Funding or Firing!

Scientific research has entered the age of "get funded or get fired." Since my position depends on "soft-money" (which means I'm supposed to fund 90% of my salary in grants) my job is in jeopardy. While this isn't a fun place to be, I have always known the risks and possibility of this happening. That's life—if you want to have fun and do science, you accept the risk that your nation will choose to expend its resources on senseless conflict and drain the pool of cash for research and development. :-) I guess you can see where my biases might lie.

So, much like my last post, I'm working very hard as often as possible. The summer is always very busy with students populating the lab and, my chief tech moved on to another lab this past summer. Very hairy time. Nonetheless, I have been in the lab far more lately than in the past five years or so and that's been fun for me (maybe less so for the students!) as I have been revamping my laboratory's focus and working to make the lab a leaner/meaner, agile tool.

I have continued to refine my workflow issues and have become far better at managing my time than in years past. I am still relying on a mix of emacs org-mode for a master priority list and paper calendar sheets for daily tasking (stuck into the back of my lab notebook). This seems to work well and keeps me very organized. I have done very little manuscript writing this summer but I have been reviewing papers from a bunch of different journals on an almost weekly basis. Unfortunately, due to the volume, I am often late getting my comments back to the editor and that's an ongoing source of frustration (for me as much as for them!). I've cut back on the number of papers that I am willing to review but that has been balanced by the increase in requests. Frankly, if a paper is within my areas of expertise, I usually say `yes' and I find that I learn a lot about current state-of-the-art in my field. It seems to me that I exist in an interesting niche with expertise in Physiology/Neurophysiology, developmental Neuroscience, and computational modeling.

In other news I've been learning R as I can't afford to pay staff statisticians a whole bunch of money to build statistical models for me. Nargh. Luckily, we have a class through Epidemiology and Biostatistics on R programming so I'm muddling through. The class is taking a HUGE chunk of my time but this is good for me and I find it interesting and very useful—potentially. Also, there's a great add-on for emacs called ess which stands for "emacs speaks statistics" and this has been a life-saver. I can run R within an emacs window and have all the editingfeatures and syntax highlighting that I know and love available.

I suppose that's all for now. I realize this has been a long gap but I have been extremely busy and, even now, I'm avoiding programming homework to post. LOL!

Workflow and "refactoring"....

I am coming off a 9 week jag of, essentially, continuous work. And here I mean that at least 6 to 8 hours (more like 10 to 16!) per day, every day, has been dedicated to work. My wife and I have BOTH been on this crazy work schedule and it put a damper on our holidays and most of the beginning of this year. Most unfortunate. The result has been two manuscripts submitted, a small-ish grant, and some preliminary work on two other grants.

However, trying to manage this much work has initiated a strong desire to revise my work-flow. I usually use Emacs' org-mode to build my "to do" lists and take notes in lectures or meetings. I have been reading a lot of time-management books a la Dave Allen's Getting Things Done because, mostly since the divorce from my first wife, I've had a real issue with procrastination at times. This is much less a problem now than when I was in grad school but, occasionally, I can feel overwhelmed and it's hard to get started on a project until deadline pressure starts to weigh heavily upon me. So org-mode helps me stay organized and it works well for outputting thoughts to html or LaTeX for incorporation into larger documents. I've also started using it to outline papers/grants.

The big problem with the last few weeks has centered on the use of tools that I'm not all that familiar with. One of the manuscripts we were working on was being written by the first author in Mickeysoft Word. I really, really dislike Word. I have good reasons for disliking Word that go all the way back to when I was working on my thesis in DeScribe (a fantastic word processor and page-layout program!) and had a horrible time trying to export it in a format that Word 2.x for Windoze wouldn't munge up and destroy the table of contents and figures I had painstakingly laid out. I currently have Word 2011 for Mac (ver. 14.02) and it still fails and crashes with documents that are larger than about 10 megabytes. I also find the interface in Office/Word for Windows confusing and difficult to navigate. I download new versions of Office as they become available to the university and check to see if my pet-peeves have been sorted out but the majority of my problems with Word remain.

I've started using OpenOffice to have some compatibility with my colleagues who use Word (while still maintaining some of my OpenSource cred!) but, unfortunately, symbols (like Greek mu and beta) are different between Mac and Win fontsets (at least the subset used by OO and MS Office) so I usually end up with emails back saying, "Hey, your symbols are all monkeyed up! Why can't you just use Word like a normal person!?" etc. OpenOffice is ok—it even has many shortcut key combinations in common with Emacs so I can use it just fine. I also don't have much trouble finding some of the more sophisticated things I need (which I can't say for Word!). I use OpenOffice when I need to work with someone who comes from the WYSIWYG word processing world and I've mandated that everyone in my lab use OpenOffice and store lab-wide documents in either ascii text or OO formats.

This brings me back to Emacs. I used vi for about 10 years before switching to Emacs and it's been about 15 years since I made the switch to Emacs. I like Emacs—the command keys for most of the editing I do are embedded in my motor memory and the control over fonts/colors/syntax highlighting makes my life much easier. Since I prefer to use LaTeX and BibTeX for my writing, Emacs is a good editor for those environments and that makes my life easier. Also, I can do just about everything from within Emacs (even though I don't unless I'm on an old or low-spec machine like some of the ancient Linux boxes that are scattered about the lab) and that just appeals to me philosophically. Emacs used to be considered a big program but in today's world of 64 bit architectures, gigabytes of RAM and terabytes of storage, Emacs is very lightweight when compared to Office or other gui text editors.

If I run top (a *nix command) and look at how much real and virtual memory that Emacs is occupying it comes out to about 30 megabytes of each. Word is taking up about 82 megabytes total and OpenOffice is occupying about 110 megabytes. So Emacs "wins" in regard to smaller memory footprint. I still rely on a lot of paper notes (laboratory notebook, my journal, day-planner sheet for each day, etc.) but most of my self-authored documents are written in Emacs and then exported and prettified for others if needed. I use TeXShop and BibDesk too so those count as gui tools that make my life easier. I find it helps to have a giant monitor that I can plug my laptop into when I sit down to work also. My lovely wife bought me a gorgeous 22" Samsung for my study at home and I have a 23" Viewsonic that I bought for myself at work. These huge monitors allow me to take my laptop with me to meetings and take notes or go seek some peace and quiet in my favorite library on campus and then come back to my desk for larger scale editing and graphics work. This is very nice!

So my tools are in place and I just need to figure out a more disciplined way to distribute my workload and get more done. I have been very encouraged by the amount of work that I've managed to complete in the last few weeks but I had to abandon submission of one of the big grants I was working on and embarrass myself in the eyes of my co-authors because I wasn't organized enough to get that grant in shape for them to work on—not pretty and I need to do a better job on this kind of collaborative project. :-(