Third-graders and science

I recently agreed to answer questions from third-graders about what it means to be a scientist, what a scientist does, and so forth, as part of a project to get students interested in science. My friend teaches third-graders in a Long Island, NY, elementary school, and it is her class that I agreed to 'talk to'. I cannot do so in person, so we agreed that her students would write letters to me with their questions. Today when I got home from work, there was an envelope waiting for me. Inside were personal letters written to me by hand from about twenty students. I had a long day in the lab, so when I got home I was pretty exhausted. But after reading these letters, I perked up again. They are just so sweet and unusual and interesting. It will be fun to answer their questions and to see what I can come up with in the way of photos and other items that will allow them to 'see' what it is I do everyday. I thought I would post some of their questions here over the next month or so, anonymously of course. But it will give you an idea of what third-graders think about when they think about science. Stay tuned.

A fascination with the night sky

I find myself looking skyward at night a lot this month; the reason is that this is a remarkable month for planet sightings according to the different astronomy websites I’ve come across. Check out the following website for good information about what’s happening in the sky above us during March http://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/visible-planets-tonight-mars-jupiter-venus-saturn-mercury. It helps that March has been a month of some wonderfully sunny clear days and equally clear crisp nights, so that when I look up I can in fact see the planets, stars and the moon, not hidden by clouds or fog.

I’ve never been very good at identifying the different stellar constellations, except for the Big and Little Dippers, the common names for Ursa Major and Ursa Minor if I understand the information I’ve read correctly. As a child, I remember looking up at the ceiling of Grand Central Station in New York City and being pleasantly surprised by what I saw there—a zodiac mural painted on the green ceiling, which has recently been restored. For more information about it, check out the following site: http://www.wnyc.org/articles/wnyc-news/2010/nov/08/stars-shine-grand-central-terminal-again/. My parents tried to explain some of this to us, but my siblings and I were not of an age where we could really understand it. But it was fun to look at.

I’ve been trying to photograph the night sky a lot this month, without much success until tonight. I am posting the photo I was happiest with. You can see the crescent moon, and closest to it on the left is Jupiter; Venus shines brightly above the both of them. Enjoy!

Forays into the world of social media promotion

I am slowly becoming more social media-savvy. It’s taken a while—I joined Facebook in June 2008, rather late compared to many of my American friends, and it’s hard to believe that I will be coming up on four years of social interactions that have changed my life in a very positive way for the most part. Joining Facebook pushed me over a wall that had been of my own making; it was easier to stand on the side of not knowing, of not reaching out, of not sharing, of being skeptical to all of it. But I’ve realized that as long as I can maintain some semblance of control over what, when and how I post, I can be a part of the digital age and actually be happy. I’ve also joined Twitter, mostly in a professional context—I enjoy tweeting about science and the little tidbits that I come across during my day, since I follow a lot of scientific journals and newspapers that write about science. It is an amazing daily ride through a huge world of other twitterers who seem to love what they’re doing. I don’t post each day; I simply don’t have the time for it. And as you have probably surmised, I have less time these days for blogging as A New Yorker in Oslo because my work life has changed (yet again) and now I am busy with new responsibilities that are actually quite welcome. I plan to keep on blogging, but I may not post as often as I used to. I hope you will keep reading in spite of the change.

In my more recent consultant work, I have discovered the power of Facebook ads to promote business pages, events, products, and whatever else one might dream of. For my own creative projects, I’ve created two Facebook ads, one to promote my book Blindsided—Recognizing and Dealing with Passive Aggressive Leadership in the Workplace; the other to promote my new page Books by Paula M De Angelis (https://www.facebook.com/BooksbyPMDeAngelis; you would have to be a Facebook member to connect to and ‘like’ the page). The ads appear on the sidebar of Facebook sites. You can choose your budget—25 dollars a day for ten days, or 500 dollars lifetime budget for one particular ad campaign. It’s a pretty amazing way to promote what you want to promote. You can choose your target audience. In my case, I target English-speaking countries, and in both cases, my target audience on Facebook was approximately 175,000,000 people over the age of 18. Daunting? Oh my God, yes. I have no idea if these ads will increase sales of my books. But whatever happens, it was worth learning about this promotion possibility. I also use press releases to announce the publication of new books, and they are also quite effective at getting the message out there. The point is that being an indie author means that you do all of the promotion work yourself. If a publishing house had released your book, they would be doing this work for you. I don’t mind doing the legwork myself. Again, I guess because I am a bit of a control freak, I like knowing what is going on and having some control over how fast it all proceeds. I’ll keep you posted on the eventual outcomes—how many people actually look at the ads, and if sales of my books increase.

