On a fast plane

Careers in virtually all academic disciplines are fostered by being a superstar who knows more about one subject than anyone else in the world.   Philip Zimbardo

But those superstars often get lost in transit.  When I started at UCSD 30 years ago I worked for a well-known seismologist.  He had written his seminal paper quite early in his career and it was cited many times.  However, the citations always referred to it as Doe, 1970, 1971 because he had reversed the data in the paper and had to publish a correction.  Nonetheless this paper influenced his field profoundly.

He called me at home once while I was finishing the dinner dishes and asked, “Shelley, I’m in the Washington, D.C. airport, why am I here?”

In 1984 the Seismological Society of America met in Alaska on the anniversary of the Good Friday Earthquake.  In that pre-PC era we made travel reservations with a booking agency.  When the Professor returned from his trip I asked him how it went.  He told me,  “Shelley, I could not see the San Andreas Fault from my window seat.  Make sure that doesn’t happen again.”

The solution: the  next time I called the booking agent, I added a special request,  “make sure he is on the seismologically significant side of the plane, please.”

Stories from academia I

All too often, academic departments defend their territory with the passion of cornered animals, though with far less justification.
Bruce Jackson

My first real managerial position at UCSD was working for a lab that had several projects about language. These projects collected data from human research participants (often undergraduate students).  As the manager I had to mediate disagreements in the lab for the academic director.

Two laboratory assistants, one male and one female, both in their twenties, got in a heated argument over whether this particular subject that had showed up in the lab for testing belonged to the bilingual research project or the communication disorders project.  They were just short of a tug of war with the undergraduate’s arm when the female lab assistant won out and the male lab assistant got in the last word– “FUCK!”

The female lab assistant notified the academic director of the exchange. The director  asked me to take care of it.  I called human resources and asked if this behavior was sufficient to warrant a letter of warning.  They recommended it so I drafted the letter for the academic director to sign.  The draft read:

“Use of expletives or profane language in the lab is prohibited.”

Proud of myself for the clear wording of our expectations for future behavior, I set the letter in front of the director to sign.

She scanned it quickly and barked, “I don’t agree with this! I reserve the right to say “Fuck” in my lab.  Change it.”

The watered down version we gave to the employee read:

“Use of expletives or profane language in front of human research subjects in the lab is prohibited.”

That Damn Bird

I manage several research units in cognitive neuroscience at UCSD.  The research has flourished in an open environment with as few rules or procedures imposed as possible by the department, since the University itself and the funding agencies provide reams and reams of guidance and procedures.

I was quite happy to manage in this fashion, until the bird.

One of the  star researchers   studies social interaction for learning  by building robots he places in the classroom as tutors ( a controversial subject outside of Japan) .

For someone who studies social interaction this researcher  is extremely unintuitive in my opinion!  He purchased a parrot (one of those birds who lives 200 years) and, because his wife dislikes birds, has begun to bring it into his lab every day.

The young bird is just beginning to vocalize and becoming quite enthusiastic about his noisemaking.   It  likes to peck at the keys of unoccupied keyboards until the keys break off and fly to the floor.  He sheds feathers everywhere and is not yet potty-trained.  Thus one custodian has complained about having to clean up bird shit, a task not listed on her job description.

Since this researcher is very successful in bringing in funding, everyone in his lab is afraid to tell him how the bird disturbs their work.  So it was left to me to bring up the subject.

I e-mailed him the department policy on pets “unless you are a seeing eye dog, you cannot be in the workplace.”

The researcher’s first response was that he “would quit UCSD.”  His next 18 responses accused me of harassing him about the bird.  Everyone in the building, according to him,  liked the bird and wanted it there.

Who is harassing whom?  I thought, as I wearily opened that 18th e-mail that told me I should focus on reducing administrative errors in the department and not harassing innocent birds.  I happily remind myself that I am retiring in six short months. That damn bird will soon be on someone else’s radar.

Autumn in San Diego.

The sunshine and clear skies– the cooler evenings — like the infamous madeleine evoke in me a primordial nostalgia.  School starts in Autumn and school has always been about new beginnings and remembrance of the past.  Fall is football, fishing season and flying Blue Angels.  San Diego’s past as a naval and fishing port is evident.

