Every week my summer research program has a Friday lunch talk meant to enhance our career preparation. Today it was about “Balancing Work and Family.” I was interested to see how they’d address the subject - I often get frustrated with these talks because they’re generally put on by women’s associations and feature only female speakers, which perpetuates the idea that only women have to worry about balancing work and family (because they’re the ones deciding to add work to their traditional task of running the family, presumably).
This one was actually quite good. It addressed the issues faced by dual-career couples, which is really the way to look at it. The issue isn’t being a woman who works, it’s being a person who works while your spouse also works. Men who don’t have stay-at-home wives also have to deal with it. Accordingly, there were two speakers, a male surgeon and a female gastroenterologist, both married to fellow physicians.
Unfortunately there wasn’t a whole lot of advice given (somehow they had the impression that the audience was largely made up of undergraduates and that nobody was actually trying to plan out when to have children or how to manage staying in the same city yet). But there were interesting statistics: apparently 22% of male physicians are married to physicians, and 44% of female physicans are. (I’m not totally sure how that works, maybe the percentages of physicans who are married, and fewer female physicians are married at all?) Comparing physicians in dual-doctor marriages to physicans married to non-physicians, the dual-docs were more involved with their children, made a little less money individually but more as a family, and felt their careers didn’t take precedence as often. I think that makes sense - when the other person is just as career-oriented as you are, things have to be equal and you can’t push all the childrearing duties onto the other person.
Both of the speakers were very encouraging, and I thought it was great to hear from people who were happily and successfully living in dual-career families. The surgeon mentioned that he and his wife make sure to be home by 6, they leave work at work on the weekends, and so on. And it sounded like maternity leave and that sort of thing is becoming standard even during residency.
At one point an audience member asked whether it’s common for people to take some time off while their kids are young. Both speakers said that it can be done if that’s a priority. Then the female speaker talked about the fact that women tend to feel a lot of guilt about not being there as often as their friends or neighbors who stay at home are. She said you just have to work that out and realize that nobody spends 24 hours a day with their kid, and children never get confused about who’s their mom, dad, nanny, or other caregiver. They love them all, but parents are always special. I thought that was pretty reasonable.
Then the male speaker said his wife had found it really difficult to deal with the guilt feelings, and ended up cutting down to working three days a week so she could be home with the kids some days, rather than always feeling guilty that she wasn’t taking them to play dates or whatever like the stay-at-home mom next door. He said she was very happy with her decision, which is great (and heaven knows three days a week as an academic surgeon is still a far more high-powered career than most people will ever have), but I think it’s really unfortunate that women still so often feel such guilt about having a career. It’s not like she was neglecting her kids before, but there’s still such a big cultural push for women to be primary caregivers that it’s difficult to ignore that.
Anyway, it was a good presentation and I found it mostly very encouraging. Though this was the second time a speaker told us they had brought in a newborn to sleep under the desk while they finished a grant application! I guess that is definitely a way to combine work and family.
A week or two ago I heard an NPR show with Chris Anderson of Long Tail fame, and for awhile it was all “long tail = awesome” (which was my initial response as well). Then somebody called in and got hysterical about how long-tail marketing would destroy the local bookstore and all that. I don’t think I’d go that far, but it got me thinking about what the implications would really be.
Today, via Marginal Revolution, I found this very interesting post on that very topic: “self as niche-market”, by Rob Horning. I’m not sure how much I agree, but I like the way he looks at it.
The rarity of the physical object once lent fascination to otherwise mediocre relics. Long-tail marketing (which makes copies of ultra rare stuff available immediately to whoever hears of it—which itself is easier through search engines and the Internet’s harvest of links and filters) ultimately will destroy the significance of the content of collector’s items; make them more like baseball cards or beanie babies—objects with no relevant use value. As bigger companies begin to market to the niches, the small players who used to service that market—little record stores and book stores and antique stores and so on; Dave Hickey’s cherished cultural underground—will be squeezed.
