For many, the weekend (TFI Friday!) and seasonal holidays (“Autoresponse: your e-mail will not be answered”) are a blessed respite from the grind of work. For working parents however, they signal the shift from part-time to full-time childcare. Continue reading
Paradoxically, having kids can be a great way of learning to deal with overstress. Continue reading
It’s fairly well accepted that in the biological sciences roughly 50% of undergraduates are female, with a 50:50 sex ratio also continuing to postgraduate level (see HERE for US data). At postdoc there’s either parity or a slight skew towards men, and thereafter a steadily climbing rate of male occupancy as one climbs up the higher echelons of academia (LINK). (It’s even more male-biased in the physical sciences)
There has been much hand-wringing about this. Continue reading
I remember reading an anecdote about a meeting between Francis Crick and an eminent biochemist (I’m pretty sure it was Erwin Chargaff). Chargaff came away highly unimpressed by Crick, which seems bizarre nowadays when Crick is revered as a kind of demigod. The reason for Chargaff’s disdain? Crick, he said, seemed to exemplify the worst aspects of the British system, namely “all talk and no action”.
It’s a neat reminder of what we now refer to as “the American work ethic” swept away. High-minded gentlemen scientists sitting around in armchairs in club rooms doing thought experiments, and occasionally deigning to publish their insights. Theorising, theorising, theorising. Very little actual “doing”.
That’s what the work ethic replaced. Why do the thought experiment when you could do the actual experiment? And the powerhouse performance of American academia in the 20th century is all the validation that’s needed of that more practical approach.
But there’s a sense now that the pendulum may have swung too far the other way. Continue reading
Total Internal Reflection 