Month: October 2020

Heart of darkness

The news came in yesterday that the university is extending its current policy of remote work and teaching, previously effective until the end of 2020, to the end of May, 2021. Not a huge shock, frankly; it’s what my money would have been on, and I wrote as much yesterday when I was drafting this post, before the announcement came. It doesn’t really change any plans either, since we’ve been assuming from the get-go that our AI ethics course, due to be lectured in the second period of the spring term, will be taught remotely. Still, it’s strange to think that by the end of this latest extension, we’ll have been working from home for more than a year without interruption – and of course there’s no guarantee that things will be back to normal even then, although one may hope that at least some of us will have been vaccinated already. In the meantime, I’ll be getting my flu shot for the coming winter, courtesy of occupational healthcare. 

Speaking of winter, it’s almost November, and as the days grow shorter, I’m reminded of the one redeeming feature of the dreary Irish winter in comparison with the Finnish one: more daylight. Last year and the year before, I “cheated” and only came to Finland for the end-of-year holidays, not long enough to really feel the effects of prolonged darkness – especially since I wasn’t working during the time I spent here and therefore could sleep for as long as I wished. Now, however, I’ve already noticed that it’s getting more laborious to get myself up and running in the morning, and while the turning of the clocks on Sunday brought some temporary relief by making mornings somewhat brighter, it’s not going to last long.

Fortunately, working from home has rendered the concept of office hours even less relevant than it was before the pandemic. I was free to choose my own hours before, but there was still a fairly strong preference to be at the office at more or less the same times as my colleagues, for the social aspect if not for anything else. Now that there’s basically nothing to be gained from being together at the “office” (i.e. at our computers in our respective homes), I’ve gone to sleeping according to what I presume is my natural rhythm, which I suppose cannot be a bad thing healthwise. There are still the meetings, of course, but I’ve mostly managed to avoid having them so early in the morning that I couldn’t trust myself to wake up for them without setting an alarm, although I’m not sure how that’s going to work out when we get to winter proper and there’s barely any daylight at all. 

Before the all-staff email yesterday, I was already thinking that if we do go back to working on campus after New Year, I may well continue to take remote days more frequently than I used to, at least during the winter and especially when it’s very cold. As much as I love a good northern winter with lots of snow, I don’t particularly relish temperatures closer to minus twenty than minus ten, and when you combine that with pitch darkness in the morning, the thought of staying in bed is very tempting. So, once in a while, why not just do that, get up when you actually feel up for it and work from home, since that’s now officially sanctioned by university policy? 

I participated in my very first virtual conference last week, the one-day Conference on Technology Ethics (formerly Seminar on Technology Ethics) organised by the Future Ethics research group at the University of Turku. I didn’t present anything, but the event was free of charge and I figured I might come away with some fresh ideas for the AI ethics course and perhaps even for my research. The conference did not disappoint – particularly the keynote talks by Maija-Riitta Ollila and Bernd Carsten Stahl were very much the sort of thing I was hoping for, and I think I’ll be referring back to them when I get to the work of creating my lecture materials. Everything went reasonably smoothly too, although there were some technical issues with screen sharing on Zoom. There was even a virtual conference dinner in the evening, but I didn’t participate so I don’t know how that worked out in practice. 

The next online event I’m looking forward to is a cultural one: the Virtual Irish Festival of Oulu! As the organisers put it, it’s the first, and optimistically also the last, of its kind: under normal circumstances the festival would have been in the beginning of October and very much non-virtual, taking place in various venues around town and offering music, dance, theatre, cinema, storytelling and workshops over a period of five days. I’m rather annoyed that there’s no proper live festival this year, since I missed the last two – this may seem like a silly thing to complain about, considering the reason I missed them is that I was in actual Ireland, but it’s not like they have trad festivals there all the time. Still, a virtual festival is surely better than no festival at all, and the programme looks very promising, so I’ll definitely be tuning in, and I think I’ll buy the €5 optional virtual ticket as well, to support the cause. 