I don’t really see it as a problem that mediocre stuff would stop being attractive to collectors once it’s easy to get. People who like things just because they’re obscure or unpopular are obnoxious, and I’d be happy to see them have to find a new hobby.
To be more serious, not every collector’s item is vulnerable to this sort of thing. Unpopular music used to be scarce because physical copies of LPs were limited; now that it’s digitized anyone can get it immediately. So it won’t be impressive to track down obscure recordings. And the stuff that’s valuable to some collectors and junk to others (old dishes or whatever) will be easy to transfer, so that won’t be exciting anymore either. But there are some things that are truly scarce, and just making the transfer easier isn’t going to make the items less valuable. For example, one of the things I’d love to collect some day is medieval manuscripts. The outstanding ones are museum pieces, but there are enough mediocre ones floating around that they can be affordable for normal people. But there already are as many manuscripts as there are going to be - new ones aren’t the same thing at all. And nobody has them in their attic just waiting for the time when it will be profitable to sell them on eBay. Of course, once people realize that collecting old Beanie Babies is pointless maybe I’ll have more competition, which would be unfortunate.
Paradoxically, the vastly increased access to underground cultural goods may make the cultural underground itself disappear altogether, since people will need no longer such stores to buy these things, stores that also served as places to congregate and swap interests and develop networks that fostered the emotional support required to resist the mainstream.The Internet makes such resistance easy and trivial. It also isolates you in your rejection rather than unite you with like-minded malcontents. So rather than find an alternate society where people are more discriminating and demand more and bring more intellect and passion to the things that inspire and entertain them, you end up alone in front of your computer, gorging on loads of esoteric information suddenly made meaningless.
I’m not sure about this. I think the people who like things because they’re obscure are people who aren’t going to be happy with buying them from Amazon. People enjoy the experience of going to a little store and hanging out with other people who are weird in the same ways as they are. Resisting the mainstream isn’t always something that requires support, it’s something plenty of people do on purpose.
Also, I think the internet actually serves as “an alternate society where people are more discriminating and demand more and bring more intellect and passion to the things that inspire and entertain them.” Not always, obviously, but there are plenty of pockets like that. It allows people who wouldn’t otherwise find each other to meet and create community. Personally, I’ve found that it’s difficult to discover like-minded people in real life. It happens, sure, but the weirder you are, the harder it is. But I’ve found plenty of them (including my wonderful boyfriend) online. Just to take one particular interest, I know maybe a handful of foodie types in real life. Online, there are lots - and it’s great to hang out with people who have similar interests and learn from them.
This actually brings up what I think is probably the biggest negative consequence of making the long tail accessible - the possibility of greatly increased stratification. Don’t get me wrong, I love stratification - going to college and finding a bunch of people like me, heading out post-college and discovering an even smaller self-selected group of kindred spirits, being able to assume that my friends will know what I’m talking about if I bring up what I’m reading - this makes life very pleasant. But I think it’s probably harmful in the long run, because diversity is important. Being cut off from the life experiences of a huge pool of people can’t be healthy, and communities need mixtures of people to allow everyone to succeed. If intelligent, educated people are forming their own closed communities, what is happening to the people who aren’t as lucky? And if we’re used to interacting with people just like ourselves, will we even be able to take advantage of small opportunities for human connection, like chit-chatting with the checker at the grocery store?
The last portion of the post deals with targeted advertising:
…you allow advertisers to craft ads precisely pertinient to your needs, your vulnerabilities. You become your own niche of one. The perfectly targeted ads won’t even seem like ads anymore; it will seem like just-in-time information for the consumer. …
So one won’t be able to escape the sense that everything he wants has already been sold to him, that no desires originate from inside (if that’s not already true). The illusion that you have resisted marketing by buying this instead of that will become even more untenable. Maybe this will end up pushing people out of the market for individuality and into the realm of actual activity.
