A Fisherman Sells His Boat

This is pretty much how my sabbatical went ...

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So I tried, I worked at three different universities on synthetic, theoretical and spectroscopic projects and all of them were interesting projects similar to things I have done in the past. In all cases I was hopeful for a short work term leading to a small publishable paper. One project worked and I think I can make something from another but for the most part two of the three projects were "interesting but not publishable in its current state".

When I came to ABU I had equipment worth a lot of money I had purchased from my research grants over the years. In fact, a lot of the equipment we use in the lab (especially the organic lab) is really "my" equipment. Indeed, when one of the Biology faculty lost his keys it was my $ 5000 toploader balance that was stolen from the lab. For the most part however my research equipment has sat in bankers boxes for the past 12 years. Sort of like really cool toys that you probably will not use again but don't want your parents to give away. This past year I came to a decision about my research equipment and decided to loan it to a new faculty member starting out at a university in Halifax. It has been an interesting way to end my sabbatical and in fact the relationship has some promise of a research collaboration.

So, when it is all done I hope to have a couple of small papers published from my sabbatical. I attended four conferences and presented four research papers. I have re-newed old friendships, networked and created new collaborations. I also spent a lot of time with my family thinking about what is next. And for all that thinking I came to the realization that thinking about something as complex as the ABU Science program is alot like steering a boat. If the boat is tied to the wharf then it doesn't matter which way you turn the rudder nothing will change. Once you are moving then you can steer the boat. So I have to get back into the business that I was called here to do so I can figure out what happens next. Gotta go, classes start in a week and I have two laboratory courses with new textbooks and no lab manuals.

A Sabbatical Comes to an End

In the last little while I guess I have coasted a bit. I wasn't able to do a lot of new research and there were some family issues that needed to be dealt with. And then there were these two national chemistry conferences that I attended. I would have liked to presented the synthetic chemistry that I focused on all last summer and fall. Unfortunately, the lawyers at UNB felt that since the work I had done was the chemical basis of a grant application that might lead to patents in the future that if I were to discuss the work at a conference that would disclose the work and it would become public domain and not patentable. Sucks to be me. So, this winter I had to come up with research topics on Chemical Education (the unique pedagogy and methodology of teaching chemistry) that I could research and complete in my basement.

Both conferences I attended were in Edmonton, Alberta and I was able to make research presentations at both. At the first conference I spoke on the Brooker Limit and the pedagogical role of classroom demonstrations as part of the methodological way that we encourage higher level thinking (integration) in our students but if Integrated Thinking is our Charybdis than Edu-tainment is our Scylla and we need caution (c'mon cut me some slack if you don't get classical allusions look them up).

I spoke a separate time on the unique danger of methanol in lecture demonstrations and showed that my research indicated that more than any other chemical (excluding acids) methanol is implicated in demonstrations where students get hurt.

The organizers of the first conference were very nice and by way of appreciation for my presentations they gave me ... wait for it ... A BEAKER MUG!

But this, boys and girls is not just any old beaker mug. It is not like those cheap $ 20 mugs that I have been giving away. No indeed. This puppy is a heavy walled magnificent thing (it even has a beak!) that I will cherish for years. If only I drank coffee, perhaps I should start just so I could amaze my fellow professors with the mug.

The second conference was at the Shaw Convention Center on the banks of the the North Saskatchewan River in downtown Edmonton. The convention center was very nice (that is it behind me) but it is in a part of town that is very run down and I was very pleased to find this parking lot down by the river. Until I found the lot I had to use on-street parking and the conference center is in a bit of a seedy part of town and the only spots I could find were somewhat disconcertingly in front of"XXX Adult Peep Show" parlours. In fact, one day I was convinced that my rental car had been stolen until I remembered that it was in front of the Strip Club NOT the Peep Show.


The second conference was 10x bigger than the first conference and we had about 15 sessions going in parallel (which made for a lot of running around). I presented in the Chemical Education session on the increasing Home Schooled demographic in first year chemistry and discussed the unique challenges faced by students from Home Schooled environments and how the typical design of first year chemistry courses is especially intimidating for them. To provide some context I used examples from our experience with LabEx. I got a very positive response to this presentation and had a number of very encouraging conversations in the corridors after my seminar.

