#R1 drone

[voidmountain]

@piratedllama I can but you’re not going to like it!

Void’s guide to getting a job in conservation

My story

My educational credentials: BAs in philosophy and creative writing from a big cheap state school, and a PhD in English literature with a specialization in environmental humanities from a small private R1. Couple years as an adjunct professor.

I trained my entire life to be a literature professor. It’s all I ever wanted. By the time I was finishing my doctorate, I had a very limiting belief that I was either over- or underqualified for any job outside academia. I was wrong.

By the time I made the decision to leave academia, I had published 2.5 peer reviewed academic articles and several magazine pieces. I also had about 5ish years of part-time communications consulting under my belt from helping run the writing center at my institution. I got a part-time social media/SEO management gig, and then used a grant to fund a comms internship at a local environmental nonprofit. Then I straight up just applied to jobs at conservation orgs on LinkedIn at a rate or 5 per week for about 6 months. I was looking for jobs in communications and education. Landed a couple interviews then got a position as a comms manager. My islander heritage ended up being relevant too bc I have a cultural insight into the regions where the org works. I’ve worked here for about a year, mostly wfh desk stuff, but I like to tag along to projects so I can take pics/do interviews/help with fieldwork/coordinate community meetings & info sessions. I still have a publishing career on the side, with 2 new articles out and a book manuscript in the works.

I do not recommend doing it this way lol.

What I would do instead

Conservation orgs have room for people with all kinds of backgrounds and expertise. If your goal is to have a job similar to mine, get lots of writing and science communication experience. Be able to show that you’ve built impactful campaigns and learn your way around SEO and communications terminology. Start with internships/social media, try and get some experience working with journalists, and have a nice portfolio of campaigns (easy way to start is an awareness campaign for a particular policy or science issue). Other creative experience is a plus (photography/graphic design/web design/UI).

Fieldwork is not that hard to get into. You can get field experience as an undergrad by working in research labs or volunteering. From there, lots of conservation orgs in your area are probably looking for volunteers or part-time workers to do field monitoring. TBH you don’t really need a degree to get into fieldwork, but the ceiling is kind of low without one. With a BS you can work your way up through an org probably to a manager level position where you could lead a field team but not direct a program. Generally, without a MS or PhD, you won’t be designing programs—just carrying them out, which can be really rewarding. You can also make lateral moves towards things like project management—coordinating supplies, transportation, methods, and problem-solving stuff.

Other ways to get into the field: orgs often contract out conservation tech companies to carry out specialized operations, like aerial monitoring and bait distribution. Getting a license for like a heavy-lift drone, an ROV, or boat stuff can also get you in the thick of it.

If you want to design and direct conservation programs, unfortunately you probably need to go to grad school. I can write up a separate post about how to decide whether to pursue an advanced degree if people are interested, but my general advice is Never Enroll In A Masters Program. Either do it as a 4+1 with your undergrad or go straight for the PhD. That’s where you’ll get experience designing your own experiments and contributing to the sum of conservation knowledge.

Extremely important caveat

You do not have to do any of these things in any particular order. It’s totally cool to work in the field for a couple years before going back for the PhD. You also do not need to link your education to your job (god knows I didn’t). My side hobbies of wildlife photography and scuba diving made me a great candidate for the job I eventually got, and they didn’t have anything to do with my degree or original career path. There’s also a million other jobs that conservation orgs have that don’t involve having a science background at all—HR, finance, admin, philanthropy, consulting, & policy analysis are huge parts of this. So are other jobs that aren’t *within* conservation at all, like journalism & social organizing.

A lot of folks I meet out here in the conservation world are on their third or fourth careers. It’s very, very normal to switch it up, try many things, land somewhere, leave, and pick up somewhere else.

All this to say: the world is really, really big. Don’t feel pressured to take the shortest most linear possible path. There are a million ways to have a good life.

[mirikitzu]

MURDER DRONES OC TIMEU!!! >;3

"Serial Designation M1-R1, ready to serve! Er... SHOOT, I'M SUPPOSED TO BE KILLING YOU-!!!1! STAY STILL!!1!1!"

[strawberrydracos]

Playing Ace Combat 7

Started playing the game today! I'll go little by little and updating this post through reblogs sksksksks

@technoblade-apologist-and-proud this is for you buddy, since you asked :] Starting with Mission 1 and 2 today

(Putting stuff on read more bc I get a little self concious of long posts)

First impressions of the game upon opening it: Menu music is beautiful "Wow this is so. Graphic design. Wow." upon seeing the actual menus "Why do we have cowboy music on the cutscene?" Girl talking about loving the color of the sky instantly made me remember the damn "Don't you love the color of the sky? / Which one?" classic tumblr post. "That plane looks like a tesla" upon seeing the drone in the cutscene Started laughing for a whole minute when rave music started playing in the plane selection screen before the mission.

Right out of the bat we start Mission 1 with DEATH from controller. I didn't know what to press and the screen only told me about R2 to accelerate so I killed myself by crashing on the end of the take off thingie. This was a warning to what was about to come.

