Botany Unit looks forward to the next year.

This continues my uncle's diary from here.

Transmutation

The year is coming to an end and there is new stuff to report. The story is simple: the Command Center has been hijacked! Old comrades are not particularly surprised but newbies like me are stunned. But let me start from the beginning.
Ministry of Everything has many units and one of them is called the Chem Unit. After a recent reorganization it is now divided between four sub-sections - Air, Fire, Water and Earth. This time-honored Aristotelian classification seems to stimulate our Chem comrades intellectually and it connects us to modernity by providing budget drivers for the entire Ministry of Everything.
Our fellow comrades in the Chem Unit are not very different from us, other than  their unusual fondness for verking, a preferred way of getting things done. But never mind, their main problem is a massive inferiority complex. On the surface they have phenomenal foresight and a vision of an upcoming scientific discovery, but  when it comes down to staking a claim, they often get everything wrong. It is not clear whether heuristics gets in the way of their analytical thinking or whether it is something else, but their record is littered with theories involving changing rubbish into gold, flogiston and curing cancer with vitamin C. So they verk hard, keep quiet and do not speak at the meetings. Well, until now.
Over the last year they surreptitiously replaced every comrade in the Command Center with one of their own! As often happens, nobody noticed until a gigantic Mendeleev table appeared at the entrance to the Command Center and the New Year’s party involved a spelling-bee competition featuring unpronounceable names of chemical compounds. Needless to say, the top three spots (awarded 20 pound bags of onions each) were all won by chemists!

The Botany Unit tries to play along. In the coming year we will be bringing in new programs and initiatives. Plants and Elements, Plant chemistry and I love carbon, are just a few examples. Our Hammer and Sickle training program includes now a new set of drills and I am happy to report that new comrades can recite all elements that start with P and have two vowels, compute sum of valencies of all metals or perform even more complicated mental tasks. There are subtle changes in our environment as well. A complete set of Paracelsus' works now adorns the reception area, and we have commissioned an oil painting of Madame du Chatelet to display between two scrofulous plants in our windowless foyer (some comrades argue that Madame Curie would have been a safer choice.) All together, a lot of thinking goes towards appeasing chemists who are brimming with anger after centuries of disrespect.
At the moment things are fine though. Other than slowly reducing the flow of the resources and snooping around with an eye to nano-managing, the comrades in the Command Center enjoy leadership positions and try not to over-verk themselves.

Happy New Year

Remarkably, the Botany Unit is weathering these events well, given that this has been the worst year on record: deep divisions and polarization in the Central Committee, suffocation followed by the shutdown, and a ten percent reduction in seed allocation, now followed by this chemical invasion. Perhaps things cannot be worse, and we have been watching it unravel with morbid curiosity. Yet strangely enough, the Botany Unit is infused with hope and optimism. It is as if, pushed against the wall and surrounded by stronger enemies, you suddenly find a six-shooter in your pocket. How can that be? Well, in a time of crisis, old Communist principles kick in. What you stand for matters more than who you are. In our case these are beets, potatoes and corn - the basic products of the Botany Unit. Perhaps not enough to defeat capitalist pigs and save the planet, but certainly things that are our pride and responsibility.

Continued here.

Hard verk

This continues my uncle's diary from here.

The battle against capitalist pigs is going well and we can afford some minor celebrations.  The history is somewhat murky but as our glorious system matures the difference between working and not working has increased considerably. Our beloved Party that always tries to balance things out decided to bridge these two states and introduced verk. What is verk? Well, this is an intermediate state and for the most part it is up to the employee to determine how much of not working they include in their verk. More to the point, the main characteristics of verk is that you can verk at home, in the shopping mall or for that matter anywhere else and to verk you no longer have to come to the workplace. Needless to say the program turned out immensely popular and many of us verk a lot!
I started forgetting faces of some of my colleagues, but when I see them once in a while, I notice that they look more rested and happier. Unlike work which by law is limited to 40 hours per week, one can verk for 80 or more hours per week without exerting oneself much. There is not much more getting done this way but everybody looks very busy these days and statistical reports are stellar.
Our former management was not particularly fond of verking and counteracted with an obsolete concept of “face time” - being present and together with your colleagues - but the new management embraced verk wholeheartedly. Quite frankly Ministry of Everything is not doing very well these days and our Command Center is in disarray and infested with a number of comrades who’s qualifications are somewhat lacking. All in all, it is better when everybody is verking rather than coming to work and  rolling their eyes or gossiping.

