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

A Nimble Mind

An exponent of modern music and as a person who gives all genres a go, I should say I felt discouraged by the scene. A lot of time it is a subjective assessment and not supported by logic. I know I used to listen to music in a different way and was mindless about the technical side of it. But that has changed and it brings a different level of musical elitism. However, this elitism has certain anachronism with it. With the super-fast distribution of new music and DIY culture, it is not the wisest way to limit your palette to the known and tested bands/musicians/artists.
No matter how onerous it is, exploring new music is always rewarding. I have been doing that in the past 15 years and I discovered strong bonds with very exciting projects and works of original artists. The clash between a pompous group of die-hard classical fans and modern age adventurism dates back to the era of Stravinsky, Shostakovich, and many Jazz pioneers. All these views are respectable vis-a-vis authenticity and originality and I think they all form a beautiful gestalt of contemporary music.

This is an introduction to the new vision, new perspective and new taste: how I will be enjoying or analyzing music from now on.