Strangefox

I'm guessing that you are wanting to get a sim card from ATT, and just use a phone you already have or will purchase? If so, you have to make sure it's the right type of band. Typically, most phones aren't an issue nowadays, but not all phones will work everywhere. The typical GSM bands that ATT uses in the US are 850 and 1900 mhz.

If you're not sure if your phone supports those bands, you can look it up on www.phonescoop.com

Friends, Romans, Beardsmen, I beseech the! You may grow a beard in graduate school but you must accept the task at hand. For you shan't just have any beard, it must be a manly beard. A beard which inspires other men to cheer and women to swoon. It doesn't matter if your beard looks like that of Grizzly Adams, Blackbeard the pirate, or one of those half-naked Greeks in 300, the only requirement for the beard is that it must convey your badassness to all. To those of you with patchy, wispy beards, shave that shit off for you cannot compete with the true bearded men, and we True Beards do not take kindly to imposters and shall hold your bitch-ass down and shave that pathetic shit off.

Now throw your razors in the trash and someone fetch me my mid-afternoon beer for it is time for data analysis.

So says the Gospel of the Genomic Repairman.

I remember those stressful days of waiting for acceptance letters or emails. My roommate setup a jar where I would have to put a buck in if I checked the mailbox. Needless to say by the time I got my last acceptance we had enough cash on hand to throw a rocking party when I left. My old laptop has the command and the r key permanently worn down from me refreshing the screen on my email inbox waiting for those acceptance emails from program directors.

I'm sure there are some wonderful, romantic-comedy-worthy student/professor relationships out there. But in most scenarios, it just seems like a really excellent way to destroy your reputation as a qualified academic while simultaneously tanking your professor's career. Some say two birds, one stone; I say, just don't do it.

some would argue that any relationship between a grad student and a faculty member is inappropriate, even if both are single. personally, i don't think it's a big deal if the student and the prof are in different subfields and the prof won't ever actually teach the grad student. i do think it's inappropriate when profs date their advisees. any situation where the prof has some control over the student's career just screams uneven power relations. some people don't think that's a big deal, and i guess it would depend on the individuals involved, but in general... dating your prof, rather than a prof, is a no-no. it happens, though. a lot.

No, never, they treat me like their 7 year old daughter. Although sometimes I want them, especially the yummy old ones.

Are you kidding? That's phenomenal! You should write a dissertation on why people don't write dissertations.

I'll try to make it short:

Essentially while in REM sleep, your body goes into sleep paralysis. When you're in Alpha/Beta, your body isn't.

The way this app works is that you place your phone next to your pillow, and the accelarometers that are inside phones are sensitive to your body movements, which subsequently move your bed. Your phone keep track of this. You create a buffer duration from your alarm and that's the window where your phone can sound off the alarm (i.e., you set a time for an alarm, and the buffer creates a window from the alarm time and the #minutes/hours before the alarm; it doesn't create a window AFTER the alarm, because then you'll wake up late). The alarm goes off when you're in Alpha/Beta sleep if it falls within your timing window--otherwise, if the window is too small (i.e., you made the buffer only 10 minutes, but a REM cycle can be 45-90 minutes), then it'll wake you up closest to optimal.

Hope that makes sense? I made my buffer 2 hours (yes, that means even though I make my alarm 8am typically, sometimes it wakes me up closer to 6; though since I wake up at 8am almost everyday, my body's gotten used to waking up at the time after habitual practice), so I almost always wake up refreshed, even when I get less-than-optimal amount of sleep.

Hi Strangefox,

I'll be getting one too. My school has a page for international students on how to get a SSN - perhaps your school has one too? F-1 students can get a SSN if they'll be employed on campus (RA/TA) or if they have approval for off-campus work. You'll need a letter from you employer (your school) as well as your I-94 card (which you'll fill out when you arrive in the US - it's a square white card they usually staple in your passport), your I-20 form, your passport, and this application form. I'm not sure if you have to get a SSN, but the SSN is useful to have in the US since to apply for many things (such as bank loans, or driver's licenses) it's often necessary.

Yes, they should send you proofs to double-check, with any changes highlighted that they have had to make.


Depending on the journal, the editors may send it back for revisions multiple times before it even goes to the publisher (mine did). Part of the revisions included re-formatting the references according to their specs (their website of Author's Guidelines said one thing, while recently-published articles were showing another). In my proofs, the copy-editors caught a reference or two that was cited in the paper, but omitted from the list at the end.

