Don't Count Your Chickens

They tell you not to count your chickens before they hatch, but here in Saudi you can't even count them AFTER they've hatched.  We announced a week ago that we finally had our tickets to fly home in August, but it turns out that wasn't true.  Somehow between last week and Sunday, the travel agency or consulting firm managed to cancel the reservations.  Yes, we're dealing with both a consulting firm and travel agency to book these tickets.  I have no idea why it takes so many middle men to get this done, but we tell the consulting firm what we want/need, they tell the travel agency, the travel agency give the consulting firm a few options, the consulting firm sends them to us, and we pick the most desirable one.  It's like one huge game of telephone, so it's no surprise that this got screwed up.  It's extra unsurprising because they managed to screw up our tickets when we came to Saudi a year ago.

Aside from the fact that I was royally cheesed off that this got screwed up, the consulting firm somehow got in their mind that it absolutely had to be fixed RIGHT THIS MINUTE.  That meant they did a lot of: send me an email, wait two minutes, and then call me to ask if I'd gotten the email.  So this went back and forth for a few hours resulting in a option for tickets on August 8th.  This wouldn't be a huge deal, except we were told in no uncertain terms that we had to leave campus by the 5th.  Turns out they're more that willing to change this rule so long as it saves them money on plane tickets.

So after two hours of headaches, emails, phone calls, and a very unpleasant tone of voice, we once again had plane tickets home.

Contingency

With all of the unrest in the Middle East lately I know many have been worrying about how it will affect Saudi Arabia, especially our family back home.  While this worry may be well placed, here on campus we haven't noticed any changes or signs of uncertainty.  Regardless, according to this article, a significant number of Saudi Arabia's military has been moved to the northern region in response to recent events in Bahrain.

To be on the safe side, we went ahead and registered with the US embassy in Jeddah (the Smart Traveler Enrollment Program), and truthfully we should have done that when we first arrived.  Now we'll be notified by email if something were to happen that the US State Department deems worrisome.

We also came up with a brief emergency plan.  If necessary, our plan would be to try and buy airline tickets to somewhere outside of the Middle East leaving as soon as we could.  It's kind of a lame, super obvious in a duh kind of way, but there really isn't much else we could do.

I do suppose that we'll actually want to figure out where the US embassy is in Jeddah, so we'll have to research that as our next solid step.  We'll also need to get an airline approved cat carrier so we have it if we need it before we come home in August.  Like we said before, we have no reason to believe anything bad will happen, but it's always better to have thought about a contingency plan before you actually need it.

On a much happier note, the State Department also recommends registering with the local embassy whenever traveling abroad so we went ahead and registered for our trip to Italy which is coming up very quickly.

Fame above Science

Needless to say, ethics in science is a big deal.  When scientists claim a conclusion has been reached, there is a lot of power of persuasion behind that claim.  So when it was reported that vaccines and autism were somehow linked, the number of people who took that science and made it part of their beliefs was quite large.  There have been entire movements that try to persuade against infant vaccines.  Only now, we find out that the data was altered to support the desired finding, and the primary author was paid by an accident attorney looking to make some money.

It's turned out that the peer review process, despite it's reputation, doesn't always cut the muster.  Bad science ends up published and even worse, ends up in the mainstream media, which may or may not take findings out of context.  It seems like the only thing more prevalent on late night news than local crime is all of the new medical findings that should be a huge concern to the general population.

Having already been sternly lectured about the importance of ethics in scientific research when I started grad school, and then to still have face the ethics/plagiarism issue when working with other students, I really don't know how this can be fixed.  If you can't convey to a twenty-something the importance of ethics, how do you do it for a grown adult?

The obvious solution, which involves everyone acting in a way they know to be ethical, really isn't practical, but I feel any other possible solution is incredibly pessimistic and displays a feeling of mistrust to fellow scientists.  So for now, man up I say.  Do better science, not for fame or tenure, but for the fact that people listen and take to heart the conclusions we reach.

Around the Web

I don't spend a lot of time following the news here; it isn't something I did back home, and now the fact that most news isn't in English here makes it even less likely for me to know what's going on off campus.  But then I found this blog, and she does a great job highlighting issues and news primarily out of Jeddah.

Reading posts like this really makes me question being here.  But hearing about these two events makes me think sometimes that improvement is possible and somehow through small changes over a long period of time, it might get better here.

In other news, I found this post at Make It and Love It, which links to an offer for a free 8x10 canvas print.  I'm thinking about getting one of our wedding pictures printed.

Finally, go to Hyperbole and a Half and read about the God of Cake, I was dying of laughter all the way through, and so will you!

Boat trip during last Eid