tiny proportion of shit that is aerobic changes.

Never mind that this is a stupid assay. Never mind that he’s only going to start with 4 shitters and if any of them has to take antibiotics in the time period their shit is unusable, never mind that the effect of a stonkingly good curry is going to fuck this up good and proper (thanks, m’good friend pippadog) and the hundred and one scientific reasons that this sucks; what kind of introduction to the doing of science is this?

I have my own theories. I think the supervisor in question wants to do this (because she’s a fruitcase) and won’t — or can’t — give it to any one more senior in the lab (because they would tell her to fuck right off). I think she’s stuck in the 18th century and is trying to turn shit into gold. I think a lot of things, but I’m getting incoherent, and frankly, I can understand and would happily defend why points one and two came up.

It is a crappy project, and it stinks, and I am really really sorry anyone has to put up with this.