I’m all for targeted advertising. Just this weekend, I happened to be walking by a store I like and noticed that they were having a huge sale. That’s information I would have liked to have. Sure I could sign up for mailing lists, but for one thing that requires me to already know what stores I’m interested in, and then I get pieces of paper that I forget about. Ads targeted to my interest would be great. I post at a forum that does this quite well already (mostly manually) - ads for cooking utensils show up in the cooking threads, clothing in the clothing threads, computers in the geek threads. I buy from there pretty often, frequently because I know I want, say, sheets, but I don’t want to go looking for them. When they show up in the decorating thread, I think “sweet” and go buy them. I’d love it if this happened elsewhere on the internet, rather than seeing ads for stupid TV shows and online college degrees.
I don’t think I’d feel that “no desires originate from inside” though. There are plenty of things I want without ever having seen an ad for them; that’s why the targeted ads are good - because they tell me where I can find the things I want!
But (as Horning says) to the extent that easily being able to find things causes people to define themselves less by what things they have, that sounds like an excellent development. People can be defined instead by what they love, what they believe, what they do. And surely exposure to more options can only help those dimensions to become more authentic.
Since I got to spend several weekends in a row at home with no visitors to entertain, I’ve been going to the farmer’s market for fresh produce most Saturdays. I’m always astonished by how cheap it is - I usually spend less than $15 and get as much as I can carry.
Then I come home and use my produce to cook things I’ve always wanted to make from scratch but not been willing to spend enough money at the grocery store to buy the ingredients. (At least, that’s what I’ve been doing so far.)
The first few weeks, I turned my haul into Italian food. Everything was good, but definitely a learning experience.
First I made pesto with green beans and potatoes, according to this recipe from Radagast. It was very tasty and it smelled so good while I was making it. I have improvements in mind for next time, though. It wasn’t quite as strongly-flavored as I would like. I think this is partly because my one bunch of basil didn’t quite make three cups, so I’ll use more next time. I’ll also add an extra clove of garlic and salt it before it gets to the table.
I might not make pesto again until I get a food processor, though. I used a blender and it didn’t work that well - the very bottom ingredients got whirred to a paste, and the top 90% didn’t move at all. I tried pushing them down, but I wasn’t very coordinated and I ended up destroying my wooden spoon. (I picked all the wood shards out before continuing.) So I would not recommend using a blender.
Next I made the classic tomato sauce from Joy of Cooking. It was definitely tasty, though I think I was a little short on tomatoes. Also, I am pretty sure I got the wrong kind of tomatoes - they were juicier and not quite as red inside as romas, so the sauce was an interesting pinky-orange color and kind of thin. (This would probably also have been helped by adding tomato paste, which was optional.) But the peeling process worked exactly as the cookbook said, which was reassuring. I’ll make it again with roma tomatoes and some tomato paste.
The final Italian-food experiment was making Marcella Hazan’s tomato-butter sauce with fresh tomatoes (I got romas this time). I’d made it several times before with canned tomatoes and really liked it, and I figured this could only be better. Unfortunately I got a little impatient that it wasn’t thickening up (fresh tomatoes are way juicier than canned!) and decided to add tomato paste. I don’t know if I added too much or it was just low-quality tomato paste, but it kind of overwhelmed the other flavors. Don’t get me wrong, it was still good. I might try this with fresh tomatoes again and cook it for longer, but I might just stick to high-quality canned tomatoes and call it good. Besides, if I’m going to go through all the work of peeling tomatoes, I might as well use them in a more labor-intensive recipe.
Last week was supposed to be Thai food, but we lost power and my Thai basil, eggplant, and green beans all went bad in the fridge. Also I’m having trouble tracking down all the right ingredients; I need to find an Asian grocery. I miss living in Northern Virginia where there was a whole aisle in the Giant full of packages I couldn’t read.