I love verking but sometime I wonder if the capitalist pigs aren’t outsmarting us. They seem to try to get the most out of their employees, rely on their skills, knowledge and initiative and generally behave as if the responsibility for future of the world was in their hands. Comrades laugh that this is a complete nonsense but capitalists are sure making a convincing show!

On top of that the Central Committee occasionally confuses verking with non working and this is potentially dangerous. Our recent example involves an onset of winter and the associated snowfall, periodic and not completely unexpected event given our geographical location. The Party's aversion to snow is legendary and the Central Committee shuts down Ministry of Everything together with the rest of the government at the slightest presence, or even anticipation, of this fluffy substance! Telling people to verk would have been understandable, but closing down  entire buildings seem to indicate the lack of trust in common sense of the employees and general stupidity on the part of people empowered to make this kind of decisions.
In this particular instance a snowfall was expected and at four in the morning, hours before the first flakes twirled in the air,  and couriers were dispatched to tell comrades to run and hide. Unfortunately, the  Botany Unit was hosting three farming teams associated with the program of Underground Farming (described here). One can only imagine the surprise of comrades farmers, weathered and tough folks,  when they were confronted by armed guards blocking their entrance to the building because of a paper thin layer of snow on the ground. Nevertheless when all seemed lost our comrades from the Botany Unit stepped up to the plate and saved the day by pitching a large tent serving as a temporary hothouse. They comforted the  distressed farmers and exacted  from them some amount of actual work which they came to perform!

All in all, we verk hard and I am sure we are beating capitalists left and right but some days I cannot escape the feeling that we are led forward by people who do not quite know what are they doing. But I am ashamed of these thoughts and I punish myself with extra verk!


Continued here.

Academic life - finding home

In my earlier post I described the two arcs of one’s academic career: the formative years associated with establishing one’s identity in the marketplace of ideas, and the return home, a quest for starting one's own scientific family and spreading one's own ideas.  The links to the Iliad and Odyssey were unmistakable,  and we covered the outward  portion of this exploit. In this post we complete the journey and absorb Homer’s wisdom on the subject of university tenure and beyond.

Without further ado let’s introduce the characters:

Odysseus - yes baby, it is you. The intellect and cunning are still there but so are some new ingredients. Hesitation, dark moods, and indecisiveness will accompany you through this journey. That is just the way it is, too much randomness that gets in a way of careful planning. But do not despair, your team, even if anonymous,  is with you and they will step in when needed. For the most part you are in the same boat after all.

Penelope - she is the ultimate prize, your dream job. Separated by time and space, she calls you frequently. She could be your dream postdoc or an endowed chair, whatever. When you saw her first years ago  she was just there, looking great and unreachable. Now you are making your move. Good luck!

Telemachus - this is how the past influences the future. You have nurtured this fellow when he was an undergraduate. Now, years later, he is completing his Ph.D. thesis. He worshipped you for all those years because through some casual remark of yours he saw that being a scholar is the best thing in the world. Now he is the president of the student body, and, while still weak and inexperienced, in time he will be a powerful ally.

Antinous, Amphinomus, Eumaeus and the rest of the suitors. Incompetent scumbags of the lowest order - the inside candidates who will stop at nothing to deny you the job that you deserve and that they want for themselves. You can discredit one or two but there are simply too many of them. They have their tentacles in the university senate, they arrange housing loans for new faculty, and more. Killing them all commando style is Homer’s wet dream, most likely you will have to coexist with them for most of your career.  If you get the job and the dust settles you might discover that some of them are actually fine colleagues. Won’t you be glad for sparing them?

Eurycleia - Odysseus' nurse. In spite of all the technology: online applications, papers posted online, videos of your classes, and so on, you need someone who actually reads all your papers and knows what they are all about. It seems that everybody else relies on someone else’s opinion. Eurycleia is a great help. She will recognize you in any disguise, she will find your unsigned notes that miraculously became your competitor's top publication. She is good at keeping secrets and she knows all the gossip. And she loves you too.

Calypso - a beautiful nymph who could be male or female. What can I say, in nearly every scientific biography there are some “missing years”. Meet Calypso and you will understand why.

