Rant: Marketing...

Been a while since my last rant; figured it was high-time.

There's nothing more annoying than receiving calls from telemarketers. Honestly, when is it ever a good time for me to listen to you tell me about some product/service in which I'm completely disinterested? Having been a telemarketer for all of 6 days, I learned a valuable lesson: cut them off right away and pleasently tell them to put your name on their 'corporate do not call list'. That company won't be calling you back. It works 'cause it's the law. Try it.

When I lived in Canada, it seemed like direct mail, credit card offers, and things like telemarketing were a background inconvenience. Here in the States, it feels like this stuff is way, way overboard.

A few days after my one year anniversary of being in the US, I started receiving credit card offers - a lot of credit card offers. In fact, there are at least 5 different companies offering me credit cards, some of them mailing me TWICE A WEEK. I swear, I'm getting ~100 packages a year from Capital One alone that I tear up and dump into the recycling bin. Oh, I also get coupon books and flyers pretty much every day. I also have received GQ, Cycling magazine, and some running mag all without having actually signed up for anything. I empty my paper recycling bin weekly because it's full of junk mail.

How about emails? Any company from which I've ever ordered anything online emails me DAILY. That's right, I get 1-2 emails per day from Newegg, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc. I know that I can block them (and have), but does this make sense? How much stuff can I possibly buy? I've heard that the idea here isn't to actually advertise anything, it's simply to keep the names of these companies on the tip of your tongue. I'd like to see a serious study just looking into whether this constant deluge of shit just pisses people off about these companies.

Here's another one. CVS, the big pharmacy chain in the US, calls me frequently with an automated message, asking me to 1) confirm my name, then 2) enter my date of birth before helpfully reminding me that it's allergy/sunburn/flu season and that I should stock up on some particular product. Thanks for calling me at 2 in the afternoon, while I'm in a meeting at work to remind me of this garbage. What in the hell are they thinking?

Oh, here's my big pet-peeve. Why is it that every frickin' store is trying to get me to sign up for their particular meaningless 'reward' card? Why can't I just bring my stuff to the counter, pay, and leave? I shouldn't have to take off my headphones at every single store so that I can say 'No, I'm not interested' or 'Can we please skip the part where I give you my whole address and/or email address?'. Just let me pay and walk out - aren't you getting my money? Why are you still not satisfied?

 I'm sure that some research firm presented some talk at a marketing meeting, showing a 4% increase in quarterly revenue from some obscure company when they started harrassing the hell out of their customers. Rationality would argue that companies wouldn't do this if it didn't work. However, I wonder if anyone ever gets so annoyed by this junk that they actually stop doing business with particular companies? We can't always choose the stores nearest to where we live, but I've certainly stopped using some websites because of the constant email spam I get from them... something to think about.

Trip to Baltimore!

Despite being relatively nearby to where I live (~45 min drive), I'd never been to Baltimore, Maryland. Now, to be fair, I've never really had much impetus to visit the city. Unfortunately, Baltimore's crime problems are somewhat legendary, having been the setting for at least two popular crime drama TV shows (Homicide: Life on the Streets, and The Wire), both of which were loosely based on a former Baltimorean reporter, David Simon's, book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets. Point is, visiting 'the killing streets' just hasn't been a priority.

All of this changed when two good friends from my days of living in Vancouver, BC, were in town at the same time. This made it a no-brainer to go up and visit the city:

Pretty much all of the major cities on the east coast of the US are nearby to one another, but Baltimore is particularly close to Washington, DC (or Rockville, MD where I live). The commuter train is only about a 40 min ride. Some people spend more time driving into a city from the suburbs.

Though visiting with my friends was great, I must admit that I have somewhat mixed feelings about the city itself. Some parts of Baltimore are as gorgeous as anything you'd see anywhere in North America, particularly the harbo(u)rfront and Fell's Point:

 The Baltimore habo(u)rfront is quite pretty and touristy, with a lot of restaurants and attractions. Everything seems busy and bustling. There appears to be a lot of fairly recent development as though the place is getting a facelift.

 The area in and around Fell's Point is very nice and reminds me a lot of towns and cities on the east coast of Canada. It's a historic waterfront community with cobblestone streets and old brick buildings. There are some pretty nice apartments there, in addition to what appear to be some great music venues.

On the other hand, it looks like many not-so-touristy parts of Baltimore are what could be referred to as 'run down'. In fact, before coming to Baltimore, I don't think I'd ever seen an actual block of 'projects' - or large communities of identical dwellings intended for the disadvantaged, and unfortunately well-known as being the scene of much crime.

