天网恢恢，疏而不漏

Graduation: One Year Anniversary

If Blogspot hadn't introduced  this new Dynamic View feature, I wouldn't have looked at my older blog posts.
If I hadn't looked at my older blog posts, I wouldn't have realised that today, Oct 6 2011, marks the 1-year anniversary of my Exit Seminar.

Yes, one year ago I presented my Exit Seminar, and as far as I was concerned, that one hour of bla-bla-bla ended my Ph.D. career. From that day on, I started a new chapter, or as it turned out, new chapters.

Immediately after my exit seminar, I traveled across four States in the USA with my mom. We set eyes and feet on Grand Canyon, Columbia River Valley, Los Alamos and the Hot Air Balloon Fiesta at Albuquerque, Californian Redwood forests and the Xi Lai Temple in L.A. We filled our stomachs with cakes and pastries, salmon and chops, dimsum and what not.

I left my home away from home, and came back to my real home. Accepted a job offer, and on the third day of Chinese New Year, left for India alone. Till now, I still remember the face of that South-Asian lady who, like me, waited the whole night in Starbucks in the LCCT the night I boarded the plane for Chennai. I didn't muster the courage to talk to her, but she was definitely attractive enough that I wish I had.

Spent four weeks in Chennai and three weeks after traveling down south from Chennai. I visited the temples in Chennai, Kanchipuram, Thanjavur, Chidambaram, Madurai and Ramesvaram. I went for two bharatanatyam performances (extremely world-class) and one Kathakali play (definitely top class!). I learned Tamil intensively for four weeks, at the end of which I could speak, write and read Tamil. If the locals go slow, I could understand them too [unfortunately since I left India my Tamil has deteriorated due to lack of practice....shame shame]. At Ramesvaram a priest bathed me in one of the holy wells (there were like >20 of them I think), and there I stood at the edge of the Indian Ocean in awe of her blue-turquoise beauty. At Thanjavur I fell in love with the majestic Periyar Kovil, and at Kanchipuram the simple yet indescribably elegant Kaisalanatha Kovil took a piece of my heart and claimed it since.

I escaped the heat of the lowlands by spending day up in the cool Kodaikanal hills west of Madurai, where the richer kids of the international boarding school there led lives so different from the uncountable poorer kids in the lowlands. I learned to love the sugar-loaded fruit juices of the Indian roadside, and in the backyard of my language institute I enjoyed twenty days of lunchtime among birds with funny headcrests. I saw a salt-farm for the first time in my life, and stepped on cow dung twice. I also finally set eyes on the bronze statue of Lord Nataraja in the Government Museum of Chennai. In many hot afternoons of Tamil Nadu March, I tried my best to run calmly across the baking-hot stone floor of temples, while locals walked and chatted as if they were walking on soft green grass. In Kanchipuram, I taught children in Tamil and English, and I entertained the teachers and the students with songs. I still remember her name--Indra. I wonder if she is still doing the morning rounds bringing children from their shacks to the school?

I can't count the number of friends I made in Tamil Nadu, including Matias and Alex who accompanied me during my one week stint in Kanchipuram. I truly miss all of them. I am still waiting for Sushil to send me a picture of him, his wife and their now 6-month old son.

Came back home again and started my working life immediately. Spent two months doing nothing much else but reading papers, writing proposals and preparing for my visit to Davis.

Went back to Davis almost without telling anyone. The first night I was back in that home away from home, I met up with my very good friend Hanayo, ate at my favourite restaurant in Davis, and untied a knot in my heart for good. The following two months were surreal--busy with my research yet enjoying all the luxuries I had before..Netflix, the library, board games, Amazon.com, a great housemate. A few days before I left for the Ecological Soc. America Meeting, our experiments produced unbelievably pleasing results! Had one of my best Meetings ever, and witnessed the largest bat colony in the world at Bracken Cave. Seeing Jay and his family again was a heartwarming moment for me.

Left Davis (this time much more reluctantly than last year) before I even had time to visit San Francisco, and once again I was back home. Went back to work immediately, and had been occupied since with preparing class materials for my course. Teaching it has been a ride so far (see previous blog post) but it's really enjoyable and rewarding. The students have warmed up to my style, and are now actively asking questions and answering and discussing questions in class. More than half of them now call me by my name instead of "Dr.", for which I am glad.

My friend passed her exam with flying colours, and with that, I have nothing left to worry about in Davis anymore.

There were somethings that I planned to do since graduation, but I haven't done. I haven't enrolled in a bharatanatyam course, and I haven't offered my services to teach at an orphanage yet. I haven't yet published another paper (still in review now...WTH). I have asked three girls out, one gave face and we stayed friends, one told me she was unavailable after a few weeks, and another is still...well....pending. So, the romance front is not exactly stale, but it's not blossoming either. Don't think I can enroll in a bharatanatyam course before Jan 2012, but I am hopeful about the others working out before the end of this year.

What a year it has been!

First publication~!

Oh yes, finally my first publication.
It comes in my last month as a Ph.D. student. Cute.