I need to publicly apologize to every Ace Combat fan that has ever lived because inverted controls make me feel insane so I had to "invert" them back to normal. I am very sorry. I have failed you all. Don't look at me.

Anyways, first mission went TERRIBLY. WHO have me a license. I was DRUNK driving in the skies. Absolutely dogshit piloting skills. I didn't know it did a neat little replay of the mission at the end + the replay with the tiny lowpoly planes. Humiliating. Everyone was flying to neatly and I looked like I was using my plane for a ribbon dance.

As someone that played Drakengard on the ps2 and Armored Core on the ps4: Piloting a plane is much more similar to riding a dragon than piloting a mech.

There's a lot going on in the cutscenes, the story seems cool and I have an idea of it already but by god they just feel so goofy sometimes, very silly, I am very lost.

Second mission started terribly as well, I still fly like I'm drunk, I died at least 5 times because I turned a little too much and crashed on the ground. At some point when I was managing to stay alive I thought I was gonna fail from the time running out because I just couldn't hit the targets.

Also. Did you know? In Armored Core you press X, Square and O for boosting and movement, and L1/L2 R1/R2 for your weapons. Ace Combat is the opposite. I've been playing Armored Core for a month already. My brain is having a hard time trying to grasp the controllers, somebody help me.

Second half of this mission went better than the first half bc I *am* learning but by god. I died once because I hit the ground again, I keep doing it, my pilot craves the safety of the ground. It was a nightmare trying to get to the targets to properly hit them but I did manage to do it.

All and all? Game is pretty fun! It will be a challenge to actually learn how to play, specially with expert controls, but that's the fun of every game, learning and mastering!

Had to stop for today but I'll reblog this once I play more :]

[tech-obssessed-shark]

Insert Intro Placeholder

Warning: Contrary to my transformers banner and my transformers pfp and my 559 transformers posts(at the time of June 12,2024) this is NOT a transformers blog but a little space where i get a little silly goofy- So follow me at your own risk

—————————————————————— I’ll work on this eventually but for now-

I lost my gender in the war(masc they/them) - AroAce(but women pretty)

Literally neurodivergent and a minor(16+), like im baby, IM A MINOR!!!! LIKE ORION PAX AND D-16!!!!

OBSESSIONS RIGHT NOW(meaning I will post/reblog about them a lot): TRANSFORMERS and One Piece

Interests include: Transformers, Tmnt, Star wars, Star trek, Lego Monkie kid, Splatoon, The Owl House, Spooky Month, Murder Drones, Monkey Wrench, and lots of other things

Favorite Characters include: Breakdown, Soundwave, Swerve, Whirl, Waspinator, Blitzwing, Ratchet, Perceptor, Prowl, Strongarm, Blurr, Donatello Hamato, Cassandra Jones, Garazeb Orelios, Tech, Wrecker, Savage Opress, AP-5, IG-11, R1-J5(Bucket), CB-23, K-2SO, Redson, Mei, Mr. Tang, MK, Princess Iron Fan, Spider Queen, Scorpion Queen, Marie, Marina, Pearl, Frye, Acht, Spock, Gus Porter, Abed Nadir, etc.

I am most know for my favorite character being SWERVEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Basically anything Sci-Fi really-

I mainly post about Transformers, art, funny things, and whatever else I am obsessed with-(Multifandom blog)- I have been starting to watch ONE PIECE I KNOW THE ONE PIECE IS REAL

I now post my art under the tag of “Techshark art” to help me organize things-

IF YOU FOLLOW ME FOR A SPECIFIC FANDOM- I post/reblog about literally anything so be warned! My interests will infect you!

For Transformers Drawing References:

If you want me to post some refs of a character, just ask! I'll try to do my best! The tag is below too-

[ariesgamesandminis]

Restocks are up from Iron Wind Metals for BattleTech!

10-043 Support Lance 20-331 Mad Cat III 20-351 Targe TRG-1N 20-396 Avatar AV1-O Prime 20-410 Malak C-MK-O Invictus 20-412 Grigori C-GRG-O Invictus 20-413 Archangel C-ANG-O Invictus 20-420 Behemoth II Tank 20-425 Shiro SH-P 20-5018 Karhu KHU-R1 20-5019 Kestrel VTOL 20-5022 Blade BLD-XL 20-5122 Tenshi TN-10-O Prime 20-5127 Flashman FLS-8K Resculpt 20-5153 Uziel UZL-2S 20-5181 Jupiter 3 20-600RE Vulture "Mad Dog" Prime 20-710 Transgressor Fighter TR-13 20-753 Schrek PPC Carrier (2) 20-800 Hex Bases (4) 20-804 Crab CRB-27 20-809 Mauler MAL-1R 20-816 Vedette Tank (2) 20-895 Exterminator EXT-4D 20-935 Axman AXM-2N 20-938 Mars Assault Vehicle (Standard) 20-994 Marauder MAD-5L 99-201 Large Flat Top Hex Base #1 AC-003 Hover Base BT-004 Afreet Battle Armor BT-005 Grenadier Battle Armor BT-008 Void Battle Armor BT-066 Scout ATV BT-125 Star Lord Jumpship BT-239 Jump Support Infantry BT-240 SpecOps Paratrooper BT-244 Heavy Infantry - Standing BT-245 Heavy Infantry - Firing BT-292 Shiro SH-2P BT-293 Hitotsume Kozo HKZ-1P BT-366 Hover Scout Drones BT-371 Davion Infantry (3) BT-372 Savannah Master Hovercraft BT-427 Balac Strike VTOL (Standard) & (LRM) BT-436 Buraq (Standard) Battle Armor CE-003 No-Dachi 3X OP-026 Loki H LRM 15 OP-044 Black Hawk C / Ryoken D Right Arm OP-118 Marauder MAD-3D, 5S, and 5T Gun Sprue 20-373D Dasher "Fire Moth" Prime Missile Launcher and Skirt Sprue 20-5189C Catapult CPLT-C3 / C5 Arm Sprue 20-741A J-27 Tow Vehicle Tractor Body 20-741B J-27 Tow Vehicle Trailer Body 20-959LTA Templar Left Arm 20-959RTA Templar Right Arm

