Topic: Research and education

Otto Muskens Otto Muskens 17 July 2010

Organizing your results

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Posted in Miscellaneous, Research and education, Tips for junior scientists, Web 2.0

Computer data 180 144 300x225 Organizing your resultsWhen you start your career as a postgraduate student, it is normal that you start collecting your scientific results in a slightly unorganized way. However as time proceeds, some basic rules are needed to keep track of your work. Every scientist has to develop his own systems for keeping organized. Ideally, a minimal set of rules should be used consistently by group members, including staff members and students, to facilitate data exchange. Perhaps some aspects appear trivial, but in my contact with undergraduate and postgraduate students I have seen many shocking examples of (lack of) data management. Here I give an example of how to organize data using a Windows operating system, based on my own set of rules. Again it should be emphasized that this is just one example of an organizational structure, which is aimed at avoiding some of the most common mistakes.

Sanli Sanli 14 May 2010

Research cartels will abolish genuine science

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Posted in Ethics, Presentations quality, Research and education

Ever-increasing competition for unfairly limited funding is backfiring. Territorial allocations and research topic fixing is hurting the creativity of researchers and specially demotivating the younger generation.

The title of this post may sound too provocative, but let me quote three dialogs, which I have witnessed in the last six months, to show how real this threat is. You may have heard such conversations as well.

  1. Prof. A tells visitor B: “Your research suggestion is indeed interesting and we can do it but prof. C may want to do it as well, and he is a good friend.”
  2. Young senior D replies to junior E’s proposal of trying slightly different samples: “Those kind of samples are investigated by Prof. F and this is a very competitive field.”
  3. Senior G, who is planning to submit a proposal, hears about the intention of Prof. H, who works on a similar subject and wants to submit a proposal as well. He decides to make sure their proposal titles are different before submission.
kiki kiki 27 April 2010

How to start a research work?

Posted in Research and education, Tips for junior scientists

A list & a form
All of us have many ideas while reading a paper, discussing with supervisors, chatting with friends, having lunch or even sleeping. Those ideas are random and flash across our brains very fast. What will you do for those ideas? I catch the ideas and write them down to my “idea list” immediately. If possible, I’ll make the ideas to feasible actions, such as looking for more detailed references, imaging several possible experiments and characterization methods, etc. However, if there’s no specially strong intention to carry out the relative research, I’ll let them be in the “idea list”.
Sometimes, similar ideas might occur in my mind. I try to find something new and take them down. I check my “idea list” every one or two months. If I find that some ideas repeat more times and have more and more details, I’d like to draw out the related contents and design a working plan using a form. This form is named as working schedule, in which major works for everyday or everyweek will be drafted in a period of time, like one month.
And then, I’ll start my research work in different fields.

Unregistered Young Postdoc 30 March 2010

Writing your own article?

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Posted in Ethics, Getting published, Research and education

I would like to start a discussion about the different customs that exist in research groups when it comes to the writing of articles. This is inspired by an experience I have had as a postdoc.

I consider my PhD time as the period when I was first exposed to writing scientifically. I think everything went typical: my first article was a real struggle, but afterwards things got easier. Looking back I consider my PhD time as the time I really learned to write in a structured way. And I have come to view this experience as essential in the development of a young scientist.

Ad Lagendijk Ad Lagendijk 16 March 2010

Our blog rated to belong to Top 50 Blogs by graduate students

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Posted in PhD life, Research and education, Tips for junior scientists

The website the Learning Master has recently asked graduate students to rank blogs that were useful for them. Our good news smiley 150x150 Our blog rated to belong to Top 50 Blogs by graduate students blog is part of this Top-50. Out of this list eight blogs, including ours, were classified as belonging to the physical sciences. This makes us all very happy.

Otto Muskens Otto Muskens 24 December 2009

Starting up a research group: the first year

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Posted in 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
1bag of money 234x300 Starting up a research group: the first yearThe 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.

Klaas Wynne Klaas Wynne 8 December 2009

How much time to spend on lecturing?

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Posted in 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

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.

Klaas Wynne Klaas Wynne 10 May 2009

Rudeness is inherent to being a scientist

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Posted in Conferences, PhD life, Research and education, Tips for junior scientists, Tips for senior scientists

Last week, my wife accused me of being rude. Not so much to her – although it’s quite possible that I am, she’s probably got used to it by now – but to others. This sort of happened because our son, Guus, is going to nursery school soon and we were interviewed by the head of the nursery school. She extolled the virtues of their bulletproof entrance door, which (according to her) had become a necessity since Dunblane. In case you don’t remember, “Dunblane” refers to a town in Scotland where in 1996 a mad man entered a school and shot dead several kids. Terrible obviously. However, I couldn’t help myself and started arguing that this was silly and that surely because this happened once in Britain, this was extremely unlikely to happen again, let alone at the particular nursery school that my child was about to attend. Her answer: “Belgium”. Clearly referring to another more recent occasion where a child was hurt. At this point, I decided to give up, judging that further discussion of probabilities or, say, Bayes theorem or shot noise wouldn’t really go over very well.

Otto Muskens Otto Muskens 6 April 2009

Starting up your own research group

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Posted in PhD life, Research and education, Tips for junior scientists

So here we are. Made it, got through the rat race, and found a safe haven in a Physics Department in a different country. They even offer state-of-the-art lab space and a small startup package (not sufficient to do anything substantial in photonics). So where to begin? Here is a brief description of my first steps as a university lecturer, which has little to do with science as I knew it.

1. Know the right people

Being in a new institute in a new country without any equipment, my first strategy cleanroom in use Starting up your own research groupis to get known and make friends among institute directors and clean room managers. It is amazing how friendly most people are toward new academics. The well-trained scientific paranoia however stirs in the back of my head. What do they want of me, why are they giving me free access to clean rooms and laser equipment, who do I have to put on my papers later on? For now I forget this voice in the back of my head and hope for the best, as there is nothing to loose and a lot to gain.

Unregistered LifeScientist 15 January 2009

ResearchGATE – the scientific network

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Posted in Conferences, PhD life, Research and education, Tips for junior scientists, Tips for senior scientists, Web 2.0, useful software

ResearchGATE works to the benefit of science

Every discovery or invention is based upon previous discoveries or inventions. This is what makes communication so essential for science. ResearchGATE empowers science by connecting the scientific community. Our platform enables researchers to communicate faster, better and easier. This will accelerate the distribution of knowledge – and create new ideas.

ResearchGATE works to the benefit of every scientist

Being connected with co-researchers is a great advantage for every scientist. You can present your profile and your work, manage and extend your professional contacts, join or found groups, ask or answer questions, share or search papers and much more. This collaboration makes everybody’s work much more effective. And it’s free, safe and without spam.

ResearchGATE is designed for the upcoming age of Science 2.0

The tools offered by ResearchGATE are custom-made for researchers. No other platform provides such a wide range of web 2.0 applications exactly matching the needs of the scientific community. New features are constantly added, always state-of-the-art and no-frills. This makes ResearchGATE the best social network choice for scientists.