Brave new work world

It strikes me more and more that the work world has become a ’brave new world’. The future is now, is upon us. A myriad of changes sneaked up on us and suddenly were there. But they weren’t just small changes; they were life-changing and workplace-changing changes. Those of us who have been in the work world for a while are a bit more observant of these changes; or perhaps we feel the effects of this brave new world a bit more intensely than those just starting out. In any case, I’ve had the past two years to muse upon all of the changes, and I must say that they herald a new world of work that we can no longer deny has in reality arrived. 

Open landscapes, shared jobs, home offices, flexible time, team projects, and group thinking are just a few of those changes. But perhaps the biggest change in the past five years alone has been the move toward selling yourself as a worker. It is no longer possible to ignore this fact—that marketing yourself and your capabilities, selling yourself to a potential employer, has become de rigueur for average employees. It is no longer a matter of choice. Even headhunting agencies will tell you that now. It started with posting personal photos on resumes. That was never done when I was starting out in the work world; it is very common now. It moved on to the use of social media to establish your online presence; that has become very important. LinkedIn, Facebook, Google +, Twitter, and a myriad of other online social spaces help present you to a potential employer. The more hits you have on Google, the better. Of course they have to be the right kind of hits; it won’t do for an employer, potential or not, to find your drunken party photos on Facebook. But it strikes me that a potential employer might even overlook this if they see that you have a huge number of friends or followers. Because this is the age of networking. The more networks you have, the better. It shows presumably that you are a social person, friendly, capable of teamwork, of sharing, of listening, of communicating. It may be to your detriment not to have an online social presence these days. I cannot say for sure, but I have a very strong feeling that this is the case. And if it is, is this the right way to be doing things? It’s too soon to say, but for those people who are professionally competent yet introverted or even shy about ‘getting themselves out there’; it must be a nightmare to maneuver through this brave new world. How do you explain to a potential employer that you are fully competent to do the job but a bit shy about promoting yourself? And if your job doesn’t involve sales or marketing, why is it necessary to have to market yourself to an employer? Why isn’t an interview about your skills and competence enough to get you hired? But it’s not anymore. I think that some of this new emphasis on selling yourself is going to backfire. An employer may be impressed by a potential employee who has hundreds or thousands of friends on Facebook; the employer may even think that this means that if this person is hired that he or she will be good at teamwork and group thinking. But not all jobs need this or require it. It won’t do to hire a scientist with hundreds or thousands of friends on Facebook if he or she can’t survive the loneliness of lab life. The life of a scientist is often lonely. If you are hired as a scientist, it is expected that you can tolerate alone time—in your office writing articles or grants, or alone in the lab doing experiments until all hours of the evening. And being social online doesn’t necessarily translate to being a better communicator or better networker in the workplace. I’ve seen that more times than I can count.

I couldn’t even imagine how awful it must be to work in an open landscape, to not have my own office or even to share an office but to be able to close the door on the rest of the workplace at times. I cannot imagine what it must be like to talk on the phone with no hope of privacy whatsoever, whether it be a work-related or personal call. I couldn’t stand the idea that I was to be monitored at all times. I also don’t like the idea of shared jobs; I don’t think it is right to hire a person to do a job and then to hire one or two more people to do the same job, so that all of them are sharing that job at the same time. I can understand sharing a job if one person does it 50% of the time and the other person has the other 50%--I call that splitting a job. The trend that I have seen recently is that one or two people are working simultaneously on the same project or job and are mostly just competing with each other instead of working effectively. I don’t get it in any case. I know a few people who have complained to me about this—that they don’t have their individual projects in the lab but instead are working on the same project as a co-worker, or that they really don’t know what is expected of them, or they don’t know what they’re really doing. That sense of vagueness that hangs over everything—the veil of vagueness, I call it. Who is my boss, what is my job, what is expected of me, am I doing a good job, what is a good job? The same vagueness is involved in group thinking—is this really the way we want to go in the workplace? Forcing people to brainstorm together in the same room for hours at a time won’t necessarily lead to new creative ideas; it may rather lead to boredom and inertia. Home office days work for me, so that is a change I like personally, but I know many people who dread this because of the lack of structure and discipline that the workplace provides for them.

This has been a long post, but one that I have been thinking about for quite a while. I will be writing more about the brave new work world in future posts. I am figuring it out as I go along, but I must say I am ever so glad to be closer to the end of my work life than to the start of it. 

Tunnel of Light at the Nydalen Metro Station in Oslo

Lovely day in Oslo today, so I went for a long walk up along the Akerselva River, as far as Nydalen. I had my camera with me and decided to take a short video of the Nydalen Metro Station's Tunnel of Light. You can see it in action and read more about it here. But I'll include the info about it anyway. Enjoy!!

The Tunnel of Light is located at the Nydalen Metro Station in Oslo, Norway, You step on to the escalator that connects to the station platform, and for 30 seconds you can experience a tunnel of rainbow colors that shift color constantly; the sound patterns ("music") also change along with the lights. The station was designed by architect Kristin Jarmund, and the interactive installations were created by Intravision System.