Polyphemus - the scruffy bespectacled chair of the hiring committee. His attention to checking the compliance of every application is legendary. When it says that candidates must use 12pt helvetica font it better not be Arial!  Polyphemus will obliterate your job application unless you walk the razor-thin path of the righteous.

Circe - the infinite allure of software: TeX, LaTeX, Powerpoint, Keynote, Java and all that. The days and weeks that you spent in her company choosing fonts for your presentations, developing transitions between slides and wondering if your treatise on why noodle dough darkens would have benefited from a soundtrack. One day you will glance at a blank sheet of paper, take a sharp pencil into your hand, look at it, and the music from “2001: Space Odyssey” will erupt in your head. Can it be that simple? Duh.

Nausicaa - the dean’s daughter, who is beautiful and honest. It is easy to accept her help, and without that things would be a great deal tougher. But watch out, Employee Integrity Testing is in your near future.

Tiresias -  he spends most of his time with university administrators and in the Underworld. Not a particularly pleasant character. Full of himself and overconfident in his ability to tell the future. You probably could do without him but he will make your cover letter ten times better. Of course you have to pay, and he will torment you with his blog which supposedly has all his wisdom on matters of academic employment.

Underworld - it is a place, not a person. Have you ever seen at a large professional meeting a booth run by the National Security Agency, State Department or some other acronym infested entity? This is the gate to the Underworld. They can swallow you whole and give your life a completely new meaning. But you have to pledge to depart the world of the living, and for many it is a one way trip. Caution, caution.

Kraken - strictly speaking not an Odyssey character. Kraken is a bright and powerful faculty member who is largely invisible due to a massive amount of funding from the Department of Defense,  the National Institute of Health, or similar entity. He has the best office furniture and equipment that taxpayer's money can buy. When the external funding dries up Kraken gets unleashed and with anger and arrogance  torments his colleagues.

Ithaca -  a place where Penelope resides. It might have other attractions like mild climate, clean environment, no crime or traffic, good school system, no history of natural disasters, and proximity to nature and recreation. It is prudent to expect no more than one of those extras.

Athena, Poseidon, Zeus and the rest of the lot are gods. In Iliad they were just tricksters but here they decide to get their hands dirty and be involved. Unfortunately not all of them are on your side.

These characters and many like that will be a part of your Odyssey, and some of the Iliad players will tag along as well. In fact you have come across some of them already and in time you will meet the rest of them. Homer’s original narrative starts the Odyssey in the middle and uses flashbacks to fill in the past. We will follow our protagonist in a more direct fashion.

Odyssey retold

One day an Ithaca alumnus is outed as having a lavish Swiss bank account.  He tries to ameliorate by making a large donation to his alma mater.  It is for a tenure-track appointment with some nice perks. Or perhaps an endowed chair accompanied by two perpetual two-year postdocs, funding for graduate students and for the lucky recipient a name plaque which will be attached outside of the building (which is also new.) There is a lot of buzz in the community and even the deities on Olympus are impressed. Athena drops Odysseus' name during lunch.  “Where is he now?” asks Zeus. “I dunno” mumbles Athena choking on an undercooked ambrosia. "Is Haphaestus again doing kitchen duty?" unspoken question crosses her mind.  Never mind, it is time to get involved.  Later in the day she locates Odysseus in Turkey, and under the  guise of a pink flamingo advises Telemachus to start beating the bushes to get respectable candidates in hopes that he will persuade Odysseus to apply. Unfortunately, the lax formulation of the job ad allows local nebbishes to apply as well. They call themselves Suitors and try to scare off everybody else.

Did Gods stage an intervention? or perhaps just a plain e-mail from Telemachus was enough to set things in motion? Whichever way, Odysseus gets the vibe, decides to apply, and thus begins his trip.
Unsure of how the business of academic hiring is done these days, he acquires services of Tiresias for help with cover letters, vitae, teaching statement, long and short term research program, writing samples and whatever else they want. It is a good move as his submissions acquire the solid look of polished bronze and project the impeccable logic of a “must hire” candidate. He decides to hedge his bets and settles on a hundred applications to a wide range of schools. Ithaca is there as well…

Just hours from the moment when Odysseus' ship sails out an ugly monster comes to the surface and blocks his path. Most of his body is covered with ads for College Board, SAT, GRE and TOEFL. It is clear that carrying this stuff around affects his buoyancy. “Interfolio, at your service” he gurgles happily “will it be Mastercard or Visa?” Startled, Odysseus and his fellows shut down their laptops and turn off WiFi. But there is no hope. Powerful Interfolio  keeps the job applications sequestered until the payment is made. Not the end of the world but a strong remainder that many monsters feast on the fringes of the academic world. Luckily Euryclea comes to the rescue by sending a homing pidgeon with her credit card number.