Reference formatting is, IMO, by far the most excruciating, nit-pickiest part of this process. Just go over it multiple times, ask for the help of your co-authors (if you have them), and have a willing friend/family member serve as editor. My BF has impeccable grammar and was very helpful with reading multiple drafts.

Just get a copy of Endnote... It has reference styles for almost every journal out there, and you don't have to worry about the headache of compiling references. You drag and drop the reference you want into Word as you write, and then at the end it compiles them for you in the style you specify.

A copy of X4 (the newest version) is around $100 on Amazon (Student Edition) and is the best money you'll spend as far as saving headaches, imo.

Also, don't assume they'll highlight editorial changes... The last article I submitted didn't, I had to read and compare to my version to find them all.

We should probably revive the "Reference Manager" thread... But imo, Zotero isn't very good compared to Endnote.

Mendeley and Sente are both OK, and I hear people saying good things about Refworks.

But I really think Endnote is the best of the bunch. And when you're talking about something that you'll use constantly from now until you finish your dissertation... It's well worth the money. It's nothing compared to other productivity software (Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Illustrator, Origin, Prism, even MS Office), and it's spending the money on something that increases the accuracy and ease of your work.

I don't have one, and don't intend to.

I'm nearly always at work (where I have wifi) or at home (where I have wifi), and even most of the places I go out in the evening have wifi.

Other than the ability to make calls/text, an iPod Touch will do all of your e-mail, browsing, and document viewing... You just have to have wifi. So when you're weighing the benefits, ask yourself how often you need to check your e-mail or look something up online when you don't have wireless available, and then decide if those times are worth the cost of an iPhone. Otherwise, just get an iPod touch.

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HAHAHAHAHA! you'll understand soon enough. as an undergrad, i was working 20 hours a week on a research/writing job while taking 5 classes a semester in intensive seminars. graduate school is more work. you already took grad courses? were you reading a 400 page book and a 30 page article on a weekly basis and writing response papers for them in those classes? if so, then you have an idea of what you're in for. if not, then you don't.

i'm a graduate student in a history program. the "minimum" courseload is 9 credits a semester, or 3 courses. that is also the unofficial maximum. in my first semester, i didn't have any teaching requirements, so i took 3 graduate seminars (9 credits) and a "one credit" independent seminar that met every other week. "one credit" in quotation marks because, due to the length of the books assigned (often over 450 pages) it may as well have been a book a week and considered an additional full course.

that semester sucked. i barely slept. i had well over 70 hours worth of work to do every week (reading and writing papers for coursework plus the occasional paper/research time devoted to my masters thesis). seventy fucking hours. i'd pull at least one all nighter every week just to stay on top of it.

yeah, you took 5 courses a semester in undergrad and that wasn't such a big deal, but you weren't reading three or four 300+ page books a week and being expected to write papers on them every single week.



to the OP: DO NOT take 3 graduate seminars plus a language course in a single semester. YOU DO NOT HAVE ENOUGH TIME IN THE WEEK TO DO ALL OF THAT WORK. history in particular is a discipline that is heavy on reading. odds are you'll read one book and one 30-page article per class every week. 3 seminars in and of themselves will be incredibly time-consuming (because, guess what, beyond the material being long, it's also difficult, so you'll have to read things more than once or think them over for a few hours before you can begin response papers). adding a language class on top of that will bring the quality of your work down (and your ability to actually acquire that new language) in all of your classes. do you have to TA? if so, you either will fall really far behind in your work or you will burn out FAST (TAing is supposed to take 20 hours a week, but when you're grading papers, it's more like 30-40 hrs, and that's on top of however long it takes you to complete your coursework).

again. DO NOT DO IT. you're in a difficult position because you need to get at least one language under your belt before you complete your masters. that's a requirement you can't afford to put off. my recommendation would be to take two graduate seminars and one language class each semester. that's it. most masters programs don't require 36 hours of graduate level coursework (that would be 2 years at 9 credits a semester). take 6 credits of grad classes a semester and then however many credits the language class happens to be (that doesn't really matter unless your total number of credits exceeds the maximum the school is willing to cover as part of your tuition remission). find a polite way to tell your advisor that you'd rather start with two graduate courses than three, and if you find the workload more than manageable (you won't), you'll happily increase to 3 grad classes + 1 language in the following semester.

please, please, please, please, please, please, please for your own sake, listen to me. three grad seminars, with no other responsibilities (TAing, language training, etc.), is very time consuming. i didn't believe it either when i was in your position last year, so 3.5 seminars in one semester didn't seem unreasonable to me. it is. learn from my mistake.

