TL;DR: Projects are not entirely good or bad on their own. They have to match the person doing them: you! Be honest with yourself about what your strengths and passions are. Choose a project that is fundamentally aligned with those strengths. Do NOT choose a project that relies heavily on things you are not intrinsically motivated to do. You may be tempted to pick a project to shore up on weaknesses, but don’t. Any project will have aspects that will require you to work on your weaknesses, ...| RajLab
tl;dr: I think it’s time we rethink a lot of how we document computational work. Prompted by AI but also just general increasing complexity of software, we need to move from documenting how something came to be towards documenting what that something is. This more practical form of documentation will allow us to focus our efforts on what matters scientifically. | RajLab
A few years back, perhaps in pre-pandy times, I was on a faculty development panel in which I was one of two presenters. I was of course there to present on how to use Twitter to build your brand (sigh, I’m lame), and a more senior faculty member (I think a neuroscientist) was there to talk about pre-registration in lab work. He was very kind and wise-seeming, and explained how he had been pre-registering their results in the lab for a while, and how it transformed their work.| RajLab
When scientists present in an informal setting where questions are expected, I always have an internal bet with myself as to how long until some daring person asks the first question, after which everyone else joins in and the questions rapidly start pouring out. This usually happens around the 10 minute mark. This phenomenon has gotten me wondering what this means for how best to structure a scientific talk.| RajLab
Just listened to a great Planet Money episode in which Dr. Cecelia Conrad describes how she dealt with some horrible racist students in her class who were essentially questioning her credentials. She got the advice from a senior professor to be less clear in her intro class:| RajLab
As I have mentioned several times, having Gautham in the lab really changed how I think about science. In particular, I learned a lot about how to take a more critical approach to science. I think this has made me a far better and more rigorous scientist, and I want to impart those lessons to all members of the lab.| RajLab
Been thinking a lot about overlay journals and their implications these days. For those who don’t know, an overlay journal is sort of like a “meta-journal” in that it doesn’t formally publish its own papers. Rather, it provides links to other preprints/papers that it thinks are interesting. On some level, the idea is that the true value of a journal is to serve as a filter for what someone thinks is science worth reading so that you don’t have to read every single paper. An overlay ...| RajLab
Guest post by Eric Sanford| RajLab
Guest post by Connie Jiang| RajLab
I’ve been ruminating over the course of the last several years on a conversation I had with Rob Phillips about coaches. He was saying (and hopefully he will forgive me if I’m mischaracterizing this) that he has had people serve the role of coach in his life before, and that that really helped push him to do better. It’s something I keep coming back to over and over, especially as I get further along in my career.| RajLab
I am very much in favor of preprints and open review, but something I listened to on Planet Money recently gave me some food for thought, along with a recent poll I tweeted about re-reviewing papers. The episode was about wisdom of the crowds, and how magically if you take a large number of non-expert guesses about, say, the weight of an ox, the average comes out pretty close to the actual value. Pretty cool effect!| RajLab
[From AR] These days, there is a greatly increased awareness and decreased stigmatization of mental health amongst trainees (and faculty, for that matter), which is great. For mentors, understanding mental health issues amongst trainees is super important, and something we have until recently not gotten a lot of training on. More recently, it is increasingly common to get some training or at least information on how to recognize the onset of mental health issues, and in graduate groups here a...| RajLab
Got an email from someone who got asked to write a letter for themselves by someone else and was looking for guidance… haha, now that PI has made work for me! :) Oh well, no problem, I actually realize how hard this is for the letter drafter, and it’s also something for which there is very little guidance out there for obvious reasons. So I thought I’d make a little guide. Oh, first a couple things. First off, I don’t really know all that much about doing this, having written a few fo...| RajLab
Just got back from a Keystone meeting, and I’m just going to say it (rather than subtweet it): most of the talks were bad. I don’t mean to offend anyone, and certainly it was no worse than most other conferences, but come on. Talks over time, filled with jargon and unexplained data incomprehensible to those even slightly outside the field, long rambling introductions… it doesn’t have to be this way, people! Honestly, it also begs the question as to why people bother going to these mee...| RajLab
(Latest in a slowly unfolding series of blog posts from the Paros conference.)| RajLab
Guest post by Caroline Bartman| RajLab
Long blog post hiatus, which is a story for another time. For now, I’m reporting from what was a very small conference on the Frontiers of Biophysics from Paros, a Greek island in the Aegean, organized by Steve Quake and Rob Phillips. The goals of the conference were two-fold:| RajLab
- by Uschi Symmons| RajLab
Saw a recent Twitter poll from Casey Brown on the topic of figure scripting vs. "Illustrator magic", the former of which is the practice of writing a program to completely generate the figure vs. putting figures into Illustrator to make things look the way you like. Some folks really like programming it all, while I've argued that I don't think this is very efficient, and so arguments go back on forth on Twitter about it. Thing is, I think ALL of us having this discussion here are already wa...| RajLab
I was writing a couple grants recently, some with page limits and some with word limits. Which of course got me thinking about the differences in how to game these two constraints. If you have a word limit, you definitely don’t want to use up your limit on a bunch of little words, which might lead to a bit more long-wordiness. With the page limit, though, you spend endless time trying to use shorter words to get that one pesky paragraph one little line shorter (and hope the figures don’t ...| RajLab
Some discussion on the internet about how slow reviews have gotten and how few reviewers respond, etc. The suggestion floated was paid review, something on the order of $100 per review. I have always found this idea weird, but I have to say that I think review times have gotten bad enough that perhaps we have to do something, and some economists have some research showing that paid reviews speed up review.| RajLab
___ toiled over ridiculous reviewer experiments for over a year for the honor of being 4th author.| RajLab
Just had another one of those typically I-got-nothing-done days. I’m sure most PIs know the feeling: the day is somehow over, and you’re exhausted, and you feel like you’ve got absolutely nothing to show for it. Like many, I've had more of these days than I'd care to count, but this one was almost poetically unproductive, because here I am at the end of the day, literally staring at the same damn sentence I’ve been trying to write since the morning.| RajLab
Just heard about the new NIH point scale, and was puzzling through some of the implications. First, quick summary: NIH, in an effort to split the pie more evenly, is implementing a system in which each grant you have is assigned a point value, and you are capped at 21 points (3 R01 equivalents). Other grants are worth less. The consequences of this are of course vast, and I'm assuming most of this is going to be covered elsewhere. I'll just say that I do think some labs are just plain overfun...| RajLab
Just read a nice blog post from Stephen Heard about replicability vs. robustness that I really agree with. Basically, the idea under discussion is how much effort we should devote to exactly repeating experiments (narrow robustness) vs. the more standard way of doing science, which is everyone does their own version to see whether the result holds more generally (broad robustness). In my particular niche of molecular biology, I think most (though definitely not all, you know who you are!) err...| RajLab