Let’s Talk Proposals

In order for me to have graduate students and post docs, and to pay some of my salary, I need to write proposals. These proposals are to the National Science Foundation (NSF) or to NASA or to the Air Force. Over the years, a lot of things have changed about writing proposals. I thought that it may be interesting to discuss some of these things.

In talking to older researchers in the community, they would talk of the good old days of “writing” proposals, when program managers would call you up and say “I have a ton of money I need to get rid of, can I send some your way?” Well, those days are long gone. I hope that this post doesn’t sound like this. It probably will. Ugh. Sorry.

The general ideal of a proposal is that you have an idea and you can’t really go too far down the road of this idea without getting money to invest some time into it. You need the money to pay for someone’s (student, post doc, research scientist, etc.) time to pursue the idea. The proposal states some sort of question and some sort of methodology to address the question. You submit this proposal to the funding agency, they send it out to be reviewed by a few people, then it is often evaluated with a bunch of other proposals in a panel, and a decision is made on whether to fund it or not. The people who evaluate the proposal are similar to me – people who are knowledgeable about the topic and extremely overworked and have no time to evaluate a bunch of proposals. The people are the panel are asked to not only read over 4-6 proposals (being the main evaluator for 2-3), but be on a meeting with ~10 other people for a full week, arguing about which proposals should be funded. This is a thankless job, that, in truth, sucks as bad as it sounds.

Some rules of proposal writing that I have made up:

1. Don’t piss off the reviewer. Whatever you do – do not piss off the reviewer. This means a LOT of things: (a) don’t trash talk other people’s models, work, instruments, etc.; (b) pay homage to other people’s work – cite people who are competitors of yours and talk about how it has advanced the field; and (c) don’t make reviewers work to review – make fonts easy to read, make figures easy to read, make tables easy to read.
2. Be very clear. Don’t confuse the reviewer. Don’t use a lot of complicated math and terms that will confuse people. (Although, I feel like this last bit deserves a special discussion…)
3. Make the proposal as short as humanly possible, while still being clear and complete. Don’t overwhelm the reviewer with a ton of details that don’t really matter. Only include the details that matter (ok, this is a tricky bit.)

When I started writing proposals, the main guideline was page count – proposals were limited to 15 pages. So, I wrote my proposals in two-column format with 11-point Times font. This, in my opinion made beautiful looking proposals (you can argue with Times, but it is a classic). Figures were either 1-column vertically-oriented, or 2-column horizontally-oriented. These proposals just looked nice. (I recognize in a digital age when people are reading on a computer, 2-column format it no longer preferred. Ah, the golden age… Shit…. Sorry…)

Since that time, both NSF and NASA have started to specify exactly what you are allowed to do: 12-point font, only certain fonts allowed, single column only, less than 55 lines of text per page, and 1 inch margins all around. Indeed, NSF has become more and more specific about everything – including your CV (i.e., your resume). In an NSF proposal, they tell you exactly what has to be included, to the point of saying that you can only list 5 “synergistic activities” (such as serving on committees for different community things), and that your papers that you produce are “Products” and you are only allowed to list 10, and they have to be labeled “Most Relevant Products” and “Most Recent Products”. If they are not labeled as such, your proposal can be returned without review. NSF also changes the expectations on the CV randomly every couple of years. Just to keep us on our toes? I don’t know why.

All government agencies have to deal with “conflicts of interest” when evaluating your proposal. This makes perfect sense – you don’t want someone who has a direct tie to me to review my proposal. But, the government agencies can define this in radically different ways. NASA defines a conflict of interest as anyone who has been paid by the place where you work any time in the last year. So, in my case – no one who has worked for UM in the last year can touch my proposal (reviewers or employees at NASA). At NSF, they make you fill out a spreadsheet and list anyone who you have, over the past 48 months: (1) been a co-author with; (2) been on a proposal with; or (some people include) (3) been on a talk with. This is a LOT of people. And, you have to do this with all co-Investigators on the proposal. So, there are a HUGE swath of people who are not allowed to touch your proposal.

Further, now a lot of proposals have mandatory sections, such as “Facilities and Equipment”, “Mentoring Plans”, “Data Handling”, etc. These are often ill defined, and it is unclear if reviewers actually read them. But, it is (or could be) part of the evaluation.

Because of all of these additional requirements, places such as the University of Michigan now require that you finish the proposal at least 5 business days before the deadline, so they can review it. Further, the College requires at least 2 days, and the department requires at least 1 day. So, you have to finish the proposal at least 8 business days before the deadline. And you have more requirements.

Places like NASA release final Announcements of Opportunities (AOs) 90 days before the proposals are due. This has been the same for at least 25 years, if not longer. But, the mandatory requirements on the proposal have gone up, and the effective due date has moved back. This has caused a huge amount of stress on both researchers and staff members who help researchers put together proposals and fill out all of the paperwork that needs to be submitted to the university to allow the proposal to move forward. There is such a large push on the paperwork that the proposal itself (the science) becomes secondary in the eyes of everyone except for (a) the person submitting the proposal, and (b) the reviewer.

NASA, in recognition of this, decided to do something about it. As is typical with NASA, the idea was amazing.

They decided that they would have a two-step evaluation process: (1) write a 2-page proposal which will be evaluated by a group of people and they will make a decision and invite about half of them to continue; then (2) write a 15-page proposal with all of the paperwork required.

Since that time, this has been expanded to almost all NASA programs (in Heliophysics) and has morphed into: (1) write a 2-page proposal about 60 days before the main proposal is due, in which the title and team are locked in – they can not be changed for the next stage. This proposal is no longer evaluated, but is often required. Sometimes they “encourage ” or “discourage” submission of the next stage, but the main reviewers are not provided this information, so it has no bearing on the review of the second stage proposal. Submit a full proposal, as before.

Because of the way universities (and businesses?) work, maybe you can see that you have effectively DOUBLED the amount of work that has to be done. The university treats the first step as a full proposal, so all of the paperwork needs to be filled out for that. And, because the title and team are set in stone, the idea has to be fully fleshed out. So, we went from having 90 days (minus about 8 business days) to 30 days (still released 90 days before the full due date, with a step-one proposal due 30 days after release – and the university still needs 8 business days – so roughly 3 weeks) to come up with our ideas, build a team, and gather all of the paperwork and submit. No pressure.

To add more chaos to this, NASA doesn’t do this on the same days of the year, so at least you could plan ahead. Because of the fact that NASA is 100% dependent on congress for funding to the line item, they often don’t know how much money they will have for programs until well into the fiscal year (continuing resolutions, anyone?) So, it is not their fault, but when they get money, they dump these AOs on the street, and then that starts the chain rolling.

