“The gift of doctoral study is that you get the time and space to obsess about something you’re (hopefully) interested in…”
-Jeannie Holstein
The above is taken from the following link about returning to graduate school to tackle a PhD project and finding it fun. A very interesting read: ‘Academia is a very well kept secret’.
An interesting reads at TechCrunch on new forms of dissemination and measurements of scientific impact: Reputation Metrics Startups Aim To Disrupt The Scientific Journal Industry.
In a similar vein, you might want to read the excellent editorial by John R. Alder from Stanford entitled “A New Age of Peer Reviewed Scientific Journals” published in the open access journal Surgical Neurology International. The manuscript is available on Cureus blog.
Most of the crackpot papers which are submitted to The Physical Review are rejected, not because it is impossible to understand them, but because it is possible. Those which are impossible to understand are usually published. When the great innovation appears, it will almost certainly be in a muddled, incomplete and confusing form. To the discoverer himself it will be only half-understood; to everybody else it will be a mystery. For any speculation which does not at first glance look crazy, there is no hope.
In an era when most research efforts are publicly funded through federal, provincial and other government programs, open-access journals seem a natural “public” return on the initial investments. However, the existence of various levels of “open” (which also dictate how the results can be re-used) appears to blur the issue. Concerned researchers or simply interested science followers, here is an interesting read in Nature: Researchers opt to limit uses of open-access publications : Nature News & Comment.
This topic probably happen between you (the thesis advisor) and the first author (your grad student) for almost every paper: what is the author list and order?
Daniel Wessel at Organizing Creativity has a short and very interesting post on this subject: Authorship of Scientific Articles | ORGANIZING CREATIVITY.
A worthy read and numerous useful links.
“Short cuts make for long delays.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit
Last week was the Canadian university football final (Vanier Cup). My University was playing, its 8th final since 1999 (won its 7th!). For the past 10 years, they have been the dominating team of their division. Not bad for a team that did not exist until the middle of the 90’s (and for some was doomed to failure). It is a model of success. Attendance to home games now averaged 15000 peoples. This number is small compare to US college football but is 2 to 3 times higher than most Canadian university program. Of course, this helps the program, money-wise…
There is one funny thing about modern scientific presentations. We use PPT or Keynote and have nice looking images, data table, figures and movies. Yet when it comes to pointing out a specific element in a slide, we are given an external tool (external to the presention system) : the laser pointer. When you do that, and in particular if the preson presenting is sightly (or overly) stressed out, interesting things happen:
So for your next presentation learn a new trick: using the mouse or trackpad to “point” directly on the computer screen. It will show on all monitors and no one will be worried about getting a laser beam in their eyes 😉
P.S.: no these laser pointers are not dangerous.
Ruminating... 