I'm glad that I visited; but, with absolutely no offense to my Baltimorean colleagues (both those from elsewhere and currently living in Baltimore as well as the people that I've met here from Baltimore originally), I'm not sure that it's a city where I'd personally enjoy living. I had no fear in biking home from the lab at 1 am in this area, but I may not be so keen on doing that in Baltimore.

I've created a Picasa Web Album with all of the photos I took while there for anyone who's interested. But I will leave you all with one more pic that I think is worth highlighting:

We found this odd bit of graffiti outside of a cafe where we stopped to grab some coffee. Seeing as my general area of interest is in the evolution of gene regulation, I had to take a photo to express my love for RNA. Thanks to my friend Will for also expressing his support!

Fears about 'Discovery Science'...

Given all of the recent difficulties I've had with regards to my career1, I'm beginning to worry that my view of science has been somewhat naïve. See, I spent a good 10 years of training having the idea that hypotheses are important drilled into my head. Furthermore, every time I've applied for funding, I've been told (both by my supervisors and the granting agencies themselves) that having clearly defined hypotheses in my project proposal is a necessary requirement for success. And yet, having spoken to some fellow postdocs about their own work, I seem to be noticing a trend towards generating large, expensive datasets (particularly of the 'next-generation sequencing' variety) and then searching for 'interesting stories' within said sets. I've heard this referred to as 'discovery science' in the past.

Now here's a conceit: There first needs to be an observation upon which to formulate a hypothesis. In other words, you first need to see some pattern in the data before you can speculate on its potential cause(s). Generating a large, expensive dataset may produce the observation wanting an explanation. So let me be more precise in saying that my discussion here isn't so much with the lack of a hypothesis itself (which may come later), but rather with a lack of focus, or even a scientific question in the first place.

There are an infinite number of potential datasets that one could generate - I could, for example produce a dataset estimating gene expression levels in an adult dog's liver as well as a baby chimpanzee's cheek and call that a dataset. My observation may then be that 'sheesh, there sure are a lot of expression differences between these two species/tissues/developmental time points!' I could then formulate a number of hypotheses as to why this would be the case; but now I encounter a difficulty: It's very likely that this 'dataset' is totally inadequate for testing any meaningful, realistic hypothesis that I may generate. In fact, one may say that comparing these two, 'unpaired' tissues between two distantly related species is rather 'random' and even 'weird'.

So let me step away from such an egregious example of poor experimental design by using it to make a point: the question you seek to answer ultimately determines how an experiment should be designed. As I've said numerous times before in previous posts, experimental design is one of the most difficult things to learn as a junior scientist (and learning this should ultimately be the result of a Ph.D.) By extension it's perhaps arguable that the ultimate 'thing' to master as one develops their abilities as a scientist is how to come up with interesting, tractable questions.

My naïvete may ultimately stem from my conviction, up to this point, that everything within a given project stems from the question being asked, and the hypothesis being tested2. It determines the design of the experiment, the interpretation of the results, and the writing of the manuscript detailing those results. And yet, I've found myself - as well as folks I've spoken to - stuck in situations where I'm trying to find a 'story' for a number of observations at the point where I'm writing a manuscript. While I suppose that there's nothing wrong with generating new hypotheses even this late in the game, you may have to go do additional experiments in order to properly test said hypotheses (again, something I'm not particularly used to as I generally don't begin writing a paper until I have a fairly complete story).

I'd be lying if I didn't say that I worry about such completely discovery-based projects, both on scientific and on practical grounds. Scientifically, hypotheses are best tested by data generated for this express purpose - often times these large, exploratory projects 'test' hypotheses using pre-generated data (typically the data from which the observation precipitating the hypothesis was drawn) and a set of assumptions. This isn't always bad, but it could be avoided in some cases by more detailed experimental design in the first place. On the practical side, these projects are often very expensive. I've worked in labs both 'rich' and 'poor' and my personal experience is that one spends a lot more time carefully thinking about experimental design in the latter - you need to be able to get as much 'bang for your buck' as possible.

Regardless, this isn't an easily resolved issue: there are good arguments for generating 'big' datasets - they're often very useful to the community for generating and testing hypotheses down the road, for instance. On the flip side, when I hear folks saying things like 'Nature will have to publish this because it's such a huge dataset!', it somewhat undermines my 'naïve' view of what science is supposed to be.

1I left my current postdoc because of dissatisfaction with the work that I was doing. I'd like to discuss this carefully, in a blog post someday.

2I would like to note here that nowhere am I opposed to the question and/or hypotheses changing (even radically) based on new information during the process - only that the end result will be determined by the final question that's been settled upon.

Day Trip to Deep Creek Lake, MD...

