Ad Lagendijk
21 January 2010
Tags: mouse
Posted in Conferences, Presentations quality, Tips for junior scientists, Tips for senior scientists
A week ago I went to an international conference where I had to give a presentation. I was confronted with an unpleasant surprise when I wanted to deliver my presentation.
Glass surface
The conference was held in an expensive hotel in Majorca (Spain). The rooms had a fast Internet connection.
Only when I checked out I discovered I had to pay for the connection. There was a luxurious desk in the room, unfortunately covered by a nicely looking glass plate. As could be expected my optical mouse did not work on the glass plate. I always bring a cordless optical mouse for a number of reasons: I prefer a mouse over a touch pad and I use the mouse during my presentation. My improvised solution was a that I slid a sheet of paper under the glass plate.
Conference room
The presenters were supposed to put their laptop on a reading desk present in the conference room. Against my principle I did not check this out before my talk. When it was my turn I discovered that the nicely styled reading desk had two bad properties: (i) the laptop had to be put in there in an almost vertical position and (ii) it was fully made out of transparent perspex.
Read more (319 words, 1 image, reading time 1:17 minutes)
Otto Muskens
24 December 2009
Tags: collaboration, grant proposal, Scientific community, startup
Posted in Miscellaneous, Research and education, Tips for junior scientists
Some time ago I described my first steps in setting up a research group at a UK university. After one year it is time to evaluate some of the developments made so far. In general, I am quite happy with the progress. Certainly it has not been a very high-flying year scientifically. However, when you can forget for a moment the pressure to deliver, running your own little research group is actually very much fun. I will point out some aspects which have been particularly important this year.
Bringing in money
The first thing is to break the negative spiral resulting from insufficient research budgets. Without ’seedcorn’ money, it will be difficult to do research and therefore to attract more funding. There are some opportunities for getting this kind of funding especially for new academics. This year I have been successful in getting money from the Royal Society (£15,000, Research Grant) and from the EPSRC (£125,000, First Grant), mainly for equipment. To give an impression of the success rate, 2 out of 7 First Grant proposals were funded in this panel. So even in this special round for starting academics, 72% did not get the money needed to start up their first research project. It cannot be underestimated how crucial these small amounts of money are for taking off during the first years. Also not unimportant is the fact that bringing in money turns out to be one of your most important deliverables which will be highly evaluated by your university, most of times above publications or teaching.
Read more (935 words, 4 images, reading time 3:44 minutes)
Ad Lagendijk
16 December 2009
Tags: novelty, originality, principal investigator, startup
Posted in Tips for junior scientists
The career path in the academic world is tough. After a demanding undergraduate period, you will enter graduate school and another period of at least four years of hard work lies ahead. After acquiring your PhD you will have to work as a postdoc for a number of years.
In all those years other people tell you what to do or what to study. Your own input, as far as research subject goes, is marginal. For the majority of young scientists the final goal is to become a principal Investigator themselves, or at least to work in a group where their influence on the research direction is substantial.
When you have almost finished your PhD or just started your postdoc period, the future of being a group leader seems far away. You have other problems on your mind. Nevertheless there is question that you should ask yourself over and over again. The earlier you start with considering this question the better. Here is the question:

What research subject would you choose, and what equipment would you buy if you would get five million dollars?
Read more (388 words, 2 images, reading time 1:33 minutes)
Klaas Wynne
8 December 2009
Tags: academic, Keynote, PowerPoint, teaching, university
Posted in Miscellaneous, Research and education, Tips for junior scientists
I haven’t written much for this blog for a while now. The reason is that I had some serious lecturing duties this semester, which runs for 12 weeks until next week. If you are an academic in a university, you almost certainly have to do a fair bit of teaching. So I thought it might be appropriate to give you a flavour of what that means in practice (just in case you were considering an academic career yourself).

Obi-Wan Klaasnobi
This semester, I teach an introductory astronomy course for first-year students from all over the university although most of these students are from physics and chemistry. The middle third of it (about planets), I have taught for the past 10 years. This year, I took over the first and third parts as well. On the face of it, it does not sound like a lot: two unique lectures a week (repeated once) for total of 24 lectures (48 including the repeats). However, this does not mean that I just spend 48 hours teaching this course.
Read more (613 words, 1 image, reading time 2:27 minutes)
Ad Lagendijk
6 December 2009
Tags: MS Word, text formatting
Posted in Technical (ms word, tex), Tips for junior scientists, Tips for senior scientists
Depending on your discipline you write your scientific papers with either MS Word or you prepare them with a more professional text formatter like LaTeX.
Besides scientific papers scientist produce all kinds of other documents. I often notice that those
MS-Word prepared documents have an ugly ragged right side, or have a repugnant flood of white space. With a little more effort it is possible to produce text, even with MS Word, with a professional look. Two aspects are important: hyphenation and justification.