I’ll join the Procrastinators’ Club, when I get round to it

The deadline of the September call of the Academy of Finland came and went – well, sort of. As per tradition, the submission system buckled under the stress of everyone, their grandma and their pet tortoise trying to upload or update their applications at the same time, and once again the deadline has been extended, this time by five days instead of the usual day or two. I guess I’ll use some of that extra time to put a few more finishing touches on my research plan, but because of the page limit I can’t add much to it without taking something away in exchange. 

So yes, I did submit my application for Research Fellow funding, and I did exactly what I promised myself I wouldn’t do: I left it until too late to get started, finished my proposal just barely ahead of the deadline and submitted it without having anyone else read it first. Have I set myself up to be rejected? Yeah, probably. Does that bother me? Not really, not right now anyway. I’m just glad to be done with it, except of course I’m not quite done yet – I’m actually a little bit annoyed that they extended the deadline, even though it means that I can still improve my application, because that “can” almost feels like a “must” and frankly I’d rather just forget about the damn thing already. 

Funding applications are curious things for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the psychological effect of the approaching deadline. Why is it that when the deadline is a month away, you feel like there isn’t a creative cell in your body and even an hour or two of writing is a gargantuan effort, but when there’s less than a week left, suddenly your head is full of ideas and working round the clock is no big deal? Just think of all the cool stuff I’d get done if I could be like that all the time! In all seriousness, though, I don’t think I’d take that bargain, because it would mean having precious few non-working hours and probably being too knackered to enjoy those most of the time. 

I suppose a part of the answer to that riddle is that once you get close enough to the deadline, your inner critic slinks off to the background because you get so desperate for things to write down that you’ll take anything your inner crazy ideas guy can offer you. And that’s another curious thing, the mental rollercoaster ride you embark upon when the critic decides it’s time to intervene: you can go from celebrating something as the best idea you’ve ever had in the afternoon to condemning it as utter garbage late at night, trying in vain to get some sleep so you can replace it with something halfway-decent when you get up in the morning. If only you’d had those ideas sooner, you could have sorted the worthwhile ones from the ones best released back into whatever murky pool they crawled out of, but it’s as if your brain refuses to generate them until it’s too late to get too picky. 

It’s also kind of strange how working on an application can get you so stressed that it starts to border on existential crisis. In a certain sense, you’re just applying for a job – but of course it would be more accurate to say that you’re proposing to create a job for yourself with someone else’s money, and therein lies the rub: a funding application is much more an expression of your identity and values than a simple job application could ever be. What is so important to you that you’d commit five years of your life to pursuing it, and so important to the world that you should be given hundreds of thousands of euros to do it? Why is it so important, and why are you the right person to get it done? These are questions that go well beyond what skills you have and into the realm of who you are, so it’s no wonder really that having your application rejected can sometimes feel quite personal. 

With the application submitted, it’s time to move on to other things and wait patiently while the research councils and review panels do their worst. This year the Research Council for Natural Sciences and Engineering awarded funding to 22 new Academy Research Fellows, representing 11 percent of all applications and 24 percent of those with an overall rating of 5 or 6 out of 6 – so statistically, even if the review panel loves your application, the odds are still against you. The percentages vary between different funding sources and instruments, but generally you end up submitting a bunch of failed applications for every successful one, which of course isn’t terribly efficient and it’s tempting to dismiss all your hard work as a waste of time and energy. 

Still, there are always some things you can take away from the rejected ones. It’s good to force yourself to ask those big philosophical questions from time to time; they may not lead to any major epiphanies, but it can’t hurt to remind yourself of why you are in research, whether it helps you to stay motivated or gets you to consider your other options. It’s also a great social bonding ritual to commiserate together with your colleagues over your rejections, not to mention how much sweeter all the failures make it when one of you succeeds and you get to have a celebration instead. Besides, there’s bound to be stuff in your rejected application that you can reuse when you start writing your next one – which you will definitely do well ahead of the deadline, no procrastination this time, no sir! Right?