Some time ago I described my first steps in setting up a research group at a UK university. After one year it is time to evaluate some of the developments made so far. In general, I am quite happy with the progress. Certainly it has not been a very high-flying year scientifically. However, when you can forget for a moment the pressure to deliver, running your own little research group is actually very much fun. I will point out some aspects which have been particularly important this year.

Bringing in money
The first thing is to break the negative spiral resulting from insufficient research budgets. Without ’seedcorn’ money, it will be difficult to do research and therefore to attract more funding. There are some opportunities for getting this kind of funding especially for new academics. This year I have been successful in getting money from the Royal Society (£15,000, Research Grant) and from the EPSRC (£125,000, First Grant), mainly for equipment. To give an impression of the success rate, 2 out of 7 First Grant proposals were funded in this panel. So even in this special round for starting academics, 72% did not get the money needed to start up their first research project. It cannot be underestimated how crucial these small amounts of money are for taking off during the first years. Also not unimportant is the fact that bringing in money turns out to be one of your most important deliverables which will be highly evaluated by your university, most of times above publications or teaching.

I haven’t written much for this blog for a while now. The reason is that I had some serious lecturing duties this semester, which runs for 12 weeks until next week. If you are an academic in a university, you almost certainly have to do a fair bit of teaching. So I thought it might be appropriate to give you a flavour of what that means in practice (just in case you were considering an academic career yourself).

Obi-Wan Klaasnobi

This semester, I teach an introductory astronomy course for first-year students from all over the university although most of these students are from physics and chemistry. The middle third of it (about planets), I have taught for the past 10 years. This year, I took over the first and third parts as well. On the face of it, it does not sound like a lot: two unique lectures a week (repeated once) for total of 24 lectures (48 including the repeats). However, this does not mean that I just spend 48 hours teaching this course.

Social networks are everywhere. Personally I like Facebook to keep track of old friends and add new ones. These friends are mostly of nonscientific background. Until recently I had never realized the importance of social networks in science. When you do your PhD and perhaps some postdoc projects here and there, it is hard to think about what it takes to become a successful scientist other than doing brilliant science. Although scientific skills are undoubtedly important, I believe that one of the key ingredients which can make or break a scientific career is a good network of friends.

Let’s take a (not so) hypothetical situation: assume you hold some kind of responsibility in your group. You might the the principal investigator, a researcher or even just an experienced post-doc; the important part is that you are somehow responsible (morally if not practically) for people hierarchically below you.

Let’s also assume that a new PhD student (or, as a limiting case, a fresh post-doc) enter your group. The path he/she took to reach your group can vary enormously from country to country so let’s skip it. The main point is that you don’t really know this person but you have some good reason to believe he/she will do good.

The first few months are there to allow your new PhD student to get used to the new place, the new subject, the new “way of doing things” and so on. After some time passed you expect him/her to become productive. After all he/she is no more a undergrad student and is reasonable that, given some guidance, he/she will start conducting an experiment (or at least a part of it). After all the very reason you took in a new PhD student is because you need people working.

So here we are. Made it, got through the rat race, and found a safe haven in a Physics Department in a different country. They even offer state-of-the-art lab space and a small startup package (not sufficient to do anything substantial in photonics). So where to begin? Here is a brief description of my first steps as a university lecturer, which has little to do with science as I knew it.

1. Know the right people

Being in a new institute in a new country without any equipment, my first strategy is to get known and make friends among institute directors and clean room managers. It is amazing how friendly most people are toward new academics. The well-trained scientific paranoia however stirs in the back of my head. What do they want of me, why are they giving me free access to clean rooms and laser equipment, who do I have to put on my papers later on? For now I forget this voice in the back of my head and hope for the best, as there is nothing to loose and a lot to gain.

I used to go to the library. Every couple of weeks or so I would go and check the journals, browse through their tables of content (TOCs), and flip through the pages. You would find odd articles in areas there weren’t quite your own. Slowly over time journals got bigger and were published more frequently. Then they started emailing TOCs out, which seemed like a pretty good improvement as you could just read them on your computer. Gradually, I started to run out of time: the TOCs were just too long and there were too many of them. Virtual journals (such as the Virtual Journal of Ultrafast Science) offered some hope but they don’t cover all journals such as Elsevier journals, so you would still end up having to read a bunch of emailed TOCs.

