On my desk, right in front of the computer screen, lies a pile of paper. This pile gives me headaches, keeps me awake at night, and is a source of frustration on sunny weekends. It is the pile of unfinished manuscripts, gathered and carried along from earlier positions as a postdoc. Every paper has a story attached to it. Some papers are only in their first version, hardly more than a collection of raw data. Others have seen many revisions, have passed the eyes of multiple co-authors, and have got stuck just before submission, because something just is not quite right. There are papers of PhD students, co-workers, and of myself as leading author. Some contain data taken two years ago.

I am wondering how others are dealing with their unpublished data. Do you have a drawer full of brilliant work yet to be published? Or are you completely up to date with your results? For some people, it may be a reason for boasting: look at how many data I still have on the shelf! For a starting academic, unpublished data can be a life saver in times that you are starting a new lab and you need results to cover the gaps in your publication record. However, the pile also represents months of painstaking experiments, data analysis, and theory, lying there going to waste and most importantly – not being cited.

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I have recently listened to a number of talks given by excellent senior scientists. Their being excellent can be concluded from the prizes they – recently – got and from their – recent -  membership of exclusive societies.

A number of them fall in the trap of feeling the necessity of proving that they are smart and of proving that their field is much more important than the research subjects pursued by their audience.

Let me first put a two simple facts that are often overlooked:

1. Every scientist can always give a much longer presentation than the allotted time
2. Every scientist can give a mathematically sound presentation that nobody in the audience will understand.

So why do these superb scientists keep on saying things like “I could give a whole talk on just this part, but here I will have to limit myself to … “, or when they start, their first sentence is “I could give a much longer talk than the prescribed x minutes? The implication of what they state is: “I am much more important than the other speakers, and I do not understand why I am not invited to talk for hours, you dummies.”

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Office document or (La)Tex
Creating a pdf file
Additional requirements
Bookmark generation with MS Word
Save to PDF
Show your tree
Skip numbered entries
Different numbering of the same level
Thinning your pdf file
Fast web view
Bookmarks with Latex
Example pdf files
Recap

Adobe has blessed the digital world with a document format that is really platform independent. I am referring to the pdf (“portable document format“). As a result the leading format for scientific articles is the pdf file. Scientific journal editors require from prospective authors that they submit their manuscript as a pdf document. More and more grant organizations also request proposals to be sent in as a pdf file.


Office document or (La)Tex
The pdf standard has many advantages. Its major disadvantage is its limited editing possibility. As a result authors have to keep at least two files of a manuscript in sync: the “source” manuscript and the pdf version. Additional graphic material is either embedded in the source or is kept as separate files. The most popular formatter for generating the source is Microsoft’s Word, or a comparable office document formatter. Another source approach is to use a simple ascii file, containing script language directives that are to be interpreted or compiled. Of the latter class the Tex, LaTex, AmsTex family is the most popular. For some fortunate reason the Tex-family has escaped the fate of almost any open-source project: multiple distributions, bad documentation, incompatible versions, and a Windows-hostile developers community.

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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.

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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.

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I’m at a conference and I have noticed something that I have seen before: the top scientists are surprisingly nice. Now I wasn’t quite completely sure if this was true but at least some of my friends thought the same thing. Here’s is what happened. I’m at a conference that is a bit outside of my normal field, so I do not know most people but I certainly saw a lot of famous names of people who have published major papers in the field. I would muster my courage and just walk up to these famous people and say something pleasant to break the ice. Their reply typically is very courteous and you can see their eyes flitter to your conference badge immediately followed by a question like “where is Strathclyde?” Typically, you end up talking very pleasantly about science. In different situations I have found that top scientist tend to reply to your emails quickly, are happy to send you reprints (quickly), are happy to tell you about what they are doing.

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Abstract
In this post I have tested several solutions for slide sharing. I found the free product of SlideBoom to be superior.

Introduction
Scientific presentations are nowadays delivered in a form where the focus is on the presentation of slides. Old-fashioned people claim  – and complain – that a presentation with blackboard and chalk is a much better form of communication. This almost obsolete style is to be preferred in a limited number of cases only. For instance when you are lecturing to students and you really want to go slowly through a sequential line of arguments, like a full mathematical derivation. In all other cases the era of PowerPoint is a blessing. Both for presenters and for audiences.

The digital formats of a slide presentation allows for reuse by the presenter himself, and for reuse by others. Slide sharing is becoming fashionable. In this post I limit myself to the sharing of the presentation file. So I am not discussing full-blown video presentations.

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In an ideal world scientists prepare their conference talk way ahead of time. In a realistic world they prepare their talk one or two days before they get on the plane. Or they do it on the plane. In earlier days,  when a presentation was done with the help of overhead projectors, transparencies that were very clearly made while being in the air were referred to as “air-plane transparencies”. These slides showed all the signs of shaky fingers. In this post I will tell you something about my last-minute preparations for my latest presentation.

Laptop with a screen crash
I used to present my talks using a Dell laptop. Reliable, sturdy and so heavy that additional physical exercises were not necessary. About two  weeks before my conference in Crete would start the unexpected happened: my laptop had a crash, that is to say the screen stopped working and even hooking up an additional monitor did not save me. I only lost about a few hours of work. I always backup my data regularly so this little damage was a reward for my consistent backup procedure.

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The United States is the premier example of a country where people move, and indeed move all over the country, if by doing so they get a better job. This professional mobility also applies to scientists. The country has invented a lot of mechanisms to ease these relocations.

Scientists move because they get a chance to start their own research group. Or they change affiliation because the new place offers a better scientific environment. Or offers a higher salary. For some scientists moving is very simple. A philosopher or a theoretical physicists just has to bring a few books to his new place and he is all set. For a scientist who works for a giant organization as Fermilab bringing his laboratory to the new location is impossible. But how about those scientists that have acquired movable pieces of equipment and apparatuses as a result of their successful grant applications? The scientists need this equipment to be able to pursue their research successfully in the new place. In the United States the rule is very simple: wherever the principal investigator (PI) is going – even if it is abroad – he is allowed to take with him all of his equipment. In my opinion this is the correct attitude.

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Last month, I had a research proposal rejected. I’ll keep a brave face and say that it might be a good thing as it shows that, no, really, I do not get them all funded. But really, it’s a pain the behind, of course, and a huge waste of time. About a month-and-a-bit wasted to be precise.

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