ChemBark

A friend on Facebook brought my attention to a very interesting article from NBC News:

People always worry about pee in the pool, but number two is the No. 1 problem, government health experts say. They found plenty of evidence that someone’s pooping in the pool. It’s not only disgusting, but it’s evidence that people are not following basic hygiene rules, says Michele Hlavsa, chief of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Healthy Swimming Program.

“It is time to stop treating the swimming pool as a toilet,” Hlavsa told NBC News. “Nowhere else except for the pool is it acceptable to poop in public or pee in public. In other places if we did this in public, we’d be arrested.”

The pool-poo expert went on to say:

“The average person has about .14 grams of feces on their rear end,” Hlavsa said. “If that rinses off into the water, the amount from one person might not be that much. But as more and more swimmers introduce it that much, it does become an issue.”

She’s actually done the math.

“Let’s imagine 1,000 kids go to a water park. They have as much as 10 grams of feces on their rear ends,” she said.  “We are now talking about 10,000 grams or 10 kg. That translates to 24 pounds of poop in the water.”

I am willing to grant Hlavsa’s obscenely high estimate of 10 grams of poo per bottom—which does lead to 10 kg of poo per 1000 bottoms—but that does not equate to 24 pounds! The correct conversion factor for poo (or any other substance at the surface of Earth) is 2.2 pounds per kg.

I am immensely relieved her hypothetical pool contains only 22 lbs. of poo.

I’m always interested to come across instructional documents on chemistry professors’ Web sites. These documents can be great resources, because they often contain very practical advice about safety, direction on how to maintain instruments, and guidance on experimental technique from experts in the field. Taking the time to commit this information to writing also helps prevent “institutional” loss of memory when senior members of the lab graduate without having properly trained the next generation of students.

Unfortunately, you don’t come across that many lab manuals online. Perhaps this is because some of them are distributed in hard copy only. Perhaps, some professors don’t want to explicitly write procedures and safety guidelines in fear they might be used against them in court. My guess, however, is that most people can’t find the time to sit down and write out this information—or they don’t see the value in doing so.

Jim Tour’s “Guidelines for Research” is among my favorite documents. He gets very specific about some of the advice he doles out. For instance, all nitrogen bubblers left on overnight should have a flow rate of one bubble per second or less. Tour provides guidance on how he likes notebooks to be kept, and he also provides expectations about work ethic and vacations. Finally, there is the passage on personal hygiene:

Personal Hygiene: Although not customary in all countries, Americans generally bathe at least several times per week. As a result, many Americans are offended by the infrequent bathing habits of others (whether Americans or internationals). Thus, you may be leaving a negative impression of yourself without ever knowing it. Unfortunately, bad impressions are often difficult to overcome. Likewise, be sure to use an underarm deodorant since most Americans find body odor to be most offensive. I have seen people causing themselves to be ostracized by others simply because of poor personal hygiene habits.

It might seem trifling or overbearing to provide advice on this level, but the info is correct and I wish more people heeded Tour’s advice.

While the idea of writing a manual all at once seems daunting, I think that doing it in pieces seems quite reasonable. In fact, I think you can assemble some really good tidbits of advice from material that is already posted online. These documents are almost like official memoranda to members of professors’ labs. For instance:

The famous “How to Write a Scientific Paper” article in Advanced Materials had its beginnings as a type-written memo from George Whitesides to his lab.

There’s also Ken Suslick’s cool presentation on how to give a talk.

And I like how some professors provide specific instructions on how to ask them for letters of recommendation.

Anyway, before I go writing similar stuff in the future, I wanted to know if you all had come across any great lab manuals or memos. Leave them in the comments, and I’ll compile a list below.

Lab Manuals

Jim Tour’s “Guidelines for Research”
Melanie Sanford’s “Group Welcome Kit”
Dave Collum’s site
Bart Bartlett’s “Standard Operating Procedures”
Turro Group’s site
Watson Group Manual
Tolman Lab’s “Standard Operating Procedures”
Armen Zakarian’s site

I don’t know why I find myself writing so many posts about happenings at Columbia, but I do. And the trend continues, thanks to this ad I found on page 84 of the March 18th edition of Chemical & Engineering News:

The ad begins:

THE DEPARTMENT OF CHEMISTRY seeks to appoint an Associate in Discipline beginning July 1, 2013, for our busy undergraduate laboratory programs. This is a full-time special instructional faculty position with multiyear renewals contingent on successful review…

