Ideas

Apparently it is more difficult for me to sit down and write than I had feared.

I thought I would at least make some notes here of a few topics I would like to tackle.

Job satisfaction - currently a matter of significance to me as I lack it. I read an article in The Economist on Happiness and wrote down a couple quotes that struck me. The first was their citation of a W.H. Auden poem (quoted more extensively here):

"You need not know what someone is doing to know if it is a vocation, you have only to watch the eyes ... the same rapt expression, forgetting themselves in a function. How beautiful it is, that eye-on-the-object look."

And the second was taken from a psychology professor, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who describes the right job as one that has "clear goals", "unambiguous feedback", and a "sense of control" as well as one that is difficult enough to "stretch a person without defeating him". When was the last time either of these quotes described my job?

The fallibility of memory - both my own and more generally. I seem to be coming face-to-face with the deceptive aspects of my own memory more and more lately. I'm aware of some research on how our memories decay with time (of course), but also how they can be altered. Rather than simply forgetting, our brains add details that weren't there before. What I think will be interesting to look at is how our emotional involvement with the memory - either at the time the memory was formed or perhaps the emotions that arise or are present when the memory is recalled - influences our ability to remember it accurately. And what types of memories are more prone to forgetting? Or to manipulation? Maybe I'm just getting old?

Women in academia - again a personally relevant topic. Many reports have been released over the past decade on the lack of women in tenured faculty positions particularly within the sciences, math and engineering fields. Some have attempted to discern what the root cause is leading to the dearth of top female professors across US universities and colleges. As I read and re-read some of these reports, I'll try to summarize the findings, address how some naysayers have responded - but more importantly I'd like to put this in the context of what my female peers feel and think about their prospects in the academic world.

There are more, but those are the only three that have crystallized over the last couple weeks.