After the conferences I managed to get to the Rocky Mountains on a day trip that involved driving over 1000 km in one day but it was worth it. Here I am in Jasper trying to decide if we should drive on to British Columbia and make it over the Great Divide or head down the Icelands Parkway connecting Jasper to Banff.

All in all, the conferences were great and I am glad that I spent the time getting the research done and the presentations ready. I have 90 days remaining now before classes start again and I have to make some important time and family management decisions now. Do I make one last hard push to get some new research done? Do I rest now for the return to teaching? Rest sounds good but I would like to have a solid new research project started before I have to get on the ABU-hamster-wheel-of-destiny again.

I was seriously touched by the thoughtful students that put this card together for me last fall. It has been on my desk all through my sabbatical as a reminder that the Lord called me to ABU for reasons that did not particularly mean becoming famous for research. My student evaluations may not reflect it but teaching has got to be my number one priority and I guess I need to start making some adjustments in my thinking. In the words of the sage Grafiki "It is time!"

A Honeydew Comes out of Hibernation

There were a number of things that happened in December and January that forced me into my basement office for the past few months. Who would have thought that this would be the year that winter would come back to Canada? I have been working in our unheated basement and have written up a couple of papers and one big section for a grant proposal literally while wearing gloves. I am glad that winter is finally letting go and I can get back to the mobile phase of this sabbatical.

I have been back and forth to UNB a number of times over the past little while working on papers and grants and supervising some Honours students. It is all fun but I really wanted this sabbatical to be a chance to work at the bench, inorganic synthesis is what really pulled me into this profession and I really want to have at least one last time where I can be part of a larger work and where I am reporting work of my own hands.

Going back and forth from here to there this time of year has its challenges. The winter has been long and there is still a lot of snow in the woods. This drives the local deer out towards the highways where the foraging is better / easier. It also brings them into close contact with highway traffic.

Deer are not the most intellectually gifted animals that the Good Lord put on this Earth and when the thought gets in their head that they need to cross the highway there isn't much room for discussion. This leads to a number of somewhat negative motor vehicle experiences for the deer. I heard on the CBC that the divided highway operated by MRDC is keeping track of deer kills this year and it is in the dozens. I know when I made the 200 km trip yesterday I counted seven spots where it looked like deer had been killed and I drove by a mangled carcass this morning as well. I guess I will have to be careful driving until the spring foliage comes out and they have better browsing in the forest. They also cause a large number of drivers to randomly slow down and gawk which presents its own hazards driving. What I did this morning is what i do in bad weather in the winter ... I found a transport truck that was going my way and tucked in behind him and just followed him. I figure that if there is an obstruction on the road he can deal with it and as long as he can see me in his rear view mirrors we're cool.

With the road kill come the scavengers and down on the Sheffield Flats this morning near McGowen's Corner I happened to see this guy out waiting for someone to hit something. He was sitting on a snag down by the river near the highway. I slowed down, stopped and rolled down the window as if to ask him directions and he studiously ignored me so I took his picture.

As you can see the river is still frozen over but the spring freshet is on and the river is opening up river from the Mactaquac dam down through Fredericton so I would expect the river to rise over the next few weeks and that always makes the trip "interesting". The new MRDC highway is all on high ground except the Jemseg - Coytown stretch across the Sheffield Flats. I stopped under the new highway bridge there and was fascinated by the objects that get thrown over the side the bridge such as this object which is common enough along the highway where truckers decide that stopping is just not an option.

And then there was this hubcap that caught my eye:

It is somewhat a metaphor for life that all of this will be changed and perhaps washed away as the spring floods come through and scour the countryside. I could use some scouring right now.

A Frozen Honeydew Does A Little Research

It has not been a particularly productive month or so in Honeydew labs. At the beginning of December I was working at MtA in the drybox preparing samples when I got a call on my cell. It was not good news. A close family member had an accident at work and within a couple of weeks he succumbed to his injuries and our shocked family was trying to cope with the aftermath. That was coupled to an astounding series of winter storms that left us housebound.

What that also meant was that at a very inopportune moment in the research cycle I was forced to walk away from the bench. Christmas, as somber a Christmas as I remember, came into the mix and suddenly it was a wintry January. It wasn't that it was impossible to do research as much as it was just the wrong time to have to leave the bench work. I had an agreement with my family that in the heavy winter months my commuting to MtA and UNB would be at a minimum and only on days where the roads and the weather were clear.

