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 data scientist in training), my only job really is to write and bring in that sweet, sweet tide of grant money to my chosen university/sugar daddy.

I suppose it’s time for some news as well. 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 is completely unknown to me. After over a year of working on radar meteorology problems, my best guess is that I will focus on the impacts of measurement uncertainty–a fancy way of saying “What are the societal ramifications of thinking we know some simple piece of information (e.g., How much is it raining?) when our observations can be very, very wrong?” 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 fraught with uncertainties. Uncertainties stemming from more sources than we can possibly enumerate: theoretical gaps, measurement errors, theoretical errors, sparse observations, and quite simply, sometimes it is just the case that we correctly measured the wrong thing. What are the risks of putting complete trust in imperfect data?

Thinking about problems in this way has really re-energized me. The idea of going around and breaking things, then writing pretty papers about it seems like a lovely use of time. And if (because I don’t know what the future holds) my academic life is not all it’s chalked up to be–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 👋