Sergei Rachmaninoff

 A pretty late discovery. The first time I listened to Rachmaninov with intent and engaged with his music was in April 2019 when Concerto no. 4 in G minor for piano and orchestra was performed by Garrick Ohlsson and Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra.

I have bought Rachmaninoff's complete orchestral works conducted by
Pavel Kogan and Evgeny Svetlanov. Particularly, I have listened to Symphonies No. 1 and No. 2 and they are truly moving. I am listening to digital versions and I can just imagine how this pleasure would have been enhanced listening to these symphonies live or on vinyl. 

Maybe someday!

Categorical Buckets

 There is a tendency to simplify matters and it is reasonable as we all want to soothe ourselves in the face of difficulties. It is a defense that I actually believe in on occasions. The feeling that we have grasped the concept and translated it into the wavelength of our knowledge. That is soothing and reassuring, anxiolytic in the most profound sense.

However, it is erroneous scientifically and misleading practically, when we are dealing with complex multi-faceted phenomena. The so-called well-framed knowledge is dealing with categorical buckets and is leading to a fractured understanding of facts. This notion raises the question of an optimal approach. 

The multidisciplinary approach and the teamwork in an intellectual sense is probably the best available option,  It is surprising how distant fields benefit from the synergistic impact they can induce on each other when working in tandem. 

Picture: Walk for Science, Pittsburgh, August 2017

2020 Election: Populism and Manistream

 Now that the US election is drawing to a close, it is a good time to reflect on the results. And from my personal standpoint there a few interesting points. 

The populism and the affinity to it is one standout, still noticeable in 2020. This election was not meant to end populism. Nor did we expect that in a foreseeable future in America or elsewhere. In countries such as Hungary, Brazil, and the Philippines, the populists are at the helm, and in many others (Germany, Italy, and Italy) they have control over parts of the opposition. The paradoxical approach of Trump to power is indicative of a lack of principles in the populistic figure. He was running a campaign based on anti-establishment agenda despite having 4 yours of the undisputed authority to restructure the establishment. 

The premature claim of victory in the election revealed the president's attitude toward the democratic process and I am afraid to say a long-lasting narrative for die-hard hardliners to hold on to an election stolen from him.  An arbitrary early end to ballot counting was a brazen act yet the inherently populist idea that only a specific group of voters are "real people" and deserve to have their voice heard. The attitude was warmly supported by European equivalents from Germany to Slovenia (Slovenian PM was the first to prematurely congratulate Trump.)

On the flip side, the system is still working and that is a soothing signal for people looking nervously at the state of democracy during the 2020 election. However, with or without  Trumpism is there, formless and morphing from one form to another. Defeating the incumbent president is not unprecedented but a rare incident. 

More than 70 million voters cast their ballots for Trump. From their standpoint, the populist approach to power and the promise were convincing. In four years, they could be swayed by the same agenda once again.  

 "It’s not about voice, I can teach anyone to sing. It’s about what would this person declare with this voice. If you have nothing inside, voice is just a senseless tool. Like submarine in Karakum desert."

Alexey Tegin

COVID-19: Information and Misinformation

 There is an informative JAMA publication by Dr. Bruce Miller that addresses the current state of information regarding the pandemic. The interference of misinformation with information is described as a severe threat to such complex public health issues. An array of symptoms include antimask behavior, antivaccine beliefs, conspiracy theories about the origins of COVID-19, and vocal support by elected officials for unproven therapies. Some articles pointed out that only 50% heed the recommendations to wear a mask in public places. The relationship between antiscience viewpoints and low science literacy underscores new findings regarding the brain mechanisms that form and maintain false beliefs. Here is the summary of this publication:

Science Literacy Is Essential

Schenley Park

9/22/2020

Dark Matter

Mercurial, I flow the earth

I breathe with the ones who came before me

Sanguine, I paint the halls of life

The cold storm of ages embraces my solemn soul

My work has begun...

Image: October,12, 2020

The Second Coming

 Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; The centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the earth,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

William Butler Yeats

My Personal Take on Noir

 My affinity for noir movies is something I acquired through my limited exploration in cinema. It was one of the pleasant self-educational paths I took and the reward was so sweet.

It is hard to pinpoint why I like noir cinematography, aesthetics, or scenarios but there are some points that might be relevant. 

I feel beneath the grey gloomy veneer of the noir picture there are certain elements that are integral to the genre:

The question of individuality: probably the overarching presence felt constantly is that individuals facing the challenges on his own. No room for fancy comrades and mighty organizations and corporations backing him up. 

