Wrong Way to Employment

Hmmm.... well, I guess there's no point applying for a job with GSK anymore. They *might* be on to my blogpost "Spinning Words".

- Excerpt of my webstatistics -

Disclaimer: I do appologize to all the sincere scientists that work there. No need to tar everyone with the same brush.

Wish List

*Thanks to MaTuVu for so graciously letting me nick her idea


01. A cat without halitosis
02. To shadow polar bears on the Artic (not the other way around)
03. Complete the next step of my Mountain Leadership Training
04. Meet Noam Chomsky, Karl Popper and/or Richard Dawkins
05. Spend a week at the Santa Fe Institute to pick their brains
06. To spend a christmas somewhere snowy with lots of fairy lights
07. My own Carvers (skis)
08. A Star Trek suit (red for “command”, of course ;-)
09. To swim in the Dead Sea
10. To climb Mauna Loa (world’s largest volcano)
11. To re-visit the Yellowstone Caldera
12. To travel through Africa, Russia, South America and Alaska
13. Go to Roskilde Festival in Denmark with Val
14. To build up the nerve to sing something on a big stage
15. To write a few really good film-scripts
16. To ski on every continent, at least once.
17. To have my own house
18. To visit the Pyramids
19. An entire wall of books (+ swooshy library rail-ladder)
20. To make some local spanish friends to refresh/improve my Spanish
21. To find a job I’m passionate about
22. To see the red square (Moscow)
23. To fall in love, over and over again, with the right person
24. Participate in a research project on the Antartic
25. To travel 2-3 months each year (weekendtrips, long trips)
26. To be able to raise my kids bilingual
27. To set up a few projects I have in mind
28. An Audi
29. A weekly massage
30. To learn how to do parcour
31. To learn how to Kite-Surf (somewhere warm)
32. More friendships, as pure and exciting as the ones I've already built up
33. To shove my PhD certificate in the face of my old maths' teacher
34. To make a difference in someone's life
35. To grow old and be perfectly entertained when looking back on my life
36. (Not publishable)
37. (Not publishable)
38. To take a crash-course in stunt-driving (excuse the pun)
39. Wireless headphones
40. A pair of reading glasses with correct focus
41. To be able to use my reevu cycle-helmet without people taking the piss
42. To fix my rollerblades
43. To decorate a place entirely to my liking (blank cheque would help)
44. To always make time to just lie around putting the world to rights
45. Lots of summery nights in the Park with a bunch of good friends (pool welcome)
46. To always be able to challenge my own fears without being forced to
47. To one day be able to wrestle my brother to the floor again, for old time's sake
48. To not forget what being a teenager was about
49. To never tire of surprises
50. To spend my Sunday mornings with a nice cup of coffee in my hand, a lazy book or newspaper, an egg, a croissant, and a another warm hand that slips into mine every now and then out of sheer love and contentment.

Favorite Quotations

It's somewhat ironic for me to be blogging this, considering my title-quote. But meh... Enjoy.

1.

The report of my death was an exaggeration
- Mark Twain -

2.

Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast
- Oscar Wilde -

3.

History will be kind to me for I intend to write it

- Winston Churchill -

4.

Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love

- Charlie Brown -

5.

In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French;
I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their language
- Mark Twain -

6.

To lose one parent, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune;
to lose both looks like carelessness
- Oscar Wilde -

7.

Many a man who falls in love with a dimple make the mistake of marrying the whole girl
- Evan Esar -

8.

Those who live on hope, die fasting
- Benjamin Franklin -

9.

Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint
- Mark Twain -

10.

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars
- Oscar Wilde -

11.

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one
- Einstein -

12.

To disagree with three-fourths of the British public is one of the first requisites of sanity
- Oscar Wilde -

13.

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence
- HL Mencken -

14.

There is no reciprocity. Men love women, women love children, children love hamsters
- Alice Ellis -

15.

The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray,
and the advantage of science is that it is not emotional
- Oscar Wilde -

16.

I can't listen to that much Wagner. I start getting the urge to conquer Poland
- Woody Allen -

17.

I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be
- Douglas Adams -

18.
Before I met my husband, I'd never fallen in love, though I'd stepped in it a few times
- Rita Rudner -

Spinning Words

I know this is a familiar story: "Drug company 'hid' suicide link".