Sadly, NASA specifically does a lot of stuff with good intentions, but this ends up biting them in the Saturn-V because they fear litigation. Someone gets a great idea (2-step process to ease work on proposers!), which then gets eaten by lawyers and gets turned into the opposite of what they want for fear of litigation.

Interestingly, it is within the power of NASA’s program managers to do something about this. Here is an example. Let’s say that NASA offers a program that has enough funds for 2 proposals and 10 are submitted. The review panel comes in and evaluates the proposals and let’s say that 4 proposals are rated as must fund. Well, NASA can’t fund 4 proposals. A program manager would never let a panel do this – they would go over and over and over these 4 proposals until 2 were rated as must fund, with maybe a backup or 2. But, if the panel were insistent, NASA would then have to use “programmatic considerations”, which are very much up to the program manager. They may look at the PIs and see that PI-1 has $10M in funding and is overwhelmed, while PI-3 has almost no funds, but a good publication record and is competent. Funds could go to PI-3 instead of PI-1. (NSF does this a fair amount, while NASA almost never does this.)

So, the example idea. Let’s say that the program manager has funds for 2 proposals. Instead of asking the panel to pick out the 2 best (and I have not even started talking about what is “best” yet!!!) proposals, the program manager asks for the 5-6 proposals that are reasonable – the ideas are ok, the team is ok, the methodology is ok. No whack-o ideas. The PM gets 6 proposals from the panel. They have to select 2. So, maybe they have some “programmatic considerations” or something, and whittle it to 5. Those 5 go into a lottery and then proposals are selected at random.

This is a crazy idea. But, if you did this type of thing, you could reduce the pressure on the proposal writers. Instead of having a 15 page proposal, you could reduce it significantly, since you are really only looking to see if the idea is nutty or not. You could save a huge amount of time on proposal reviews and panel reviews. See these papers: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4959526/ and https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6996170/.

We have not even started to discuss biases in proposal evaluations or determining whether some research is better than other research. Further, it should be noted that by law, you can not charge time to a government agency while writing a proposal to the government (unless the grant says that it is ok.) So, a LOT of research scientists are, by law, required to write proposals in their own “free time”, This is incredibly painful.

Our proposal system is broken. It does not encourage innovation by giving researchers space to come up with fantastical ideas, but keeps them constantly putting out paperwork fires that arise because of ever-tightening deadlines and ever-mounting requirements for proposals. People are being stretched too thin to effectively come up with paradigm-altering ideas. And, if they had these ideas, they would be lost in the shuffle of funding only the people with the best “data management” plans.

NASA and NSF – please be paradigm shifters and change the way funds are awarded. Be scientific about it. Experiment. Try something new! Be bold! Be transformative!

The Blank Page

I have not written a blog post in over 18 months. Why?

There is so much to write about. The world feels like it is burning down, with outrage everywhere. It is so easy to write something and add to the noise now.

But, I don’t want to be part of the noise. I don’t want to add to the chaos. I don’t want to write simple things that make people feel more outrage.

I want to write things that actually explain why everyone hates everyone. Because maybe that will make us pause for a minute and think about the causes of our outrage. Even if others don’t. At least we can.

This is hard to do.

The causes of problems are much more deep than we want to think.

It is easy to think that someone is evil. Or racist. Or ignorant.

But really, very few people are evil. And while there is clearly racism and systemic bias in our society that we need to deal with, most people are relatively kind and want to do the right thing. Further, while there are a lot of uneducated people out there, a lot of the people are not ignorant.

We need more people to stop and see things through other people’s eyes. This is very hard to do. Especially, when they are not even trying to see through your eyes.

It is easy to look at other people and think that they are crazy, or dumb, or just bad. But the truth is that they most likely feel that the world is going to hell, just like you do. The difference between you and them is that someone has told you one story on how we got here and they were told a very different story. And because the truth is always much more complicated than we would like to think, it could be that both stories have some truth, and both are deceptive.

Getting to the “truth” is hard. Indeed, most of the time, there is no real “truth”. There are only stories on how we got here. This is often complicated, hard to explain, and no one really wants to hear it.

It is also hard to relay the other side of the story without sounding like you believe it. That you subscribe to it. When you understand both sides, it is hard to look at people as being evil. And that is what we are expected to do now. Right?

It is easier just to not write.

An Old Sweater

Sometimes I feel like an old sweater. I am warm and made of wool. I provide comfort and protection. But I have cuts and stains and holes. And, I am only a sweater.

Some of the cuts and stains and holes can be repaired and will just fade away in time. Some of them won’t. Some of them require active repairing that take a long time, and, I don’t know. Maybe it isn’t worth repairing them. Because I am an old sweater. And old sweaters don’t have to be perfect. Right?

Sometimes you run into someone who maybe doesn’t need an old sweater, but maybe needs a hat or gloves. Because their hands or their head is cold. Or maybe they are just really cold and need a sweater and hat and gloves. An old sweater can help. But can’t provide them what they really need. And that fucking hurts. For everyone.

Sometimes it is really nice being a sweater. I love being able to provide warmth and comfort. But sometimes it really fucking sucks to only be a sweater. Especially one with holes and cuts and stains.

Tomorrow will be better.

On Freewill, or Luck vs. Skill

I listen to a podcast called “How I built this”, in which Guy Raz interviews people about making a business. Most of the businesses are massively successful, and there are a lot of interesting stories. The last question that he always asks the founder of the business is whether the success of the company was caused by luck or skill.

In every episode that I have listened to, the founders answer with the pretty socially acceptable “a mixture of both”, and they explain how some fortuitous meeting sparked the whole thing, or the monsoon that forced them to change directions or, the fact that they were born into a society that would have such businesses, etc. They then talk about how their hard work then built the business and kept it going through hard times. These are really good answers, and they are all true.

I guess, I would argue, though, that the fact that they were born with the drive and tenacity and natural abilities to be successful is luck also. If they were instead born slightly different, the business would probably not exist. If they needed an hour more of sleep a night, or got sick more often, or any number of little changes to their body chemistry or brain function or whatever, and they would not be in the position they are in. So, in the extreme, I would argue that the fact that the business is successful is 100% due to chance.

