Author Archives: Luc Beaulieu

O Captain! my Captain!

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To Jean Pouliot (1958-2015)

88″ Cyclotron, LBNL
Recent picture
Berkeley 1985 (left) and more recently (right)

The title of this post is from a wonderful and powerful poem by Walt Whitman, delivered to a large public by a passionate performance in the movie Dead Poet Society.

It is here dedicated to my PhD thesis co-supervisor whom, through the years, became of a colleague, a co-conspirator in many fruitful scientific projects for which we successfully “tricked” numerous students to undertake them (as we acted as co-supervisors), and more importantly a dear friend.

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Free library

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It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.
― Oscar Wilde

In walking in my new neighborhood in San Francisco, I got to notice something interesting in front of a couple of houses: small tiny houses! Too big to be bird houses and almost the size of doll houses. The second interesting fact of these houses: they have books in it, protected by a glass or plastic door. The third and final interesting element, they all have the same inscription: take a book, leave a book (as in the picture below).

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How many citations are actually a lot of citations?

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In a previous blog post, I suggested to my younger colleagues that while they should not care so much about the impact factor of the journals they published in (as long as these journals are well-read in their respective fields of research), they should care quite a lot about these papers being cited, and cited by others not self-cited!

A few months ago, I was listening to the introductory talk of for a prestigious award from our national organization when one statement hit me: a physicist with 2000 or more citations is part of the 1% most cited physicists worldwide. There might have been a bit more to that statement but let’s work with it.

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Semantic Scholar

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A new search engine, Semantic Scholar,  is being proposed to the scientific community and it uses artificial intelligence. Right now it is limited to computer science papers according to the website.

Let see how this one evolves!