PowerPoint does not help
I have seen quite some historical developments with respect to visible aids used to clarify oral scientific presentations. I have seen talks illustrated with, slides being projected through a slide projector, transparencies made visible with an overhead projector, and - now - digital slides that come to the audience through a beamer. But with all these modern developments, which certainly seem to look like improvements, a lot of things have not changed for the better. Presenters going way over their time. Showing of bad slides (ugly, busy, unclear, …). Too Much Information (TMI). Much too high level for the audience. Why does this situation continue? My answer: a.o. lack of feedback. (Fig. Uncle Sam)

A number of bloggers blog under pseudonym. Unfortunately these writers refer to themselves as anonymous bloggers. Writing under pseudonym means you use a fictitious name, a name different from your own, whereas corresponding anonymously means you use no name at all. On many Internet discussion forums users register under pseudonyms. Their real identity might be known to the forum moderators, but it is certainly not disclosed (unless the long arm of law would be involved, of course). As a matter of fact forum owners often warn new users not to use or reveal their real name in their posts.

I very much like the following quote from Groucho Marx:

I don’t care to belong to a club that
accepts people like me as members

Recognition
Many professional societies like to acknowledge members that are exceptionally good at their profession. If in addition the activities of these specialists are useful and visible to a broader public, acknowledgment can also come from outside the professional circle. As a result prizes, without and with competitions, and other tokens of recognition are bestowed on the exceptional achievers. The community of scientists also has its medals, prizes, and decorations.

Young researchers always are worried about their career and this makes them mostly confuse in their research field. There are bunch of stuff that they should take care of them, publication, new finding, skill, being update, searching next job, getting match with new team and even new research field or culture, etc. If you look back then you can see each of them is a big barrier for others.

In a recent post in Science Careers Blog Jim Austin argued that young researchers should get easier funding with science supporting agencies. That would be the best way to get them into the system.

I strongly object and put a reaction there, that I hereby reproduce:

This would be age discrimination. I agree that there is problem, but I think I have a better solution, or at least a solution that is worth discussing IMHO. A remedy that does not suffer from this type of discrimination. In what I suggest it is not the old guy against the young guy. It is the established scientist against the newcomer. To solve the problem at hand, in the Netherlands (physics) granting organization FOM, has come up with a scheme in which newcomers get an advantage by giving them bonus points. With these bonus points starters get funded (considerably) more easily.

When a junior scientist - graduate student or postdoc - starts working the end of his contract seems very far away. In all cases (my experience relates to 30+ supervised PhD theses) the end of this period comes in sight much quicker than anticipated both by the junior as by the supervisor. So you have to be very efficient with your time.

Left or right
In western societies we write from left to right. In mundane texts lines are left justified. This alignment allows for quick reading. You do not know yet what will be in the new line, but you (and above all your eyes) sure know where it begins. You can improve readability by implementing full justification. But only if you use a lot of hyphenation and micro-space adjustment. Otherwise you get those ugly stretched sentences that hamper reading, rather than facilitating it. If you use MS-Word and full justification use the WordPerfect compatibility switch, as explained here.

For editors of scientific journals it is quite hard to find referees, leave alone good referees, for peer reviewing their received manuscripts. A good referee is a person that sends in a good referee report and does so in time, and responds quickly to additional requests from the editors. Why don’t peers want to review manuscripts of their colleagues?

There are a number of reasons. Professional scientists are very busy and - perhaps more importantly - they will never get public credit for their review job.

To the scientist, the lab is like a church or a sanctuary, a micro-world where he finds a safe environment to develop his ideas, and where his jargon is well understood by his colleagues. The gospel he preaches is illustrated with graphs, and is proven beyond reasonable doubt with experimental data, up to three digits after the comma. He has become a believer of his shared truth, and he is prepared to evangelize his work to make this world a better place. The people he wants to convince are first and foremost the facilitators of his own work, his sponsors. Also, his friends and family need to be made part of his considerable contributions to society. Finally, the man in the street, the voter, has to be convinced of the importance of science, since politics can retrieve the money plug at any point in time. To do that, the scientist will have to communicate.

In my previous post I described why I find a two-day course, an ineffective training for reducing PhD-supervisor miscommunications. In this post I like to present a suggestion, which I think may be more effective.

By my critical essay I did not want to question the good will of the FOM personnel service and the trainers. Indeed, it is a great challenge for many PhD students to stabilize their position in relation with their supervisors. With all the respect for all supervisors, I also think that they are not classified as the best human resource managers, which is the main duty on their shoulders from the time they become group leaders.