[lesopilkapirojok]

it feels so weird to see sw content now. like, i’m not done with sw but i got into it with r1 and later tcw in such a specific time in my life, it was an all-consuming fandom in the last year when i was healthy and later when i got ill and lost a lot of things i was working for it was a thing that brought me solace and escape. now it became a thing from /before/. something from normal life. something that i’m looking forward to return to when THIS is over. like a bottle of blackcurrant cider i keep in my fridge for the day motherfucker dies.

another reason i don’t watch or read anything sw anymore is, well. can’t have separatism, slave army and drone warfare in my escapist fantasy.

[random2908]

The thing to bear in mind is that while the NIF isn't any good at making power, it's brilliant at providing a situation close enough to an H bomb going off that you can validate your numerical models against it. It's a greenwashed MIC facility.

This is a take I've occasionally heard before. I have a lot of thoughts about it, and about the slightly tangential issue of funding and intellectual purity.

Yes, you're right. The NIF has been involved in H-bomb stuff in the past and probably will be again in the future. Let's get that out on the table where we can all see it first.

But that doesn't mean that that's what this project is about, necessarily. And even if it is, that doesn't mean that the results are unusable.

Because you'd be hard-pressed to find any physics lab in the entire US that you couldn't call a military-industrial complex facility in some capacity. My doctorate was basic experimental physics, just pushing knowledge forward, trying to get journal publications--typical university stuff. The professor wasn't even a US citizen! And neither were about 1/4 of the students. Nevertheless, the lab was funded by an NSF grant, an Air Force grant, an Army grant, and a Department of Energy grant. That's half military funding. Which of those paid your tuition and stipend depended on which project you were on and whether you were a US citizen, but any one of them might be buying your experimental equipment. For that matter, professors needed to get military money because they were only allowed to have one NSF grant at a time, and one grant can only support about two graduate students--you couldn't even hope to get tenure at an R1 school with only two graduate students.

Hell, my dad's PhD on, like, frog embryology was entirely funded by the Army back in the 1970s/80s. Why? The stated reason was that during the Cold War they had a program to pay for as many US citizens to get PhDs in science and science-adjacent fields as possible, and they couldn't care less what those people were actually researching. Who knows what they actually wanted, although I think they funded my dad before even knowing what he'd be studying. But in any case, there wasn't any obvious military use to my dad's research.

At my last job, the company's revenue came from NSF, various defense agencies, a major private defense contractor, and then maybe like 0.5% our own sales since we were just a startup. In total I think about 80-90% of our revenue came from the Department of Defense, one way or another; we were unambiguously MIC. But we were making safety-testing equipment and communications equipment. Of course the military cares about both those things, but it's not as though we had an exclusivity contract with them, and we were making it with civilian customers in mind.

So, yeah, nearly all science in the US exists within the MIC. And the reason for that is that Congress allocates a hell of a lot more money to the military than to science. The vast, vast majority of science, worldwide, is government-funded, even in private industry. (Maybe this is less true in pharma? I really don't know, but certainly more of it is government-funded than they like to let on.) So, in the US, if you want to do anything science-related--commercial or academic--sooner or later you're going to talking to the military.

But in the end, that means you can't necessarily judge science from where its funding is coming from. When I was getting my PhD, my attitude was, if the Air Force was paying for me and my lab partner to go to school, study basic science, and publish in academic journals--great! That was money they were spending on completely innocent work and the advancement of human knowledge instead of on drones. Congress may have misallocated the money by giving it to the DoD in the first place, but here it is, coming back to entirely civilian endeavors. That's a win, as far as I'm concerned.

It's different at the NIF because they do have a history of genuine weapons research. I absolutely agree with that, you can't say it's a fully innocent project. But given how entangled (no pun intended) literally all physics research is with the MIC--due entirely to Congressional funding priorities--I personally think we should take the win when there are potential civilian applications.