An Associate in Discipline, you say? Great. I can think of a few chemists at Columbia who need to be disciplined (1 2)…

Tom Barton won last year’s ACS national election for President (and was kind enough to answer our questionnaire about important issues facing the society). Yesterday, President-Elect Barton asked that I share this message with the readers of the blog:

In my ACS presidential year of 2014 I’m considering hosting a symposium on fracking with, of course, emphasis on the involvement of chemicals.  I would appreciate hearing from anyone suggestions for particular areas for inclusion, and potential speakers.  I seek a balanced set of presentations from experts in the various aspects, and would certainly be interested in any germane research.  I myself am not an expert in this arena, but I am trying to get smart in it.  In advance, I appreciate your assistance.

Feel free to weigh in using the comments. I will leave the first…

A big “thank you” to everyone who leaves comments on the site. They add so much value to the blog, and they make writing posts much more fun for me. I love a good debate, and I know there are a lot of quiet lurkers out there who appreciate the comments, too.

When leaving comments, you don’t have to enter anything in the name, e-mail, or website fields if you don’t want to. I have also avoided making commenters log in with a profile of some sort, because I find this practice annoying and it often doesn’t work on mobile devices. As a consequence, I have to use a spam blocker to filter out comments that look like they might be spam. It does a good job—blocking about 200 or so bad comments per day—but occasionally some slip through, which I delete later by hand. The filter also occasionally blocks comments that are legitimate. So, if you post a comment and you don’t see it pop up immediately when you refresh your browser, send an e-mail to paul -at- chembark.com and I will fish it out of the garbage. There is no need to re-write your comment.

Speaking of comments, I have some housekeeping to take care of in the form of two new ground rules.

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Ground Rule 14: “Unspecific or similarly vacuous negative comments by unidentifiable users may be deleted or censored.”

I have discussed before why I allow anonymous commenting on this site, and as I said above, your comment will still post even if you leave the name, e-mail, and website fields blank. While I don’t plan to make it a habit of censoring comments, I am going to add a ground rule that unsubstantiated negative comments from anonymous or unknown pseudonymous users will be deleted. Comments along these lines could be:

“John Public is a crappy teacher.” — Ben Zene

“I went to grad school with Professor Public and he sucks.” — Anonymous

“If I were a postdoc for Public, I would kill myself.” — Mo Ron

Basically, these sorts of comments are worthless. They provide little to no useful information, they’re not funny, and they make people upset. I feel little compunction about deleting them.

With that said, I would allow similar comments to remain if they were substantiated. For instance:

“John Public is a crappy teacher. I had him for Chem 157 at Harvard, and he basically did nothing. His teaching assistant made us pick dates out of a hat on the first day of class, then we had to prepare and deliver the lecture for whatever date we picked. What’s worse was that he graded our lecture while dropping in and out of consciousness, and it was our only grade for the class. Ugh.” — Ben Zene

While the above comment is negative, the user has provided a decent explanation for his negative assessment and the discussion is relevant to chemistry.

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Ground Rule 15: “Comments containing personal information with little or no relevance to chemistry will be deleted.”

Comments that stray recklessly into personal areas that have little or no relevance to chemistry will be deleted. For example:

“John Public’s boyfriend is butt ugly. His teeth look like he’s got a mouthful of Chiclets.”

“John Public is an alcoholic.”

“John Public has a house on Martha’s Vineyard.”

As written, these comments contribute nothing meaningful to a discussion about chemistry. With that said, personal information may be discussed if it is of significant relevance to a matter regarding chemistry or chemical research, and this relevance is manifest or explained. For instance,

“John Public is an alcoholic, and his lab is really suffering because of it. He shows up to group meetings reeking of booze and babbling to himself, then he usually falls asleep. The other day, he stumbled into lab and knocked over a 4L bottle of ethyl acetate. I know a senior grad student there is definitely thinking of switching labs.”

I’m not encouraging comments like this at all—they can make my life hell—but I’m not going to censor them unless I know the information to be false. With that said, you should know that leaving false, defamatory information in a blog comment (or anywhere else, for that matter) exposes the commenter to lawsuits for libel. While I will never volunteer information regarding anonymous commenters on the blog, I will comply with lawful court orders to provide information like IP addresses, etc.

