Apple's iTunes has hundreds if not thousands of university lectures available for download from such top schools as MIT, Harvard, UC Berkeley, and Stanford. Last Spring, I came across a wonderful survey course called Quantitative Aspects of Global Environmental Problems taught by Professor John Harte at UC Berkeley in the Spring 2009 semester. The videos are available through the Berkeley Webcasts website as well as iTunes.
In his last lecture of the course (#32), Dr. Harte presented his Eight-Fold Path to Personal, Professional, and Environmental Happiness. One point, which I found particularly relevant in this day in which climate change research has reached what one friend of mine called "bubble" proportions, is what Dr. Harte calls The Tyranny of the Most Important Problem. It's recommended listening for anyone who has wondered if their research is "important enough" in the face of the next great global calamity. It could be the one lecture that saves you from ditching your favorite area of belly button research in favor of running climate models for the next ten years--that is, of course, until the next Most Important Problem comes around. I transcribed a part of his discussion here, which occurs 43 minutes into the video.
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“Back in the 1980s—late ‘70s, ‘80s--I and a number of graduate students were working up in the alpine of the Rocky Mountains studying salamanders and acidification of lakes and the consequences of coal fired power plants that didn’t have their emissions controlled in any way because the original Clean Air Act didn’t apply to the western power plants. We were looking at what the pollution from these plants were (sic) doing to life in alpine and sub-alpine ponds up in the Rockies. I had colleagues at Princeton and here and other places who were working on arms control and were trying to prevent nuclear war. I would sometimes go home at the end of the day, I’ll be very honest with you, [and think] Am I wasting my time studying salamanders when we could all be blown up tomorrow in a nuclear holocaust? That’s the tyranny of the concept that there is a most important problem and if you're not working on that most important problem, you are not doing the thing you should be doing. You’re wasting your time, and you’re not helping the world.
“Don’t be numbed by the idea that there’s a bigger problem to work on. Work on the one that you enjoy, that feels right to you, where your expertise matches the needs of the problem, and where you get your satisfaction. And in the long run, you may be doing as much to prevent nuclear war by leaving the world worth saving from nuclear war than you would be by working on it directly.“
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The largest gathering of geophysicists and earth scientists in the world is happening this week in San Francisco at the Fall 2009 American Geophysical Union conference. The conference will be hosting three live webcasts, which you can also view in archive mode.
Are you looking for an easy way to collaborate with research colleagues online without getting bogged down with software bells and whistles? A wiki might be the solution for you. Here we review five wiki platforms that range from free, open source solutions to more expensive, hosted solutions. The trade off comes mainly from the development time involved in setting up and managing your wiki.
Digital data management, preservation, and access are posing growing challenges for scientists, research institutions, and national science funding agencies. This past week's issue of Nature has a special report on the cultural and technical challenges of scientific data sharing, encompassing both data preservation and open access. The report mentions promising initiatives such as GenBank and the UK Joint Information Systems Committee, but points to NSF's DataNet program, which launched a request for proposals in 2007 that led to the funding of the DataONE program, as evidence that efforts by the US are lagging behind. (An example of an established US model of data preservation and access may be the Electronic Records Archives program of the US National Archives.) Who is ultimately responsible for preserving digital data and making it openly available, and who is going to pay for it? The special section covers these issues and more. Unlike most Nature articles, these are available online without a subscription.