Also, write to Congress about allocating more science funding! Every little bit of extra funding helps in disentangling basic science from the MIC.

[leroymilo]

Duskers run #1: survives long enough to visit 3 galaxies, finally find a transporter, start exploring a small space station, has to put an enemy in r1 to free a room, planning on putting it somewhere else, OH MY GOD WHAT IS THIS WHERE DOES IT COME FROM IT WASNT HERE BEFORE ITS GOING TO DESTROY ALL MY DRONES AND MY SHIP IS TAKEN BY AN ENEMY oh, it's chill, it doesn't move, let me dock elsewhere to get rid of the guy in my ship... OH MY GOD ITS SPREADING AAAAAAAAH (1 drone down, another stuck, I can't get the enemy out of my ship, it kills all my drones). I exit, I have backup drones but most of my upgrades are gone, I only have enough fuel to explore a single base (my first with transporter). I board it, I learn how to use the transporter, it's cool, oh my god I forgot to make a new generator, I'm dead. Duskers run #2: not used to not having all my upgrades, instantly loses all drones on another spreading thing.

[galoretechs]

11 Tech Essential Gadgets That We Think Youll Love

11 Tech Essential Gadgets That We Think You’ll Love ❤️ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IKybW3tdLQ 11 Tech Essential Gadgets That We Think You’ll Love ❤️ As new technologies take over the world more & more. We gathered 11 essential gadgets from near and far for you to consider buying. From smart sunglasses to talking robots these gadgets will change the way humans interact with one another as well as the world. Products: =================================== ================================= 🔔 Join Galore Techs to watch more content on innovative Ideas and Technology: https://www.youtube.com/@galoretechs ✅ Stay Connected With Us. ============================= Time Stamps: 0:00 - Intro 0:19 - C SEED folding TV 1:11 - Y-brush 1:50 - WiRobotics WIM Robot 2:52 - Lotus: Ring 3:52 - Rabbit R1 4:54 - Cocoa Press 3D Chocolate Printer 5:57 - Linxura Smart Controller 6:56 - Leia Glasses-free 3D screens 7:32 - German Bionics Apogee+ exoskeleton 8:21 - US Drone Soccer 9:09 - Palmplug ============================= 👉Facebook: https://ift.tt/1M6FJUm 👉Instagram: https://ift.tt/ZJ9m4XP 👉Tiktok: https://ift.tt/hbZAeWc ✅ For Business Inquiries: galoretechs@gmail.com ============================= ✅ Music Credits: Music from InAudio: https://inaudio.org/ Track Name: Future Vlog [Technology Music] by MokkaMusic / Abstract Future • (No Copyright Music) F... Music provided by "MokkaMusic" channel and https://inaudio.org Track: Good Times - Ason ID [Audio Library Release] Music provided by Audio Library Plus Watch: • • Good Times - Ason ID |... Free Download / Stream: https://ift.tt/9Svjk0G ✅ Recommended Playlists 👉Movies Tech Reviews: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIz67rSO6VqKMpli3v483CbwEY_PeFPmt 👉List of New Technologies: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIz67rSO6VqLiHMsSI028gKBiOtXgiF-C ✅ Other Videos You Might Be Interested In Watching: 👉The Future of Creativity: Understanding the Rise of Generative AI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbbJw8GWdjk 👉The Secrets Behind Creed III: Unveiling the Hidden Tech https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sY4rkDoE-oI 👉TOP 12 Emerging Tech Trends of 2023 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSQlYg9TXxk 👉A Vivid Multidimensional Film: Is Across the Spider-Verse the FUTURE of Animated Movies? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcxdmahh3WQ ============================= ✅ About Galore Techs. Galore Techs does its best to present you with new gadgets, tech ideas, and technological advancements to look out for in the upcoming future. This channel is meant to be educational and informative about how these new technologies will change the world as we know it. “The Web as I envisaged it, we have not seen it yet. The future is still so much bigger than the past.” -Tim Berners-Lee, Inventor of the World Wide Web. Are you curious about science and technology? Want to learn more about the technology of the past, present, and future? Subscribe to our channel. For Collaboration and Business inquiries, please use the contact information below: 📩 Email: galoretechs@gmail.com 🔔Subscribe for more videos on new gadgets, tech ideas, and technological advancements: https://www.youtube.com/@galoretechs ================================= #GaloreTechs #Technology #Innovation #innovativegadgets #coolgadgets #amazongadgets #mindblowingtech #futuristicinnovations #emergingtech #aiadvancements #techideas Disclaimer: We do not accept any liability for any loss or damage incurred from you acting or not acting as a result of watching any of our publications. You acknowledge that you use the information we provide at your own risk. Do your own research. Copyright Notice: This video and our YouTube channel contain dialog, music, and images that are the property of Galore Techs. You are authorized to share the video link and channel and embed this video in your website or others as long as a link back to our Youtube Channel is provided. �� Galore Techse via Galore Techs https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTyjV2lcEUMfTz4lxuB1ukg February 25, 2024 at 10:19PM

[sw5w]

Yo Bana Pee Ho-tah, Meendee Ya

STAR WARS EPISODE I: The Phantom Menace 00:46:06

[chriswick47]

British Eyes Above: Unveiling the Surveillance Missions Recent investigative reporting by Declassified UK has brought to light a signficiant uptick in the UK’s involvement, as they’ve conducted a staggering 50 surveillance missions over Gaza since December. Departing from the contentious RAF Akrotiri airbase in Cyprus, these missions have become a near-daily occurrence, averaging one flight per day.

