328. Two Modifications of Opinions Article "The Living Human Guinea Pig of University Bureaucracy"

Hark! I donate my brain to society!

PDF file for second round of The Living Human Guinea Pig of University Bureaucracy:
http://stokastika2.googlepages.com/livinghumanguineapigunivbureaucracy2.pdf
I was very thankful that Hector Javkin was willing to work with me very, very late on a Thursday night to help me chop a 1200 word article into a 687 word article. He even forced me to make the edits that very night on his computer. Wow, Hector knows me well! He knows I would have procrastinated with the edits otherwise!

PDF files for the third round of The Living Human Guinea Pig of University Bureaucracy:
http://stokastika2.googlepages.com/livinghumanguineapigunivbureaucracy3.pdf
This version manifested itself last night, though I had a conversation with Nicki Arnold, the lead Opinions Editor of the paper, on Sunday night. She seemed to be very nice and upfront. She said the article was suitable for the Nexus, but that I cannot submit pieces with bold and itallics all over it. If I want to emphasize an idea, it will have to be in caps format. It seems very important to get to know the editors of the newspaper, so you know what their standards are, and what specifically they need. I am thankful for Dr. Nancy Baron for providing scientists advice on how to write Op Eds.

I find it absolutely tragically beneficial to see my mind convert over time. From last year to this year, I have transformed my value from private journal writing for self sanity to public blogging and making dramatic attempts to make my writing and artwork accessible to other people. Not that my public face is completely unfiltered. I still keep my deep dark thoughts (not that I have too many of them) to myself. I have been writing for myself and writing alone for so long that I am tired to self-amusement, and that I need to perform services to society as a writer. Hence, I have been submitting opinions columns to the Daily Nexus, Spectrum, Ecotone (literary magazine on re-imagining place, based in the East Coast), the Santa Barbara Independent. I will get rejected several times, but thankfully blogs are default guarantees of self publication. I will always have a fall-back in terms of where to place my writing.

The institutional channeling of writing is difficult and takes time. You have to develop relationships with people. Relationships with very specific people, like the editors of the newspaper. They are being chronically bombarded with emails, so it is very important to present yourself in person, to make the experience much more human. Especially since I have no institutional credentials on the tail end of my name. I am very happy thus far to have had a friendly contact with The Daily Nexus opinions editor and it is muy essential that I sign up for Daily Nexus training (again, sigh) such that I can start writing some pieces for the paper. But I think this quarter I will stick to Op Eds. After all, I am a very opinionated person! Ha ha!

315. Opinions Article Written Last December of 2007, Never Published, Thank Goodness! "Christmas Woes: Novel Victim of Internet Fraud"

Christmas Woes: Novel Victim of Internet Fraud. Page 1.
Christmas Woes: Novel Victim of Internet Fraud. Page 2.

PDF file of article found here: http://stokastika2.googlepages.com/xmaswoesnovelvictiminternetfraud.pdf.

I suppose people are wondering why I am posting this old article here and now. What happened is I tried to submit another article on my being the "Living Human Guinea Pig of University Bureaucracy." I found the email of Matt Kettman of the Santa Barbara Independent buried within my email account--with this newspaper article attached! Oh ya. I forgot. Well, anyhoo. I am glad it wasn't published or looked at. Apparently the review I wrote for the company was deemed as "excessively dramatic" for epinions.com. Whatever. It was the first time this ever happened to me! I have the RIGHT to be a drama girl!

313. Opinions Piece: The Living Human Guinea Pig of University Bureaucracy

Living Human Guinea Pig of University Bureaucracy. Page 1.
Living Human Guinea Pig of University Bureaucracy. Page 2.
Living Human Guinea Pig of University Bureaucracy. Page 3.

PDF File for the Article: http://stokastika2.googlepages.com/livinghumanguineapigunivbureaucracy.pdf.

I don't exactly know how this piece came out, but essentially, I had a wonderful conversation with Becca, a new grad student of Drs. Steve Gaines and Bob Warner, and afterwards, I was finally inspired to write this comical adventure of my transferring graduate schools and my vow to stay and finish at UC Santa Barbara. That night, I also had the opportunity that night to share the piece with Hector Javkin, who advised me to further elaborate the guinea pig analogy :-).

I am now starting to get into a habit of sending articles to (1) local newspapers and magazines (2) as well as a small group of family and friends.

Leftover Images from the Science Journalism News Article

Above are some leftover images that I used in my science journalism article to add an "artsy-fartsy" component to a potentially very boring piece of work.... Ben ended up giving me a 19/20 points. I am very proud of myself, given this is my very FIRST article....

Vic's First Ever Mock Newspaper Article on a Scientific Paper, Paul Dayton from Scripps Co-Author!!!