So, with the work incomplete, I started the writing process by organizing and reading the pile of literature related to the research. But writing (at least the way I do it) cannot be done in a vacuum. I need some back and forth discussion with other chemists so to take part in the research group discussions I had to dig out the Silver Bullet and head out in the early morning.
When I get to UNB I have to check on my neglected reactions and update my observations but my limited time on site means that all I can do is watch. This reaction has gone from a corn-straw yellow to a clear cherry red for no good reason. I wish I knew what was going on in there.Then we have discussions and debates in my temporary office (borrowed from an emeritus professor for the year who had research contacts with an Italian chemistry group, thus the prints over the chalkboard).
Head stuffed with ideas and the light declining I turn the car towards home and the rising Moon for the two hour trip back. Back to the literature and trying to write a paper on incomplete research so that when we do get the bench work done the paper will be ready to go. Not the best way to do things but the way things have turned out. Four hours of driving for seven hours on site and a chunk of that spent in the library reading the industrial chemistry literature that almost seems like it is written in a chemical language I don't know. It is as if they have their own non-systematic name for everything. Ugh.

It is always good to get home. I am happy to have the freedom to focus on research during this sabbatical period but as the half-way point slips by I feel that I am way behind and I need to start working harder and smarter. This must be what students feel like.

Honeydew Shaken Not Stirred

OK, I pretty much gave up on the old research blog. I flirted with Facebook for a bit and there were only so many hours in the day so I let the blog slide. That and the fact that the research took several unfortunate turns. It turned out that one of the starting materials that I used most of the summer was so decomposed and contaminated that almost everything that I did in the lab over the summer could not be published and would/will need to be repeated. The work that I started at MtA has also gone very slowly but I have done several new reactions. The most exciting part of that work was cracking open an ampule of a very reactive compound that I sealed over ten years ago and discovering that the compound is still pure ... dangerous but pure. There was a time when that compound was sold for $ 1000 per gram and now it can be bought for "only" $ 165 per gram.

I have over 100 grams of the compound and I am now actively "making friends" in the chemical world. I will not sell it but will use it to participate in the research of several groups that can use the compound.

But now winter is reaching out to touch my research. I bought a "beater" car in May to drive from Moncton to Fredericton and Sackville. I was small and grossly underpowered but it got me around and after some initial problems it has been a faithful steed.

That all changed Sunday. The weather office completely missed the fact that we had a November winter storm coming and we woke up Sunday morning to 10 cm of snow on the ground. But it wasn't the ground that was the problem. It would turn out that the Moncton municiple services were also caught napping and by church time the streets were still not cleared. I wasn't so bad in the city where the speeds are low but I was heading out McLaughlin Road to speak at a church in Dundas (about 20 - 25 minutes out on a day with good driving).

To make a long story short (or at least shorter) there is a steep hill about a third of the way to Dundas. It was packed snow and slush both up and down that hill and I could hear the slush sliding by the low slung floor of my little Kia Rio. I was pleased when I got past the hill and started up the next long slow incline. About a kilometer along there was a thick line of slush and as I drove over it the back end of the car came loose and I could feel the car swing around. I turned into the slide and got the car moving forward but unfortunately that forward direction was towards the ditch. I swung the steering wheel over and it was weirdly like the iceberg collision scene in Titanic where everything is sluggish and inevitable. In my case, the car swung around but kept sliding slowly toward the ditch and it ALMOST stopped but it had just enough momentum to push the center of mass over the edge of the road and then the car pretty much toppled sideways into the ditch!

Now, it is an extremely odd feeling to be sitting in your car while it is lying on it's side. The car was running and everything seemed fine except for the odd orthogonality of the gravitational reference system. Me? I'm fine ... a little freaked out but undamaged. So, I turn off the car and face my first problem: How do I get my weight off the seatbelt so I can unbuckle it? Clever use of leverage and ligaments allowed me to a) release the seatbelt and b) discover the seatbelt was holding me up. Now I am standing on the passenger side window (ominous cracking noise from the door) contemplating how to get out of the car. I grab the knapsack with my phone, laptop, Bible and preaching notes, crack open the driver side door and crawl up and out of the car.