[lyri-da-suprstar]

Last song: Messages from the stars- The Rah Band

Favourite Colour: It changes but rn Blue, Purple or Yellow

Currently watching: Invader Zim(yes the original series NOT the movie)

Last movie: Kiki's Delivery Service

Currently reading: Nothing by Parmenides (JK im just not reading anything rn tho)

Spicy, Sweet or Savory?: SWEET(I LOVE SUGARRR)

Relationships: What's that?????

Current Obsessions: TADC, FPE, Billie Bust Up, Chikn Nuggit, Murder Drones, Villainous, Rottmnt, Invader Zim and many more :)

Last googled: How to socialize(...I think this is pretty self-explanatory)

Currently working on: My 12 stories yippee(this is also a cry for help, SO HELP PLS AAA-)

[I would also like to get to know you too @yunfox00 :D👍]

@r1-ka @zzzubie @nina-noot-noot @the-man-who-goes-and-reads123 @liongrl321 @jazzythebow (i cant think of any more lol)

No pressure btw

Nine people I want to get to know better

Tysm @444rockstargf for the tag!!

Last song: In the air tonight- Phil Collins

Favorite Color: Forest green

Currently Watching: Supernatural

Last movie: Fallen (1998)

Currently Reading: Carrie by Stephen King and a Dean Winchester fic called As it Was on Wattpad

Sweet, Spicy, or Savory?: Spicy 100%

Relationship: Single as FUCK

Current Obsession: Scripting for/thinking about my drs (specifically all my ones for Rory Characters and my Dean Winchester dr)

Last googled: Dean Winchesters birthday (notice a pattern??)

Currently working on: A request from a very dear friend +lots of fic ideas

Tags (sorry if you’ve already been tagged, no pressure <3): @kappasbbgirl @iiheartsai @facingreailitysgravity @angelsanarchy @wildathevrt @svgarcaine @strawberrybyers @violetshazard @k1mdr4cul4

[prop4drones]

Skydio R1: Get your hands on the first truly autonomous consumer drone — for $2,500

While many drones over the past several years have promised “autonomous” flight, very few have actually delivered. Even the latest drone from industry leader DJI, the Mavic Air, only offers relatively limited sense-and-avoid capabilities. 

The Skydio R1 brings the futuristic possibility of drones being able to fly all on their own one step closer to the present. Founded by MIT grads, the 4 year old silicon valley company isn’t just promising some far-out concept: they’re selling the R1 today for $2,499. Though that is an eye-wateringly high price tag (especially considering that it only has a 16 minute flight time and 300′ range from the smartphone) Skydio isn’t isn't targeting people who like to fly drones — and the R1 packs some serious specs to support its truly autonomous flight:

256-core Nvidia Jetson GPU “supercomputer”

Quad-core 64-bit ARM CPU

4GB RAM

12 navigation cameras for omnidirectional vision

The Skydio Autonomy Engine

4 IMUs

Along with all the tech to make the R1 truly autonomous, it also features a 4k/30fps capable camera mounted on a 2-axis gimbal. Utilizing the app users can choose one of several different follow modes and then have the drone track them at speeds up to 25mph. Once the R1 lands, you can begin to create a video from the captured footage, even syncing the audio from your phone.

If you’ve got $2,500 to spend and are interested in checking out a brand new technology in the drone space, head on over to Skydio’s website to find out more or purchase the R1.

[3dworldcompany]

Skydio, a company focused on intelligent flight technologies, has just released their first fully autonomous flying camera drone, named R1. What sets it apart from all the other similar devices is that it’s able to track and follow individuals at speeds of up to 40 kilometers per hour all the while recording videos in 4k resolution and avoiding obstacles. The technology used in it isn’t exactly new but the way it was implemented by Skydio makes the drone look much more impressive than anything available on the market before it.

R1 has a variety of work modes and 13 onboard cameras that allow it to shoot videos from different angles. It's controlled by AI software - Skydio Autonomy Engine, which runs on an NVIDIA Jetson and analyzes the flight data, learning how to better predict the motion of the person it’s following. It can also be used as a standard camera drone by controlling it manually through its smartphone app.