Experimenting with the workplace

I have written a lot of posts about the modern-day workplace over the past year and a half in an attempt to understand my own workplace and all the changes that have occurred there during this period of time. I follow the news in both the USA and Norway and whenever there is news about what is going on in modern workplaces, I sit up and take notice. It interests me almost as much as science news. I’m not necessarily talking about business news in general; more about organizational behavior in businesses. Why do companies behave as they do toward their employees? What are the different management philosophies that dominate workplaces and how do they affect employees? Why did they arise in the first place? Who is responsible for their implementation in the workplace? When did modern workplaces become research laboratories? By that I mean, when did it become kosher to ‘experiment’ on employees by foisting different trendy management philosophies on them? Because it is an experiment to do this to a workplace—to force a workplace to adopt new strategies and ways of managing people in the name of cost-effectiveness, productivity and innovation. And before one experiment is finished, before data can be analyzed and conclusions drawn, another experiment is undertaken in the name of some other wonderful ideal that is usually impossible to live up to. It is impossible to draw any conclusion whatsoever without careful study and analysis of data that has been carefully collected from carefully-designed experiments. Do any of the workplace experiments meet the stringent criteria required for performing such experiments? I sincerely doubt it, based on what I have been witness to in my own workplace.

I get the impression that this type of ‘experimental’ approach occurs in the classroom as well. Education seems to have been invaded by the same types of people who are responsible for the major changes in the workplace. There seems to be an inordinate amount of experimentation in the classroom, whether in grammar schools or high schools. I don’t get it. What are the experiments trying to prove? I have listened to frustrated parents talk about their children, who are now young adults and who are struggling to find meaning in their lives. These are children who grew up in the 1990s and during the early part of this century, who were told that they could plan their own curriculum in schools, choose their own course of study, and so forth. What they weren’t told was how they were to follow that self-chosen road to its end. They weren’t taught discipline and focus and the value of hard work and homework; they weren’t told about failing and rising again after failing. They were only told to believe in themselves. Some of them do, but many of them don’t. It’s a vague concept for a child to ‘believe’ in himself or herself. When you’re young, you don’t think that way. You think rather—‘I’m scared to give this talk in front of the class. I don’t want to be the center of attention or the butt of the jokes or the nerd’. But there’s often no one to talk to about these things. And you would much rather get concrete help on how to talk in front of the class than hear an adult tell you to ‘just believe in yourself and it will all work out’. That may be true, that it usually does work out. But as adults, we are responsible for training the young, not leaving them to their own devices. I find it ironic that adult workplaces are micromanaged to the n^th degree, whereas children’s (public) schools are not, or haven’t been up to this point. The teachers may be micromanaged, yes, and forced to fill out a myriad of reports; the children are given a lot of ‘freedom’. Discipline is discouraged, homework likewise; teachers who come down hard on students are reprimanded. It’s a very different world than the one I grew up in, and I don’t really understand it. The same is true about the modern workplace—it is not the workplace I cut my teeth on, and I am spending a fair amount of time trying to figure out when the paradigm shift occurred, when the rug got pulled out from under our feet, and how it all changed when no one was looking. The values and ethics I grew up with that I expected would be valued in the workplace, are not necessarily valued as much as I thought they would be. Loyalty, discipline, structure, focus, hard work—I know they are appreciated, but not in the same way as in my parents’ generation. But when I started out in the work world over thirty years ago, they were still highly appreciated. It is amazing how much can change in the space of ten or twenty years. I suppose when I look at it all objectively, I cannot really be surprised. Change is part and parcel of life, including work life. Perhaps it has been rather naive to expect it to remain the same, especially when everything else around us changes continually. 

My heart and San Francisco

Nineteen years ago, my husband and I were walking the streets of San Francisco; we lived there for one glorious year when he got the wonderful opportunity to work as a postdoc in a molecular genetics lab at the University of California at San Francisco. I also ended up working in the same lab (pretty large) but in a different capacity. I remember loving the challenge of moving, setting up stakes in a new city, finding an apartment for us to rent, going to look at them in the evenings when he got home after work. All those things that make for a life together and the stuff of great memories. I got to thinking of that time in our lives because I saw our old address on a slip of paper as I was going through my files recently and tossing old papers. We lived on Carl Street (very near the intersection with Stanyan Street), a stone’s throw in terms of distance from both Golden Gate Park and the Haight-Ashbury district. I googled the address recently and clicked onto the street view—wouldn’t you know, there was our old Victorian-style house, still looking the same as it did nineteen years ago? I wonder if it still exists as apartments for rent? As I remember, there were several apartments in the three-story house. We lived on the top floor.

