You Broke It. (It may or may not be okay.)

This is to the undergrad staring at the protocol of the week in horror. Breathe. You will most likely mess it up. Instead of getting frustrated, breathe. It’s okay.

Yes, you should be able to follow basic instructions at this stage and making a mistake will probably cost you. BUT, it’s all right to make mistakes. Repeat after me: mistakes are how you learn (and also by reading protocols). Not a single person has ever made it in life without any mistakes; it just doesn’t happen. If they are saying that then they are lying liars with their pants on fire.

I couldn’t load my samples on the gel for weeks, I would always end up with horribly pierced wells (sideways, through and through you name it, I did it). And, this made me even more terrified to load the next gels. I felt useless in the lab, never mind that I was pretty good at other things. So one day, I said oh-screw-it after the umpteenth hint of “Try not to mess up the gel” and decided to cast, load and run the gel by myself. I messed up one well, but the others turned out right. My hands have long ceased to shake since then. (If they do, it’s probably because I have had two cups of coffee on an empty stomach.)

What I am trying to say is this, you will make mistakes. Some of them will be small and others big. But you should never be scared of doing things simply because you might make a mistake. Use each mistake as a learning platform.

I specified the undergraduate group, because as someone just starting out with her Honours Project, I wish someone had told me during my early BSc years that it was natural to make mistakes . Luckily in my 3rd year, my genetics TA pushed me hard enough to try out any protocol she gave me and then tweak it by myself. I still made mistakes, but I tried my best to learn from it.

Trial and error IS the scientific way of learning new things. So go forth young grasshopper and nosedive into the field…or don’t. Either way as long as you care about learning something then it’s okay. (And be nice to your lab technicians. Seriously, don’t piss them off by being rude; they are like the North and will always remember.)

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I am moving my posts from Medium where this was first published on May 16th 2014. I just want to keep all my posts in one place, hence this reposting. Happy pipetting folks!

Not Today, Facebook. Not Today.

Facebook dear, that is NOT how you conduct an experiment.

Turns out Facebook sneaked up on you during 2012 and decided to toss between turning your newsfeed into gloom and doom or a field of frolicking puppies. Well that description is far better than what the social networking site shoved on its users.

The experiment that happened, wanted to see if a particular emotion could be spread outside the realms of strictly in-person interactions. They exposed two groups of users (a staggering 689,003 sample number to be exact) to either reduced positive emotional content or reduced negative emotional content. This can be translated to imply that if you were a subject you were seeing less of either posts containing positive words or negative words as determined by the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count Software. [It isn’t clear to me if they selected solely based on the words used or included posts that lacked words but had media falling in either categories.]

I won’t discuss the results of the study but you can read the original paper here. I would like to talk about how grossly unethical this study was. The paper says and I quote

…It was consistent with Facebook’s Data Use Policy, to which all users agree prior to creating an account on Facebook, constituting informed consent for this research.

which is a heaping pile of lies. When a user signs up for a Facebook account they do not give you the permission to use them for stealth academic studies. Sure we know we will be exposed to certain ads tailored for us but the important thing is we KNOW it’s an ad, as The Laboratorium points out (go read it, it’s an excellent breakdown of the situation). What we don’t expect is to be offered up as experimental subjects without our knowledge.

For those of you not familiar with how studies like this are conducted, there is such a thing in research called ‘informed consent’. It boils down to a researcher explaining to you what the study includes, how it is going to be conducted along with any possible risks participating in the study may result in. They also explicitly tell you that you are free to remove yourself from the experiment at any given point because participation is voluntary. As in you volunteer yourself as tribute as opposed to being picked off a gathering and forced to take part in a study and then not even told that you were used. The latter is precisely the case here.