As seen from the video released by Skydio, the way their device tracks and follows its master is strikingly smooth and clever, which allows for some really impressive footage; however the price tag for the gadget currently standing at $ 2500 makes it a very narrow niche product. Still, it will undoubtedly find fans among the tech enthusiasts and people with an active lifestyle. And even though having an AI-controlled flying drone following you everywhere might unnerve some people, most should agree that it’s a fascinating and advanced piece of technology.

http://3dworld.com.ua/en/blogs/skydio-launches-their-autonomous-flying-drones-142/

[bytesnbolts]

(( @broken-tactician ))

Something or someone had triggered Nitroxide’s shiny new sensors on the Neutron’s outer perimeter. Starprowler was out on a scouting mission, Solar Pax merged with a database they’d recently recovered, and Nanostorm was on mandatory recharge. Which left her or Powerhouse to go make contact with the unknown, and Powerhouse wasn’t always the best at judgement. Of course, if it was an organic, Nitroxide absolutely could not go given her inability to transform.

:: Rivet, please go out to inspect the perimeter ping and make sure your optical feed is on. ::

:: Affirmative. ::

Rivet [R1- R6] deployed, their holo-riders perched on top of their alt. modes as they tore off in the direction of the ‘intruder’.  

If it was another organic trying to poke around and film in their not-so-abandon headquarters again, Nitroxide wasn’t sure what she was going to do. It had been hard enough to get rid of the last “urban explorer”. Hopefully, a ‘biker gang’ would scare this one off, if it was an organic.

If it wasn’t, Rivet could handle themselves and call for back-up if necessary.

Nitroxide settled into the make-shift seat Shamble had managed to scrape together for her ‘lab’. It wasn’t as nice as her captain chair in the Dreadnought; it didn’t have the protective shielding or multiple displays to help her with the drone feed. They couldn’t waste energy like that now.

Her optic faded while she patched into the drones.

[eponymous-rose]

(I’d rather this not be reblogged, just in case!)

I’ve had a funny conversation a couple of times this week, once with my cousin and once with my physical therapist, so I thought it might be fun to go over this: when I mentioned I wasn’t teaching this quarter, they both stared at me in shock and said, “And you’re still getting paid?” To be fair, I absolutely would’ve asked the same question before I started. This job is so weird I never would’ve guessed what all falls under it! 

So here’s a little glimpse into what goes on in this particular professorship:

So, hey, there are different ranks of professor. I’m an “assistant professor”, which is about as junior as it’s possible to get, but I won the dang lottery and somehow finagled my way into getting the words “tenure-track” tacked on before that. This means that over the next six years, everything I do will be scrutinized (culminating in a "summary” of several thousand pages reporting on every single aspect of my job performance), and at the end of it, after about nine months of progressively higher-ranked people in the university voting and deliberating, I have a chance to be granted tenure, which comes with a promotion to associate professor rank and Extreme Job Security. The criteria here are basically being able to prove that I’m one of the foremost experts in my field in the country and hitting research/service/teaching goals, and I’ll talk a bit about that in a second here. Promotion (often many years later) to full professor requires proof of being one of the foremost experts in the field on the planet.

Also, if you don’t get tenure, you get fired after that six-year period. Some universities are dicks and hire three or four assistant professors for every tenured position they want to fill and just fire the spares after getting six years of work out of them. My university has an extremely high tenure rate (mainly because anyone who seems unlikely to make tenure will either have some sort of intervention on their behalf, be granted an extra year to make up the difference, or will be asked to quietly resign before deliberations start), and my department hasn’t denied anyone tenure in decades.

So! What the hell do I do? Well, universities in the U.S. that are particularly research-heavy are referred to as “R1 universities”, which is the situation I’m in here. This means that the majority (often the vast majority) of my time is not spent teaching: it’s all about doing research, to the point where I will not be teaching more than one class simultaneously. In my field, that research can look like a lot of different things:

There are indeed people who work with beakers and range hoods and snazzy lab coats: these researchers in my field might be doing stuff like growing snowflakes in the lab and using that information to figure out the conditions under which different kinds of snow can form. Also there’s chemistry? I don’t know this side of it too well. Professors’ roles here, apart from the science, include ordering the right equipment (which includes getting quotes from various suppliers) and hiring lab technicians and folks to keep the equipment up and running.

Some folks do intense numerical modeling: if you’re studying the atmosphere, you can’t just try your experiment on one Earth and compare how it’s different on another Earth, since we only have the one, so what we do instead is use the most powerful supercomputers on the planet to create simulations. These can be as detailed as looking at the flow of dust in the millimeters above the ground, or as broad as simulating the whole atmosphere of the entire planet (or other planets!). On top of the science, these professors often have to negotiate for supercomputer time (a precious commodity), purchase massive computational resources (e.g., a server room hosted locally), and sometimes hire dedicated I.T. support just for their research.

I work a lot with large datasets: if we have information about the conditions under which tornadoes happened over the past 15 years, what patterns can we pick up that forecasters might be able to use? What is physically, fundamentally different about tornadoes that happen in different places? This kind of stuff really just needs a decently specced desktop machine and some know-how, and a lot of research in our field involves sitting and thinking. Also in this category is the pure math and physics work in the field, where people bury themselves in impossible-to-solve equations to try to figure the best way to wrench them into things we can solve. This is probably the closest to what most people think of when they hear “research”.