Update: In addition to a food processor and a new wooden spoon, I also really want a kitchen scale. While it was fun trying to figure out how many pounds of tomatoes I had by submerging one in a measuring cup full of water, seeing how much water it displaced, and assuming that its density was similar to that of water (the tomatoes were sold by the box not by the pound), I would prefer not to have to do that every time. Also, that method doesn’t so much work for dry ingredients.
President Bush used the first veto of his presidency today to block federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research. My best guess is that he decided he needed to appear to take a firm stand on something that his base cares about.
But this is the wishy-washiest stand ever.
This bill would support the taking of innocent human life in the hope of finding medical benefits for others,” Bush, speaking at the White House, said after he followed through on his promise to veto the bill. “It crosses a moral boundary that our decent society needs to respect. So I vetoed it.”
This particular moral boundary is in fact so important that we… we… we won’t give anyone federal funds for crossing it! That will keep our society decent!
Bush is trying to pretend that he’s so serious about this issue that he’s willing to bring out the big guns, but it seems to me that if he were really serious about the need to respect this moral boundary, he’d actually do something to prevent people from destroying embryos, not just continue to deny them federal research funding.
I personally am happy that he’s not that much of an extremist, but I wonder if his socially conservative base will notice that this isn’t exactly a brave or principled stance.
Lately I’ve had time to catch up on my blog-reading, and I noticed that yet another of my favorite science blogs has moved to scienceblogs.com. The Loom joins The Examining Room of Dr. Charles, Good Math, Bad Math, Pharyngula, and Respectful Insolence as blogs on my frequent-reads list that have made the move.
I can’t help being somewhat annoyed by this. I know certain people will laugh at me, but I don’t use an RSS reader, preferring to visit each blog individually. I’m interested in web design and like to see different looks. Sure, I have strong aesthetic biases, but even the best and least annoying design I come up with gets dull after awhile. I enjoy checking out what other people think looks good. Variety is pleasant. (Granted, certain blogs are so painful to look at that they tempt me to move to RSS, but those are blessedly rare.) So I don’t really like seeing the same look at every science blog I read.
Furthermore, scienceblogs.com loads inexcusably slowly. I suspect a lot of that is due to the bloggers’ habits of including lots of pictures, but I don’t remember the same people’s blogs being so slow when they were on their own sites. And of course all that bandwidth is now being pulled from one site, but if you want to be big, you have to invest in the infrastructure to handle it.
Probably the biggest reason to dislike the consolidation is that when the site does something really stupid like hosting a flash ad that makes tornadoes fly over the text, the annoyance is present on all those blogs!
I don’t blame the bloggers - especially once you get to a certain popularity level, it has to be a huge annoyance to deal with website stuff rather than focusing on your writing, so having that taken care of by somebody else is a great deal. (I have to say, the webmasters at scienceblogs are doing an excellent job at keeping the site up and running; I’ve rarely seen it down.) And it’s obviously an honor to be invited to blog at scienceblogs.
I just wish whoever’s in charge of things over there would increase the visual variety a bit and cut down on whatever is killing load times (presumably, obnoxious ads are prime offenders).
I’ve been following the network neutrality debate with interest, largely through Tim’s excellent posts at the Technology Liberation Front.
Recently Ed Felten came out with a very good paper (pdf) on the subject, in which he comes to the conclusion that the best thing to do is wait on any legislation unless or until it becomes necessary.
There is a good policy argument in favor of doing nothing and letting the situation develop further. The present situation, with the network neutrality issue on the table in Washington but no rules yet adopted, is in many ways ideal. ISPs, knowing that discriminating now would make regulation seem more necessary, are on their best behavior; and with no rules yet adopted we don’t have to face the difficult issues of linedrawing and enforcement. Enacting strong regulation now would risk side-effects, and passing toothless regulation now would remove the threat of regulation. If it is possible to maintain the threat of regulation while leaving the issue unresolved, time will teach us more about what regulation, if any, is needed.