Basically, play nicely, everyone. Treat others as you would wish to be treated. Deciding what stays and goes is not a science, but I will do my best to apply the rules fairly. In cases where a distinction is not clear, I will favor letting a comment stand.

And, as always, I welcome your feedback.

Now that my job search is over, I can share all of the stupid things I did and instances where I completely fouled up. This story is, by far, the most mortifying of all my search-related experiences…

After reviewing the application packages they receive for faculty positions, most schools do a round of phone interviews before deciding on which candidates to invite for on-site interviews. Few things are more exciting in your job search than being asked to schedule a phone interview, because it often represents the first meaningful acknowledgment of receipt (and advancement) of your application package. Most of the applications you submit get sucked into a vacuum where you never hear that you’ve been rejected until six months later.

After submitting an application in early October to a school in the Pacific Northwest, I received a phone call three weeks later from the chairman of the department asking to schedule a Skype interview. Great. This was the first time I’d been asked to do a video interview, but I have a Skype account and a computer with a webcam, so everything was ready to go. While I rarely use Skype, I had used it to talk with a friend in China only two months prior.

On the day of the interview, I changed into a dress shirt in my office, logged on to Skype, and awaited the call. When I answered, my video stream popped up normally for a second, but quickly changed to the following:

While I could see the search committee just fine, they saw me as a sad kitten. I know this because (i) I could see my feed in a small box on my screen, and (ii) the professors on the committee were looking at their screen and chuckling. What’s worse is that every time I talked, the kitten’s mouth would open and close. I was mortified.

I started frantically scrolling down all of the menus in Skype trying to remedy the situation. What the hell was happening? No one else ever uses my computer, and I was certain I hadn’t adjusted any of the settings in Skype. It had worked fine just two months earlier.

After trudging through the first three minutes of the interview while trying to fix the stream—a major distraction—the chairman suggested that I just kill the video and proceed on audio only. I guess it is hard to have a serious discussion about chemistry with a talking kitten?

I thought the rest of the interview went well—really well. I made a call sheet for every phoner that summarized the points I wanted to make, and putting that on the screen allowed me to refocus and get my head back into the game.

When the call was over, I resumed the effort of determining what had happened. A friend on Facebook pointed me to this blog post. It turns out that Skype is not to blame; it is some sort of default setting in the webcam software on Dell computers. Why you would set a kitten avatar as a default is beyond my comprehension, but there you go. It turns out that another user had the same experience just a couple of days later.

I sent a follow up e-mail to the chair thanking him for the interview and sharing what I had discovered about the problem.

Paul,

No worries! It’s an understandable problem and the interview worked well doing it audio only (we still had your Skype profile picture to look at, so it wasn’t actually all that different). It was nice talking to you.

XXXXXX

 

On Oct 30, 2012, at 3:50 PM, “Paul Bracher” <bracher-at-caltech/edu> wrote:

Hi XXXXXX,

I wanted to thank you and the rest of the committee for taking the time to chat earlier today. I had a great time, aside from the mortification associated with my bizarre video feed. It seems that I am not the first person to fall victim to Dell’s webcam software:

http://www.bitbybit.dk/carsten/blog/?p=269

A number of my friends in lab have died laughing, but you have my profound apologies. I would have preferred that you and the committee had been able to see the enthusiasm on my face during our discussion. I remain very excited about the position at —————!

All the best,
Paul “the Kitten” Bracher

The response was gracious, but the damage was done. I think what was especially damaging about the situation was that you have some guy who has put together a decent Web site, runs a blog, and stresses the importance of incorporating new technology into his teaching proposals, yet he can’t figure out how to use Skype properly. In hindsight, I should have done another test run, instead of thinking that my use of Skype two months prior was sufficient.

After radio silence for the next month, I assumed the worst. The stages of the search seem to progress pretty quickly once they’ve started, so when you’ve lost contact for several weeks, it’s usually a bad sign. My suspicions were confirmed in February:

Dear Paul,

It was a pleasure to talk to you a couple months ago. I write to inform you that ————— has offered the Assistant Professor in Organic Chemistry position to another candidate. The decision was very difficult and time consuming (which is why you’re only just hearing back from us), as you were in a field of outstanding candidates.

I would like to convey my appreciation for your interest in —————. Please accept my best wishes for the future development of your career.

Sincerely,

XXXXX
Chair, Search Committee

The cold sting of rejection. Oh well. Who knows what could have been were it not for the kitty interview?