So, now I am standing on the side of the road (a deserted, desolate road) in a snow storm up to my ankles in slush wearing dress shoes. But, a blessing of the age, I have a cell phone. So who do I call first? Would you believe I called the church to let them know I would not be able to speak that morning? I actually needed them to look up the phone number for a towing company too so that worked out OK. Now, at this time suddenly the road was alive with Good Samaritans. I was on the phone and a guy in a pick-up truck asked me if I wanted to use his cell phone. The next Good Samaritan in a mini-van asked me if there was anyone in the car and would I like a bottle of water. And so on ...

Finally a pick-up rolled up and it was the son of one of the members at the church I was going to speak at that morning. I got in his truck (my cold, wet feet were very thankful) and finished my phonecalls. It would be a half hour for the tow truck to show up and I was feeling a bit self conscious about how long my new friend would have to wait. That, and that fact that a solid stream of people were now stopping at the car and "investigating". Now was a crucial moment. It was clear that I was fine, the tow truck driver knew what he had to do without me and Anthony was patiently waiting with me. Well, what do you do? I said "Why don't we just head on out to Dundas and I will deliver the message like originally planned?" I mean, really, what point was there to waiting? So 15 minutes later I walk into church at exactly the point in the service where I was needed. I hooked my computer up to the LCD projector and gave the message. Just like that. Surreal.

In a weird post-script to this story. When I picked up the car the only real damage to the car was done by the tow truck driver. They checked the car over and the frame, engine, steering and suspension were all fine. There were dents to the passenger side panels front to back but that was it. The tow truck had broken the plastic over the rear bumper but apparently when I had asked them to tow the car there was an understanding that they would not be liable for any damage caused by the tow. Who knew?

A Time for a Change: Sabbatical Phase II

I have enjoyed the past four months at the bench. I would not say that I completed any individual project and therefore Phase I will blend with Phase II for at least a while. I was very pleased to find a project that appears to be new and also relevant. The fact that the starting materials could not be purchased pure and the lack of a good, in-house spectroscopic handle for the product means that everything that I did was dependant on creating and isolating crystalline compounds. In that sense the project was a failure. The work however revealed exactly what needs to be done for the project to go forward. I think I can do that over the next four months by going to UNB for two days a week to essentially work up reactions from previous weeks and set-up new reactions for the week. That will hopefully allow me to generate samples for spectroscopic analysis. The spectroscopic methods that I will hopefully will use will run the whole "spectrum" (if you will excuse the pun).

Uv-visible : the compounds are coloured and this will need to be done once we has isolated crystals of pure compounds. The spectra will show us what the pi systems in the double bonds are doing but this method is very sensitive to minor impurities if they are highly coloured. The challenge for this method is that we will need to make special cells so that samples dissolved in SO2 can be measured.

ESR (electron spin resonance) if the compounds have unpaired electrons then this method must be used to measure the environment that the unpaired electron lives in. In many ways this can be complementary to Uv-visible and both of these methods can be modelled by high level calculations.

Vibrational spectroscopy (IR; infra-red and Raman) these complementary methods are measured by dramatically different techniques but when combined gives a complete picture of all the molecular bonds in a chemical compound. IR is dead easy to measure with just about any heatlight source and a heat detector. Raman is a very different method and the main reason why Phase II will mostly occur at a different University. UNB is a two hour drive to the west from ABU while MtA is a half hour drive to the east. At MtA however they have just installed a research grade Raman instrument and it will be my job in this phase of my sabbatical to learn how to use the Raman and make some publication quality measurements with it. This will all be new work for me and I am looking forward to it.

If this sabbatical is going to generate publishable research it will happen in the next four months or not at all. So the pressure is on.

Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics

LINK: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php

As usual Jorge Cham has nailed the essence of the significance of the research done in most University Laboratories. In reality, if you actually do work that gets published, the paper will get read by a small group of people (no more than a 100 would be my guess). Most of them will go "Meh" and forget the work unless they are thinking of writing a review or a paper where you might review one of their manuscripts.
The university system is actually designed to train scientists not to really turn the scientific world upside down. We forget that when we continually ask professors "So when are you going to make Flubber anyway?". Still when you are hip deep in research and trying to convince yourself that the work is in someway relevant ... well it can all get a little delusional. It is good that we now have a test to get our heads back from the clouds.