Crisis is averted, Odysseus continues, and his job applications get delivered before the deadline.  The seas are calm and the winds favorable until suddenly the skies darken and a powerful storm approaches. Unbeknownst to Odysseus it is Poseidon who brings the storm, enticed by his son Polyphemus.  What happened? Odysseus, in a fit of joyous insubordination, lists himself as a female and a Pacific Islander on the Affirmative Action Form.  This is childish behavior unfitting of a serious scholar even though the provided data is stored on 5.25in floppies in the government bunker while the form itself is the main ingredient of a fully recyclable coffee cup. Polyphemus spots the silliness (even though the form is anonymous) and gets a conniption. It does not end well, in anger he pokes his own eye out scratching the cornea. Poseidon, a god whose sense of humor is descended from invertebrate and sense of justice from Vlad the Impaler, blames Odysseus and sends the storm.

The storm rages for hours and tosses the ships around with no mercy. Finally, an island appears on the horizon. They do not know it but they have entered the land of Circe. In a blink of an eye she turns Odysseus’ entire team into computer scientists and convinces him to engage in developing his webpage. Days turn into months while powerful java scripts are being written to display Odysseus' vitae in all congressional languages. A webcam app shows the inside of his office, another app indicates the amount of seed in his bird feeder, and for an unknown reason his website announces to the world that he just changed the air filter in his furnace.
Finally, Odysseus has had enough. He refuses to cooperate and the defeated Circe releases his crew from the torment of programming this rubbish.  Circe remains friendly, fixes  terrible scripts on Odysseus' webpage and bestows the biggest gift of all - a new Linux distro. Linux programer is a new hobby on Odysseus' vitae, a big shot in the arm in the dying world of Windows. He feeds Interfolio its dues and his applications are updated.

They sail out and soon enough, trouble shows up on the horizon. It is the six-headed Scylla, a monster of interdisciplinary research, and the whirlpool of Charybdis, a temple of a single author paper. The passage between is very thin and Odysseus has to use all his cunning as many job applications call for research plans in a concise two page format. Scylla lures with societal impact and scientific breakthroughs, Charybdis whispers about divided credit and lack of independent record. Charybdis murmurs about famous writers, poets and artists, all taking their challenges solo, while Scylla hisses about ten thousand people behind the Large Hadron Collider and the discovery of Higgs boson. Tough spot, careful navigation is required and on the horizon tenure might be at stake as well.

They continue west when an island shows under a veil of fog. Beautiful Sirens are calling from afar. Odysseus plugs the ears of his crew with wax, a productivity trick that he learned from Achilles in Troy, while Sirens are singing about the Tenure Committees, Curriculum Development Committees, Faculty Outreach and Faculty Senate. They are calling for Odysseus and his crew to abandon their research journey and devote their time to serving Academia. “Too early, too early” moans Odysseus covering his ears.
Perhaps you wonder whether the Sirens wouldn’t sing about something more desirable to lure them  to their island. Naaah, not in this job market.


Days turn into weeks and not much is happening. Something is not quite right. "Is it me or is it the system?" Odysseus wonders aloud. Finally, many months after job applications reached their destination, an e-mail arrives. It mentions an on-campus interview, 45-minute talk, and meeting with the faculty and the dean. The whole works, and it is for real this time.  Suddenly the frustrations of the journey fade away and layers of faceless anonymous communications peel off. Is it a new beginning or another island of illusion? “Carpe diem” says Odysseus as he crosses the campus gate.

                                          The end of the Odyssey

What??! This is the end? Where the hell is Penelope? Ithaca? Suitors skewered with arrows?
Well, it is tough but we are not there yet and maybe never will be. Don’t you get it? This is the odyssey! It is not supposed to end, there is always something new beyond the horizon.