I think a lot about freewill, and whether we actually have freewill or not. Clearly, you could argue that we all have freewill. I have a LOT of choices. For example, for breakfast this morning, I could have gone and had a donut, or two, or a dozen. I could have made myself eggs, or gone and bought pancakes at a restaurant. I could have eaten the yogurt I have in the fridge, or the Cinnamon Life cereal. All of these are possible things that could have happened. But, I had oatmeal with a spoonful of brown sugar and a spoonful of granola on top. Why? Anything was possible! But, I chose the most probable outcome, since this is what I have for breakfast almost everyday (yes, it is true, but that is a separate post).

Each choice in my life is exactly like this. I have the choice of doing A, B, C, D, …, X, Y, Z, but I choose one thing. Sometimes, it is very very clear what choice I will chose (breakfast being an obvious one), but sometimes the choices are not super obvious. I guess I would call the things that are very predictable “ruts”, since it they are probably repeated decisions that don’t even seem like decisions anymore. I don’t ever open the refrigerator and say “hmmm, now what would I like for breakfast?” I simply just get out the oatmeal and make my breakfast.

Some decisions seem maybe more spontaneous, or maybe are more intermittent. For example, I don’t vacuum my floors on a regular basis, so it may appear to be semi-random when I choose to vacuum my floors. But, in reality, what is probably motivating my decision on when to do something like vacuum is that I start to feel anxiety about how dirty my floors are and that is set against how busy I am with other things in my life. These things conflict until the anxiety of the dirty floors overwhelms the busyness of my life, so I vacuum. I would imagine that that trigger point within me is set to a very firm place, and so if you could look at these metrics, you would see that I am very predictable on when I will vacuum my floors.

I would argue that every decision in our lives that we are allowed to make is like this: we have a bunch of choices on what we can do, and that, with enough information about us, someone would be able to predict with great accuracy what our choice would be in the given situation.

Does this mean that we have no freewill? Well, in someways, I would argue that we don’t have freewill, but it is complicated. We are born with given characteristics and those characteristics greatly shape how we will make decisions in our lives. Those characteristics change over time, due to aging and maturing and our interaction with people and our external environment. We learn and are changed by our circumstances. Our decisions change the direction of our life, which can (do) then change our future decisions.

For example, I used to almost never eat oatmeal for breakfast, and I thought that it was incredibly boring and dumb to do this. But, I saw others around me doing this type of thing, and recognized that it is a pretty nutritious breakfast. It also reduces the number of decisions that I have to make in a day, and I don’t think of breakfast as a time when I want to be stressed out (what to make today????), so I just embraced this and now have oatmeal every day. I am 90% sure that in some amount of time, I will switch to something else, and will no longer be in this rut. I will change. Is that freewill?

Ok, so you have about 8 billion people walking around the planet, and I would argue that with enough information, you could predict what they are going to do over the next certain amount of time. The problem that gets thrown into this is that (a) humans interact with each other, (b) humans interact with their environment, (c) many humans do not want to be “the same” for long stretches of time. These things cause people to change their decision making predictability.

External events, such as having a loved one die, or watching someone on a video get suffocated to death, causes people to change their decision making. Sometimes these changes are permanent, and sometimes they are temporary and they revert back to their “nominal self”. These events can be very small or very large, and sometimes the change can be very small or very large. This is probably also determined by the person’s characteristics. Some people fear change, and so they hold on to their normal routine as much as physically possible. Some people rejoice in change, and will use any excuse what-so-ever to change circumstances and change their decision making. This is a probably a very predictable characteristic of people, given enough information about someone.

I guess, what I am arguing is that we are all decision making machines and the vast majority of us will make the same decisions in the same way over and over again if the situation is the same. This says to me that we don’t really have freewill. What we have is external influences in our lives that cause us to have different situations all of the time. We are like leaves in the wind, interacting with other people and our environment, bouncing from one situation to another. And, just like, with enough information and a good enough model, we could predict the path of a leaf through the wind, we could, in theory, predict the path of a human through some portion of their life.

So, what does that mean for freewill, or for whether someone will go on to create a gigantic company? Is it luck? Is it destiny? Is it freewill? Is it skill? It is a complex interweaving of where and when we were born, our personality, people around us, society, and external forces. Some of those things we feel that have control over (but, I would argue that we don’t have too much control, unless we recognize it and act on it) and some of them we don’t.

This is not to dismiss the fact that people work extremely hard to create and sustain things. Those are characteristics that people are either born with or are learned in some way. Ugh, if I continue along these line, I will start talking about how we, as a society, assign value to characteristics that people are born with, or that they learn. That this causes all sort of very bad things and some very good things in our society, but that we treat traits in people as being choices that they have and then assign value to them based on those traits. I don’t want to walk down that road today, since it can be very dark.

So, I will end here: rise and reprogram yourselves, my automatons! Recognize that you have choice in your life and that you are the master of your destiny!

(Of course, whether you rise and reprogram yourself is a choice, too. Shit, we are in a trapped in a recursive function.)

What Gas Kinetics Can Teach Us About Politics

This post is going to be very long and extremely nerdy. I love science and I really enjoy thinking about politics. So, I thought that I would mix and match these a little bit and see if some basic physics can teach us a bit about politics. Here you go.

A gas has some fundamental properties, such as density and temperature. Density is pretty easy to understand – if you take a volume of space, say a cube that is one meter on each side, and count all of the particles in it, that will give you the number of particles per cubic meter, which is really the definition of the density. Velocity is relatively easy to understand also. If you take the velocity of all of the individual particles within some volume (like our cubic meter box) and calculate the average velocity (speed and direction) of all of those particles, we get the bulk velocity.

Temperature is a bit more complicated to understand. First, you have to understand that if you are in a closed and sealed room, so that there is no bulk velocity, the individual air particles are all moving at different speeds and in different directions. When you take the average of all of those particle velocities, you get an answer that is equal to zero. So, on an individual particle level, there is velocity, but on a fluid level there is no bulk velocity. Temperature is actually a way to describe the randomness of the individual particle motion. If there is a lot of variation in the velocity of individual particles, then there is a high temperature. If there is very little variation, then the temperature is very low.

When you experience temperature of the air, you are experiencing a whole lot of particles hitting you at relatively fast speeds and they give you some of their energy. When the air is very hot, the particles are moving really fast and they transfer a bunch of energy to you. When it is very cold, the particles are moving slower and transfer significantly less energy. Interestingly, there are two components to our experience of temperature: the speed of the particles hitting you and the number of particles hitting you. We don’t think about this very often, since the number of particles hitting you is pretty steady, but if you were to go way up in the atmosphere, then the number of particles hitting you would decrease significantly, and you would feel very cold, independent of the temperature of the particles. For example, in the thermosphere, which is the section of the atmosphere in which satellites fly (so, space), the temperate is incredibly hot, like 2000° F, so it seems like you would fry, but you actually freeze, since there are so few particles. There is a lot more that we could talk about in terms of how we perceive temperature, but I will stop there.