Hy-phen-ation
When I look at the documents the Dutch ministeries produce, I must come to the conclusion that hyphenation is either never heard off or it is forbidden. In the Dutch language a complication is that in a sequence of nouns the nouns are combined into one word. So the Dutch language has a number of very long words, like “regeringsvoornemen” or “onafhankelijksverklaringstekst”. Using long words in a text without hyphenation makes the text ugly and unclear.
Read more (739 words, 2 images, reading time 2:57 minutes)
Ad Lagendijk
3 December 2009
Tags: h-index
Posted in Ethics, Getting published, High-impact journals
The H-Index is ruling science these days.
Recently an interesting article appeared in EuroPhysics News. I think this paper is of interest to all scientists, and not only to physicists:
Europhysics News Vol. 40, No. 5, 2009, pp. 26-29
DOI: 10.1051/epn/2009704
Bibliometric evaluation of individual researchers: not even right… not even wrong!
Franck Laloë[1] and Remy Mosseri[2]
[1] Laboratoire Kastler Brossel, ENS, CNRS and UPMC, Paris, France
[2] Laboratoire de Physique Théorique de la Matière Condensée, UPMC and CNRS, Paris, France
Published online: 17 October 2009
Here is the pdf file. Or download it from the Europhysics News site.
Ad Lagendijk
28 November 2009
Tags: bad contrast, presentations, web development
Posted in Presentations quality, Technical (ms word, tex)
I discovered something a few days ago that made me ask the question: Am I mad, or are all web designers out of their minds? The sun was shining in my office and I just could not read the information on the web site of a major multinational company.
In my book I spent tens of pages on how to improve the slides of a presentation. I consider the most important guiding principle whether or not people in the audience can actually read the slides. For a number of reasons the legibility is poor in at least 25% of the scientific presentations I have been going to lately. The two most important causes are: (i) too small font sizes and (ii) bad contrast.
Read more (470 words, reading time 1:53 minutes)
Ad Lagendijk
8 November 2009
Tags: climate model, error bars, global warming, model, reproducibility, scenario, variability
Posted in Ethics, Getting published, Tips for junior scientists
Experimental observations always are coming with uncertainties. Any measurement is an estimate of the real value, if indeed such an objective value exist.
The uncertainty in the magnitude of a measured quantity is more important as the value itself. Many readers will find this remark alarming. The determination of the “error bars” is considered a dull, redundant exercise. Especially when the reported observable quantity has a surprising value that reporting it without the associated uncertainty will certainly get the authors the attention of the media, or get their manuscript accepted in Nature or Science.
The problem with a reported observable without an uncertainty is that people, including the reporting scientists, will draw conclusions from these observations that are in no way corroborated by that experiment.
Read more (1274 words, 4 images, reading time 5:06 minutes)
Sanli
10 October 2009
Tags: honesty, plagiarism, Scientific community
Posted in Ethics
This post is not about building the atomic bomb or chemical weapons. It is about being sensitive to a basic and yet very important ethical issue in producing and publishing science: Honesty. Publishing in science is based upon trust. No review mechanism, no matter how sophisticated its design is, can overcome systematic fraud when it is practiced by a major part of the scientific community.
Honesty measures can be categorized to different levels based on the number of scientists who practice them. At the bottom of the dishonesty pyramid lies acts like plotting the data in the graph such that the agreement with the theory is exaggerated or underestimating the error-bars to beat the exactness record. One level higher in the pyramid could be keeping it silent when you find out that your already published results are not as correct as you have claimed, if no one else is pointing that out (Yes! I think this latter behavior is so common that is it ranked near the bottom of the pyramid).
Read more (448 words, reading time 1:48 minutes)
Otto Muskens
19 September 2009
Tags: collaboration, manners, Scientific community, social networking, survival
Posted in Ethics, Miscellaneous, PhD life, Tips for junior scientists, Web 2.0
Social networks are everywhere. Personally I like Facebook to keep track of old friends and add new ones. These friends are mostly of nonscientific background. Until recently I had never realized the importance of social networks in science. When you do your PhD and perhaps some postdoc projects here and there, it is hard to think about what it takes to become a successful scientist other than doing brilliant science. Although scientific skills are undoubtedly important, I believe that one of the key ingredients which can make or break a scientific career is a good network of friends.
Read more (540 words, 2 images, reading time 2:10 minutes)
Readers' comments
What do you mean by 'pointing stick'? Obviously, we don't live in an ideal world, but fortunately most scientists will ...
22 Jan 2010 8:28, Mirjam
What about academia.edu? My impression was that they aspire to become a kind of "Facebook for scientists".
14 Jan 2010 22:32, Researcher
Yep, I sympathize with you. Last spring I taught a bachelor course for Electrical Engineering students, and although most of ...
9 Dec 2009 11:31, Nicole de Beer
I know exactly what you are talking about... As a postdoctoral researcher, I got a 4 hours teaching contract on ...
9 Dec 2009 9:44, suzan
Hi The EquPixy 2.1 add-in for Microsoft Word (MS Windows) will help you to work with mathematical and chemical formulas and ...
7 Dec 2009 17:01, Dmitry