Bill Herman from Public Knowledge disagrees:
I dare say that current political theory demonstrates that his policy option is quite unrealistic; the chance to act will expire too quickly, and the threat of regulation will have passed.
(He has a fairly lengthy and thoughtful explanation following the brief part I quoted.) Tim Lee and Professor Felten maintain that there are several reasons to wait, each describing ways that passing legislation now could backfire.
It seems to me that there’s another reason there’s no harm in waiting: yes, as Herman says, the issue is currently in the public eye. But why? A few ill-advised comments from a telecom CEO and a bunch of wild speculation and exaggeration. It doesn’t appear that there have actually been any serious violations of network neutrality yet. (One dinky ISP in North Carolina blocked rival VoIP services, but the FCC stopped that with current regulations.)
So if the issue is this hot based only on a theoretical threat, I can only imagine that if ISPs actually started violating network neutrality principles, the grass roots would be even more outraged. There would be plenty of political will to enact regulations at that point, if necessary.
Lately, I’ve seen a bunch of billboards around here with a pretty strange message.
Picture: a gone-to-seed dandelion, with the fluffy seeds floating as if someone has just made a wish.
Caption: If you can wish, you can believe.
Sponsor: the United Methodist Church.
Way to reduce religion to a superstition, guys!
(You can see a picture of the billboard here. Isn’t it generally considered pretty darn offensive to imply that someone’s faith amounts to mere superstition?)
I decided to take Adrienne’s suggestion and install Akismet. That required me to upgrade from WP version 1.5 to 2.0.whatever. A couple hours later, it looks like everything is running smoothly. (It shouldn’t have taken that long; chalk it up to my stupidity, the stupidity of the FTP client on Windows 98 [why am I using Windows 98? the department I’m working for can’t afford a new computer, and my laptop can’t connect to the network at work], and a little bit of stupidity on the part of the one-click installer at Dreamhost [I originally installed WP to one directory, then moved it, but the installer thought it was still at the old directory despite the fact that that directory was empty… that was bad].)
Please let me know if anything has become broken. Now that I’ve installed Akismet, comments should show up right away again.
I didn’t realize it in time, but yesterday was Nikola Tesla’s 150th birthday.
Happy birthday to the great inventor from me and one of his many namesakes!
My summer is turning out to actually be busier than the school year was, surprisingly enough. I was accepted into a summer research program, which I’m enjoying very much. My project is in occupational medicine; I’m studying the vibration and force manufacturing workers experience as a result of using power tools. It’s pretty interesting, and much more up my alley than a more typical project involving mice or cell cultures would be. (I’m really glad I don’t have to do anything mean to mice.)
The program I’m in comes with a bunch of other requirements; I’m taking two classes which have a fair bit of homework, and I have to attend various lunch talks and things like that. So it’s more of a time commitment than I expected.
I signed up to teach quite a bit as well; I’m doing mostly physics and chemistry and teaching once or twice a week. Except some weeks it’s more like 3 or 4 times a week, and that gets very tiring. But it’s still fun.
This past weekend was the first one I’ve spent in St. Louis with no visitors to entertain since mid-May. Visitors have included a friend of mine from college, friends of Tim’s from high school, my mom, and Tim’s parents. We went to southwest MO for boating and waterskiing one weekend, and the last week in June was spent in Providenciales (British West Indies, Bahamas) scuba diving, lounging on the beach, and attending the wedding of two close friends. I have to figure out where the camera is, and hopefully then I’ll post pictures of that.
The rest of the summer features work and class prominently. I’m also working on a project to refinish a display cabinet that’s been sitting in my closet all year; it turns out that sanding is very tiring, even with the help of a power sander. I’ll be really disappointed if this doesn’t turn out well.
I also have a trip to Cleveland and one or two trips to Minnesota planned for the end of summer. Then it will be back to school, and second year is supposed to be significantly more time-consuming than first year was. But the content should be more interesting, so I’m looking forward to it.