Ok, the temperature of air tells us how much randomness there is in the motion of the air. If you take the average of all of the velocities of the individual particles, you get the bulk velocity. We can actually describe people using similar ways. For example, if you look at people’s political beliefs, we can describe it using very similar plots as what we would use in gas kinetics:

A Gaussian distribution function describing the politics of the US.

There are a lot of people who are “middle”, about an equal number of liberals and conservatives, which have smaller numbers than middle people, and the smallest groups are the most extreme on both sides. This, in many ways, is how a perfectly functioning society should look. The reason that it looks a lot like air is that in air there are a bunch of particles that are not moving very fast, but there are a some that are moving quite quickly to the right and some that are moving quite quickly to the left. This makes a very stable situation and is called a Gaussian distribution. It has a lot of cool statistical properties that you most likely don’t care about.

The shape of this distribution can change pretty dramatically and still be considered very stable and Gaussian. For example, it is quite natural for our society to shift the entire spectrum to the left or right. This might be issue by issue (like gay marriage or border security), or it could be that a society is becoming more liberal or more conservative as a whole:

A shifted Gaussian distribution function, when the country moves a bit more to the conservative side.

This is extremely natural, and it is as if the entire country moves a bit. It may not be over night or even over a year, but slowly the entire society can shift in view.

Another thing that is quite natural is that the distribution becomes more narrow (colder) or more broad (hotter). An example of this is when our country suffers some natural or man-made disaster. We tend to “come together” and forget differences when these things happen. It can be represented like this:

A more narrow Gaussian distribution function, when the country comes together after some sort of tragedy or event that brings us all closer together.

Or, if we had an extremely broad range of thoughts on a topic, we might have a larger spread in our distribution function, like this:

A wider distribution function, where there is division in the country, but it is not motivated by partisanship. This simply reflects that we have a lot of very broad opinions on something.

So what does this matter to anything at all? Well, a Gaussian distribution is very normal (that is a math joke), while other distributions are not very stable. For example, the country today actually feels more like this:

This distribution is no longer Gaussian, and is pretty unstable.  There is active partisanship with the majority of the country “taking sides”.  This is what the US feels like today.

It feels like we have erode the middle and everyone has “chosen a side”. You are either liberal or conservative, with no room in the middle. There are a few things to say about this distribution:

• It is highly unstable in gas dynamics. In fact, this type of distribution is pretty much impossible except for in gasses that are extremely tenuous (thin). Bad things happen when you get such distributions. In plasma physics, these types of distributions will cause instabilities and lots of waves to form.
• The reason that gasses have a hard time being in this state is because there are lots and lots and lots of collisions. One very fast moving particle will collide with a slow moving particle and the fast one will slow down a bit and the slow one will speed up a bit. If a left moving particle hits a right moving particle, they both slow down to almost zero speed. This is how nature behaves. In society, Gaussian distributions result through communication. When we talk to other people, we get a perspective that is not our own and an understanding that things are much more complicated than what we thought. We also gain empathy for other humans. Collisions are quite important for our society to be functional.
• In order to get this heavily distorted distribution, you have to basically put a virtual wall between the left and right moving particles. If these left and right particles can’t interact, then two Gaussian distributions will form on opposite sides of the middle. In nature, you can’t stop left and right particles from interacting, since they are completely mixed up in the same air, unless the air is so thin that each particle doesn’t collide with any other particles. Then it is every particle for itself.
• In society, it is relatively easy to keep the left and right sides from interacting. This can be done through geographic isolation, with small towns being very homogeneous and not really interacting with people with different viewpoints. In larger cities, there is a lot more diversity, so people tend to interact more and tend towards the center; but even in cities, there can be isolation and little interaction between groups.
• We, as a society, are starting to virtually isolate ourselves more, and companies are really helping with this. Online, people choose who they want to interact with, so they can isolate themselves and not have any interaction with those who have different points of view. You could live your entire life without going outside now, just ordering everything off the internet. Even when we go to stores, we don’t have to interact with humans at all – we can use automated checkout machines. These virtual and real isolation methods allow highly non-Gaussian distributions to form.
• The “media” helps isolate people too. Certain outlets, on both the right and left, tend to talk to their base and reinforce the firmly held beliefs. When people on the right only get their news from media on the right, and when people on the left only get their news from media on the left, it is like they are only colliding with particles that push them further away from the center. It is highly unnatural and serves to divide our society.
• We, as a society can feel this division. We know that there is something wrong. But, the problem is that companies on the right and the left make a profit off of the division. Media argue that the reason we are unhappy in our society is not because we need to talk to each other more but because the people on the other side of middle are their enemies. This stokes more isolation and causes the feeling of something being wrong in society even more. Facebook, youtube, and other companies serve people what they think that they want, which is preaching to the choir, which causes isolation.
• (This is just like food in this country. Why would you want to eat healthy when the crappy food tastes so unbelievably good? Pizza is good. Burgers and fries are good. Milkshakes are good. Companies want you to eat this stuff and advertise it during times of the day when we are most vulnerable – I literally get e-mail for pizza at 5 PM. They make a profit off of you destroying yourself. This is the American Dream.)

The last thing I would like to discuss in this way is our government. Polls put the favorable rating of congress at something like 11%. Why is this? Well, the short answer is that congress can’t get anything done. People don’t like the dysfunction that exists in congress. They elected their leaders to go to Washington DC and do something. While some people care about what gets done, the majority of the country (people in the middle), would be happy with almost anything that is not too extreme to get passed. It would be nice if budgets were passed, if debt ceilings were passed, if our tax system was revamped, and our health care system was fixed. But, congress can’t seem to accomplish anything. Why is that?

This is a distribution function of congress:

Congress! Nothing can be done because there is no one in the middle to reach across the aisle!

