Established scientists receive numerous email messages from people applying for a PhD position in their group. I get a few per week and I am sure some of my colleagues get many more. At first sight this looks a burden, but it is not. More than 95% can be put aside after reading the first few lines. In the following I will give a few tips and I am sure that if you bring them into practice you will get a positive response of the scientist you have sent the application.

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Much more has been said about the failure of current grant system than that has actually changed. My favorite opinion piece is this one by Peter A. Lawrence. The single-sentence abstract says it all: “The granting system turns young scientists into bureaucrats and then betrays them.” There are a couple of suggestions for improving the funding distribution in that article but the title of a comment by Markus Noll says enough about why nothing is changing: “Scientists in power will never change their system unless forced.”

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In my previous post I discussed a feature I would like to be implemented by slide-sharing services. I am not going to repeat here all the arguments why slide sharing is useful for scientists. I just want to discuss the present quality of the engines used by these services. I consider here SlideShare, authorSTREAM, SlideBoom and Google Docs from the point of view of scientists. Two years ago I pointed out to you that SlideBoom was by far the best. After two years much could have been changed in a world where nowadays everything on the Internet is about sharing.

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Ten years years ago the major computer company Sun  Microsystems advertised in all media with the slogan: “The network is the computer”. And I must admit they knew where they were talking about. They saw the clouds coming. Sun has been taken over by Oracle in 2009.

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