As I previously stated, we are currently living the largest social and professional experiment of our time in which many activities have moved to digital, virtual long distance connections. Quite interestingly over that past 5 weeks my usage of videoconferencing software has been on average 14h/week (range 8h to 19h). Even is the most busy videoconferencing week, I have found that the interaction with colleagues and students not fully satisfying.
Continue readingOver the past few weeks a lot of us have become, willingly or forced, the participants in the largest unplanned international experiment of our time. Some might even say that this particular experiment contains multiple sub-experiments that will feed the researchers across a very wide spectrum for years to come. It is also the largest (in scale) telecommuting experiment ever attempted, again across multiple industries as well as social , educational and health-related activities.
Top educator and COMP gold medal winner Prof. Jerry Battista from Western Ontario has decided to make available materials that he is using in his classes.
Find below his message and the links to three incredibly well-done videos.
In case you’ve missed this one, an interesting analysis was recently published in Nature on citations of manuscripts published in predatory journal. If you contrast with a previous post of mine (here), when considering all journals about 24% of publications get 10 or more citations. This falls dramatically for predatory journal. More importantly no paper get over 32 citations in those journals while 1.8% of all published manuscripts get over 100 citations in general.
Source: Predatory-journal papers have little scientific impact
A rare post in French on a conference I gave last year on the status of author taken by students, mainly in the context of sciences and engineering (my field) but pointers given are quite general.
Le titre de cet article est celui d’une présentation que j’ai donnée l’an dernier dans le cadre de la Semaine sur la conduite responsable en recherche 2019 organisée par l’Université Laval.
Cette présentation vient d’être mis en ligne et est disponible ici: https://youtu.be/7MEplFlwW30!
[This post was originally published over 6 years ago. It is still extremely relevant!]
Recently saw a comment by a student about not being advised before hand that doing a PhD had many difficulties and challenges. However, my first reaction reading that text was to start laughing. Of course, all that was said was true. But the first thing that came to my mind was the famous warning when you ask for a sundae with nuts at a McDonald : you received (at least in North America) the nuts in a small, sealed separate bag (think allergies); this bag has a warning that reads (seriously): may contain nuts!
Doh!
Ruminating... 