The career plan (revised)

When I began my graduate educational journey, which started with a dead end job working in IT for a small business, I didn’t really have a good concept of how things might unfold. I did all of my applications with the not-so-professional guidance of close friends who had as much experience as I did in successfully applying to neuroscience graduate schools (none). When I was fortunate enough to have a choice between graduate programs, I had the luxury of choosing a research direction, between the genetically minded approach of one school to the computationally minded approach of the other.

I ultimately chose the computational direction because while clearly genetics is relevant now and will be forever relevant, I think that the coming of age of computational neuroscience is now. Genetics presents an ethical minefield that threatens to ultimately slow the scope of its reach (for better or worse), and I think this will delay the onset of the true age of genetic “understanding” with respect to nervous systems.

Additionally, another branch point came during rotations in my first years in graduate school, when I had some experimental opportunities to weigh against learning computational techniques. In the end I chose the mathematics, though, because I feel like these are techniques that are far more difficult to learn on one’s own. The anecdotal evidence for this has been realized time and again by experimentalists who are struggling to learn modeling techniques in a meaningful way. In contrast, I’ve seen a number of computational folks who have made the transition to experimental techniques seamlessly.

My plan thus far was to continue developing my computational techniques throughout grad school and then transition into a postdoctoral position and learn some electrophysiology. However, a phenomenal opportunity arose in which I might be able to do in vivo electrophysiology now, as part of my dissertation. I jumped at it, almost without proper or deliberate consideration. It sounds reasonable enough to me, though it obviously is accompanied by a bit of trepidation, considering the magnitude of this change.

I already have experience in biophysical modeling, and I’m working on some data analysis techniques which will serve me well. If I do electrophysiology now, then I can devote my postdoctoral appointment to different computational techniques, or perhaps a more mathematical project. Since the landscape of computational neuro is in a sense just as large as experimental neuro, there are far more techniques I have no experience with but am interested in learning. Once again, at this stage it’s unclear which approach will be more fruitful, but here’s to the uncertainty of the journey!

Project Euler

Project Euler is a small database of computational/mathematical problems that one can solve using any method he/she knows. I think it’s going to be a fascinating way to learn different numerical programming techniques.

I only solved the first few problems^* so far, and while I think in MATLAB/GNU Octave for the time being, I am certain I can learn enough Perl or C to do (at least some of) these problems as well.

^*I am sure someone’s pointed this out in the 8 years since its introduction, but I might as well mention it here. The original problem 1 statement reads:

“If we list all the natural numbers below 10 that are multiples of 3 or 5, we get 3, 5, 6 and 9. The sum of these multiples is 23.

Find the sum of all the multiples of 3 or 5 below 1000.”

If we expand the boundary from 10 to 20, we see that the numbers divisible by 3 include 3, 6, 9, 12, 15, and 18. The numbers in the set divisible by 5 include 5, 10, and 15.

We are told to look for the sum of all the multiples of 3 OR 5 below 1000. In this toy example, I do not think the solution should include 15, which is divisible by 3 AND 5. In any case, they meant and/or (and go so far to say so in their PDF solution), so my qnd solution was correct. Feel free to contact me for at least one MATLAB solution to this problem.

What’s that due process stuff, again?

I just wanted to comment briefly on this story by ABC about currently ongoing accusations on the CIA Algerian station chief, who was recently accused of a heinous crime of rape.

Disclaimer: I don’t know all the facts of this case. (Who does?)

If the following are true, then there doesn’t appear to be any good reason to fire this person.

1. No formal charges are currently filed.
2. No crime has been shown in a court of law to have been committed.
3. As it currently stands, it is just an accusation.
4. Due process still exists and matters.

If any of these four things are incorrect, then fire, tar, feather, and jail him. Otherwise, there doesn’t appear to be any good reason to do so.

Pirates of the Indian

If you put your ear to the underground and listen closely, every once in awhile, you hear something truly important. The world of hip hop music has had a pretty low signal to noise ratio in recent years — that is, there’s a lot of junk out there. But there are artists like Talib Kweli, Common, and K’naan, among others, who are using their music to reach out to people and spread a real message. This is what hip hop was in the beginning, and while the mainstream has degraded, the movement is still very much alive. It’s not to say that listeners should agree straight ticket on the opinions being expressed, but more often than not, I find that these opinions go largely unappreciated.

One such opinion of K’naan deals with the pirates off the coast of Somalia in the Indian Ocean. Honestly, my impression of them has been that of terrorists who are hijacking consumer and other private vessels for money. But K’naan recently released a single off of his forthcoming album Troubadour entitled “Somalia,” in homage to his home. In the song, he has a lyric, “So what you know bout the pirates terrorize the ocean / To never know a simple day without a big commotion.” The first time I heard this, I had to pause for a moment because it sounded like K’naan was defending the actions of Somalian pirates who have hijacked dozens of ships over the last several years.

I did a quick search to see if I could find out more about K’naan’s thoughts about the issue and came across this video:

According to K’naan, there is nuclear waste being deposited on the coast of Somalia, and the local fisherman mobilized in the absence of any governmental or international protection. He admits that it might have spiraled out of control from this mission to greed, but he falls short of condemning this behavior.

According to at least one report in Al Jazeera, the basic story likely has merit.

It bothers me that I hadn’t heard of this line of reasoning previously. While I certainly believe that there are probably innocent parties involved in this and the piracy is absolutely condemnable, I also believe in the sovereign right of the Somalis to secure their coastal waters from people who may be illegally dumping toxic waste.

“So what you know bout the pirates terrorize the ocean / To never know a simple day without a big commotion.”

Apparently not much, K’naan, but thanks to your outreach, here’s to hoping more people start to care. Perhaps all of this can be avoided.

Fair assessment of students

In many disciplines, grading is arbitrary. We have all had the experience of having a professor or a teacher whose grading scheme was a black box. This is an archaic problem that has been passed on through generations of traditional educational models. Transparency in evaluation of student work is an important tenet of my teaching best practices.

Assessment of certain assignments lend themselves very well to objective criteria. In most multiple choice exams, the answer’s usually clear. The discrete nature of right and wrong lends itself well to grading. But as we all know, multiple choice exams aren’t necessarily the best way of assessing student learning (also not necessarily the worst). Even short answer questions in biology or multi step physics problems can introduce potential qualitative judgments that an instructor needs to make. Do I give credit for an answer that does not show work? How much “work” is enough for credit? Was the answer precise enough? In most of these assessment methods, a gradient of answer quality exists.

It is the duty of the instructor to be impartial to the students. In addition, I consider assessment to be an ongoing conversation between students and teachers, and in every classroom situation I’ve been in, I’ve tried to foster that environment. This is particularly difficult in an educational system that is structured around GPAs and grades, with students who have worked not to maximize their understanding but often have learned only how to optimize their grade with a Least Effort Approximation.

It is imperative for teachers to be open with their students about what they are looking for. The standards should be loose enough to allow for students to show the quality of their learning on any given task. In other words, tasks should be meaningful. Students will understand expectations better, and teachers are able to explain grades clearly when these guidelines are set. Controversy will undoubtedly exist, even with transparency, but at least everyone will be arguing on similar grounds, which unfortunately does not occur with most methods of evaluation.

If nothing else, teachers should be aware of the problem created by arbitrary assessment and opacity. I doubt I’ll be able to ever fully convince “old model” teachers to ever fully embrace openness with students, but that problem is independent of the arbitrary grading problem, which is a serious problem that probably affects most teachers — and all of their students.