"Panorama reveals that GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) attempted to show that Seroxat worked for depressed children despite failed clinical trials. And that GSK-employed ghostwriters influenced 'independent' academics."

But while we've all seen programs or read articles that have focussed on the topic of drug trial manipulations and the aggressive marketing style of some Pharmaceutical companies, this documentary takes on a slightly different perspective. It explores how the manipulation is achieved: through clever strategic use of spin-doctors and ghostwriters with a knack for "re-phrasing" the specifics and how their skills are used to reel in supposedly independent academics. It focusses largely on the power of word and perception.

I am interested in this topic for quite obvious reasons, but also because most -if not all- of the freelance translation work I do on the side, involves documents related to phase I and phase II clinical trials. It is interesting to study the wording in certain documents and I can only hope that if any of my family members or friends ever were to face the decision to participate in a drug trial because of health reasons, they will be guided through the sometimes ambiguous wording by someone who's got their best interest at heart.

Moreover, how do we keep ourselves from conveying the wrong messages? Language is clearly a very subtle, powerful tool. Are we always that concious of our choice of words? If I trawl through the archives of this blog, I am sure to find misleading statements, while I might not purposefully have written them in as such. We inherently rely on our own common sense and that of those nearest to us, to be corrected in our use of language and to be pointed out the hidden messages behind the facade of linguistics.

I think all of this pinpoints a process that underlies many misgivings and failures in democracy: the manipulation of language in politics, science, medicine, trade, economics, sales and education. And by extention, their (ab)use of the most powerful forum of words: The Media.
A fact that was worded incredibly well in Manufacturing Consent:


“Media is to a democracy, what violence is to a dictatorship.”


To watch the abovementioned BBC documentary, Click Here. (35-minute feature)

Addendum: I would like to point out that while the documentary itself reports on manipulation, it in itself is not entirely devoid of somewhat ambiguous, sensationalist spins.

Flip a coin over it.

I feel like a coin today. A rusty little coin hesitantly balancing on its rim, not quite knowing which way to fall just yet. So I'm spinning around a bit, waiting to gradually lose momentum. Hoping that either side of me will make up its mind about its weight and thus take the decision off my hands.

There's no greater struggle than that between two opposing sides of the same coin.

Penguin Pooh

You can just imagine the conversation on this researcher's first dinner date:

"So what's your research on??"

"Well..."

A diagram of his paper:

Man, did I chose the wrong topic ;-)

Little Miss Sunshine

I know two cinema sessions in one week is probably pushing the boundaries somewhat, but I went to see Little Miss Sunshine with a few friends today. It is absolutely brilliant. Totally my kind of film. Right up there with Igby Goes Down, Thank You For Smoking and Garden State. It's the kind of mentalness I find comforting. The kind of observational psychology that brings it all down to earth. Go see it!


Dwayne: I wish I could just sleep until I was eighteen and skip all this crap- high school and everything- just skip it.

Frank: You know Marcel Proust?

Dwayne: He's the guy you teach.

Frank: Yeah. French writer. Total loser. Never had a real job. Unrequited love affairs. Gay. Spent 20 years writing a book almost no one reads. But he's also probably the greatest writer since Shakespeare. Anyway, he uh- he gets down to the end of his life... and he looks back and decides that all those years he suffered- Those were the best years of his life, 'cause they made him who he was. All those years he was happy? You know, total waste. Didn't learn a thing. So, if you sleep until you're 18... Ah, think of the suffering you're gonna miss. I mean high school? High school- Those are your prime suffering years. You don't get better suffering than that.

Sparks in the Dark

At 11pm last night, everything suddenly went very dark. A power-outage had paralysed our entire block. As I stumbled my way towards the flashlights we keep stored in an emergency box, I was engulfed by total silence. Despite common sense telling me everything was perfectly safe, my heart was racing. It seems I never entirely outgrew my fear of the dark. And there are few things more isolate than a modern house stripped of its amenities.

Flashlight at hand, I found my way to a box of matches. And as I moved through the house to light the candles, my free hand kept touching the light-switches it passed on its way. Out of habit.

