Acceptable derogatory terms

I don't want to offend good people. Really, I don't. But I really want to offend bad, lazy, incompetent people. What terms can I use to get the message across quickly and efficiently while in a moment of anger? Can we at least make it ok to use the word fuck in an adjective form? (for complete analysis on parts of speech see here) Can we agree that fuck as a work doesn't offend anyone and therefore it will be the official term to express extreme anger (e.g. you fucking incompetent sorry excuse for a human being). I'm open to suggestions.

Marketing and Sales

This year I really feel like some sort of door-to-door salesman. As a TT PI, I feel like a huge part of my job is selling what my lab does. Hi there, my lab is awesome, here are some of the reasons why....(fill in with unabashed egotistical stump speech)

I'm emailing strangers to try to start scientific discussions and collaborations by telling them how awesome our research is and that they just absolutely have to work with us. Making sure people see what we are doing. To try to get on big PI radar screens.

I've been cold calling program managers at various DoD agencies. Please read a paragraph about my work and consider throwing some crumbs my way. Act now, if you don't fund this work, the security of the country will be at stake. My research will help you defeat our enemies.

This requires a fair amount of cojones and agressiveness, qualities generally lacking in engineers. Maybe it's different in other fields. My experience has been that to grow big, you have to be boisterous and animated. You have to be able to entertain site visitors. You almost have to ooze charisma. It takes a certain personality type. It also helps to be tall. Think about the academic big wigs you know. I know many excellent researchers that are quiet and more subdued who do great work and do well in their careers, but they typically don't run super groups (meaning $1 million plus in annual research income, 15 or more group members). The high school quarter backs and team captains run the show here just as much as in the business world.

I don't really have a strong opinion about this system, other than this is the game I have to play. I'm not by nature one of these alpha personalities that lights up a room. I do work hard to be that way though. So far it seems to be working, it is however quite tiring to be this person. Several of my colleagues refuse to partake in this practice. They don't want to bend and mold their research to fit someone else's vision, to travel non-stop and become detached from the day-to-day operations of their labs. Perhaps that is why we aren't a top R1.

interpersonal communication

In the midst of selecting new students for the lab. We have multiple students that described themselves as having good interpersonal communication skills. What would be really great is if they had included their intrapersonal communication skills.

I'm curious if other T/TT folks out there are influenced by how the candidate looks on paper, especially by GPA/GRE scores that might allow them have a better chance of obtaining external graduate fellowships? I haven't been on one of these panels, but from having applied and having seen a small sample of other students apply, it seems that those less important (in my eyes) criteria are heavily weighted in the decisions.

Also, how much do you push/assist your students with these applications? After all they are newbs and (especially in my field) have never even heard much of the terminology of what they are about to embark upon for their Ph.D.s.

Successful Group Journal Clubs

Pro tip:
I don't know about everyone out there, but all of the journal clubs that I was part of during grad school and postdocing were INCREDIBLY BORING! Students would choose obscure papers or interesting papers that were completely unrelated to the research program so no one else bothered to read them, turning journal club into a mandatory show and tell. They would cut and paste the figures and essentially say this paper is good. There was very little discussion. The standard predictable questions were why is this interesting and I don't understand X, please explain. I always felt forced to dig up some paper that other group members haven't read yet, which usually meant it was not related to their or my research and therefore on the most basic level a waste of time. The club would meet weekly or biweekly and feel like a chore that satisfied the professor's need to feel intellectual.

Now as faculty myself, I want to make everyone be intellectual, but I don't want to subject them to a journal club. What I tried recently, partly by accident, was to send all of my grad students one of the manuscripts that I agreed to review. I had each of them write up a review and present it at an inpromptu meeting. It was a great success. Everyone had comments about the paper, some students thought it was good, some thought it had major flaws. We really got into the details. They then sent me all of their comments and my review work for that one paper was done.

Of course there is one catch to this. The manuscript has to be relavent to the group's research. In this case, it was very related and I primed it by saying that the results might affect the students' research projects. Not every manuscript will work. Most of the stuff I get for review is only tangentially related to the field, but at least some of the manuscripts are right there. I look forward to doing this again in the future.

Let's start an engineering Super-PAC

I saw a great commercial recently on TV, where several individuals simply say what they invented. For example, “I invented the text message, I invented Words with Friends, I invented the phone camera, etc.” At the end it turned out to be a commercial for Best Buy trying to get people to buy gadgets. Wouldn't it be great if it had simply ended with the question: “What will you invent today?” We really need to find a way to get people think just a tiny bit about the world around them. How exactly does your cell phone work? Engineers need to form some Super-PACs to lobby on our behalf and run some cool commercials. I don't know if "Got milk" gets people to buy more milk, but everyone knows the commercials at least.

poor folks

Can the peeps that don't come from upper middle class families/academic/professional degree families please raise their hands? I've been working on some blog posts that I hope to have up soon, but after the last few weeks of conference schmoozing, i'm not particularly enthralled with academic snobbery. Ooh, my entire family are doctors and engineers or lawyers. Academics are some of the worst 1% because they pretend to relate to and empathize with the common man.

Refusing to Review Revisions and Other Musings

Haven't posted in a while because life is about as boring as it can be right now with regards to my career. Classes are finished up. The group is chugging along. Papers are slowly being written. Grant proposals are being written very quickly. The monotony of work as taken hold of me. Took just under 2 years. So this is what my life will be like, assuming I make tenure, until sometime close to death. Yeah, things are different each day at the microscopic level (new committees, new results, disgruntled students, etc.), but the big picture doesn't change unless I decide at some point to jump ship or move up the administrative ladder. So here is a glimpse into todays activities.

What is the etiquette on reviewing revisions? A journal I was reviewing for recently had an explicit question asking if I would be willing to review a revised version of the paper. the question comes right after the recommendation question. In this particular case, I rejected the paper. There was nothing wrong with the paper, it was just very lame work and it had been submitted to one of the top journals in the field. I've always said yes in the past to the question of reviewing a revision, because I'm a good little TT citizen. In this case though, no amount of fixing would make it not lame, and if the devices were used to do an interesting study, it would no longer be the same paper. So I said no. I don't want to give this group hope that this work will be published in this particular journal. I am not against though reading a new version of the paper. Since I always over analyzing everything, now I'm wondering what the underlying meaning is for this question on the review and if it has any special implications for the authors.

Related to this, what is the difference between 'accept with major revisions' and 'reject and resubmit'? Both options are available, along with accept, accept with minor revisions, just reject, and reject but submit to a different journal. This is how I spent my Saturday night.