WIR-023

Previous goals

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• 1. Write 400+ new words (or edit an equivalent amount) at the start of each day for 5+ days.

Work completed

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• I worked very hard on a manuscript! Hoping to share this with you folks as soon as possible.

Reflections

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At the outset of this pseudo-blog, I assumed that ambitious goals would make for the best motivation. It turns out that even modest, exceptionally simple but very well-chosen goals work much, much better. Over the past two weeks I’ve done more writing than the previous three months put together. Indeed, as an aspiring academic (that is, a quant who doesn’t know they’re a quant yet), my only job really is to write and bring in that sweet, sweet grant money to my chosen university.

Those thoughts aside, it’s time for some news! I’ve committed to a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Engineering at Northeastern University under the primary advisement of Auroop Ganguly. (The ambiguity of my degree-title brings me a lot of joy, and I hope it will provide an escape from needless stuffiness). What I will work on next remains completely unknown to me. After over a year of narrowing my interests to the domain of radar meteorology, my best guess is that I will focus on the impacts of measurement uncertainty. Questions this topic may adress include: “What are the societal consequences of errors in trusted observations?” My interest in this line of research developed after working on the 70-year-old problem of precipitation estimation, and realizing that even gold-standard datasets of real-world observations are rife with uncertainties. These may include theoretical gaps, measurement errors, theoretical errors, incomplete observations, and that fact that sometimes we correctly measure the wrong thing. Uncertainties even prevade our lists of known unceratinities.

As a computer scientist, I learned to develop methods that improve on weak baselines. Now, I’ve begun to take a different perspective. Thinking–What are the consequences of placing complete trust in an ambigious ground truth? This romantic notion of going around breaking things, then writing pretty papers seems to me like a lovely use of time. And if (because I can not know what the future holds) my academic life fails to pan out–Boston isn’t a bad place to flame out.

Action items

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Weekly goal

• 1. Write 400+ new words (or edit an equivalent amount) at the start of each day for 7 days.
• 2. As an alternative to (1) two uninterupted hours spent working on figures will count as 200 words.

Until next week 👋