Dear Senator Boxer

Dear Senator Boxer,

I'm a physics PhD student at Stanford University. I do cancer research and my career goals are to stay in academia and continue doing research into how cancer can be better imaged and treated. I will be graduating in about a year and will soon be looking for post-doctoral research positions.

It is highly likely that my next job will be at a university or hospital. I'd like to find research that will benefit from my skill-set and has the potential to help many cancer patients. But what if that group is at a Catholic Hospital or University? As a student, I have never had to worry about whether my health insurance (provided through the university) covered what I needed. Now my future career plans may be limited or changed based on provided health care.

I have an IUD, which means that I will need to get it replaced or removed in a few years. If I had to pay out of pocket, that could easily be $1000. Without the new health care rules that would ensure my employer would cover contraception, how could I know this would be covered? When looking at a position, will I need to call HR and find out whether the health care plan covers contraception? Who can provide assurance that the plans would not change? There are many leading research universities and hospitals with a religious affiliation, so this is a real concern for me. It isn't one that the men in my lab worry about.

Thank you for supporting contraception access. I find the conversation right now horrifying - a bunch of men thinks it limits their religious freedom if I have access to contraception. I wish I could tell them about my latest cancer treatment research and explain to them that it wouldn't be happening if I had children to take care of at home. I am able to make contributions to science - perhaps that they will benefit from - because I have control over my body and whether I have children.

Thank you for being an elected politician I can count on.
-Nicole Ackerman

Faculty Benefits

As part of my fellowship, I am visiting a few local campuses this quarter. So far I have visited Santa Clara University and Foothill College. The goal of these visits is to understand different types of institutions, specifically how it differs to be faculty at different types of institutions. I am greatly enjoying these visits and am seeing that there is a lot to be excited about at all institutions.

There are some big questions we are getting answered at every visit: How is hiring done? What is the tenure process? Sometimes the discussion turns to the mundane topics of employment - wages and benefits. I don't feel particularly concerned about these topics. If I was working as a part time faculty (adjunct) I would have issues of low pay and no benefits. But as long as I am full-time (tenure track), I should be able to live, right? As I recently learned, community college faculty are fairly well paid. What would I possibly need to worry about?

Dear Nature: I have this excellent paper on hypercube...

There was a recent piece (of sh$$) titled "Womanspace" in Nature (a highly prestigious journal) that was meant to be funny, but did it by making an extended "joke" at the expense of women. Both the fact that plenty of readers are female, and the fact that women aren't actually a character out of a 1950's sitcom. The best theory is that this was meant to get a lot of publicity for Nature, given the comments from Nature editors (initially) that they were surprised over the lack of outrage. The journal did publish critiques recently, but that doesn't "fix" what was done.

Many people have given this article its fair criticism, and I yield to their superior blogging skills. What I particularly like is that many have found constructive things to do... I only swore a lot and thought about slashing tires.

Hate misogyny in science? Here are some fun things to try:

• Occupy Nature! Kate Clancy's blog is through a subsidiary of Nature, but instead of abandoning her blog she has decided to use it to highlight other bigotry. Find other things to be angry about at Nature? Send them to her.
• Submit your own crap! Lab Lemming points out that this is a a call for submissions - anything and everything. This is similar to using "postage paid" envelopes from junk mail to return bricks to them.
• Submit followup articles on gayspace, blackspace, and jewspace.

Further critiques of the article

• Dr Isis
• Janet D. Stemwedel at SciAm
• Anne Jefferson, All-geo
• Christie Wilcox , SciAm

23% Hate Everything

Living in California, I get to see some incredible elections. Yesterday I voted on school district board members, community college board members, fire district members, and two propositions. One was a bond measure of the community college, and the other was "fire district appropriations". The text was:

Measure F: "Shall the appropriations limit applicable to the Menlo Park Fire Protection District, currently set at $40,000,000 pursuant to Measure G approved by the electors of the district on November 7, 2007, be continued at $40,000,000 for a period of four years from the date of the election?"

This isn't even an increase in funding. And right now, it isn't enough money for them to run the fire district! A "no" vote would mean a decrease in funding. In our voter guides there was a page with the argument in support. What was the argument in opposition? There was none!

This isn't the first time where I have seen a measure which seems like it shouldn't be up for vote. There have been measures that were superseded by the legislature, so the voter guide said votes don't even matter on it. But I consider these unique opportunities, from a "science" point of view. After all, they are a sort of control. How many people vote yes on a law that even those responsible for getting it on the ballot don't support? How many people vote no on something like this fire district appropriations?

23% voted no on the fire district measure. Who are these people? Do they want their house to burn down? Do they not understand how flammable everything is here?

The Computer Culture War

Our household will be increasing its quantity of computer gadgets. Some number of laptops/tablets/smartphones will be purchased in the next few months due to expiring contract, expiring backlights, and a general sense of patriotic consumerism (lol). While the majority of the responsibility of this lies with Tom, I am part of conversations and the phone decisions. The upcoming purchase is quite different in tone to my recent (few months ago) purchase of a netbook. I hadn't appreciated the capability-to-cost ratio in modern netbooks until a vist to Fry's, after which I did some online research and returned to Fry's the next day to purchase one. I knew I would be working in Ubuntu ~100% of the time, especially after installing more memory than Windows would support.

Now Tom is going to buy an apple product or two. Other products have been considered, but some sort of iThingy looks like the new addition to our digital household. Through this process I have decided that digital gadget monopolies - I mean, brands - are a sort of geek culture war. There is often little room for compromise and we may view those who hold different opinions as being responsible for the current destruction of society. Here are my sides in this battle:

Med School (sexist) Softball!

I'm playing on the Radiation Oncology team in the Stanford Medical Center Co-Ed Softball league. It is lots of fun - I'm getting to meet many people from the medical side of the department who I haven't interacted with before. Also, I get to play softball and drink beer. It is a touch better than when I was in Junior High playing softball and drinking iced coffee. People are much nicer now than when I was in Junior High. I'm not a better softball player though. I might, in fact, be worse.

I can deal with being a bad softball player, because it is all about having fun, right? Unfortunately there is something severely limiting the fun I'm having, and it has nothing with my inability to throw/catch/hit. It turns out that the rules for Co-ed softball (which I first assumed were just for this league) are disturbingly sexist. I knew some of the "strange" rules coming in - the men and women are pitched different sized balls. But others I only learned at our first game last night. I was pretty pissed off and decided to make it a battle against the power-that-be who make the softball rules. Unfortunately, these are the "official" rules of the Amateur Softball Association. So my battle is going to be difficult.