We did not just say "get up and leave". We said: contact a hotline, find councelling. Have you done that?

First off what are you writing for (institutional fellowship, training grant, NRSA)? I've got a good powerpoint on grantsmanship that walks you through the NIH process and you can use as a springboard to get your own proposal off the ground (I used it to write my F31 that I have). Email me if you want it genrepair@gmail.com

Oh brother.

I wrote my first grant this past semester and I found absolutely NOTHING that was useful.

I think that is because every funding organization is so specific about what they want that a good "grants for dummies" books just doesn't cover it. FYI: such a book EXISTS. The poverty of usefulness in no way prevents people from trying to sell them. I'm saying I found them totally inadequate.

At the end of the day you have to begin and end with the granting agency. My experiences were with IES and NSF and both had a veritable book on their websites about how to write for their purposes. It'll cost a small fortune but I highly recommend printing it out and reading the entire thing. First, you'll probably be the only person to read the whole thing. Second, there's all kind of minutiae that can trip up a newbie: fonts, page numbers, mini deadlines before the big deadline, what direction they are heading in, etc.

Next, if you working as part of a team or in connection with a Uni find THE admin. This person can appear deceptively unassuming. It's not the star grant getter in the dept. It is his or her admin that you need. I found Jackie. Bless Jackie. She knew about the online submission peculiarities, how far in advance to prepare to overcome the inevitable Uni and granting agency snafus, etc.

If you're not working with a Uni call the grant coordinator listed in the CFP. They are, theoretically, supposed to answer all of your questions including what kind of proposal they are most apt to consider this year. And that changes. One year it's STEM programs, for instance, the next year its Head Start. That won't be published but they should tell you. Or, rather, once you tell them your pitch they should tell you if it stands a chance. Now, I had a hard time getting these folks to respond to me until I *cringe* dropped my mentor's name. Just an FYI. If you have a name to use you may have to.

Also on the website should be .pdfs of former grants that won. Use those as templates.

But, as for where to start. Like all things start at the beginning: what is your research question, your population, and most importantly how does it fit with the goal(s) of the granting agency. That last one is a biggie. You could have a leg up on making a wonder woman bracelet that actuallyd deflects bullets and the lasso of truth but they won't care if you don't tell them why spending their money on it will make them look good. Write that out in any format to begin with. Once you have a handle on that formatting and expounding and clarifying is manageable. Without that you have no guiding principle.

Well, WiFi is a collection of standards that describe wireless interaction. Wireless router is a device, which allows multiple machines to connect to the Internet connection (wired and wirelessly), while providing some additional functionality, such as a firewall.



The most common setup I've seen is to get a cable modem (on one end the wire from the cable company plugs in and on the other an Ethernet port) and then connect it to a wireless router. This may be changing and some of the modems, like the one you've found, have integrated wireless access points. Bottom line is that it will probably work fine. I would be cautious about "nobody can break the encryption", though. Someone with enough time on their hands and dedication could probably find a way to get the password, but the bar is raised high enough that most people would give up.

P.S. Sadly, I made a typo in the Schneier link. If anyone cares to read it, remove the period (.) at the end.

Well, http://www.phdcomics...php?comicid=508 (and following comics) describe the situation pretty well.

I honestly have no idea (the field I'm in has no gruntwork), although I'm very curious about the issue (since I'm currently advising a few 16-year olds on getting research that has gruntwork). The one thing is that a lot of undergrads don't really want to do research but want to have something to put on their applications for jobs/med school, and we might just be in the position where we can just use them as free labor just because they're forced to go through undergrad first and need some grunt work on their applications.

One suggestion, maybe, is to try to video-record instructions you're giving to undergrads? (or set up a webpage for instructions?) That way, maybe you don't have to repeat instructions whenever you get new students. And then it won't exhaust you as much, so then you can help them on the non-repetitive non-draining tasks. But of course, that's making a major assumption - the assumption that they'll actually follow the instructions on their own.