This is the first science journalism article I ever wrote. Unfortunately at age 25. I was briefly involved in newspaper and yearbook in middle school and high school, but these creative activities were looked down upon in terms of grade-point-average points. Off the top of my head, I suppose there are several mechanisms to consider when writing a science journal article: (1) zipping and unzipping code language such that many people can understand versus a select few of individuals can understand, (2) the intro hook to the article must be extremely catchy and attract the attention due to the reader's direct application and relation to the article topic itself, how science relates to and shapes our every day lives, (3) application of intense visual arts to correlate with the article, hence "The Matrix of the Mind: Mapping Language on Landscapes," (4) adding elements of public critiquing of scientific articles and science itself, because most scientists are reporters, not analyzers and critiquers. The public rarely sees this side of science journalism. Someone has to play skeptic with science, and (5) the importance of using multiple lines of evidence in order to construct a science journalism story, most particularly interviewing the scientist him- or her-self, and directly seeing their system of study with your own eyes. There are several layers of missing information in scientific articles that can be revealed in science journalism, most particularly the personality of the scientist (e.g. precisiologist, fuzziologist, fluffologist.... INTERNAL FACTORS) and how it influences his or her word choice, as well as several layers of bureaucratic and financial influence (EXTERNAL FACTORS) that have biased or distorted or skewed the byproducts of the scientific research.

Syllabus for My First Course in Marine Conservation with Dr. Ben Halpern, Blue Horizons, Summer 2007

It's kind of ironic. I am 26 years old. Technically I am "1" year old (considering that female species don't mature till age 25 and male species don't mature till age 50). Okay, so my dad is 11 years old, I believe. My sister is -1. My mother is by far the oldest. Perhaps around 25 years of age. But okay, given my existence of 26 earth revolutions around the sun, you would think that I would have taken some form of official "conservation" course. But the truth of the matter is I hadn't, until Ben Halpern's course this summer. Overall it was a great course. It made me think about things I want to think about, like invention and implementation of creative "adaptive management" bureaucracies for effectively solving management problems. But unfortunately, we received few lectures on such things, and the beginning of the class focused more on the typical "depress me" with doom-and-gloom components of "the world is going to hxll," and more particularly our oceans.... Ben is very to the point and gets to the meat of issues. He made us bring in ocean news articles, and we had brief discussions on such issues in the beginning of class. Not only that, Ben made us write a news article off of a scientific article, in which Paul Dayton of Scripps was one of the co-authors! Paul Dayton is one of my all-time heroes, and his lecture at UCLA in 2004 "The Loss of Nature and the Nature of Loss" was one of the "last straws" that made me go on leave of absence to write my philosophy of ecology book, Question Reality. I wanted to interview Paul Dayton for the science article, but there was not enough time. Plus the paper was actually 3 or 4 years old. "Old news," basically. I am thankful Ben made us write the paper, though I wished he had a formal lecture on how to go about systematically writing a science journal article, something he did not do. I know that many people in the class did not even know how to write a scientific article, let alone translate a scientific article in lay terms for the public. I think several students in the class were in great disadvantage. In addition, I added a level of critique in my journal article, mainly because of my one year of writing critiques of scientific papers for the UCLA Ecology and Evolution Department. The second big project Ben had us to do was a presentation on a hot topic in conservation... how scientific findings are being specifically applied to a suite of conservation and management issues. This allowed me to pull out some old demons in my two year mental rabbit hole: I revisited my experience at a conference in Tijuana addressing the threats of rapid development along the coast of Baja California, primarily from Ensenada to the United States border. I wished I could have done a better job in my presentation, though several people thought that what I did in class was quite thorough.

Though many people thought this conservation class would be review for me, it ended up not being so. It was close to "right where I left off" in terms of my own personal knowledge regimes of what I know and what I don't know of the world.

The marine conservation class on its own was very good, but in the context of the budding Blue Horizons Film Program, the class was a bit inappropriate. The primary goal of Blue Horizons is to create a film on a regional environmental issue, and it would be more important to transform Ben's class into a more guest-lecture seminar, inviting local representatives from several agencies to give talks about the issues they work with. In addition, local field trips should have been arranged such that we could become visually oriented to such regional issues. I honestly thought the course was going to be a spitting image of Dr. Miriam Polne-Fuller's epic, life-changing Shoreline Preservation Course that I took as an undergrad TWICE (yep, it's THAT good). If the course were structured as above, and students would have had direct access to the people and places that would be potentially filmed, I bet most of the students would have started their projects a LOT earlier... than instead of cramming within the last couple of weeks. I admit I crammed in terms of editing the film, but I started my project rather early, and racked up 25 hours of film by the time the course was close to being over!