Academia Ghetto Thread

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Considering re-writing/expanding on a couple of my University papers and throwing them up on Academia.edu.  I'm thinking terrorism in history might be a good niche to claim as my own.

Oooh, good idea!

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I am so so not ready for the start of the term. I'm taking grant writing and scientific teaching, which sound cool, but I am not looking forward to teaching biology at 7:45 am. The silver lining; it's the organismal term. We break Principles into three terms: term 1 is molecular, term 2 is organismal, and term 3 is ecological. In my opinion, this order makes zero sense, as who can even be curious about the molecular level stuff if they don't yet understand the organismal level stuff? But that's how we do it. Anyway, the nice thing is that it means that this term will probably be pretty exciting and fun for most of my students, particularly the pre-med ones, so hopefully they'll be more engaged than they were when moving clear fluids around with pipettors.

[LMNO]

Considering re-writing/expanding on a couple of my University papers and throwing them up on Academia.edu.  I'm thinking terrorism in history might be a good niche to claim as my own.

This is your moment, sir.

[Cain]

Well, once I get a good night's sleep.  And put in some job applications so I no longer have to reside at this nuthouse.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I emailed the other two people I want on my graduate committee yesterday evening.

My institution literally has only four biological neuroscientists, and one cognitive neuroscientist who is a complete hack. Of the four, two are not currently doing research. Of the two who research, both are superb scientists with large bibliographies, one is my advisor, and one is retiring next year.

So, yeah, pickings were slim. I hope neither of these fuckers says no.

[Freeky]

I found a course on video game programming that is both free and theoretically has other students taking it I can interact with.

SO EXCITE.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I found a course on video game programming that is both free and theoretically has other students taking it I can interact with.

SO EXCITE.

That sounds super awesome!

I have an assignment to do tonight and I don't wanna.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I'm also trying to foster the kind of deeply obsessive interest in my thesis topic that made my undergrad thesis paper so good, but now that my interest is kindled, of course I have another trainee, and no time for extra reading. I need to have much, much more context about what effects thyroid hormone and its various actors have on the brain in order to get a good solid obsession on.

[Freeky]

Okay, so I'm getting a little pissed off at the actual graded assignment we have for this week. 

There were like maybe ten lectures so far, mostly covering how to make a program do a thing and then tell you that thing, and the three that were dedicated to numbers had to do with data types, integer types, and real number data, and the explanation of these at no point entered into the realm of the Math methods (that's what functions are called in C#, it's unintuitive). 

There are three labs, using the information we got from the lectures, that took a bit of slogging through but could be done.  These were optional.

In the actual graded assignment, his only hint was USE atan2 IT'S GOING TO HELP YOU OUT and I'm over here like motherfucker, I know there's a lot of code but YOU NEVER TOLD US HOW TO USE ANY OF THE MATH CLASS, OR EVEN HOW TO CHANGE CLASSES.

So I'm spending hours trawling google with stupid ass questions, hoping to find out how to format shit we haven't even covered, and hoping I'll know I find what I'm looking for.

[P3nT4gR4m]

Stick with it. Hacking has a ridiculously steep learning curve but the most important lesson you will ever learn is how to google the code snippet you're trying to write

[Faust]

Okay, so I'm getting a little pissed off at the actual graded assignment we have for this week. 

There were like maybe ten lectures so far, mostly covering how to make a program do a thing and then tell you that thing, and the three that were dedicated to numbers had to do with data types, integer types, and real number data, and the explanation of these at no point entered into the realm of the Math methods (that's what functions are called in C#, it's unintuitive). 

There are three labs, using the information we got from the lectures, that took a bit of slogging through but could be done.  These were optional.

In the actual graded assignment, his only hint was USE atan2 IT'S GOING TO HELP YOU OUT and I'm over here like motherfucker, I know there's a lot of code but YOU NEVER TOLD US HOW TO USE ANY OF THE MATH CLASS, OR EVEN HOW TO CHANGE CLASSES.

So I'm spending hours trawling google with stupid ass questions, hoping to find out how to format shit we haven't even covered, and hoping I'll know I find what I'm looking for.

Most of the Math methods will take a double (what with needing all those tasty decimal points) and return a double. if you are doing any data manipulation before hand c# does a couple of funny things when handling multiplication and division with doubles and ints... for instance dividing a double by an int will give you back an int (losing all  the decimal information).