For a couple of years, I tried an RSS reader. A free reader, such as NetNewsWire for the Mac or FeedDemon for Windows (http://www.newsgator.com/individuals/) can collect RSS feeds containing TOCs from you chosen journal. FeedDemon has to possibility of searching through your feeds. That worked pretty well until I switched to a Mac and found that NetNewsWire couldn’t search through feeds. By the time the TOCs were simply to huge to read them “raw”.

When talking about the Survival Guide, I have heard from several people some strikingly similar opinions. The first and the second sentences are usually something like “I agree with [the author: Ad]…” or “I checked it for preparing one of my presentations. It was rather helfpul…”. By the third sentence, many readers whom I talked to cannot avoid expressing their surprise about the style of the book. Here are some examples:”It is written in a very strange way.” “I did not like the [imperative] tone.” “Ad must be a tough guy.”

Although I never got offended myself by the intonation used in the Survival Guide, I think I can understand why some readers find it offensive. First of all, it is just unusual. Furthermore, it is commanding and strict. When Ad states a new tip in his book, he usually leaves no room for some similar opinion to exist. I would not be the first one to see, in this sense, a similarity with the Bible (Read the comment of Jos Wassink for this post, in Dutch). I can tell you that Quran has also a similar style. However, in my opinion, the most similar(in style) book to the Survival Guide is The Art of War from San Tzu (~1100 AD). Just read some quotes and you will probably agree with me.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Dutch science was without doubt world-class. The first Nobel Prize for chemistry went to the Dutchman Van ‘t Hoff. The first three recipients of the Nobel Prize in physics were either Dutch (Zeeman and Lorentz) or were partly educated in the Netherlands (Röntgen).  All of them were born in upper-middle-class families.

Interestingly, none of these famous scientists went to the Dutch grammar school (“gymnasium”), which was the traditional, elitist place for secondary school education. Instead, most early Dutch scientists received their education at the so-called HBS, a public school type that was supposed to be more or less open to everyone. Not surprisingly, it was also at the HBS that the first woman, Aletta Jacobs, was allowed to attend classes. The HBS became a way for upper-middle-class families to give a proper education to their children. Practicing science was a superb opportunity for those children to get highly respected jobs in society.

Left or right
In western societies we write from left to right. In mundane texts lines are left justified. This alignment allows for quick reading. You do not know yet what will be in the new line, but you (and above all your eyes) sure know where it begins. You can improve readability by implementing full justification. But only if you use a lot of hyphenation and micro-space adjustment. Otherwise you get those ugly stretched sentences that hamper reading, rather than facilitating it. If you use MS-Word and full justification use the WordPerfect compatibility switch, as explained here.

Exercise: Take a text of your own, about ten lines or so. Change the format from left justification to right justification. It should have at least a number of sentences. Try to read the text. You see, it is much more difficult.

For editors of scientific journals it is quite hard to find referees, leave alone good referees, for peer reviewing their received manuscripts. A good referee is a person that sends in a good referee report and does so in time, and responds quickly to additional requests from the editors. Why don’t peers want to review manuscripts of their colleagues?

There are a number of reasons. Professional scientists are very busy and - perhaps more importantly - they will never get public credit for their review job.

Immaterial rewards
In the journal Science several interesting articles have been published recently about the moral duty for scientists to do regularly review jobs. In In Search of Peer Reviewer editor William Perrin, from Southwest Fisheries Science Center, complains and does a simple calculation. He proves that for every manuscript that you submit you should do at least four review jobs. Perrin’s paper has provoked a number of comments (the above link will also show these reactions). It boils down to the suggestion that, by rewarding a reviewer in a way that will boost his career, more workers will accept to perform review tasks. An interesting action in the respect was recently announced by the American Physical Society(APS). The APS has published a list of their best referees for their journals. And indeed non-anonymous credit for a referee can only come from editors. But in my opinion this will not be incentive enough to convince scientists to do more and better review jobs.