Ok, this will be a funny example. I am really afraid of spiders. Yesterday I saw a spider that had fallen in a bath tub. Well - thought I - I am going to travel the US in two months - can't a touch a tiny spider?? And I took it out! I even let it walk a bit along my arm. To tell you the truth, the spider was not very big, 1 centimetre may be (with its legs, of course!). So it was not that of a challenge really. But I am proud of myself anyway. May be the next step will be to hold a slightly bigger one?? (But not a black widow!! )

In fact, I have conquered many of my fears within the last two years, some of them much more serious than holding spiders. And I found it really liberating and empowering. The very fact that I am going to study in the US is a result of me crushing a number of fears that made my life very difficult. One of these fears was that of problems (not a math problems, - life problems!). I was afraid that things would go wrong and I wouldn't be able to pull my act together. But the really funny thing is that when things did go wrong, I coped! And it was such a nice feeling. And now, though I am worried about different things from time to time, it's by far not the same as before. I may be uncomfortable thinking about some problems I might encounter, but I am not that afraid of encountering them, really. Actually, I want to have to solve some of them whereas several years ago I would have preferred to hide into my imaginary world of white unicorns. I am not saying that I am strong like a superman or something. When things go wrong, I can panic and I can be depressed but in the end I always win. And each time I do it, it is a bit easier.

And what about you? How many fears have you conquered recently?

Conrats Strangefox! Cheers!

Most school email systems can forward mail from that address to another email address. Many schools also allow you to keep the institution's email address for as long as it remains active; check your school's computing/webmail page to find out what their policy is. I use my school address when it's relevant and my gmail for everything else, but I have it all sent to my gmail address. That way it all stays in one place so I can search everything at once.

If you decide to forward school mail to your gmail address, make sure you set up gmail so you can send mail from your school account directly from gmail. To do that:

Click the gear icon in the upper right corner
Click on "Mail Settings"
Select the "Accounts and Imports" tab
Go to "Send Mail As"
Follow all gmail's instructions from that point forward

Then when you go to write or reply to an email, you'll get to select which address to send from using a drop-down menu. It's super-easy.

Sac the hell up and quit being so sensitive. Not every professor has to like you. Just get another professor to write the letter for you and don't even bother talking to the other one. If they asked, just tell them the deadline past or you couldn't wait on them any longer and went with another prof.

i'm... i want to put this more delicately than it will probably sound, so forgive me, for i mean no offense, but i'm not sure you're understanding "essentialism" or "biological determinism" the same way that your professors and classmates are. my suggestion is to look for a few journal articles that discuss the epistemology and process of social construction. sounds like you're in a field with a lot of constructivists, and it sounds like your disagreements with their perspective on how the world works may be due more to unfamiliarity with the debates they're engaging in, rather than a disagreement with their ultimate positions.

yes, human beings evolve. but there is nothing biological about race, for example. how we define race differs across time and space, the criteria has little to do with anything genetic or biological. usually (though not always) race is somehow related to phenotype (skin colour, hair texture, bone structure), but those rules change over time and place. there's nothing BIOLOGICAL or ESSENTIAL about race. that doesn't mean that race isn't experienced concretely in people's lives; it is. but it's a construction, not biological or essential.

does that make sense? do i just sound like the people in your seminars? probably.

for what it's worth, social and cultural anthropology at the graduate level also talks about essentialism and biological determinism like it's a bad thing. often, the background that all of us get in our undergraduate surveys lags behind the cutting edge theory work happening at any given time. i'm not sure that you would have many epistemological agreements with your colleagues in an anthropology department either. the entire discipline is in crisis and has been since the culture wars and the linguistic turn.

it is very possible that your fellow seminar-goers are speaking in extremes and loosing the subtlety of the arguments they're trying to make. it's also possible that they don't fully grasp the concepts they're employing. some people grab onto jargon, get a grasp on part of the concept, and then run hog wild hoping to impress their profs in seminar. and sometimes the profs are guilty of... problematic interpretations of the theory they're teaching.

i don't think any constructivist position actually denies the process of human evolution, but the process by which people form groups (based on ethnicity or race or gender or nationality or whatever else) is not actually biological, even (especially) when the logic behind group formation is based on "science" or "genetics." malaria immunity amongst africans has nothing to do with race or blackness, for example, but with people having a long-term exposure over multiple generations and building up an immunity. now, someone "constructing" race will extrapolate that and declare that black people from africa are genetically more resistant to malaria. people from africa, yes. black, no. blackness has nothing to do with the immunity. being from a certain part of africa does.

is that distinction clear? how genetics or human evolution is employed to reify the biological argument for race?





sorry, that was long-winded and probably unnecessary. i'm just procrastinating.

ANYWAY... i've also found it difficult to talk across disciplines. i can understand a cultural anthropologist or a sociologist just fine, but lit students and poli sci students and "cultural studies" students are speaking another language. even within my own discipline, i find there's a lot of disconnect between regional subfields. it can be frustrating and i don't really have an answer for how to deal with it. sometimes i feel like i'm in the wrong department when i'm exposed to another historian's approach, but my advisor's line of thinking is right in my wheelhouse so i just ignore everyone else and press forward.