Jeff, AMMRL;
1st thought:
Why do you as a Director receive after hours calls from your facility? We
post an emergency number and it better be an emergency when they call in
order starting with lowest to highest rank. Fire, quench earthquake etc.
"The sample will not eject" is not an emergency ... even a broken sample in
the probe is not for well trained people. Most experimental difficulties
fall into the non-emergency category as well.
2nd thought:
What these people should do when you as a technical and/or academic
profession help them solve their problems with their work is at minimum
acknowledge your help in the acknowledgments of the numerous papers that
your work directly supported or produced. If you are assisting in structure
elucidation as well then that requires at least a footnote (pers. comm.) and
more appreciatively a co-authorship or else it is academic plagiarism.
3rd Thought:
It sounds like you are due a vaycay ... Florida's nice this time of year.
It's cool and the bugs subside somewhat. Nothing like a nice long vacation
to jolt the NMR clients and admin folks that yes you are needed and things
are not well when you are gone.
Be well all ... and may your magnets always be in spec',
your instruments always be in tune and let it be your hard work that nails
the Nobel spectra,
Whether or not they appreciate it ... good work is its own reward:)
_____________________________________________________________
Robert Harker
////(--)\\\\
Engineer
University of Florida
Department of Chemistry UF Box 117200
Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) Laboratories M/S 82
Gainesville, Florida 32611-7200
Contacts:
352-392-4650 Office
352-392-9886 Labs
352-392-8758 FAX
rharker_at_chem.ufl.edu <mailto:rharker_at_chem.ufl.edu>
www.chem.ufl.edu/NMR <
http://www.chem.ufl.edu/NMR>
Ship To Address:
University of Florida
Department of Chemistry UF Box 117200
Chemistry shipping and Receiving CRB 127
(NMR) Laboratories M/S 82
Gainesville, Florida 32611-7200
Attn: R. Harker, NMR Labs 352-392-4650
The information and/or attached files contained in this communication are
considered intellectual property of the author(s), the University of Florida
and/or its partners and clients. All Rights Reserved
____________________________________________________________________________
_
-----Original Message-----
> From: Jeff Simpson [mailto:jeff.simpson_at_unh.edu]
> Sent: Wednesday, November 13, 2002 11:25 AM
> To: ammrl_at_chemnmr.colorado.edu
> Subject: ruminations
AMMRLers,
Long time, no public postings for me. At least not since I came to UNH
earlier this year...
Anyways, I was just summarizing some thoughts I had on the issue of
teaching academic researchers how to use scientific instruments and came up
with the following, which is not especially profound but does bring into
focus what I feel are important issues.
Advances in technology bring increasing complexity. When everything works
perfectly, the end-user may be able to click a couple of times or push a
button or two and useful results may be generated. The down-side of this
is that (1) the end-user (and sometimes faculty as well) has(have) no grasp
of the work involved in making the user-interface so easy to use and so
tends)tend) to not appreciate the preparatory work done by others, (2) the
end-user gains no meaningful understanding of the bias and/or limitations
of the technique being used, and (3) when there is a problem the end-user
is utterly incapable of dealing with it.
While (1) makes you feel bad at being taken for granted and (3) makes for
late-night phone calls, I find (2) particularly troubling in the academic
environment. The trend is that students treat sophisticated instruments
(e.g., NMRs) like black boxes. If the student is not encouraged to learn
at this point, then they cannot rightly claim to have expertise in anything
save interpretation and we should make no pretense that they are gaining
expertise in instrument operation.
Of course the students will still lie about their level of expertise: we
had a post doc who came to MIT claiming to be an NMR expert (call me and
I'll give you his name...got to avoid that libel suit) and yet didn't know
where to insert the sample...needless to say he was the butt of many jokes
after that. I even changed the placard outside his office/lab to read 'NMR
Expert' under his name.
But I guess that was unprofessional of me.
I'd be interested in hearing comments from anybody on novel solutions to
this problem.
Jeff
Jeffrey H. Simpson, Ph.D.
Director, University Instrumentation Center
220 Parsons Hall, University of New Hampshire
23 College Road, Durham, NH 03824-3598
603-862-2457 (2790 asst) (4104 fax)
jeff.simpson_at_unh.edu
http://www.unh.edu/instrumentation-center/
Received on Wed Nov 20 2002 - 15:51:36 MST