In the glow of the candles, we switched off the flashlights and contemplated what we were left with. And the thing we came up with was each other. We huddled round the little lights with a few blankets wrapped around us and simply... talked. About funny things that have happened to us in the last few years, but we’ve never taken the time to tell each other before. About what’s on our mind right now. What worries us and what no longer does. About the film we were watching when the power cut and what the ending would look like if we could write it. About our plans for tomorrow, when the lights come back on. And about how lucky we are to live in a place where a power-outage turns into a simply fun night, instead of a week-long drama.

Pulling Hairs

I am much too tired to write a complete typical Pew rant about the following, but I rather suspect this topic will be picked up by more blogs over the next few days. I hope they manage to word the frustrations better than I can at this very moment.

Climateprediction.net quite cleverly teamed up with the BBC to carry out what has been labelled the largest and most important Climate Change Experiment. I am all in favor of the idea of involving the general public by making use of their computers to distribute experimental/theoretical computations that would otherwise take years to complete in a single lab. NASA started a similar project a few years back as part of the SETI-project. I think it's brilliant.

However. There's as always a downside to such "popularisations" of science.

I dare assume that most of us are aware of the chaotic principles underlying the Earth's weather system. Most of us also know that when it comes down to the current forecasting models, the probabilities of the forecast being accurate drops off sharply after day 5 into the forecast. That is why most MetOffices generally dont give out weather bulletins more than 5 days ahead of time.

Whilst I am aware that slightly different probabilities are involved with larger scale, whole system predictions, it is safe to assume that due to the non-linear nature of climate, any prediction in the long term needs to be taken with a pinch of salt.

The actual methods of calculation and the reasoning behind the conclusion-forming is explained on the BBC site, and I would suggest you all have a look at it. I am fairly confident most amongst you will raise a few eyebrows when they then check the actual result page as displayed on the BBC site.

To state that Britain SHOULD expect a 4 degree rise in temperature by 2080 is simply absurd. It is the type of uncautious generalisation seen all too often in the media and makes me feel embarassed to be a scientist. Because we let the media get away with it. I am all the more annoyed because I generally regard the BBC as one of the last remaining flagships of genuine journalism out there.

I believe a little nuancing is desperately needed in the whole climate change debate. There are most certainly problems that urgently need to be dealt with, but before we all jump on the "end-of-time-catastrophe" bandwagon, let's just point out a few other bits of science that seem to tell a somewhat more balanced story alltogether...

In terms of glacier melting, I have two very fine examples right here:

A New Alpine Melt Theory

Too Cold to Snow?

Helen Margerison, who wrote the latter, was a 2005 New Scientist Essay Competition finalist and as such, I actually saw her present her findings at an award event in London. It stunned me at the time, because this sort of information generally doesn't get spread out over the newspages. It is far too nuanced. Far too "unexciting". Just pay attention to her statement that "... the odd thing about glaciers in the Dry Valleys is that they don’t melt when the climate gets warmer, they actually begin to grow..."

It's a sad time when people only care about environmental issues if there's a doomsday scenario attached to it. I'd like to believe that even if we nuance the situations correctly, people will still realise that we are doing some serious damage and that action is always justified, whether we are causing these natural events or not.

Suicide Bunnies

I spent the entire day strolling around Ghent today, because I felt I deserved a day off after all the hard work that goes into being so very unemployed. I'm not suposed to hear back from either of the two jobs I interviewed for until late next week and there's really only so much faffing one can do before the mind starts to believe that realigning the coffee-cups in your cupboard is a highly valid achievement for the day.

I wasn't looking for anything in particular really, except that I sort of wanted to buy some "creative" tools. I intend to redecorate one of the rooms in the house and while I have a vague notion of where I want to go with it, the exact strategy of how to get there, has yet to come to me. As tends to happen when one wanders into an exciting shop without a purposefully designed shopping list, I came out with loads of stuff I've no clue how to use.

