The postdoc dilemma

A while ago, I read a column in Nature which I related to. Like the author, I am currently a postdoc researcher, and recognize the dilemma. The column ‘The postdoc dilemma’ appeared in the Careers section and was written by Gaston Small. The crux of the dilemma:

The job–career balance is a fundamental challenge for postdocs. Fulfilling the obligations of the project that currently pays your salary is, of course, essential, but at the same time postdocs need to push previous work through the publication process, which often entails multiple revisions. Writing grant applications, and applying and interviewing for faculty jobs are necessary activities; [...] postdoc funding runs out quickly. These additional responsibilities to our careers are as time-consuming as obligations to our full-time jobs.

An important point made in the column is that in the postdoc will work on papers from the postdoc project in years after the project is over and thereby catching up on whatever time lost on non-project work.

 

 

Picture of the Day: Norwegian Spring

When I was little, I was taught that the spring months were March, April, and May. The picture below (of my car) was taken yesterday, a week shy of the halfway point of the spring season. I love this country!

 

A Dictionary of the Near Future

I am supposed to be working, but I then I an op-ed, by Doublas Coupland in The New York Times, caught my attention: A Dictionary of the Near Future:

The thing about the future is that it never feels the way we thought it would. New sensations require new terms; below are a few such terms to encapsulate our present moment.

I regcognize myself in a lot of the terms, Airport-Induced Identity Dysphoria, for example:

AIRPORT-INDUCED IDENTITY DYSPHORIA Describes the extent to which modern travel strips the traveler of just enough sense of identity so as to create a need to purchase stickers and gift knick-knacks that bolster their sense of slightly eroded personhood: flags of the world, family crests, school and university merchandise.

It goes deep, wonder what economists have to say about this:

CRYSTALLOGRAPHIC MONEY THEORY The hypothesis that money is a crystallization or condensation of time and free will, the two characteristics that separate humans from other species.

I am dimanchophobic every now and then, approximately once a week:

DIMANCHOPHOBIA Fear of Sundays, a condition that reflects fear of unstructured time. Also known as acalendrical anxiety. Not to be confused with didominicaphobia or kyriakephobia, fear of the Lord’s Day.

So not true:

INTRAVINCULAR FAMILIAL SILENCE We need to be around our families not because we have so many shared experiences to talk about, but because they know precisely which subjects to avoid.

Fair enough, true, but is it a real problem, or just the manifestation of deeper problems regarding attention spans or commitments, or both?

KARAOKEAL AMNESIA Most people don’t know the complete lyrics to almost any song, particularly the ones they hold most dear. (See also Lyrical Putty)

?:

PROCELERATION The acceleration of acceleration.

Mere word play:

PSEUDOALIENATION The inability of humans to create genuinely alienating situations. Anything made by humans is a de facto expression of humanity. Technology cannot be alienating because humans created it. Genuinely alien technologies can be created only by aliens. Technically, a situation one might describe as alienating is, in fact, “humanating.”

So that’s what standard deviation means, I hear it all the time:

STANDARD DEVIATION Feeling unique is no indication of uniqueness, and yet it is the feeling of uniqueness that convinces us we have souls.

Periodic Productivity worked for me

A Report from Montréal

‘This week, I’m attending the Fourth World Congress of Environmental and Resource Economists in Montréal. It’s been great so far, except my own presentation was a bit of a mess. I presented in the morning session on the first day and I was exhausted from the travel. That’s just an excuse, but it is what it is. Been to a lot of interesting sessions. The difficult thing is always to choose between the sessions. Yesterday afternoon, for example, I had to drop Thomas Kuhn for the session on Ethics and Social Norms.

Yesterday, AERE, EAERE, and FEEM presented their FEEM 20th Anniversary Prize to Resources for the Future and Marty Weitzman. Worthy winners, for sure. I attended Weitzman’s presentation on Tuesday and it was great, as expected. Depressing conclusions on the dismalness of economics (when it comes to climate change, that is), but important research nonetheless, the way I see it.

I’m discovering Montréal a little bit at the time. As Tom Sterner said in the first plenary session, it was a great idea to have a jazz festival in parallell with the conference, and I wholeheartedly agree. I just wish I had more time to enjoy the festival; the conference and surrounding arrangements takes 15 hours a day. My hotel, I have discovered, I just at the intersection between the shopping district, the jazz festival area, the Chinese quarter, and a more questionable and run down area with strip joints on every corner. To get to the conference site, I have to traverse the strip club area, which certainly adds to my ‘daily’ experience of Montréal.

Gotta run; more session to attend to, more people to meet, more fun to be had.