October, and the annual Miramar air show attracts thousands of aviation enthusiasts to San Diego.  Driving home from work on Friday night, I saw  six Blue Angels flying in formation above the 52 freeway.  When I first came to San Diego I remember 5th Avenue (now Gaslamp) was filled with peep shows and nudie bars, and the swabbies (white-uniformed sailors) roamed the streets.

October, lobster season opens and the ocean offshore of Sunset Cliffs is now covered with bobbing floats to indicate the traps.  Those traps , during the high winter surf, will break from their mooring and float towards shore, endangering surfers who use leashes.  There are several memorials set out each year at Sunset Cliffs for the young surfers who were trapped underwater by these metal cages and drowned.

My son’s father used to take him deep sea fishing in the fall.  I had no idea what a violent sport fishing could be.  My son then eight and now 31 told me about his first fishing expedition.  He was given a small wriggling fish and told to bait the hook of his line.

“Where’s the tab to put the hook in,” he asked, horrified to think that he had to pierce living flesh.

On another outing where they sunk their lines deep into the ocean, he snagged a bottom fish and as he reeled in the long line, dragging the fish up from the deep , the fish turned itself inside out, guts and organs flapping in the water,  in response to the decreasing pressure of the sea surface.

Halloween comes next.

You meet the most interesting people…

In a consignment store in western Washington, over which hung the sign "no government employees or tweakers allowed"

You meet the most interesting people when you travel.   Up on the Olympic Peninsula we met this local who donates goods and money to an orphanage in Popotle, Baja California; he was an anti-development activist in Vista, and is a now a local gadfly in western Washington.  He is also slightly paranoid and his mind has likely been permanently altered by 60s drug use.  When we asked him why the sign “no government employees or tweakers allowed,” he laughed.  If we wanted some crystal we need only cross the street to the only restaurant in this small coastal town to obtain our addict-brain’s desire.  We gave him twenty bucks and he insisted that we take a curio from his store.

Data Monitoring

I started blogging in 2005 on blogspot.com and moved away from it in 2007.

Return to blogging this September  I find a whole world of options and they all cost money.

I uploaded a photo of Lake Quinalt to this post and previewed a poster-sized monster in my post space,  causing an alert that I had used up almost a third of my blog space but could purchase more gigabytes.

I trashed the post and picture and decided this is a good thing.  Spare prose, that’s the ticket.  Or learn to tweet.

Cox Cable has also informed me that now it monitors my data download usage each month.  What is the world coming to when virtual space costs money?  I can see a new career opportunity for all those underemployed real estate agents: selling internet space.

Tweet:  bak to blg pix 2 big save space sell air.

 

 

The meaning of license plate holders

A seagull soars on the back of the car and the message below reads:

OB is an attitude not a place. 

Standing in line at the supermarket, I scan the crisp white t-shirt of the young man in front of me.  The message reads:

         FUCK YOU!

I’m from Ocean Beach.

Enlightenment is an attitude not a place.

Surfing before sunset in OB, I overheard one young man instruct his friend in the Zen of surfing.

“You must be dedicated; you must devote every waking second to surfing.  You must concentrate and then you will learn how to surf, and one day you, the board, and the wave will be gliding as one across the surface of the ocean. If you are not dedicated, if you do not concentrate, then you will NOT catch that wave.

You must get beat up to surf.  If you are not willing to get hammered, then you will never really surf.  On the next wave, give it everything, don’t hold back, you’re gonna get hurt and you’re gonna get right out there and do it again.”

When I teach friends to surf, I tell them, “Look where you want to go and you’ll get there.”

Hello world!

Hello World,

First day of school at UCSD is tomorrow; it’s my last first day of school at UCSD and I intend to miss it!  Will start posting more stuff when things cool down a bit.

Retirement is only 7 short months away and my first post-retirement activity will be to forget every single acronym I’ve used for the past 30 years in my job; then I will take a cruise to Alaska since my nephew now works for Princess Cruises and I get a 60% discount.

I’m learning French again for a planned trip to France.  If anyone wants to learn French I highly recommend the website ABOUT FRENCH.com