I have been a volunteer in quite a few psychology studies myself over the course of my psychology units and even afterwards. Every single time the participation was voluntary. A researcher would approach me and give a brief talk on the study and ask if I would be interested in joining. If Facebook was interested in this study all they had to do was send a simple message regarding the experimental methods, ask for informed consent and then give users the freedom to either opt out or take part in the study. But they didn’t.

Forget asking you out, Facebook wants to kidnap and pour slime on you and then ‘observe’ if you decide to go for a second date. To which I say, “Not today”.

Edit:

The results of the experiment are not in question, it's how they went about getting them that is. The end does NOT justify the means.

— Sneaky Science Lady (@HereBeNabila) June 29, 2014

 

Can We Talk About Mental Health Issues?

Let’s talk. Such a simple sentence and yet it carries such complexities with it. None more so when it is uttered in the context of mental health.

In an ideal world, mental health issues wouldn’t be stigmatised. In an ideal world, we wouldn’t have to fear that we are broken or beyond help. In an ideal world, I wouldn’t have to worry about being labelled by my depression just as I am not labelled by the hair-line fracture running the length of my metacarpal. But we don’t live in an ideal world. Ours is a fractured one, a terrifying battlefield of strewn limbs and shell-shocked minds.

Here is the paradox of this vow of silence, we need to talk about mental health issues. It is the only way we are going to have some semblance of control over ourselves. So this speak no evil, hear no evil business that we have going on with these issues? It needs to stop. And, we can stop it. We just need to talk and listen. If you have a moment (which I assume you do, or else you wouldn’t be here) listen to this video.

You are going to have to ask for help even if you think it’s all in your head. Actually, especially then. Talk to the campus counsellors, your close friends or use websites such as the Black Dog Institute or Every Day Health to ask for help and advice. Despite the stigma against visiting your campus counsellor that may be present in your peer group, go to them. Make an appointment and explain to them how you are feeling. Yes, you may feel embarrassed to talk about your triggers or the situation at hand, but it’s better if you can be as honest as possible. Not to mention, try to keep up with your appointments. [I made the mistake of dropping out of them when I felt I was getting somewhere, which turned out to be a colossal mistake.] More often than not they will try their best to lend you a hand when you feel like you are drowning.

Speaking of drowning, know the signs. Do you often feel like you don’t have any life eft in you to drag yourself out of bed for days? No, it is most likely not laziness. Most of us are quite capable of separating our usual procrastination from that hollow feeling in our bones. Talk to other people. Figure out how they manage their symptoms. If it turns out that you have to be on medications, do not feel ashamed or as though you are somehow less of a person for getting help. Different people have different biochemistry and there is no singular prescription for any mental health issues. Like any other adjustments, this too is a trial and error process.

My mother has a saying that she likes to repeat in times of trouble:

Life will be daunting. You are still going to live through it.

You too will live through this.

Paranoia and Aliens. RUN!

A slight touch of paranoia could have helped the crew of Prometheus. I mean, who takes a casual two and a half-year long stroll through space to meet their ‘makers’ and not expect even the tiniest hint of the ever potent parental eyebrow raising? Or that our existence has as much meaning as we choose to pour into it, which is a nicer way of saying on a grand scale we resemble specks of dust: pretty to look at when caught in a stray beam of sunlight but a pain to get rid of. I am going to side with the android in this case and repeat his sentiments on the rocky relationship between creation and creator: we create because we can. There is no grander scheme in play, no deeper meaning in watching a crawling species take its first step other than the curiosity that has driven our thirst to know more, to peel back the skin and prod at the flesh. Perhaps it’s this bitter disappointment in finding that we were merely just another toy for a bored child we begin to hate our creator with even more passion. Like a child asking their parent why they aren’t good enough to love.

I feel I should specify that when I talk of creator or creation it’s entirely from a philosophical point and has more to do with my musings from the film as opposed to any particular religion.