A quick peak in my bag tells me I have netted 4 cans of spraypaint (grey, orange, brown and blue), two artist's spatulas, 3 paintbrushes, 6 canvasses, 12 tubes of acrylic paint, a stanley knife and a bottle of white spirit. When the shopattendend asked me whether I needed spraycaps for wide or narrow angle, I got a little flustered. Because I have no clue what she was on about, I decided on a wide angle as I assume wide can be made narrow with a little effort?! *ahem*

Because I had arranged to help out my cousin in the evening and then to go out clubbing with a friend after, I decided not to go home but to take my freshly caught haul of books to Het Lepelblad, as it's one of the few places in town that will allow you to just sit there reading for hours over one cup of coffee. Unfortunately, the nightclubbing got cancelled so I decided to come home and spend my evening figuring out what exactly I am going to do with all the stuff I bought today. Ideas welcome.

In the meantime, I would like to leave you with a few pages of two highly entertaining books (The Bunny Suicides and Great Lies to Tell Small Kids) by Andy Riley. I bought the sequels today and while they are not as funny as the first two, they are still pretty damn good.

From "The Bunny Suicides":

From "Great Lies to Tell Small Kids":

Fragile

With careful deliberation I retrace my steps

For the thin ice not to fault

Everything about this morning is fragile

Your hello broke apart in a thousand pieces

On the longing that fills the air

The shards will cut my pretences

And remind me to assuage

For the link between us

Is but a frail thread

Around which my feelings revolve

With palpable purposefulness

I long to edge closer

Towards the depths of your eyes

To feel the warmth of your presence

And catch the glimmer of your smile

But I will retrace my paces

For the ice not to break

As your goodbye shatters about me

My confusion resolves

I will learn how to swim

Should the ice melt away.

Scent of a Woman

Contrary to what my nickname may suggest, I am all in favour of smelling nice. I am not averse to a few sprays of perfume, or a good scrub in the shower. I change my clothes on a regular basis and I take a toothbrush at hand at least twice a day. Mom raised me well.

However.

For no reason in particular, I thought back of some publication I read a while ago about the role of scents in the game of seduction and attraction. Several studies seem to hint that the scents people produce help us all to attract the genetically most advantageous partner. Our biology seems to drive us to find partners that have MHC genes (major histocompatibility complex genes) not too similar and not too dissimilar to ours. These genes produce proteins that attach to our own cells in our body, so that our immune system knows they are our own and should not be destroyed. Finding a partner with similar MHC genes, though not exactly the same, seems to increase our chances of producing offspring that has a better survival rate in this world.

So that's the science bit.

I now wonder what the effect is of our societal obsession with smelling nice. I assume that our natural scents are covered up by the perfumes, deodorants and soaps we slap on ourselves each day. If scent has such an evolutionary importance, it might determine more than purely a compatibility of genes. Maybe it determines who is most likely to stick with us in the long run (this is a far stretch, but one should never assume). By dowsing ourselves with the latest fashionably hip Eau-de-Cologne, we may inadvertently be confusing our own radars.

In that respect, I am all in favor of a few sweaty T-shirts here and there. If you dig deep in your own memories, and trace back to a moment of intimate passion with someone you loved intensely, I'm sure you'll find that the natural scents you smelt then, were anything but gross. Quite to the contrary. They were enticing, seductive, energizing... I think that's what it's all about.

I have yet to figure out how all of this translates to Gay attractions, for the absolute evolutionary drives to procreate with your partner of attraction are somewhat dust in the wind here. Having said that, as a lesbian, I can only conclude that the scent of some women drives me mad too. There might just be a little more to do with scents than purely the Darwinian principles ;-)

Li'l Excitements

I have a pretty major translation deadline for tomorrow (some freelance work I do whilst being a perfect li'l bum) and this inevitably means my urge to procrastinate goes up ten-fold, hence the blogging...

I was invited along by MaTuVu and a very excitable, very cute 10-year old, to an afternoon showing of "Crusade in Jeans" at the local cinema. I'd read the book several times over as a child so was keen to go see it, despite it being predominantly aimed at a younger audience. There's something extremely endearing about watching a film with li'l uns. They are so genuine in their reactions to the film, regardless of how many people are sitting around them. And when they figure out the next sequence of the plot before it happens, you can see them getting all excited. I could almost feel myself slip back into that mindset.