Every once in a while, it feels good to take a day off and go do something outdoors. In this spirit, today a bunch of friends and I made a day trip to Deep Creek Lake, MD, which is ~2.5 hours away from Washington, DC by car:

 

Deep Creek Lake is located in the thin north-western tip of Maryland, close to the borders of both Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

In looking up details for this post, it turns out that, like all of Maryland's 'lakes', Deep Creek is man-made and the result of damming a river. This is pretty impressive given that it's 64.7 square miles. It's mostly known as a summer resort, featuring many rustic-looking faux log cabin resorts, but apparently it's also been trying to build 'cred' as a skiing destination in the winter.

We went to the local State Park in order to do some hiking, sightseeing and swimming. Our 5 mi (8 km) hike was pretty intense given that a large part of it involved a fairly steep gain in elevation. Thankfully, the area is nowhere near as warm and humid as the DC metropolitan area (which has been subject to the recent intense East Coast heat-wave). Luckily I brought my GPS watch for the hike, so I was able to display our trail on Google Earth:

I don't know when the satellite image was taken, but the landscape is nowhere near as barren as it appears. It was all actually quite beautiful forest!

I'm going to post a few of the pics that I took from the trip below, but I've also put the whole lot in a Picasa web album for those who are interested in seeing them.

As seems to be the norm for hikes in this part of the country, they typically involve walks on minimalist trails through beautiful natural forest.

The lake itself was large and quite scenic with quite a few boats motoring by.

There's a small man-made beach where we were able to 'swim'. I write 'swim' that way because, while the water was warm, you're not allowed to walk out farther into the lake than roughly waist level. Yet there are lifeguards...

As my final two pics, I'd like to point out a pair of strange sightings witnessed during our trip:

What exactly is a 'Bust Largness Wakeboard Contest'? Plugging this into Google image search, I get results of people wakeboarding as well as 'Sexy Nylon Spandex Halter-Top'. I'm just saying...

The sign under this, umm... structure says 'Noah's Ark Being Rebuilt Here!'. Some local, rural church is involved in the incredibly useful task of 'rebuilding' Noah's mythical Ark from the book of Genesis. This is one of those 'Only in America' things, I guess...

Scenes from a Commute...

As I discussed in a previous post, I've become a pretty serious cyclist. I commute 15 miles (24 km) to work by bike at least six days a week (weather permitting), which has gone a long way to the successful completion of 'Operation Iron-Carlo', the code-name given to my loss of the weight I gained at the end of my Ph.D. As an added benefit, having a decent bike allows me to avoid taking Washington D.C.'s umm, shall we say 'unreliable' Metro system1 for ~8 months out of the year.

I've actually been recording my total distance biked (as you can see on the right side of the blog). This actually isn't arbitrary, but is rather quite precise2 due to a little toy I got for my birthday this year:

I managed to get a really good deal on a Garmin Forerunner 305 GPS exercise 'watch'. It's a bit more pricey than a cycling computer, but it can also be used for jogging and tracks all kinds of stats that you can use for endurance training. While biking, it gives you total distance travelled, current velocity, heart rate, and altitude among other things, so it's pretty nice.

There's a docking cradle that allows the unit to recharge and transfer its data automatically to your PC (or in my case, Macbook) where your routes can be displayed in Google Maps and all kinds of stats and metrics can be compared between laps or trips.

Anyways, the real purpose of this post was to say that I've recently decided that I should take a bunch of pictures in and around Maryland/DC before I move away in a few short months. I just got a new, much better digital camera to replace my previous ailing unit, and so to test it out, I took a bunch of photos along my bike ride this morning and have uploaded them into a Picasa Web Album:

Home to Work Bike Ride (29th July 2011)

The photos aren't quite as impressive as my buddy Martin's pics from his recent trip to the Netherlands, but they're ah... quasi scenic, I guess. Lots of road and trail, or whatever.

1As a guest in this beautiful country, I've tried to avoid complaining about things like public services - for the most part, they've been great. However, I have to agree with many of my friends that the Metro system here in Washington is truly abysmal. The trains run infrequently except at 'peak' hours and there are frequent technical difficulties causing unexpected delays. The real 'killer' though is that in the 2 years that I've been here, there's been near constant weekend 'scheduled track maintenance' where trains run on single tracks or entire stations are closed down for days, creating 30 to 45 minute waits between trains. Stories of people waiting for an hour without seeing a train are not uncommon, and are extremely aggravating. The issue seems to be a consistent state of under-funding leading to aging equipment in a shoddy state of repair. There's actually an entire blog dedicated to ranting about the DC Metro: Unsuck DC Metro.

2I always round fractional miles from each trip down to be conservative.