There was some discussion last night and this morning on the twitter about training lab peeps to write. People of all ranks come into a lab with varying writing ability - sometimes an undergrad will have rare clarity whereas a postdoc appears to write with a ball pein hammer. How do you get people to at least approach a viable level of written communication?

The answer, of course, is practice. No one ever likes that answer, but it's true. You need to read and write a lot to be proficient at it and some of it can be picked up in grad school and some can't without a shit ton of work.

One of the ways I try and get people to think about what they are writing is by avoiding track changes in the early stages. Don't get me wrong, I think track changes is great. But the ability to breeze through and accept everything without thinking about why, is waaaaaay too easy. So I mark up a hard copy and send it back. This may happen again, depending on where the piece is at, but eventually we switch to track changes.

In the hard copy phase I try and focus on big things. Does the flow need to be changed? Are there major gaps? Do the figures make sense in relation to the text? Once we transition to track changes, the sleeves get rolled up. After a couple rounds of that, things should be in order. If I can, I like to circulate it through another member of the lab at a point when it is getting close to acceptable.

As a final check I like to send it out to someone outside the lab. If we have collaborators on the project then this is an obvious and critical step. If not, I may tap one of my senior colleagues to do a once over. We all have people around who delight in the opportunity to edit, use them. At each step of the way, the trainee makes the changes, not me.

There are many other ways to get people to write for practice, some of which I employ across the board and others for just certain people. It takes a lot of work on their part and a decent amount on mine. But when they get to the point where they can get something finished in just a few drafts back and forth (and act as editors on the writing of others), then it is worth the initial investment.

Ah, Civility. Always there to lean on when we don't like what is being said, but would rather blame it on how it is being said. After the initial discussion died down around Tuesday's post, along came a commenter to tsk tsk about what he perceived were personal attacks directed at Dr. Jones.

So I ask, are Dr. Jones's statements not personal attacks themselves? These were open comments on a listserv directed at a young female scientist, followed up with other "helpful suggestions" to women that reinforced the idea that they should put everything on hold in order to concentrate on science. This is direct and unambiguous bullying by a senior scientist, aimed at influencing the choices of junior scientists. Apparently that is bad, but the individual should not be held accountable.

So here is my question for the day: At what point is it okay to stand up against bullying? Where is the line between silently or quietly disagreeing with a person's point of view and making a loud statement that their viewpoint should not be tolerated by anyone under any circumstances?

If influencing people's family decisions with the threat of career stagnation isn't enough, then what is the trigger? How egregious does a statement have to be in order for us to respond? If these statements was made by a man, could me call him sexist? Or should we just consider their point of view and go on our merry way?

Micheal McCarthy suggests that by strongly disagreeing and even using sarcasm in a response, we limit the voices that will join the discussion. I would counter with, by quietly and respectfully responding we let the bullies have their say and crush voices of their targets. By passing the buck on standing up to these people, we let them ply their trade down the road. I call bullshit on that.

If a white male can't stand up and say that direct sexism (regardless of the source) is not okay, then who does?

I don't want to alarm you, but a lot of the stuff people go on about when it comes to a discussion of work/life balance is about as real as unicorns. The only "balance" is in choosing which ball you are going to let drop today and deciding not to drop the same ball repeatedly. If you want to call that balance, feel free to amuse yourself.

But to me, the key is that last part: don't keep dropping the same ball. There will be days you miss important things with your kid, or push too much responsibility to your significant other. If those days build up you are looking for trouble. There also have to be days where you say "I can't make that meeting" or "I can't be in the field that long" in order to go home early.

You need to make decisions that will allow you to live your life and accept that you won't be making everyone happy all the time. This includes yourself.

If you choose yourself and your job all the time, you'll probably end up dispensing terrible advice on listserves to junior people, much like Clara Jones has done on the Ecolog-L over the last few weeks.

Dr. Jones started off by basically telling all young female scientists that: A) Babies attract bears*, B) Women go to too great of lengths to achieve their goals, C) Science and families do not mix, D) Guilt caused by having a family you can't interact with will hurt your research output, E) You ladies should be the type of women who can lose a kid and show up (on time!) to work the next day, and (my favorite), F) If you have to have kids, consider surrendering custody, like she did!

BUT WAIT! There's other ways to make a family compatible with a career in science, just freeze your eggs!

Seriously, what the hell is with all you ladies wanting to have kids before you are full professor! While we are at it, I propose to freeze one's parents so they don't get old and need help while you are on the tenure track. Probably safest to freeze any grandparents, good friends and pets while we are at it. Oh, and obviously you're gonna want to freeze your significant other** so they don't feel like you're never around.

Which one of you ladies needs a mentor? I bet we can hook you up with Dr. Jones!

If we continue to frame the discussion regarding work/life balance and gender equality in science as "How can you manage your life to be least obtrusive to your career?" then we are going to keep losing good people, and especially women, from science.

