NY times blog

Some of you mentioned that you didn't know that the scientist at work thing was ongoing. There are now 8 posts from me with one more comic early next week. Http://scientistatwork.blogs.nytimes.com.

I just got back from a circumambulation of the local holy mountain and leave for Chengdu today. I will post something about the kora soon. And probably something about being back here in Jiuzhaigou.

Dr. JZG

Sent from my iPhone

The NY Times

Starting today for about 3 weeks I will have 2-3 posts a week on the NY Times Scientist at Work Blog (http://scientistatwork.blogs.nytimes.com). They are about a week behind, so it will likely continue after I return.

Dr JZG, writing from JZG

Sent from my iPhone

Fulbright student newsletter

An article I wrote about my experience as a Fulbrighter living and working in Jiuzhaigou National Park was just published in the Fulbright Student Newsletter. Check it out!

I leave for Hong Kong on Monday and am not really ready to go. It's all coming up a bit quickly. I'm in the midst of writing a proposal for NSF and haven't been thinking enough at all about what we'll do in the field. I am also busy packing the house as we are moving house while I am gone.

I've also finalized that I will be bloging for the NY Times Scientist at Work Blog from 13 July to 16 August. I will post 2 to 3 times per week and will put links here when they come up. Definitely check it out and see what we're up to. I may also post here, but to be honest, it depends on how I am feeling and how much time I have. 

-- Dr. JZG

VoA

Ok. I just did the VoA interview on China's drought and thank goodness they are editing it! It will be aired sometime in the next week or so. I'll send you a link when I have it.

Public science

Somehow things all happen at once. I took a workshop this week on writing OpEds to get more women's voices in the public debate in America (fabulous workshop, I highly recommend it... it's run by The OpEd Project (http://theopedproject.org). They have public workshops and you should definitely attend... if you're a woman). Then I wrote an OpEd (not published yet) on China's erosion management in light of current flooding. Today my agreement with the NY Times finally came through to blog for them at their Scientist at Work Blog while I'm in China this summer (scientistatwork.blogs.nytimes.com). More details when that actually happens, but tentatively it will be 2-3 posts/week for 3 of the weeks that I'm in the field. Then Voice of America contacted me to be interviewed for the show tonight. So I'll be on VOA tonight talking about the drought in China. Exciting! I'll post a link as soon as I get one. It's the Chinese/English program.

I have mixed feelings about being a scientist in the public eye, but I think that if I can encourage young women to continue with science, it can't be a bad thing.

-- Dr. JZG

Sign ups

My students are doing final posters for both classes. They will present them in a joint final poster session on Thursday. One class has to sign up to print their posters. The other has to sign up to stand by them. The posters are all due at exactly the same time and everyone has to be there for the entire session (thus, standing by your poster later has no time advantage). In both cases they are rushing to sign up for the latest possible spot. Fascinating. Even the ones who have to present work from both classes (and who I assumed would want a 30 min break between needing to stand by posters) are signing up for the later spot.

Dr. JZG's birthday

For my birthday my students gave me the best present ever - they made a cake for me. But it wasn't just any cake, it was a soils cake! We have been studying soils in class for the last two weeks and they made me a cake with what they have learned.

Figure 1: The gorgeous cake that my class surprised me with on Wednesday.

As you can see below, the cake has an O-horizon (green frosting), an A horizon (chocolate), E horizon (yes, it's that rare, acidic forest soil with a vanilla E horizon), a B-1 horizon (chocolate), and a B-2 horizon (mixed chocolate and vanilla). They also included biologic processes (gummy worms) and fossils (some crystal things). 

A cross-section of my cake.

Although I haven't been posting at all, I have to tell you, I absolutely LOVE my job. Being at a small liberal arts college is most definitely the perfect job for me. I am so energized by interacting with my students and they are so intelligent and ask such fabulous questions. They push me to really know what I am talking about and to keep them productively engaged throughout the entire class or lab period. This is by far the hardest job I have ever done, but I love pretty much every minute of it. 

We are doing lots of outdoors stuff now in class. On Monday we went to a farm to study soils for geomorphology. Thursday we got new GPS units, so the GIS class started to set them up and we came up with a lab that they will do combining GPS data with other data I download for them. This coming Monday in geomorphology we are going to learn to measure rivers and then the following week we have a big field trip to a nearby river to look at how lowland rivers function. At the end of the month I am taking the geomorphology class to West Virginia (the same park we went to for a bike race last weekend) to study mountain rivers. I'm so excited about it! The semester seems to be flying by now that spring break is over. 

I love this job! 

--Dr. JZG

I am a negligent blogger, but I love this figure

My students, for the most part, aren't thrilled with math or equations. So we do a lot of conceptual figures in class to show what general trends look like. Occasionally a student reminds me to label the axes on a figure. A student in one of my classes sent this figure to me today. I love it. It made me laugh out loud.

Exciting news!

As many of you know, I finished my PhD just under a year ago and then have spent the last year doing, among other things, revisions on these papers. One paper came out in Geology in October, one was accepted in the summer and back-logged until the end of 2011, the final paper was accepted in December last year. Anyway, yesterday I got proofs for the paper accepted in December (so it will likely come out early this year) and just found out that the paper slated for end of this year is actually coming out in May. Fabulous! 

In other news, I am in the midst of course planning while trying to visit people and get ready to move. It's not going super fast, but I think that things will be ready in time. It's nice to finally have the textbooks for the classes I'm teaching. I think that one text book is a bit more advanced than I was hoping but that it's the best option currently available. We'll have to just focus on fewer chapters rather than trying to march through the whole book (which I wasn't planning on doing anyway). 

We leave tomorrow for the cross-country road trip.

--Dr. JZG