Quick links

Quick link: How to give a good talk

I came across this blog on how to give good scientific talks. I’m up to the second post and I agree with almost all of it so far. Eliminating words on slides and using presenter notes is something I’ve recently started to do. It takes some more practice but I feel like people are indeed more engaged in the talk.

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An excellent article on managing collaborations

I came across this article on retraction watch. It offers some practical and concrete advice for setting up expectations and checks when beginning new collaborations. I’m filing it here for posterity – I’d like to implement many of the suggestions.

Quick link on organising projects

Felix Wichmann pointed me to this paper on organising project directories.

Some of the tips are a bit specific to bioinformatics / computer science, but one idea I really liked was to have a chronologically-organised electronic notebook for each project. This would sketch out analyses / experiments you tried, what worked, and what didn’t. You could also “transcribe notes from conversations as well as email text into the lab notebook”. This type of document makes way more sense to me than keeping a single general lab notebook for all the projects you’re doing. Perhaps that helps you too, but notes about a specific project should all be accessible within the project directory. This idea would definitely complement some others that I’ve previously detailed on this blog.

It strikes me that ipython notebooks or R markdown documents are perfect formats for such a project notebook.