Citizen scientist

The above link is a blog post about why science is complicated, why non-experts like politicians shouldn't be trusted to relay scientific information accurately, and moreover what research really means. Translating scholarly work into a publicly accessible format as well as finding reliable sources of those translations continues to be an issue and a need. It is a real and crucial issue, since, as I mentioned, numerous versions of scholarly knowledge - some closer to the original facts than others - get used for a multitude of political, social, and economic initiatives every day. As voting citizens and as initiators, targets and recipients of these initiatives, we would do well to do what we can to bridge that gap from our end. I believe that the academic community also has a responsibility to shoulder its part of the bridge-building, and that educational systems and institutions, government ones included, fall somewhere in the middle. Learning more about what, and how, we all understand, citizens and scientists alike, can only help.

Is it a breakthrough? Not yet...

... but I think I might be getting somewhere on my dissertation proposal. After weeks of agonizing anxiety over my apparently insurmountable methodological issues on establishing chronological control, I just sat my ass down and forced myself to read over my proposal draft and the comments my prof had made on it. This is a scary, SCARY thing, to confront such a highly imperfect representation of your self-made aspirations, the tangible measure of your self-worth as a blossoming academic, the sum of your educational background, the bar for your future career. It's so scary that every time I looked at the 10-page document this past month, I said to myself, "Nahhhhh.... I can't right now. I'll tackle it soon, just not now."
My proposal matters much more to me than to anyone else; it's the same with any student whose thesis looms in the near future. This is partly why I am so scared of it: because how can I convince anyone else that they should care enough to lend me some advice or assistance (or god forbid, funding)?
But, having run out of excuses, I did it today, and (as happened before, and will happen again) on reading through it, I realized it's not so bad, and even got a bunch more ideas on how to get at what I am trying to analyze. More to the point, I thought of how to break down the problem I want to research into its different bits and am forming a plan for how to tackle them one at a time.
The first and most important step in my plan is remembering to breathe.