So where were we before this detour into creator and creation? Ah yes, paranoia. As many of you know I am more or less a paranoid being. My backup plans have their own backup plans, or so I like to say. And justifiably so. Some of the burden of this sense of paranoia lies with my anxiety disorder, or is it the other way around? One may never know. What I do know is this: after watching Prometheus this week I am kind of glad I have that nagging voice at the back of my head telling me to have an exit strategy planned. It doesn’t have to be a concrete plan, it just has to have the barebones to work when shit hits the fan, which it eventually will (this is basically what my brain thinks by default). In my case the assurance of a Plan B can be more comforting than the original plan succeeding. It is a rather bizarre notion to understand if you don’t have a similar worst-case-scenario mapped in your head for most things.

I’ll be honest, it is a pain to unintentionally wait for the other shoe to drop. It takes a toll on your mind and at times on your relationship with other people. But, and this is a rather big but for me: it helps as well. And not just to high tail out of your alien overlord’s house. I am far more prepared to power down and rethink my strategies while I tweak existing backup plans to make something work. This applies to anything from a lab protocol to my day-to-day budgeting. Hell, it even works when I am going out for the night with a strip of paracetamol in my purse. I don’t usually get the muscle ache that comes from dancing on heels but like I said, one may never know.

So if you share a similar state of paranoia on all things outside your realm of control, make yourself a nice cup of vanilla chai latte and take comfort that should our alien overlords come to smack some sense into us, you will probably last a few minutes longer than most because you knew to look behind you for scaly, tall creatures with rows of teeth. Just a thought.

Don’t be Smart

No, seriously don’t. If you have had good grades most of your life and despite your bouts of depression scored better than most of your class, people are always going to say you are making your depression up. I have been told that exact same thing.

“Oh but you don’t seem to be struggling with work?!”

“Attention seeker much?”

“She just can’t deal with not being good” (Which is ironic)

All through my O and A-levels and for the last 3 years in my Bachelors degree I have scored consistently better than most. But that doesn’t mean that I am making up my depression. It’s like if you are smart (in the grades sense at least) you are going to have crash and burn to ‘prove’ to people you have depression. Just so they can say “Well you need to buckle up. Will power blah blah.”

Give me a break! I didn’t get out of my dorm room for over a MONTH other than to get take away or use the wash room. I am someone who genuinely enjoys cleaning, mostly cause my dust allergy is horrible. And that same me spent over a month in a room where dust and hair layered the floor. If I could travel back to four months ago I would hug that me, because it breaks my heart. Yes, I scored better than most, because some topics are easier for me (Genetics for instance) but I didn’t nearly do half as good as I would have w/o depression. I am postponing starting my Honours course by a semester because I need the time. I am a private person who won’t put up a facebook status saying I am depressed or I want to kill myself. Nor will I want to cry in public in front of strangers. (Except that one time I broke down on a beach before the Hospital on my way to my friend’s place). But nooooo I am making it up because my academic career doesn’t resemble a complete war zone.

In other news, it’s been 16 days I have been on ProDep and Xanax. They seem to be working well, haven’t had a single episode (even with my Mother in hospital), it’s like a cotton wall in my brain.

Palm meet Face

I didn’t think I would be writing about this of all the things in the world, but well clearly I was wrong… as per usual.

My mother had the Fine Needle Aspiration Cytology (FNAC) test done yesterday for a small disk-shaped lump on her breast. This is because of regular pain and that my youngest aunt at the age of 40 has been diagnosed with Stage 3 breast cancer leading to her having to undergo mastectomy and chemotherapy this month. [Fun year 2013 has been]. We are waiting for the official results but they have their ‘suspicions’.

There has to be a limit to all the horrible things the universe can throw at us, but apparently not.

So, tired and exhausted. But can NOT afford to dissolve into panic and my recurring bad days because my father keeps pointedly telling me to ‘stay strong’. Which is code for ‘you are the eldest child, you can’t be not normal, especially now’. So chin up it is and with digging my nails (blunt now because my sister worries) into my palm and forearms, I should survive.