Summer Mode On

My readership (counting perhaps one reader) has already noticed that the blog has moved into summer mode. I certainly have, but days are still busy. I prepare for two large conferences this summer (WCERE 2010 and IIFET 2010), that is, I make slides, I review a paper, and try to take some time off inbetween. So until mid-August, there will be little if any activity on the blog.

A Sign of Life

Just want to give a sign of life and say that I, at least in the short term, intend to keep posting on the blog. The hiatus, which just ended, was caused by a number of things: Completing and submitting my PhD thesis; that time of year; looking after my son (maternity leave); playing chess; submitting stuff to conferences; moving to a temporary apartment; living temporary; buying a house; preparing a trial lecture and the defense of my PhD; giving the trial lecture and defending my PhD; an extraordinary snowy winter; and getting a job. With all that out of the way, I hope to be able to keep this blog alive.

FlashChess3

Unfortunately, I came across FlashChess3 a while ago. It’s a fairly decent online chess engine, and I enjoy it alot. I mostly play the ‘casual’ level because I beat it most of the time without too much effort (not the best way to get better, I know). Some nice features are the possibility to play both colours (I used to play another online engine where I was always white; I got better white white, but am still terrible with black) and the possibility to undo moves such that I can keep playing games even though I do stupid mistakes I’d never do ‘for real’ (I hope). It also annotates the games, which is nice; I guess the feature is more developed in the download-version. What I don’t like is the irrationally aggresive pawns several online engines seem to feature on low levels of difficulty.

Quote of the Day

Buck up. Irrational cheerfulness is hard to teach but good to have for any work .
-Deirdre N. McCloskey, Economical Writing, Second Edition, 2000, p. 21

Grindadrap

Nobel, Schnobel

Obama??!! Gimme a break!

The 11th Occasional Workshop on Environmental and Resource Economics

As said, this weekend I attended the 11th Occasional Workshop on Environmental and Resource Economics in Santa Barbara. The format of this meeting is pretty crazy. Each presenter gets 10 minutes to explain their idea, and each discussant gets 5 minutes to disucss two (!) papers. The weird thing is that it works remarkedly well. Since the meeting attracts many of the top guys in the field, the whole thing is like a blitz-show outlining the research frontier of environmental and resource economics.

Unfortunately, I was unable to give a presentation myself. I’m kind of glad to. Imagine presenting an idea you’ve worked on for months, sometimes years, and which takes you 20 pages plus to write down, in 10 minutes! I’d be in big trouble.

It was a really nice meeting. I met a lot of people working on the type of problems I’m interested in. I was also able to introduce myself to some the senior people in the field, which supposedly is a good thing for my future self. More importantly, perhaps, I got a few new ideas I’d like to look into as soon as I can get my disertation off my table. That, however, will still take some time.

I’m in San Diego

For the past week and two weeks more I’m visiting both the Southwest Fisheries Science Center in La Jolla and the Center for Environmental Economics at the University of California, San Diego.  My main focus here is to finish as much as possible various chapters of my dissertation. My main focus with this post is to create some envy:

Well-Fed Norwegians

Reporting on the Norwegian election, the Economist has an amusing description of Norway and Bergen (my hometown) in particular:

Norwegians [...] seem a largely content bunch. Why wouldn’t they? A stroll through Bergen, Norway’s second city, reveals handsome, well-fed citizens who work in designer offices or high-tech fishing vessels, relax in art galleries and theatres, and enjoy pristine scenery. Education is free and health care is heavily subsidised.

One Year with Kvams

It is now exactly one year since I started this blog. It’s been 156 posts (including this one), 2 pages (I planned to publish my About page on this anniversary, but ended up postponing it, again), 11 categories, and no less than 486 tags. More interestingly, maybe, Have I achieved anything of what I wanted with this blog?

Well, I’ve discussed books, some rather extensively (to a blog, at least [I think]); the blog at times may look like a discussion with myself (although that point has gone lost on me for a long time; however, it is obviously not a discussion with anyone else; it feels like talking to myself [and the occasional stray dog wandering in from Google], but that was also a part of the point); I’m not as critical as I’d ideally be, I think (I know!); I’ve certainly got a lot of writing exercise; I haven’t discussed music to the extent that I originally imagined and wanted (I’ve realized it takes a lot of effort to write well, originally and creatively about music); it’s definitively been an ‘outlet’ (or arena, I don’t know) for my narcisissm and a distraction; I’ve posted on both interesting (to me) and important (to me) stuff, I’ve even posted on fun (to me) stuff; finally, I’ve let myself down on the weather in Bergen (oh well, not much to talk about, really).

In conclusion, I’m quite happy with both my input and the outcome of Kvams. More often than not have I kept up a steady posting rate, and even though I’m quoting other blogs, articles and stuff quite heavily, I think I contribute a fair share myself. In all, I’m looking forward to more blogging.