I remember a particularly entertaining cinema visit when I was living in Stoke. Harry Potter's Chamber of Secrets had just come out and I'd gone to see it with a friend. At 2 p.m. on a weekday, we were - of course - surrounded by kids and stay-at-home mums. It became apparent that most of these kids had read the book from front to back several times over. They had clearly memorised all the spells, incantations and dialogues and were reciting them along with the movie. At one point, a clearly frustrated mother turned to her son and said: "Seriously Jack, why do you insist on me taking you to see this film when you know it all by heart already?!?". The kid turned to his mum, waved his hand as if waving a wand and said: "Silencio!". He then turned his full attention back to the screen as if the matter was now dealt with entirely.

The magic is still alive for them and I guess that is why I find is so invigorating.

Subliminal Ticking

All this purposelessness is making me feel restless and wired. I have recovered enough to resume normal activities, but not enough to vent frustrations in say... the gym or the nightclub. And jobhunting involves a hell of a lot of pointless waiting around. No wonder people don't do it more often.

Anyway... that wasn't the reason for my blogging. The reason I'm blogging is this recurrent dream I've been having every night for over a week now. Or rather, a recurrent feature of my dreams, because the dreams themselves have actually all been very different. The only constant in them all was that I was quite simply very pregnant.

It's bizarre really. There's never an explanation as to how I got knocked-up or by whom, or what it is exactly I am pregnant of. It's never part of the storyline. It's just me, strolling around being pregnant.

Now, I had an episode like that when I was about 20. Only... I was actually very broody back then. This time around, I'm not so much broody, as I am surrounded by friends being pregnant. I rather suspect it is a subliminal message of my body that my biological clock is ticking. So if the alarm first went off when I was 20 and the "snooze" time is roughly 7 years, then according to my calculations, I can safely hit "snooze" again and still make the mid-thirties deadline to decide the kids/no kids issue... right?! Right.

;)

Risky Business

When an HR manager starts off the jobinterview by informing you that "the company is really looking for someone with a little more experience, a few more years in the industry, someone a few years older than you in fact, but that your CV really caught their eye and they were curious enough to invite you for an interview"... you know it's time to bring out the big guns.

Strangely enough, as soon as he said those words, I began to feel very calm and in control. I figured: "well OK, so the job is not mine. So let's just see how far we can take this and let's practice our interview-skills." Despite carefully planning and studying the points I had wanted to get across during the interview, completely different and more accurate words came out of my mouth, all of which seemed to hit their target.

About 45 minutes into the interview, the HR manager started to question whether they really did need someone with all the experience or whether perhaps someone like myself could pull off the job as well. At one point, he leant back in his chair and just stared at me with a puzzled look on his face, whilst muttering: "hm... we really WERE looking for someone with more experience... but maybe...".

He eventually decided to call in the R&D boss, so he too could interview me and give his opinion. Thankfully, the R&D boss turned out to be a very friendly, very interesting man. The interview was conducted in a very pleasant and jovial manner. He eventually showed me around the company and introduced me to a few other people from the R&D department. The downside to all this is that I now very much want the job. *grin* They have a real coffee-machine and there's a gym right next door and everything!! Not that I'm easily bought or sold... *cough*

They will inform me of their decision at the start of February, when all of the interviews have been held. Despite the interview going well, I estimate my chances to be slim. It WOULD be a risk on their part to invest in me. But it'd be pretty cool if they did so, nonetheless ;-)

Swottin'

I've got a job interview tomorrow and I've decided to spend my afternoon swotting for it. Hence the procrastination. The biggest stress-factor at these things is always the dress-code, but I think I've finally found a happy mean between uncomfortably fancy and comfortably student-esque. The only big dilemma is the "bag"... I don't do purses. But I supose I can't really show up at a job-interview with my regular berghaus daypack/bookbag??

Anyway... I'm sure they're honed in enough to look at the stuff that matters. My CV for instance, would be a good start, if not my footwear ;-)

I'm kind of hoping the scenario will be as follows:

Resolutions

1. to no longer suck the sour-coating off gummybears and then spit them out in the trash when the sour bit has gone

2. to try a real job (Got a job interview on Friday. Should I fail, then I have officially at least tried and I can consider this resolution to be completed)

3. to eat enough meat to compensate for two vegetarians

4. to not put the empty sheeth of After-Eight chocolates back in the box as if they were still full

5. to wash my car at least the once

6. to get over my fear of buying flowers

7. to steal Phil's cat