There is no middle anymore. It is highly unstable and is as split as possible. There are a couple of reasons that this distribution function is like it is:

• The leadership in congress demands that their party members not cross the aisle on “critical votes”, which are almost any policy vote where there could be some division. If members of congress cross lines, they are punished: money is withheld from them when they go up for re-electron and often the most extreme members of the party run a primary candidate against them. Their job is literally on the line with every single “critical” vote. This is done because the Party wants to stay in power, so it is not about what policies are passed, but how the Party can stay in power. Further, there are extremely rich people on both sides of the aisle who give huge amounts of money to the parties to get their agenda passed. For example, if your party controls the Environmental Protection Agency, you can stop regulations that may negatively affect your business. That is a victory for your business, even if the rest of the country can not get anything done because congress is dysfunctional.
• When the member of congress is primaried, it is often by someone who is more extreme. This causes even more division, since people in the extreme edges of the parties tend to vote in primaries, while people in the middle don’t really care too much, since they are happy with almost anything. This shifts the parties towards the extremes, which causes more division and more instability. Further, media outlets buy into the narrative that putting someone who is even more extreme in Congress will actually help. This is completely not true. The more moderate or centrist a candidate, the more they could reach across the aisle and work with others to pass legislation. This is what people actually want. But media companies that make a profit off of the division in the country do not, so they continue to give airtime to the most radical people on both sides of the aisle.

What can be done, then? This is a very hard question, because the things that are causing a bifurcation in the United States political system are not really in our hands. People need to stop watching media outlets that primarily serve one side or the other (yes, I am mostly talking about Fox News, but there are companies on the left that do the same thing). People should broaden their friendships and seek out diversity of thought. On Facebook, people should be civil to each other and explain their points of view and listen to other people’s points of view instead of immediately unfriending/unfollowing them. This is incredibly hard to do, since people tend to be quite rude, righteous, and unwilling to listen to other people’s ideas. And when this happens unicorns will become reality.

I honestly don’t know what we, as normal citizens, can do about this. Maybe boycott Facebook until they change algorithms, providing a broader range of information to people, even though this would lose money for them. Super targeted advertising seems like it is the future, and with it will come even more isolation. And Russian fake news sites to sow even more division in the country. Yeah, I am optimistic.

From a government policy standpoint, there are many things that could be done, but it seems like the parties like the system the way that it is. They want to stay in power. They don’t seem to get that they may get even more power if they encourage more reaching across the aisle. Here are a few very quick policy ideas that might actually help the division in our country:

• Shows and networks should not be able to call themselves “News” unless they demonstrate unbiased (balanced) reporting through some metrics. This is not a violation of first amendment rights, it would be something like a certification program, where the show would get an official “News” designation, otherwise, it would be classified as “entertainment”.
• Fake news should somehow be rooted out, where platforms should be held responsible for serving false stories that are claimed to be real “News”. Similar to above, but on different platforms, I guess.
• Funding for candidate elections should be completely revamped, obviously. There should be less money in elections and more small donations from individuals. This will probably never happen, since there is no motivation for people in power to give up their power.
• Our voting system should be completely revamped. If we had a different voting system that didn’t allow the most polarizing figures to be the primary winners, we could have more centrist candidates that could reach across the aisle. This will take some explaining that will happen in a different post.
• Gerrymandering should be balanced instead of leaning towards one side or the other. This oscillates back and forth depending on who is in charge, but since we have science now, we could actually do this in a way that is less politically motivated. This will probably never happen, since there is no motivation for people in power to give up their power.
• We should actual educate our citizens, since it is more difficult to deceive an educated person.

These are tiny measures that might make a small difference, but really citizens need to understand what is happening and move to counteract it. That is very hard.

So, given that non-Gaussian distributions are unstable, what will happen? Sadly, we will probably have a horrible act (hurricanes? North Korea? terrorism?) that brings the country together for a while, and the divisions will grow again. Ultimately, the underlying problems will have to be fixed or the country will continue to be divided, anger will rise, and horrible things will happen. When we demonize the other side of the distribution function, and don’t see them as “us”, we do horrible things, like run protesters down in the street. Or shoot protesters at a rally. Or start civil wars. With open carry policies, stand-your-ground becoming the law of the land, and anger mounting, things could get quite bad.

I love it when things end on a positive note.

The Need to Say Something. Anything.

It has been a long time since I have written anything.  I guess I am pretty cyclical in these things.

A lot of stuff has been happening in my life.  Some of it good.

I run a lot now. I find that it is extremely meditative. I am not entirely certain what meditation is supposed to be, but I think that I do it while I run. Thoughts flitter in and out of my brain like butterflies.  I feel like I am processing all of the things that are going on in my life.  Just thinking and letting go.  Thinking and letting go.

One of the major things that I think about almost every day is the state of politics right now. It is so unbelievably upsetting. I don’t want to talk about politics because it makes me too angry.  I stopped going onto Facebook, specifically because all I feel is rage.  My solution that I keep thinking of is to make pictures that are gross simplifications of arguments with witty hashtags (i.e., hire models and pose them doing not so great things).  Or, this morning I thought about making an ordered list of things that republicans care about most (with unborn babies, guns, the flag, tax cuts, and unbroken solders at the top, and broken soldiers and black men at the bottom – you get the idea), but I never do this stuff.  It is yet another step toward dehumanizing the other side.  It also won’t convince anyone of anything, since it is just aimed at either making democrats laugh or making republicans angry (shamed?  Not a chance.)  So, there is no point.

I keep coming back to that – there is no point.  There is no point to writing.

It doesn’t even help me anymore either. You see, I spend an ungodly amount of time actually writing.  I write reports and proposals and letters and e-mails. I am drained by all of the writing.  I want to write for myself, because I love to write. But, I can’t.  I don’t have anything to say but political bullshit, and I am so beaten down at work with writing garbage, that I don’t have the energy to write at home.

So, what to do?  I honestly don’t know.  My life has changed a lot in the last year.  I don’t know what is going to happen.  But, I don’t want to give up what I love doing.  I just don’t know how to do it anymore.

Maybe, instead of letting thoughts flitter in and out of my brain while I am running, I will try to hold on to some of them and foster them.  I will try to breathe some life into them and grow them into something that I can write about.  Hopefully not political bullshit, but maybe a little of that.  I don’t know.  I will try to be neutral, if I do.  Or at least not too biased.

Anyways.  I have to get back to packing up.  Did I mention that I am moving in less then a month? Like I said, things have changed a lot.

How Science Really Works

Dave asked a bunch of very interesting questions in his recent post. These questions are probing about the nature of science and how science is done over the long-term. I think that a lot of people understand about science in the abstract – you ask a question (typically a yes/no question) and then think of some way of answering this question. This is a pretty picture of how people do science at a microscopic level, but it doesn’t address how people come up with the questions to ask. That, I think, is the tricky bit.

Let’s take the most obvious analogy that I can think of: a forest.  Let’s pretend for a few minutes that no one has ever heard of a forest or trees. One day, someone wanders over a hill into a valley and notices these tall brown and green things in front of them. No one has ever seen these things before. The person takes a bunch of pictures, does some rough analysis of the heights of the trees and maybe how many there are (very rough!) and publishes a paper in Nature. A new field of science is born!

