Dream Brave
Hello World!
First of all, I hope everyone is staying safe. I’m sending positive mojo out to all of my readers.
I just wanted to post a little update and a few thoughts on the future direction of this website.
I haven’t written for some months now. I am pleased to see that the second blog post written in a “tutorial” style, entitled “Good Things Come in Threes“, appears to have resonated with a broad spectrum of readers. It has now been viewed 298 times (come on 300!), across at least 20 countries and 6 continents. It has also somewhat miraculously begun to appear among the top ten search hits on Google for the phrase “good things come in threes”.
I’m honored that you each take the time to visit the site. And I truly, deeply hope that that post has helped fellow researchers, scientists, and discoverers out there to keep making progress.
I myself am in the process of re-training to re-enter the job market (hopefully early Fall 2020) as a data scientist. I was fortunately already unemployed and had hunkered down to re-train myself by spending a significant portion of my time in online courses (thank goodness for things like Coursera) before global events hit.
So I have not suffered as hard as many. My heart goes out to you all.
In the mean time, I have not forgotten (nor will I ever) that discovery awaits!
Discovery still awaits…
Around the last time I posted I had hoped to be able to put together a paper for submission laying out the framework I am using to synthesize scientific discovery related strategies, tools, and behaviors.
Unfortunately, I have not been able to access a sufficient number of historical case studies to get a publication worthy paper together yet (no access to many of the academic papers needed, no money left in savings to buy books out of pocket, plus in-person library access for interlibrary loan isn’t feasible at the moment).
However, I am finding that much of the framework I have conceived of for scientific discovery is useful in the field of data science (a profession devoted to the expert gathering, handling, and manipulation of large quantities of data to discover trends and insights).
I realize now, of course it applies! Scientific discovery covers all the sciences. Sometimes when you’re a novice it’s easy to lose sight of the big picture.
Since people seem to have found some of the processes I use useful (if I take the visitor interest in the post “Good Things Come in Threes” as an indicator) I have decided to go ahead and create a series of posts detailing my scientific discovery framework in the hopes that it will help you now (while I slog toward getting the paper done in the future).
These upcoming posts will cover my working version of the scientific discovery process, discovery categories, discovery classes, and how I’m using those definitions to guide day-to-day work.
You will also start to see things being illustrated with data science examples (rather than neutrino physics ones) as this is my current focus. Also, I have been working on building tools to help me become a more insightful data scientist and I will attempt to share these (including a simple trick called the “Question Pinwheel” to help generate more thoughtful starting research questions and a process manual for running a data science project from start to finish). It’s my hope that through this first data science pre-test I can lay the foundation to adapt it to a more general science template for how to move through my work with a more discovery-centered focus. Hopefully you will find some of my tools and ideas helpful too.
So stay tuned!
…and we should all dream brave.
I’d like to end with a sentimental reflection:
When I was about 12 years old I got into my first (and only) fight at school.
It was during an art class. The teacher stepped out for quite some time. A well-known school bully, recently transferred from another school, came up to me when I got up to wash some paint brushes out in the sink.
He said he had heard a rumor that I wanted to be a physicist. As a kid, that was considered such an odd thing that people often added it to my name when they introduced me: “Have you met yet? This is Bernadette-who-wants-to-be-a-physicist-when-she-grows-up.”
The bully asked me, “What’s a physicist?”
I explained it to him. He stared at me for a while, then crossed his arms, and told me that if my father had any sense he would beat me until I knew I was just supposed to grow up and cook for my family.
I took offense and let my anger get the better of me. The bully and I ended up in a full-on fist fight.
I lost.
He knocked me to the ground, sat on me, and punched me until someone told him the teacher was coming back (the other students stayed out of it entirely). Later on, in a school bathroom, I confided to my best friend that I was just relieved he hadn’t punched me in the face or I would have gotten a nosebleed and my Mom would have found out (cat’s out of the bag now).
I could draw a lot of things out of this memory for you. But I only care about one thing right now:
That moment showed me that what I thought was just being a little kid, with a little kid’s dream, was actually dreaming brave.
I eventually became a physicist, fulfilling the little kid’s dream I had from age 5. I also became a writer. And now I’m working on becoming a data scientist.
Each of us is a once-in-a-universe-occurence.
You are a powerful thinking machine, an un-repeatable collection of experiences and thoughts and actions.
No matter what happens, always use a part of yourself to dream brave. The course of progress depends on it.
For now my dream is to use everything I’ve learned about scientific discovery to get up to speed quickly as a data scientist and perhaps be able to contribute to some of the open source data science projects trying to gather data and insights to help combat Covid-19, the novel coronavirus. (For example, Google is hosting open source projects on Kaggle that could use researchers with backgrounds in data, statistics, and computation, no medical degree required. Feel free to check it out if you think you might have something to contribute.)
The discoveries we need are out there waiting for us. But we all know that discoveries can only be made by the minds that pursue them.
So take this bit of advice from Bernadette-who-wants-to-become-an-insightful-scientist-when-she-grows-up:
Stay safe. And dream brave. We need all the world-changing discoveries you’re going to make.
Related Content on The Insightful Scientist:
Blog Posts
How to cite this post in a reference list:
Bernadette K. Cogswell, “Dream Brave – On the future direction of the website and the global current moment”, The Insightful Scientist Blog, June 4, 2020, https://insightfulscientist.com/blog/2020/dream-brave.
[Page feature photo: A tattoo of the world on the arm of a man in Dayton, Ohio, U.S.A. Photo by Don Ross III on Unsplash.]