*Between babies and menstruation, I don't know how any women goes in the woods without getting mauled!

**If they are also in academics, make sure to freeze them before they get you! Being frozen for a decade or two totally kills your h-index.

I stopped by to talk to the college-level finance person today to discuss a couple of things and to share notes on dealing with two kids under 5. It's not unusual for us to chat and I needed to work out a few matters with her. Part way through the conversation she mentioned that I seemed to be getting money from all over the university and kiddingly (I think) asked when I was going to be shaking down the president.

If I thought the president could fund a project, I would.

The thing is, even though we have had some success at the granting game, there always seems to be another key piece of data to get or salary to cover. Part of the deal when managing a lab includes finding whatever means to make things happen - usually by digging up the money. And we have spent a lot of money, well beyond what the university promised me when I was hired.

Through various means we've managed to find ~$100k in "extra" money in the last four years. Some of that has come through applying for internal funds and some through finding myself on the wrong end of a balance sheet and having to more "actively" chase some money down. If one includes student fellowships (not TAs, but direct merit-based research fellowships for grad students), then the lab has pulled in an additional $150k or so.

Yes, this takes time away from chasing the Big Money, but sometimes you need to cobble a few things together to get you there and $250K isn't exactly small money, either. It's not always fun or comfortable, but my job is selling our science so we can keep churning out the best data possible. Sometimes that is to grant agencies and sometimes it is to the Research Office here.

Whatever it takes to enable the lab peeps to do what they do.

If you are like me, you either walked into your new lab as a PI, or plan to do so, ready to roll. There is a lot that needs to get done, but how long could it take, right?

Chances are, if you got a PI job, that you did a postdoc in a lab that was running full steam. I did both previous stops in labs of assistant professors who made tenure while I was there. In both cases, the labs were established enough to be just gaining a reputation for themselves, but hadn't fully broken through yet. By the time I left each, the story was different and each one had expanded significantly.

At the time it never occurred to me to consider the early days of each lab, but thinking back, each took some time to get established. However, walking into my own lab I assumed that in a year or two I would be DOING ALL TEH SCIENCE!!!!

Hhahahaha, yeaaahhhh. About that....

I'm sure there are people who do magic in a year or two and crap nature papers like they have some sort of scientific dysentery. Good for them. But for the rest of us, a lab is built in small steps with the occasional home run and the more than occasional strike out. It is torturous at times and progress seems glacial because you always feel like you are behind. But at some point (different for everyone) you can look back and surprise yourself at the progress you have made.

7%. <10%. 12%. These are all funding rates I have seen in recent panel summaries and quoted widely on the intertubes and in faculty meetings. On the surface, these numbers are crippling. How is anyone supposed to be competitive when rates are so low!?!?

One thing the preproposal process gave me a greater appreciation for, however, is that those funding rates are misleading. I am not at all saying that we don't need more money for research in this country, nor am I here to say that 7% funding rates are anything but demoralizing. But those bemoaning 7% as a figure are making a flawed assumption: that all proposals are worthy of funding.

If all proposals were within a standard deviation of fundable, then a 7% chance of success would basically seem random. This is demonstrably not the case, however.

Take the preprosals as an example. Let's pretend that the panel normally fields 100 proposals and that it got the same number of preproposals (most panels saw >2X the number of preproposals than their regular proposal numbers, but work with me). Three panelists weighed in on each proposal and nearly 25% of the time, all three determined that a particular proposal was poor enough to reject outright. No discussion, it just wasn't what it needed to be. If a hypothetical panel had 100 preproposals, we're now down to 75.

Of the remaining number, another 25% just cleared the "cut" bar and were discussed, but no one felt they were in contention. Down to 50.

Of the remaining proposals, all of them had strong points and many had vocal advocates. Where they ultimately ranked was based heavily on the perceived weaknesses (if there were any) and how passionate their advocate(s) was. But even in this group, there was a clear sense of a spectrum on which they fell. And this is where some of the tough decisions start being made.

Enter the preproposals with a 20-25% invite rate.

More than anything, the 20-25% cut off represents the proposals that would be in the conversation for funding. In an ideal world we could fund these 25 proposals, but the percentage is an arbitrary number based on submission rate. So whereas a 7% funding rate is a scary number, the reality is that those seven proposals are only coming out of a 20-25 pool of proposals whether you make the cut at the preproposal stage or the full proposal stage. It doesn't matter if 100 proposals or 200 proposals are submitted, a lot of them are just not convincing or exciting to a panel.

I've heard POs make this argument more than once and never really made sense to me before going through the preproposal process. As much as I have some issues with this new process, I have to admit that it allows the culling of the bottom 50% with FAR less work (for writer and reviewer) than the previous system. This is a good thing for everyone.

So whereas funding rates are low, fretting over the funding percentage is to take an uninformed view of the process and what that percentage represents.