I used to think that I would have at least three, four publications by the time I graduate. Well, currently I only have two papers accepted (including the one above).
If the editors weren't so demanding for one of my other behavioural studies, I might have one more accepted. Hehe...that poor behavioral paper was rejected by one...two..three journals, though the third journal expressed interest and encouraged me to resubmit with some additional data. I really wanted to publish in the first journal (Proc. of the Royal Soc. B) but they said my data were preliminary. *Yeah right, I replicated my results over two years, and it's still considered preliminary*. The second journal rejected for what reason...hmm, forgot lah. Pretty glad that the second journal rejected though, because I found out about the third journal after that and would prefer the latter anyway.

Oh well, after four years of doing some pretty independent research, writing grants, presenting at conferences and writing papers, my experience is that doing science is more or less the following:
1. Observe something(s)
2. Wonder if there is a pattern, ask the Questions
3. Design experiments, recognize the strength and weaknesses of each
4. Conduct the experiments, smiling all the time because what else can you do?
5. Taste failure, blame it on your assistants/collaborator
6. Critical analysis, try again
7. Fail again, blame your assistants/collaborator again, contemplate changing the research team
8. Try again, after undergrad plead innocence
9. Repeat #4-$8
9.(secret stage). Manipulate data on password protected file. 
10. Finally, Success! 
11. Share success with others, get criticized, but remember to smile because no matter what they say, they don't know your biggest secret...(#9 secret stage), so it's all good.
12. Step back, look at your awesome data and plan on packaging it into a nifty story
13. Present story in (easy mode) conference, or (hardcore mode) publication
14. Conference-> you are the best presenter ever, but audience look like they were watching Avatar for the 27th time. Only one question was asked, and it was something slightly better than "what did you do again?"
15. Paper-> you are the best writer ever, and the first draft is already journal-quality. Six rejections and four revisions later, you no longer recognize your paper but it gets accepted with praises.
16. Somewhere in between, if you run out of money or suddenly you just want to indulge in self-inflicted torture, you stick a knife into your head and decide to write a research grant to get more 1)money, 2)recognition, 3)motivation, 4)pain. You are always successful in obtaining at least one of those four, guess which one?


HAhahahaha...this post very funny lah. Of course please don't take my above points seriously...it's a mix of truth and parody. I will write a more accurate and honest post about my Ph.D. experience later, after I have really graduated.

Here's a picture of a female of the assassin bug (Zelus renardii) Abdullah and I studied in this first publication. She's just laid some eggs which look like a stack of beer bottles, no? Hahaha. The insect stuck to her hindleg was a Geocoris pallens adult that we fed to her. Geocoris pallens is actually the protagonist of my whole Ph.D. story, unfortunately this post isn't about Geocoris, so he/she remains a fodder in this case.

 And here's a video of the behavior we observed and study in the paper. When Mama finished laying the eggs, she applies a layer of sticky substance on the exterior of the egg cases. This behavior has been observed in other assassin bugs too. When the baby assassin bugs are born, they crawl out of their egg cases and then return to the eggs to gather the sticky substance. With their forelegs, the newly hatched assassin bugs apply the sticky substance to their bodies. We were interested in why do the babies do that? As in, are there any benefits to applying the sticky substance?

Short answer: Yes. Having the sticky substance improves the juvenile assassin bugs' success of catching prey (flies in this case), and also helped them resist higher windspeed (interpreted as improving grip on the substrate).

For the simplicity of the study and the fun I had while designing and conducting the experiments, this is arguably my favourite research projects so far.

Field Experiment

One of my greatest pleasures of doing research is going into the field and toil under the sun. The feeling of sweat evaporating off my skin while I observe insects or sticking poles into the ground is plainly enjoyable to me.

Of course, many things go awry in the field. Sometimes hours or even weeks of hardwork can be undone in minutes due to unforeseen mishaps OR just stupidity on my part (hahaha). For example, this summer California experienced a cool start to the summer months, effectively delaying summer agriculture by weeks and my own field work by one whole month! This in a year when I am rushing to wrap up by the end of summer...grrr. Cool weather aside, there were a few days of strong winds. VERY STRONG. Strong enough to justify a state warning.

Then again, who gives a damn about state warnings? Look what the winds did to my cages :(

Top of cage torn open

Oh...but that wasn't the worst. Look at this! I laughed loud when I saw the four poles sticking out of the ground, looking so pathetic and naked.

Where did my cage go?! Damn wind...

So...what was the cause for this undoing of our hard work taken to install these cages into the ground? The winds? Nope. Soft ground? Nope. Our fault? Yes. You see, I designed these cages to withstand strong winds. I am convinced that it would take a hurricane to blow these cages off, if they were installed correctly. The problem we had was that we didn't seal every cage tightly. A small crack that allows wind to blow in will cause the cage to catch more wind, enlarge the crack and soon the whole cage will be catching the full force of the wind like an open sail in a storm.

Nevertheless, my frustration lasted only a couple of hours before I was laughing at the whole (acci)incident. I contacted my trusty group of farmhands and gave them another 3 days worth of pay to dig up all the cages and reinstall them five rows down (because other than the wind damage, the plants within the cages also didn't grow as intended). My farm friends were laughing at the cages too and we had another jolly few days together reinstalling the cages that we built just two weeks before.

Also, here's a picture of three of the five members in my research team this year. An interesting bunch, no? Hahahhaha.

Tierra, Michael, Lucinda