In a private communication, Sciencewoman asks:
Just out of curiosity, how have you been able to blog under your real name? Has your department been supportive? Are you post-tenure and immune from some of the pressures that the rest of us feel? Or is it that a philosophy department views outreach/education differently from a strict science department?
In the same communication, she also suggests that I might answer these question in a blog post, so I am.
Brains enjoy getting information about the world around them. Although our sense organs do a pretty good job of keeping the data flowing to the brain, the occasional sense-organ-extending measuring device can add a whole new set of experiences for our brains to chew on.
We wrap up the brain-friendly giftables list with a selection of measuring devices. A (lab) notebook or sketch pad would make a fine accompaniment to any of these.
The human mind seems to like creating things, and kids will use whatever tools are at their disposal to build. My uncle used to build death-defying systems of roadways with Hotwheels track and masking tape. A childhood friend of mine built elaborate structures out of Fig Newtons (largely because they were in abundance in her home and she couldn’t stand to actually eat them). When you have a creative itch, almost anything can serve as the scratcher. Here are some toys for building that are probably less likely to attract ants than are Fig Newtons:
There are two features of games that have always appealed to me. First, the good ones put you in a place where you are explicitly thinking out different ways the future could play out — the possibilities that are more or less likely given what you know (and what you don’t know). Second, many of them let you drag someone else (whether your opponent or your teammate) into thinking through these situations, too.
Any game where you have to make choices about what to do involves some sort of strategy, and formulating or refining strategies is a work-out for your brain. This means that games, in general, tend to be brain-friendly giftables. That said, here are some of the ones we like best:
As promised, I bring you some gift recommendations for kids who are into math or science (or could be if presented with the right point of entry). The first installation: books.
Books are the best. They don’t need batteries or assembly. They don’t have lots of little parts that will end up strewn on the floor (or lost under the couch). You can read them alone or read them with others.
You can buy ’em new, but you can also find some amazing books at used bookstores, or garage sales, or library sales. And of course, if you have a library card you can partake of an astounding number of titles for free (provided you return them by the due date)!
Esteemed reader Jake also reminds us that, especially for younger kids, the real present isn’t the book so much as the time you spend reading the book to them:
This is an eminently affordable gift if one makes use of the public library. A promise of a read aloud every night before bedtime can provide many benefits to both parent and child. It definitely counts as quality together time. If the books that are read are a bit ahead of the child’s own reading level, but not ahead of their comprehension, then they can help provide curiosity about what more there is to be found in the world of books, can help expand vocabulary, can provide a vehicle for the child to ask questions about various things/situations/ideas in a comfortable situation, and can help relax an active child so that bedtime doesn’t become a stressful event.
It doesn’t matter if what you read is fiction, science, history, or biography, so long as the child is interested and engaged.
If they are old enough to sit up and focus, they’re old enough to start enjoying books.
With that sage advice, here are my recommendations.
In a comment on the last post, zwa asks:
I’m curious about your vegetarianism (as one myself) and whether your kids are. If yes, did they choose it, if no did you try to convince them?
My kids are vegetarians, and have been since birth — so they didn’t choose it. I have imposed it on them in a stunning act of maternalism.
OK, it’s actually not that stunning.
Anyway, for the curious, here are my reasons for this particular parenting choice:
I’m revisiting a topic I posted about half a year ago: once you have a Ph.D., what are your job options beyond a faculty job or a research position?
The last post was more about what one could do with a science major or masters degree. It didn’t necessarily exclude non-standard things to do with a science Ph.D., but it wasn’t specifically aimed that direction.
Here, I want to take on directly the problem of what you do with that shiny Ph.D. (in science or any other field) if, despite all your efforts, you can’t land a faculty job (or can’t land one you can live with). And, I’d like to get answers from people who have actually dealt with this situation. I’m not looking for speculative alternative paths that occur to you, but things you have actually done (or have seen done).
From time to time I get emails asking for advice dealing with situations that just don’t feel right. Recently, I’ve been asked about the following sort of situation:
You’re an undergraduate who has landed an internship in a lab that does research in the field you’re hoping to pursue in graduate school. As so often happens in these situations, you’re assigned to assist an advanced graduate student who is gearing up to write a dissertation. First assignment: hit the library and write a literature review of the relevant background literature for the research project. You find articles. You read. You summarize and evaluate and analyze, over the course of many pages.
What you write is good. Not only is it praised, but it is incorporated — in some cases, word for word — into the chapter the grad student is writing.
Uh oh.
You know (because you have been told) that just doing this kind of literature review wouldn’t be enough to make you an author of any published paper that comes from this research, but your gut tells you there’s something not quite right about the situation. And, another researcher in the lab is taken aback to learn that what you have written is being used this way. In fact, the graduate student’s supervisor makes it clear that your words can’t be used verbatim in the thesis or any manuscripts to be submitted for publication; the wording will have to be reworked.
Are you enabling misconduct? Are you being taken advantage of? And, given that you’re being asked to do some more literature reviews, what do you do now?
Loyal ScienceBlogs reader Dr. Kim D. Gainer is moving to a newly-renovated office (Yay!) that is smaller than her current office — which means that some of the goodies on her bookshelves are in need of new homes.
That’s where you come in.
She writes:
If folks would like any of these books, they should e-mail me at kgainer@radford.edu, and I will ship them out to them, no strings attached. There is no fine print to this offer! I will cover the postage (media rate, of course, so people shouldn’t expect the books to appear via next day FedEx). I simply want these books to do the most good.
Here are the books she’s hoping to relocate:
Occasionally I get email asking for advice in matters around responsible conduct of research. Some readers have related horror stories of research supervisors who grabbed their ideas, protocols, and plans for future experiments, either to give them to another student or postdoc in the lab, or to take for themselves — with no acknowledgment whatever of the person who actually had the ideas, devised and refined the protocols, or developed the plans for future experiments.
Such behavior, dear reader, is not very ethical.
Sadly, however, much of this behavior seems to be happening in circumstances in which the person whose intellectual labor is being stolen doesn’t have as much power as the people stealing it (or at least complicit in its theft). What this means is that one sometimes has to choose between taking a stand to expose unethical behavior and having a future in science. (One’s supervisor, after all, can determine whether one’s current position continues or ends abruptly, and that supervisor writes the letters upon which one depends to find future positions.)
What’s a scientist to do when facing this kind of snake pit?