Fieldwork. Think Twister. Coordinating large numbers of people, who may be on the ground, driving, in the air, in the ocean. Also, coordinating instruments that might be stationary or might be buoys or drones or something else. We’re a public university; we don’t have the cash to buy our own airplanes, so profs in this scenario have to rent time on research aircraft owned by organizations like NASA or NOAA, or rent time on boats, or hire folks to develop and build new instruments. Massive amounts of organization goes into this, and all stages from inception to execution are generally overseen and organized by the professor.

When any or all of these approaches come up with groundbreaking results (you’re expected to have that kind of result happen a couple times a year), it’s time to write a paper and get it published in a prestigious academic journal. That process can take between four months and a year, depending on a bunch of different factors, so often a professor is juggling a few different projects in different states of done-ness.

What you’ll notice in all this is that professors generally have to come up with the money to do this stuff. New profs generally get a starting budget to get them off the ground, but most of that winds up wrapped up in personnel and start-up costs (e.g., buying computing resources or space for a lab). For the rest of it? Grants.

Grants in my field right now are a bit of a mess: it takes months to put a proposal together, it’s chaotic and complicated as hell, and there’s only about a 10-15% success rate, so you can do the math on that one. In my field, grants range from “small” ones supporting a few years of the pure-science stuff (typically a few hundred thousand dollars that mainly goes toward paying several people’s salaries over several years, but also covers things like journal publication fees - it costs several thousand dollars to publish one paper in an academic journal) to much larger ones supporting field campaigns or long-term projects (rarely, several tens of millions of dollars if you’re talking projects with multiple aircraft and such). I get paid for nine months of the year, and have to come up with the remaining three months’ salary on my own. 

The other thing, though, that grants pay for is graduate student salaries! My department pays students quite well (more than enough to afford the rent on an apartment here, which is saying a lot), and also provides full benefits and a complete tuition waiver. Grad students in my field are essentially in an apprenticeship situation: they pick an advisor and work with that person for typically about seven years. During that time, they have to hit certain milestones (nine months of classes, plus a few courses sprinkled throughout the remaining six years, giving presentations, passing exams, doing a defense, writing a dissertation---essentially a book of their research results), and if you’re thinking this is putting a horrifying amount of power in the advisor’s hands, you’re absolutely correct. The imperfect but step-in-the-right-direction solution my department’s adopted has been to give each student a committee of professors, where one leads the research but the others are always available for new ideas or to resolve problems or speak up on behalf of the student. Students are also strongly encouraged to take a year or two off from their main research project to work with another professor, either here or elsewhere, and explore new research ideas.

Professors are responsible for teaching their students what they need to succeed, and our department has famously exceptional graduate students and graduate student mentorship: profs teach students how to do research (often guiding them through a Master’s project, then letting them take the reins and backing off to an advisory role for the remaining years of the PhD), which includes having them publish their results as the lead authors of their own scientific journal articles. Profs also pay to send students to conferences to showcase their research and introduce them to the people who’ll help them in their future career (one of the reasons I traveled a bunch this quarter was to meet some folks who might be good contacts for students who don’t want to just shoot for a job in the US). Some students will get to go on field campaigns, flying on research aircraft or, I dunno, driving tanks into tornadoes. Some will be more interested in non-academia pursuits and might spend some time shadowing insurance analysts or taking extra entrepreneurial classes in the business school or working hands-on with forecasters during the height of severe weather season. It’s our jobs as professors to know the job market, to know the right people, and to know our students well enough to help them get where they’re going. This department takes this Very Seriously, to the point where it eclipses research as our Top Priority, and the general understanding is that getting a grad student position here sets you up for life.

So! Part of my job this time of year is recruiting graduate students based on my budget. For some folks, that means actively advertising wherever possible and getting super involved in the visiting student weekends (we fly prospective grad students out here to visit before they make their decision, and there’s always a fair number of students who haven’t settled on an advisor yet). Some folks are absurdly lucky and study fields that are considered particularly cool and interesting, and the top students actively seek them out and will cold-call or send e-mails or introduce themselves at conferences (look, turns out it’s hilariously easy to sell someone on “come study tornadoes!” and even a newbie like me has to choose between several particularly strong candidates). Either way, the graduate student hiring process involves a lot of internal debate---we’re not a huge department, so we typically can only send offers to a little under 10% of the folks who apply each year---that mainly centers around making sure each student has a supportive research “home” waiting for them here, based on funding and how much time each faculty member might have. Professors need to coordinate grant budgets (or startup funds, or stopgap funds in the increasingly common situation where no grant money could be secured for a given year) to make sure students have any equipment they might need (cool stuff like supercomputer time, servers, equipment to take to the field, accessibility aids, but also mundane stuff like office space and desks). We also have to coordinate with the university to make sure international students can get here and stay here under the correct visa status.

Right now, I only have one graduate student, and he’s currently undergoing the barrage of first-year coursework, but we meet weekly and he’s started playing around with some data analysis and reading some of the big papers in the field (he’s coming in from mechanical engineering, so the math is familiar but the vocabulary is funky). I’ve developed short- and long-term learning goals for him, culminating in putting together a proposal for his master’s research in June, then converting his early results to a scientific journal article to help him hit the ground running, because he’s brilliant and he’d be able to pull it off without breaking a sweat. 