Scientists everywhere flock to the forest. There are a wide variety of papers that come out, covering topics such as: (a) bark – the skin of trees; (b) how tall is a tree, really; (c) rings – what are those all about; (d) leaves – it’s all about the shape; (e) can animals survive in the darkness of trees; (e) on the size distribution of conifers of the upper valley; (f) a detailed analysis of the bark from tree 12,362; (g) a detailed analysis of the leaf distribution from tree 12,362; and (h) the life cycle of tree: a statistical analysis. You get the idea – there are just a mountain of papers.  No one has heard of trees, let alone forests!  So, there is a ton of new things to investigate.  Some of those papers do a detailed analysis of single trees and generalize to every other tree, while others do statistical analysis of all (or a subsample) of the trees. Every paper is new and fresh and exciting.

After 20 years of studying the forest, you have some scientists who are still looking at tree 12,362, and writing papers on how that tree has changed over the course of 20 years, and others who are looking at a statistical analysis of how much sunlight is needed to support the robust growth of poison ivy (the scourge of the forest!). Another study argues that the analysis of the study that was done 15 years ago was flawed and instead of 1,250,320 trees in the forest, there really are 1,261,624. There is a vicious rebuttal.

After 40 years, the papers start to focus on forest management and what we can do to sustainably harvest the wood for houses and fires and other things, but yet keep the biodiversity of the forest. There are occasional papers on new species of trees and animals that come out, but they are relatively few and far in between.  It is becoming harder to get funding for fundamental tree research. The public in general is still pretty excited by trees and forests, but we know a lot about them, so we don’t need to spend as much money on fundamental research for this specific topic. Textbooks are written, and the topic is covered in classes throughout high school and college.

This is the natural order of science topics – an initial discovery is made, people flock to the field to study it, lots of basic science is done to explore the topic, with funding to support the new science, then, as more and more is known about the subject, funding starts to decrease, papers discuss more and more about the details of the subject, with fewer fundamental discoveries, the knowledge is accumulated in textbooks, and eventually people turn to different science topics. It is a lifecycle. Many science topics result in practical applications.  For example, atomic physics. One of the practical applications is the ability to kill hundreds of thousands of people with a very small device. I supposed I could have come up with a better example.

In the 1940s, the first rockets that went into space made measurements of the upper atmosphere and the magnetosphere.  These rockets couldn’t get very far away from the Earth, so they were basically constrained to studying these regions.  There were a LOT of them. We made a ton of fundamental discoveries of the thermosphere, ionosphere, and magnetosphere. As we moved into the 1970s, we sent missions to Mars and to fly by other planets like Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus. We took pictures of the sun from above the atmosphere and discovered what the sun looks like in X-ray wavelengths. In the 1980s we took images of the northern (and southern!) lights from space. We measured the winds and temperatures in the upper atmosphere. We were discovering new species of trees everywhere we looked. With more satellite launches, radars deployed, lidars built, and other instruments spread across the globe.

Today, NASA’s budget is less than 1/10th the size it was in 1969. We have been to the moon, then decided it was not worth the expense.  We have measured all sorts of interesting things in space.  We’ve done a pretty good job of classifying the trees – improving our understanding of the near-Earth space environment. Does this mean that it is time to stop doing research on the space environment, since we understand a bunch of the large-scale physics of the system?

I think that this is an interesting discussion. At this time, we spend several billion dollars a year on measuring the weather down here where we live.  In many ways, this is not to improve our understanding of the atmosphere (although this data definitely helps!), but it is in order to enable us to specify the weather status right now and predict what the weather will be like in a few days from now. This is obviously important for many, many people.

Specifying the weather in space is not super important to the vast majority of people right now.  There are some areas where it is important, though.  For example, trying to predict when and if satellites or pieces of orbital debris will collide.  In order to figure this out, it is quite important to understand the weather in the upper atmosphere. If you would like airplanes and cars to reliably use GPS in an automated way, then understanding the state of the ionosphere becomes important.

In some ways this discussion of the importance of space research becomes an argument for the transition of the pure research to the specification and prediction of space.  There will clearly need to be science that is done to improve our understanding of the system. For example, meteorologists can explain how a tornado forms, but to predict this is almost impossible. More research is needed in order to more fully explain the exact conditions, with bounds on those conditions, that lead to different sizes of tornados. Science improves our ability to predict. The motivation that drives the science can be both the desire to better understand the physical processes and the desire to improve the nation’s ability to predict what will happen in the future.

We are at a cross-roads in the space physics community, where one road is called Specification and Prediction, while the other is called Double Down on Basic Physics.  I personally think that we should explore both paths and that it is ok to have science that is motivated by practical applications and not just the desire to know more.

Dave – you asked a lot more questions than just this really “simple” one that I answered. I think that you have started an interesting discussion that I hope you will pick up! I really look forward to hearing your thoughts on this and other topics that you raised.

Hello Dave: Writing For Science

My friend, Dave, and I worked on a podcast last year.  We have not really continued it, since both of us ran out of time to dedicate to recording and editing new episodes.  If you would like to check it out, it is called “X and Why” and available for download on your favorite podcast app.  You can also get it from the website xandwhy.xyz. Recently, Dave wrote a blog post about writing. It was quite insightful and very interesting.  We agreed that we should be doing more writing and that this is the first in a series of back-and-forth posts that we will publish. Dave’s first post can be found here. You might want to read that before reading more of this, since it will be a response.

One of my sisters is only 6 weeks younger than I am.  We went through school together, and my parents thought it was best to treat us as equal as possible. This means that we were placed in the same level of classes for as long as possible. The big problem with this was that I was a pretty slow learner in many subjects, while my sister was a superstar in every subject. In math, my 4th grade teacher said that I would never do anything math related, while my sister was acing everything math related.  In middle school, I struggled to get a C- in Advanced English, which is where my sister was placed. She deserved it. I clearly did not. My mother used to be extremely frustrated when she would quiz me on my spelling words. It was a pretty tough time for all of us.

I used to be an avid writer in middle school, too.  I wrote about super heroes. They were very imaginative, with characters that suffered greatly for their powers. I got well-deserved Cs on the stories, with red ink everywhere. In high school, I turned to writing about much more depressing subjects and writing poetry. While the ideas were interesting (maybe), they were written horribly. I recognized this in high school, but didn’t know how to improve them.

