Tag Archives: science

Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) in Scientific Writing

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Want to get better and more effective at writing scientific manuscripts? Stanford is hosting a free MOOC course on the topic. The content look very interesting:

Week 1 : Introduction; principles of effective writing (cutting unnecessary clutter)
Week 2 : Principles of effective writing (verbs)
Week 3 : Crafting better sentences and paragraphs
Week 4 : Organization; and streamlining the writing process
Week 5 : The format of an original manuscript
Week 6 : Reviews, commentaries, and opinion pieces; and the publication process
Week 7 : Issues in scientific writing (plagiarism, authorship, ghostwriting, reproducible research)
Week 8 : How to do a peer review; and how to communicate with the lay public

LINK:  Writing in the Sciences | Coursera.

Are you at an exciting phase of your thesis project?

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If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?

– Albert Einstein

How do you know for sure that you are at a particularly interesting stage of your thesis project?

When the excitement spread to your supervisor, fellow students and the extended team (collaborators and others). When you present at a meeting and peoples come talk to you with that look in their eyes. When you are asked by scientists or other students unrelated to your project if you have published/submitted your results.

The flip side of that coin is that the pressure is on you (and your supervisor) to convert in a timely fashion to peer-reviewed publications 😉

Laptop multitasking hinders classroom learning…

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With the start of the a new semester approaching fast, here is an interesting study on the effect of laptop in university classroom both on the person of interest and the surrounding peers. Based on my teenagers behavior at home, it seems obvious that multitasking  in the form of (homework, Facebook, music, Skype) or (TV, Facebook, texting) never really worked.

The manuscript is by Sana et al in Computers & Education entitled “Laptop multitasking hinders classroom learning for both users and nearby peers” is demonstrating the (significant) effect in the classroom.

Abstract: “Laptops are commonplace in university classrooms. In light of cognitive psychology theory on costs associated with multitasking, we examined the effects of in-class laptop use on student learning in a simulated classroom. We found that participants who multitasked on a laptop during a lecture scored lower on a test compared to those who did not multitask, and participants who were in direct view of a multitasking peer scored lower on a test compared to those who were not. The results demonstrate that multitasking on a laptop poses a significant distraction to both users and fellow students and can be detrimental to comprehension of lecture content.“

Thanks to those who have pointed out this study on LinkedIn.

Practice, practice, practice

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“Practice is the best of all instructors”
Publilius Syrus (Roman author, 1st century B.C.)

Back from the AAPM scientific meeting, and kudos’ to the organizers for an excellent meeting. Over the past few years, they have set-up a “Best in” category regrouping the 5 highest scored abstracts in each 3 broad categories of the meeting. Not only do they get oral presentations but they also deserved a special poster viewing session. An extremely interesting and exciting session!

Continue reading →

Big week at the 2013 AAPM meeting

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Our group is well represented at this year AAPM meeting. 2 Faculty and 7 graduate students for a total of 11 oral presentations and 2 posters.

For a number of these students, it will be their first experience presenting at such a big event (over 3000 participants). Also for many of them, it will be their first scientific presentation in English. Hours of preparation and rehearsing for 5 minutes (snap oral) or 8 minutes (regular oral) presentations. While, I do tell them that the shorter the talk the more time (usually many hours!) is needed to select and organize the visual materials (aka slides), they do not realize it until we do the general repetition during our weekly group meeting.

For each talk, we can spend between 10 to 30 minutes going over the slides, suggesting modification, addition, removal, asking questions such as: what are you try to say? What is your main message? What do you want the audience to remember from this or that slide, …

Of course, senior grad students have it easier as they already know what to expect and prepare their presentations accordingly 😉

For my friends and colleagues in the medical field, see you in Indy.

The best job is …

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Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.

Confucius

My two teenagers have started their summer jobs as instructor and assistant instructor in specialized summer camps. This reminded me that when my son started his first summer job (last year), I asked him at the end of his first week how it was, if he liked it?

His reply was, I am having lots of fun and their paying me to for it!

This is a very important feeling, maybe the most important one when it comes to employement. I told him never to loose that feeling because whatever he choses to do later on in life, this how it should feel.

I also told him that this is exactly how I feel everyday in my line of work: scientific research and university teaching. Yes it is tought to get such a position, even thougher to thrive due to the highly competitive nature of publishing manuscripts and getting research grants. At the same time, I get to chose what I am working on and the perks are very satisfying in the end.

The best job is the one that does not feel like it 😉