I'm a campus alien

Even though on maternity leave I drop by uni once in a while to meet with my students or some colleagues. Sometimes I have to take the LittleOne with me to not be ordered back home after half an hour because he decides that he's suddenly very hungry. It's quite easy to get around campus with a pram because there are elevators and ramps everywhere you need them. But walking over campus with a pram in the middle of semester is the strangest thing!  Because I'm the only one - so there is a lot of staring. I never have realized that there are no people with prams (as I think about it: not many people in wheelchairs either) on our campus. Occasionally you can see someone with young kids and on very hot days there are people with babies enjoying the AC cooled buildings. But they are obviously not there for work or study. In my home country it is very common to see students with their babies on campus and even in lectures. But here: nothing! And it's certainly not because all the babies are in day care - it's very hard to get a place in day care, even in the universities own places. Students just don't seem to have kids. Or maybe they have family around to take care of them? On the other hand: paying more than 10k per year for studying is a very compelling argument to delay the family business until after the degree.

social media

"Put your research out there" and "Set up a professional online presence" - I hear these sentences more and more often. A colleague asked his students to search for information about me on the web and it seems they could not find much, that I am not present as a researcher in the big universe of the web. Even though I spend a lot of my time online - but de facto more as a private person and not as a researcher. Actually, this blog is the closest to my research as it gets when flipping through the stuff that I actively put out there.

The university tries to encourage us to set up and maintain some kind of research online presence and they praise all the advantages that come with the usage of research blogs, twitter, Youtube, social bookmarking, writing collaboration tools,... . I'm more wondering if anyone in my field uses social media to push their research. The only thing I know of are people recording their lectures and posting them on YouTube. And I understand the advantage of using Googledocs or something similar to speed up the progress of international publication writing processes. But this is still communication within a framework of people whom you trust and you can choose who participates in the discussion and who gets to know your thoughts.

This would be so different if I'd twitter my current research progress: anybody could follow my tweets about my current experiments but is anybody actually interested in how my samples are behaving today? Same with research blogs: it would be very difficult to figure out what can be disclosed before it's officially published, because I wouldn't know who reads my posts. The many-to-many approach seems weird to me when it's already so difficult to get people from you own institute together to talk about their stuff because they are so cautious about what to disclose (and of course they are all totally busy).

Can anybody suggest blogs or twitterers who put current research progress and thoughts about it online? I'd really like to see how this is done properly.

And are there any thoughts about social bookmarking/bibliography systems like CiteULike or Delicious? Is it worth to get into that?

And does the recent Twitter hacking attack influence your opinion about the professional usage of social media?

environmental guilt

A while ago I had a short conversation with a student, which made me thinking about my job from a different perspective. The student studies environmental engineering and did some internships with companies to improve their environmental standards. He seemed to be pretty enthusiastic about his studies. But after a couple of beers he mentioned how tired he is to live and work in this constant atmosphere of guilt and that he is grown-up and smart enough to estimate the impact on the world climate if he once in a while drives a crazy fast car. And sometimes that's just what he wants to do without feeling guilty.

Talking, reading and thinking about environmental impact and "how to save the planet" has become an everyday topic. It comes and goes in the major news but it's always present and I'm sure a lot of people have it in their heads - even if just for complaining about a bunch of politicians flying around the world to meet in Doha for the Climate Change Conference and there doesn't seem to be much change afterwards. Still I don't have the impression that the majority of the people actually cares very much about the footprint they leave in their everyday life. So I was surprised about this outburst of "feeling guilty". I'm not sure if feeling guilty is the best starting point for planet saving activities, but it's certainly better than not caring at all.

When reading through blogs of scientists, the topic about the importance of attending conferences pops up frequently. Being present and visible, meeting people, starting new collaborations, presenting your work, pushing your career and with this your science. The science we do is meant to be for the greater good of our society. We do research to expand knowledge and develop a better world for everybody, so everything (within certain ethical frameworks) that is necessary to achieve these goals is well invested. Right?

I usually attend two international conferences each year. My boss is more in the region of 6 or more. From Australia these travels can only be done by long-distance flights, but no matter where your home university is: conferences involve flying most of the time. So even if my private me takes great care of her carbon footprint to keep it small, my professional me just smashes all efforts. And estimating from the amount of time my boss spends in planes, it will get worse.

This is a part of my job that actually makes me feel guilty and I'm thinking a lot about if it’s really necessary to attend conferences. Are the outcomes of a conference for my research high enough to justify the travel? Or was it just nice to meet the science crowd again? Are there alternatives to keep and get in contact with other researchers and be part of the community - we live in such a well connected world! Or would my chances to have a career in the research world just vanish quickly if I'd reduce my attendance rate on conferences?

Are there people seriously thinking about this problem, which not only affects researchers but a lot of employees of international operating companies? Besides fossil fuels a lot of money and time could be saved... Are there possible solutions proposed or already in use? And can we really justify to drive a crazy fast car?