Speaking of kids and the IPY, I’m involved with several projects for the International Polar Year. These are primarily field projects, doing useful arctic things like installing new long-term weather stations, measuring glacier volume change, extracting lake sediment cores to understand prior climate, etc. In the past, my wife has always been my chief field assistant. Now that we have a son, we all go out together. However, the National science Foundation is not very happy about our working together and makes our lives quite difficult in the regard. I know most of the decision makers there personally and they all know we are quite competent in the field and have no personal issue with us doing this, however, as professional bureaucrats they feel they have an obligation to say No to anything that might give the public cause to give them grief. My position on this is two-fold — 1) as the National science Foundation, their decisions should be based on objective facts rather than speculation and 2) that I shouldnt have to make a choice between a life of science and a family life (considering this work takes months of field work). So I’m wondering what others think? Is the marginal extra expense of bring a child along in the field a waste of taxpayer money? Is it morally wrong? Does the public really have an issue with this? Considering that 50,000 people in the US die each year in auto accidents, half of which have no fault assigned to any of the drivers involved, and that this is just one of many crazy risks the public considers normal, personally I think we’re much safer and saner to spend as much time as we can in the Arctic. Ideas?
-Matt