This is bad advice in general; but dealing with doubles wherever you can for calculations (even using Convert.ToDouble()) might avoid some issues here.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Okay, so I'm getting a little pissed off at the actual graded assignment we have for this week. 

There were like maybe ten lectures so far, mostly covering how to make a program do a thing and then tell you that thing, and the three that were dedicated to numbers had to do with data types, integer types, and real number data, and the explanation of these at no point entered into the realm of the Math methods (that's what functions are called in C#, it's unintuitive). 

There are three labs, using the information we got from the lectures, that took a bit of slogging through but could be done.  These were optional.

In the actual graded assignment, his only hint was USE atan2 IT'S GOING TO HELP YOU OUT and I'm over here like motherfucker, I know there's a lot of code but YOU NEVER TOLD US HOW TO USE ANY OF THE MATH CLASS, OR EVEN HOW TO CHANGE CLASSES.

So I'm spending hours trawling google with stupid ass questions, hoping to find out how to format shit we haven't even covered, and hoping I'll know I find what I'm looking for.

That is incredibly lame. The info you need should have been covered in either a handout or previous exercises. Giving you an assignment that requires knowledge he hasn't taught  you yet is some super-shitty teaching.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

So, just a funny coincidence.

The biology department is currently on a search, so yesterday the grad students were turned loose on one of the interviewees. Seems like a super nice guy, but the interesting part is that he is the scientist who does the telomerase research that one lunatic in Spokane is obsessed with... you know the guy who got national news coverage because he was kicked out of a Starbucks for hitting on the 16-year-old barista? The guy who writes crazy screeds about how Millennial women are bigots because they won't date him? Poor thing has become the laughingstock of the Internet, but he's really just a sad, homeless schizophrenic who needs help.

Anyway, I hope we hire the telomerase researcher, he seems nice and his research is brilliant. I'm actually kind of surprised that a large grant recipient at an R1 institution is applying to our little State university; this guy is currently at Johns Hopkins and studied under the Nobel Prizewinner who discovered telomeres. If we get him, and with him his grants and doctoral students, it'd be a good sign that we're moving in the R1 direction, which would be nice if only so my Masters degree has a little more clout. At the moment hardly anyone even knows we do research here.

[Freeky]

Most of the Math methods will take a double (what with needing all those tasty decimal points) and return a double. if you are doing any data manipulation before hand c# does a couple of funny things when handling multiplication and division with doubles and ints... for instance dividing a double by an int will give you back an int (losing all  the decimal information).

This is bad advice in general; but dealing with doubles wherever you can for calculations (even using Convert.ToDouble()) might avoid some issues here.

I'll keep that all in mind, thanks.

Stick with it. Hacking has a ridiculously steep learning curve but the most important lesson you will ever learn is how to google the code snippet you're trying to write

I figured as much.  It's otherwise a lot of fun!

That is incredibly lame. The info you need should have been covered in either a handout or previous exercises. Giving you an assignment that requires knowledge he hasn't taught  you yet is some super-shitty teaching.

Yeah.  So glad I didn't have to pay for this shit.

[Freeky]

So, just a funny coincidence.

The biology department is currently on a search, so yesterday the grad students were turned loose on one of the interviewees. Seems like a super nice guy, but the interesting part is that he is the scientist who does the telomerase research that one lunatic in Spokane is obsessed with... you know the guy who got national news coverage because he was kicked out of a Starbucks for hitting on the 16-year-old barista? The guy who writes crazy screeds about how Millennial women are bigots because they won't date him? Poor thing has become the laughingstock of the Internet, but he's really just a sad, homeless schizophrenic who needs help.

Anyway, I hope we hire the telomerase researcher, he seems nice and his research is brilliant. I'm actually kind of surprised that a large grant recipient at an R1 institution is applying to our little State university; this guy is currently at Johns Hopkins and studied under the Nobel Prizewinner who discovered telomeres. If we get him, and with him his grants and doctoral students, it'd be a good sign that we're moving in the R1 direction, which would be nice if only so my Masters degree has a little more clout. At the moment hardly anyone even knows we do research here.

That sounds super cool, I hope you get him!