doodle
as my email traffic seems stuck in a perpetual rush hour jam, i find myself inadvertantly perpetuating it by not even responding to emails that would require at most 20 seconds of my time.
this week i had to organize my graduate committee meeting, and the mere thought of coordinating a group of people via email turned me into a 9th grader (lots of big sighs and time-consumptive hemming and hawing). then i remembered doodle. this site allows you to create online polls and email off the link, so everyone who's participating goes and checks their availability. you get a comprehensive idea of time constraints, rather than sorting through the social etiquette upchuck of "what time works for you? oh, well actually that isn't the best for me, but maybe could we push it back 2 hours? you have a thing that kindof conflicts then? well, how does thursday sound? do you want to do a morning thing? a lunchy thing? a pre/post lunch thing? oops, turns out thursday's no good for ___, so how does friday look for everyone?"...etc. my advisors swooned and thanked me for acting as a preventative traffic cop.

gaits
i remember doing a theatre workshop in high school where we explored leading with different parts of our bodies and expressing character through gaits. sometimes when i'm out walking i watch people and try to identify what they're leading with, and why. the bus station is an especially good spot to do it (and for getting a quick reality check about peterborough's economic demographic); i saw a guy there yesterday with a very extreme shuffling knee-lead that was combined with the sense that he was stuck inside an ever-shrinking box.

i've been walking around in high heels to and from tango rehearsal, and it's interesting to find people unaware that they're sizing me up because of my gait. even though i'm not wearing anything more revealing than a pair of jeans, the frequency of cat calls and unspoken invitations to "cat fights" increase. it seems like everyone has a predetermined opinion about why i'm wearing heels and what i must be trying to proclaim.

science or nature?
for those of you concerned about the worth of my poop-sorting skills, feast on this:

we got results back from the stable isotope work (looking for a relationship between chimney swift population decline and diet as a contributing factor), and in joe's words, the results were "absoloutely stunning". i can't elaborate, as i've been sworn to secrecy, but i'll explain what this means.

to start, for most biologists the idiom is "publish or perish". everyone's trying to publish so that they can gain further esteem and funding. you choose which journals to send your article for possible acceptance. each journal has an "impact factor", with the "more impressive" journals having higher impact factors. so if you publish in, say, "journal of chimney swift ecology in ontario" (don't look it up, it doesn't exist), the audience is very limited and the impact factor of that journal would be low. there's a lot of dischord about impact factors, and much validity in the arguments of those opposed to them. however, for now it's largely the method employed for ranking success.

another thing to consider is authorship. the more papers a person authors, the more they'll get referenced, and the more esteem and funding they'll get. to be an author on a paper you just need to have been involved with the work in some way. so if a project takes off, and is headed for a journal with a high impact factor, everyone wants on the bus. delegating who gets what position in the authorship (first, second, third, etc., which defines the significance of your role in the project) and whether someone should even be included or not (because more authors can dilute the effect of authorship) gets quite, quite sticky.

that said, these "absoloutely stunning" results, which happen to be very applicable to a number of other species and population declines in general, have made my world a little helter-skelter. fortunately joe is acting as captain in these reckless waters, dealing with the host of people vying for authorship. according to joe, we're heading for science or nature with this, which are the leading impact factor journals in biology. and he wants me to be first author. what would this mean for me? if the paper happened to get picked up by either science or nature, i'd be sitting really pretty (a master's student with a paper published in science or nature is kindof a big deal), and probably have a number of enemies. after all, people work their whole lives to get published there. actually, i'd be sitting pretty even if i published in a lower impact journal. and even if it doesn't get published in any journal, as joe says "there's your thesis, right there".

not bad.

the burning hell
...not actually a blurb about my blossoming satanism. this is a band i'm heading to see tonight (aptly named for a halloween event). although their name might evoke heavy metal or suicidal emo imagery, they're nothing of the kind.
http://www.myspace.com/mathiaskom