We loved being there and each weekend was a new adventure. There were so many things to do and see that year. Where should we go, what should we visit this time? Of course we did all the standard touristy things—visiting Fisherman’s Wharf, Alcatraz prison, Muir Woods, Chinatown, Golden Gate Park, different museums and the zoo. And so many other things. We drove to Marin County, to Berkeley, and to the Napa Valley wine country (don’t get me started on how much I loved being there—it is one of the most beautiful places on earth if you ask me). But what I remember most from our year in SF is that we got outdoors and walked. It is a great city to walk in, hilly yes, but easy to walk around in. And that is how we discovered most of the interesting off-the-beaten path restaurants and cafes and stores that we ended up liking to go to. And our trips to the beach on the weekends, even in the months of February and March. Deserted beaches for the most part, but what an expansive feeling to be there. I love being at the shore during the winter months; I remember doing that when I lived in New Jersey—driving to the shore in the middle of winter and looking out over the ocean. In San Francisco, we took the cable car all the way out to the end of Irving Street and then walked a few meters from there to the beach. We stopped and bought homemade vanilla sodas at the little Italian deli that stood on the corner of the last street before the beach. That was my first introduction to those wonderful Italian syrups that come in all flavors—vanilla, coffee, chocolate, and so many others. I took so many pictures that year, we had so many visitors that year—my sister and her husband, my friends Gisele and Judy, my husband’s friend Lars, colleagues from our Norwegian workplaces.  I remember my husband’s aunt and uncle (Gunvor and Åke) visiting us in the autumn, and her falling in love with the pumpkins that were in abundance at that time of year; she helped me carve out a large one for Halloween. And when my ten-year old stepdaughter Caroline came for three weeks during that summer, we took her to Disneyland in Los Angeles and then visited my friends Lucy and Steve in San Diego where we ended up visiting Sea World as well. My brother got married that year as well—the wedding was in NY which made it a pleasure to fly the short trip back to NY to be a part of it. There was never a dull moment in all of 1993, and that is why that year stands out in my mind as a very memorable year. It was full of adventures and new experiences that we tackled and mastered and enjoyed doing so in the process. Perhaps those are the things we should do more often in our lives—choose new experiences that bring us out of our comfort zones, that stretch us and make us broader. Who knows? It is easier to choose safety at the expense of all else, and becomes much easier to do so as we grow older.

We often walked around in Haight-Ashbury on the weekends, with its great old record stores, clothing stores, cafes—you name it. Of course it had its quota of shady stores and seediness, but what big city doesn’t? I wouldn’t have lived smack in the center of that district, mostly because it attracted a lot of tourists and there wouldn’t have been much privacy or quiet. But we were there often. It’s where we discovered a little hole-in-wall Southern food restaurant that probably isn’t there anymore. It served crab cakes and seafood gumbo and you name it. We went there often, as well as to a barbecued ribs place that probably should have been closed down by the health authorities, but boy were the ribs good! We had an organic deli and bakery on the corner a few houses down from us, where we bought fresh bread, and a small supermarket a few blocks from us where we could get fresh fish. We didn’t lack for much that year.

It was the one year in my life where my work really didn’t matter all that much to me. I was employed in the same lab as my husband, working on a flow cytometry project that I learned and mastered and that eventually led to a publication for my boss at that time. I’m proud that I was able to come in and get the project organized and on-track so that a publication became possible. I worked hard, but I left work at the door at the end of the day. We met some great work colleagues and hung out with them as well--concerts, picnics, parties. But weekends belonged to my husband and me, our free time, relaxing because work did not hang over our heads as it does usually. I miss that. I try to keep weekends free now, but there is always something to do for work. I don’t mind it, but I miss that feeling of being truly relaxed.

When we returned to Norway, a new year awaited us. It seems almost impossible to believe that nearly twenty years have passed since that time. But they have. We sat and watched The Streets of San Francisco with Karl Malden and a young Michael Douglas, that ran for a year or so on Norwegian TV during 1994. We missed SF. It made us feel good to watch the show, to try to identify the streets we knew and had walked on. Is it possible to fall in love with a city? I think so. It happened to me during 1993. I don’t know how I’d feel going back now. I’ve changed, our lives have changed. Perhaps it’s good not to go back? I don’t know. I’ve done it once, returned to Cambridge in England, the city where I met my husband. It wasn’t the same feeling. Of course it couldn’t be. Part of the original feeling had to do with its being my first trip to Europe (1987), first time in England, meeting my husband, falling in love—all those things. Can you recapture those feelings, the feelings you first have about a place or a person? Probably not. And that’s ok actually. Because other feelings and thoughts have taken their place. New memories have laid themselves up on the old ones. I dig deeper now to unearth the very old ones. But they’re still fresh when I do so. The mind is interesting that way. A mystery that holds our lives in its recesses. The heart likewise.