When it came time to go to college, it was clear that I was not going to be a writer.  I, instead, took every physics class that I could.  I took programming and math classes. One of my favorite classes that I took in college was “Data Structures”, which is currently a programming class that is dreaded by almost all computer science students that I talk to. I loved that class. English, on the other hand, I don’t even remember. I know that I had to take some sort of reading class and some sort of writing class, but I have no idea how I did. I hated writing.

When I graduated from college, I expected to have a job doing some sort of programming or some sort of physics-related thing. I did not expect to write. Then I started graduate school.

I wrote my first paper in my second year of graduate school. You can find it here. When I got the reviews back from this paper, they included phrases similar to “this was the worst written paper that I have ever reviewed.” I am not exaggerating at all.  They were incredibly brutal. It was quite demoralizing. This paper was eventually accepted for publication, and an amazing thing happened. We had to send in a double-spaced hard-copy of the paper to the American Geophysical Union, and a copy editor actually marked it up.  They sent it back to me, and I had to make all of the changes that they noted.  This was a brutal process, but it taught me some of the things that I was systematically doing incorrectly. AGU continued to do this for many years, so every time I wrote a paper, I got a fully edited paper from AGU, which taught me grammar and style. The copy editors of AGU taught me to correctly write scientific papers. Now, when you write papers, AGU doesn’t return copy edited manuscripts, since it is all done electronically; you simply send them the Word (or LaTeX) file, and they make the changes.  I think that this is very sad, since I learned so much from this process. I also learned a huge amount from spell checkers, which have saved my life.

I am now the teacher and not the student.  I edit my student’s papers and bleed all over them.  My students and I still get pretty nasty comments from scientists, but I am not overly concerned. I have actually hired copy editors to read over my papers and edit them.  They typically don’t find more than a few issues, while the scientists typically find 10s of suggestions for grammar.  I make these changes that the scientists suggest, but most of the time they are being overly picky about things. For example, my last paper was returned with a statement like “the first sentence in the paper had a split infinitive, so I basically couldn’t proceed with reading the rest of it.” For those who are not in the know (which was me before that moment), a split infinitive is when you put a descriptor between the noun and verb (“To boldly go…”),where you are supposed to have it after the verb (“To go boldly…”).  Wikipedia says that it is a common practice to split infinitives and it is perfectly acceptable (or, it perfectly is acceptable? :-). Ah, scientists.

Now, I am a writer. I have to write.  I write papers.  I write proposals. I write blogs. I write annual reports. I write proposal and paper reviews. And reviews of reports. I write and write and write more.

I still struggle with writing.  When I stare at a blank page and have to write a paper or proposal, I don’t know what to say. So, I force myself to write something easy to begin with – like the descriptions of the figures. This is easy. Then I write the methodology, which is also easy. Then maybe the discussion and conclusions. The last thing that I ever write is the introduction, since this is the most free-form and is the hardest to make flow. It is also the first thing that anyone reads and sets the whole tone of the paper. If you mess it up (split infinitive), the reader is discouraged straight away.

That is my writing story.

You (Dave) asked a bunch of questions about science, but I feel like I have written too many words to keep people’s interest already, so I will answer these in a separate post in the next few days. It is a good topic that you have started with, and I am very interested. I just thought that I should respond to your initial post with my own story of my writing journey. Thanks for suggesting this, Dave, and I hope that we can continue this longer than the podcast!

 

Advantages and Disadvantages

As part of the College of Engineering Honors Community, we talk a fair bit about privilege, and what it means to have privilege.  We also talk a lot about diversity and considering other people’s path through life. Additionally, I listen to a lot of podcasts where there are discussion on how some people see the world through the wildly varying lenses. It is sometimes extremely difficult to understand how people can view the world in radically different ways. So, I wanted to open a conversation about how some of us have advantages over others and some of us are disadvantaged compared to others.

Here is a simple example that everyone can probably appreciate. Let’s say that you have a chronic illness that causes you to miss one day of work a week. Over a full year, this is about 50 days of work missed, or about 20% of the time. That is a lot of work. Pretty much by definition, this person will fall further and further behind a person without a chronic illness. They won’t be able to accomplish as much as their co-workers. Let’s say that their employer treated them very fairly, and basically compared them to other workers hour-by-hour (like 1600 hours of work compared to 1600 hours of work to another person), and gave them appropriate raises.  Then the chronically ill person, in the best of circumstances, would get roughly 80% of the raise of a person of similar work performance.  Is this fair?  Because someone is born with a chronic illness, they fall behind others of similar talent.

Let’s consider another example. When a professor tries to get tenure, they may end up working a lot of hours. The more hours the professor works, the more papers and proposals they can write.  While there is a lot more to it, if you assume that you have two people who have exactly the same abilities, the person who works more will produce more. Consider sleep.  If you are the type of person who needs 8-9 hours of sleep a night, you basically have a disadvantage over someone of equal ability who only needs 5-6 hours of sleep a night.  The person who needs less sleep, literally has more hours in the day to work. You could argue that this is a HUGE advantage. If you assume each person spends 7 hours a day with family and eating and stuff, and they sleep for either 5 or 8 hours, then the person has either 12 or 9 hours of work time, for a difference of 30%. This can make for a 45 hour work week or a 60 hour work week.  That is massive when considering the amount of time it takes to write papers and proposals, prepare lectures, and advise students. Is this fair? Because someone is born with the need to sleep more, they naturally fall behind someone who needs less sleep but has similar talents.

A professional basketball play is another example of someone who is born with certain advantages over another person.  I could never be a basketball player.  I have super short legs and have almost no hand-eye coordination at all. But, let’s pretend that I wanted to be a basketball player and tried really, really hard at it. There is no way that it would happen. This is a somewhat different type of example, though, since I will never have similar talents as someone who is two feet taller than I am and can actually dribble a ball.

Let’s then consider two people who are identical in their talents, except they just have a few differences. Let’s say that one is a man and one is a woman. This shouldn’t matter at all if they are identical in their talents. But, in the real world, it does. For example, when sending resumes to perspective technical employers, men receive more callbacks than women, even when the resumes are identical.  In teaching evaluations, men are typically given higher ratings, even in online classes, when the only thing that is different about the entire class is the name of the professor. When competing for the exact same technical job, women are disadvantaged compared to men.

This is also true of race – black and brown people are disadvantaged compared to white people when applying for the same jobs. There are many aspects of life where black and brown people are at a disadvantage: law enforcement and banking to name just two. Imagine being pulled over by the police multiple times in a month for trivial traffic violations (or no violations at all). I would definitely have to change my driving habits and would have to add 20-30 minutes to every single trip that I take, just in case I got pulled over.  It would change a huge aspect of my “just in time” lifestyle.  I have also been extremely lucky with banking.  We built a house just before the recession, and had a very difficult time selling our old house. The bank basically bent over backwards to help us out of our situation.  If they had not done this, we could have lost our brand new home that we had spend thousands of hours building with our own hands. I am extremely grateful for this, but it really could have easily turned out differently if the bank had decided that I was not the type of person that they wanted to take a huge risk on. Like if my skin were a different color.