The question of morality: you will see the protagonist following a moral code and is persistent in obedience regardless of the outcomes.

The question of ultimate redemption: maybe this part is controversial but my understanding is that noir movies do not follow the happy-ending trends and more focused on picturing personal fulfillment. The hero is delivering according to his/her principles and you can see that being the only intact facet of the story.

Alternatives to Schools

 This was another hard and gut-wrenching report related to the COVID-19 crisis.

As schools are being closed in some regions of the developing world, child are being sent to the street, exploited as sources for cheap labor. 

While hunger is stalking children from Afghanistan to South Sudan, young girls in sex works and pregnancies shooting up in Uganda.

This happens while other sectors of society (bars, gyms, subway, etc.) have been allowed to reopen, begging the question: what is the root of all this discordance.  

Hubris

There are different ways that you can hone your position; different ways to exhibit your talents, demonstrate your wits. The ideal scenario is that you earn this position by respect, honor, and originality of your work and your character; far from sloganeering and scheming, there are ways way more effective to connect and persuade. 

Multiple times, while walking around Scaife Hall, Presby, or Monti, from lab to office, from Medical Arts to De Soto, I mentioned this to myself. 

Pandora's box

 " It is the greatest temptation of the rational faculty to glorify its own capacity and its own productions and to claim that in the face of its theories nothing transcendent or outside its domain need exist. "  Excerpt from Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life 

 I think this is very relevant to the matters we deal with on a regular basis in the academic milieu. Interestingly, the story is the same where you are amongst ideological fanatics in political or religious campaigns. There is an aversion to dialogue and affinity to seal the codebook of life in your limited lifetime. The tradeoff is understandable: the state of calm in return for blinding yourself to the (often convoluted) truth. 

Early-career Setbacks: A Mixed Psychological Effect

The following is an excerpt from a very interesting study by Wang et al. 
You can find the full-text here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1903.06958.pdf

“Science is 99 percent failure, and that’s an optimistic view”, said Robert Lefkowitz, who was awarded the Nobel prize in 2012 for his groundbreaking studies of G protein-coupled receptors. Despite the ubiquitous nature of failures, it remains unclear if a setback in an early career may augment or hamper an individual’s future career impact. Indeed, the Matthew effect suggests a rich get richer phenomenon where early-career success helps bring future victories. In addition to community recognition, bringing future attention and resources, success may also influence individual motivation, where positive feedback bolsters self-confidence. Together, these views indicate that it is early-career success, not failure, that would lead to future success. Yet at the same time other mechanisms suggest that the opposite may also be true. Indeed, screening mechanisms suggest that, if early-career failures screen out less-determined researchers, early setbacks among those who remain could, perhaps counterintuitively, become a marker for future achievement. Further, failure may teach valuable lessons that are hard to learn otherwise, while also motivating individuals to redouble effort, whereas success may be associated with complacency or reduced future effort due to utility maximization. Such positive views of failure are reflected in Nietzsche’s classic phrase “what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger”, in the celebration-of-failure mindset in Silicon Valley, and in a recent commencement address by U.S. Supreme Court chief justice John Roberts, who told graduating students “I wish you bad luck.” Overall, these divergent perspectives indicate that the net effect of an early-career setback is unclear. Given the consequential nature of this question to individual careers and the institutions that support and nurture them, and building on the remarkable progress in our quantitative understanding of science, here we ask: Can an early-career setback lead to future career impact?

To offer quantitative answers to this question, we leverage a unique dataset, containing all R01 grant applications ever submitted to the NIH, to examine early-career success and failure. NIH funding decisions are largely determined by paylines derived from evaluation scores. Our empirical strategy harnesses the highly nonlinear relationship between funding success and evaluation score around the funding threshold. Indeed, focusing on individuals whose proposals fell just above and below the threshold allows us to compare observationally-similar individuals who are either near misses (individuals who just missed receiving funding) or narrow wins (individuals who just succeeded in getting funded). Here we focus on junior scientists by examining principal investigators (PIs) whose first application to the NIH was within the previous three years. We combine the NIH grant database with the Web of Science data, tracing their NIH R01 grant applications between 1990 and 2005 together with research outputs by the PIs, measured by their publication and citation records (see Supplementary Note 1 for details). In total, our analyses yielded 561 narrow wins and 623 near misses around the payline.

Published in Nature Communications