I’m also on the committees of two second-year Master’s students, so my responsibilities there include reviewing their proposals and, in one case, helping her put together an application for a major fellowship that would put $100,000 toward her education, which means she wouldn’t be beholden to any given research grant and could study any topic she liked. I’m also co-advising a postdoctoral researcher---his primary advisor is a specialist on snow, which is his area of interest, but I’m a specialist on some of the methods he uses to study snow, so I’m consulting with him on that side of things. I’m also working with a couple of particularly motivated final-year PhD students who want to run a multi-day Python and machine learning workshop for the department. Heck yeah.

Apart from research and advising, another facet of being a professor is the nebulous category often just referred to as “service”. Volunteer work, essentially. Right now, I’m reviewing scientific journal articles, typically 2-4 at a time (down to one right now, although I anticipate a flood right before the holidays). This is all done as volunteer work, but it’s honestly the easiest way for me to keep up with the latest literature, because yeah, you can’t just sit in a room and think if you don’t know what everyone else is thinking about. And when even a small field has a dozen or so major academic journals putting out a couple dozen articles each a month that you have to stay on top of... reviewing can be a great way to get the highlights. Sometimes I also get to review other people’s grant proposals, which is really helpful! Still, I wish journals would pay us for this work---someone did a poll on Twitter and found that folks in our field spend on average about 6 hours per review. That adds up!

I also tend to help out with conferences, either doing logistical stuff like deciding what the major topics are, and who gets to speak when (and who probably shouldn’t be given a microphone...) or coordinating the judging of awards for student presentations. That sometimes involves weird event planning stuff like trying to find a venue and speakers and transportation for a formal dinner, or hiring caterers and dealing with competing hotel quotes for room blocks, or cold-calling reasonably famous people and asking them to volunteer their time (or offering them an honorarium) to Skype in to a room full of people.

I’m also on a few national committees that are working to define the priorities of some of the big professional organizations: mainly I work in my particular subdiscipline, but also with diversity/equity/inclusion and early-career support. Some of that is as simple as running social media accounts or helping to design surveys. I’ve recently been assigned to help audit a major organization’s commitment to diversity, which could be pretty interesting. It all sounds like a lot, and a lot of it’s coming to a head lately just because of conference timing, but it usually slows down to one or two hours a week of work in the off-season. I like this kind of stuff because it’s a relatively low-effort way to meet scientists all over the world that I wouldn’t have encountered otherwise.

We’re also hiring a new faculty member right now, which is... hilariously complex. Every aspect is basically done by committee and the entire department has to agree on who to interview and, eventually, who to hire, because hiring someone for this position is potentially choosing your coworker for the next 30+ years. Interviews are two-day endurance training for the poor candidates, who get face-to-face meetings with every member of the faculty, on top of more specialized interviews. We’ve had about 120 competitive applications thus far. It’s... a lot.

And just because I’m not teaching actively right now doesn’t mean teaching isn’t eating a lot of time: there’s some fun logistical set-up to do! For instance, the class I’m co-teaching starting in January features a lab where we take all the students over to the engineering buildings to set up some instruments in a wind tunnel. Gotta make sure we’ve timed it right so they can actually give us the wind tunnel! We’re also coordinating the timing and the schedule so that both instructors are actually around for the parts of the class they’re teaching. For three of the five weeks I’ll be teaching, I have the previous instructor’s materials to work with, but the other two weeks are all new material (and a lot of ad-lib based on how students do with the first chunk of the class). I also haven’t done anything related to this class since I took a comparable class over a decade ago, so, uh. Better study up.

In the spring, I’ll be teaching an entirely new class that’s never been offered by the department before. That involves building a syllabus, figuring out what each lecture will be about, coming up with contingencies in case some lectures get cancelled, writing exams and assignments and lectures and (since it’s a programming class) making sure everyone has access to the necessary hardware and software and data for the big final project. And, because I’m me, I’ll also be coordinating the whole thing with a special office in the university that does long-term testing of teaching effectiveness---they’ll send someone over to spend a few minutes chatting with the students midway through the quarter, then work with me on recommendations and improvement. I figure it’s a new class being offered for the first time, so we might as well get in on the ground floor of longitudinal pedagogical study. Also, I don’t actually know this programming language yet. Little more studying to do, there.

So... yeah. This job is absurd. It’s a million different jobs, the vast majority of which I’ve had no training for. And I adore it. Nobody cares where I am or what I’m doing at any given time, as long as I get results and as long as my students are succeeding. As someone who loves nothing more than bland, repetitive tasks repeated over and over again, it’s not exactly in my wheelhouse... but I love how hard it makes me think, and I adore being pushed this far out of my comfort zone and knowing I actually have the resources and the know-how to succeed. Every single day is something completely new and exciting and bizarre. Hell, every hour. It’s pretty fantastic, and utterly terrifying.