(It should be noted here that until recently, there was clear discrimination in our mortgage lending, where banks would turn down black people who had significantly better credit than white people who were given loans. This is not fantasy. It was standard practice. Now there are laws specifically prohibiting against it, but there is unconscious bias where questionable cases are tipped one way versus the other depending on the race of the person applying. The Supreme Court even acknowledged it.)

Is it fair that by luck of birth you may have huge advantages over someone else? Or put another way, is it fair that someone else, by luck of birth, may have a huge disadvantage compared to you?

Take me for example. I am a middle aged white male who is very healthy, was born to parents who were not rich, but were not suffering, and had access to a very nice safety net. I am a professor at a major research university who has tenure and basically can’t be fired. I am extremely lucky. I have worked hard and am smart enough to succeed in my field, but there is no question that if I was born with different skin color, had parents who were much poorer, had a lower IQ, suffered from abuse and neglect as a child, went to worse public schools, or was a woman, I would have had a significantly harder journey.

We just had a meeting with four women faculty and four men faculty and all four men stated that they typically made mistakes or did something dumb in class specifically to try to make them seem more approachable to students, while all four women reported that they got bad teaching evaluations when they made mistakes in class. What a different perspective.

What does this mean?

First, we should all understand that advantages and disadvantages come from all different directions. We are luckier than some people and unluckier than others. Some of us have a lot of advantages, while others do not. Just knowing this and thinking about its ramifications is a good start.

I try to keep the understanding that others might have fewer advantages than I do in the forefront of my mind.  I see that I have many advantages compared to the vast majority of Americans, and it has really changed the way that I think about how I get things accomplished. I feel like I have a responsibility to use the advantages that I have to help others who may not be as lucky as I am and continue to be.

I totally stole this image from the web. I am sorry.

 

Welcome to the New Year

It is New Year’s Day 2017. I am not sure that I have ever really published something on the first of the year before, since I am not really one for making resolutions. This year, though, I feel like I need to.  I am not really sure why.  Maybe it is a mid-life crisis or something. A realization that life can be both short and long at the same time.  That we both need to live life for today, but need to plan for tomorrow at the same time.

My largest struggle in life is my inability to say “no” to people.  I constantly overcommit and spread myself too thin. There are all sorts of reasons for this, I am sure, but, no matter what the reason, it is still there. I have to learn to say “no” to people.

Interestingly, the majority of people around me recognize this. Most people agree that I need to say “no” to other people. Not to them. Which is the whole problem.  Who do you say “no” to? How do you prioritize what is important and what should you turn down?

This really leads to the core of the problem, which is that I don’t really have any life-long goals that I am working towards.  I don’t have an ambition to be a department chair or a dean or a NASA administrator or anything like that.  I don’t know if any of those things will actually make me happy or not. (Which is yet another issue – are you supposed to work towards things that will give you happiness and/or work towards things that will fulfill some larger purpose in life? This whole life thing is really freaking confusing at the moment.)

I tend to bumble along in life, taking whatever random turn life offers.  I seem to have no real purpose or direction. Which makes it very easy to overcommit and take on too much responsibility, since I have no overarching path to guide my decision making. I simply say “yes” to everything because I don’t want to disappoint people; and the thing sounds interesting, so I might as well do that too. What horrible reasons for taking on more responsibility.

What does this mean for the New Year? Well, I have a couple of concrete things and a nebulas thing.  First, the concrete things, since they are (much) easier. There are a few things that I know that I love to do, which I will do more of in 2017.

I have learned over the last couple of years that I really love to run. I have been trying hard to run every day.  I clears my head and gives me a lot of energy. It is easy to do and doesn’t take as much time as cycling or going to the gym. So, I resolve to run more this year. I would really like to average about 3 miles per day, which is really, really hard, since I am often so busy that I can’t run at all. (We also live on narrow dirt roads, so in the winter it is difficult to run, since it is dark and often icy. This means that I have to go somewhere to run, which takes a lot of time, or that I have to torture myself and run on the treadmill.) I will compromise and set my goal at 2 miles per day, or 730 miles for the year. In 2016, I ran about 500 miles according to my phone. If I do two half marathons this year, that should be an easy goal, right?

I have also learned over the last many years that I love photography. I am also incredibly frustrated by it.  This is because I am in a place where I can see that my pictures are pretty ok, but there are a lot of much better pictures out there. So, for the last couple of years, I have not taken nearly as many pictures as I should, since I have sort of given up. But, I have become more inspired lately.

There is a difference between just doing something over and over and over again and a thing called deliberate practice. When you just do something over and over again, without really trying to improve, you don’t get any better at it (surprise!).  With deliberate practice, you really try to improve, which means getting feedback, and studying, and really going outside of your comfort zone. For example, if you want to improve in running, you try to either run a little bit longer every day, or you try to run a bit faster everyday, or you talk to a coach about how you can improve.  Improvement comes with some pain. So, one of my goals for this year is to improve in photography.  My sister and I are going to take a picture a week and post it on a website.  I will try to use the idea of deliberate practice to improve some aspect of my photography every week.

Now, the nebulas goal.

Decisions would be much more straightforward if I knew what I actually want to do with my life.  There are a lot of choices out there, such as being a leading modeler and always pushing the boundaries of what computational physics can do; being someone that drives new innovations in measurements and how data and models can be fused together (a sub-discipline here is ground-based or space-based measurements – it is very hard to do both); being an administrator and pushing for improvements in academia at the University of Michigan, or on a broader scale; being a leading educator and pushing for new ways of teaching students (at the university, in K-12, and across all age ranges through podcasts, blogs, videos, books, etc.); or being whatever comes next.

What I would like to do this year is try to figure out what I would like to be when I grow up. I would like to consider each of these different options and figure out some sort of prioritization in my (work) life. If I can develop some sort of framework for making decisions, then perhaps I can learn to say “no” more often.  This will allow me to spend more time focusing on a few key things and not spreading myself so thin.

I guess that is my stretch goal – figure out how to be to not be so stretched.

P.S. Some very small additional goals for 2017: (1) try to enjoy travel more and (2) try to eat vegetables every day (and french fries don’t count).

Where does this path go?