Rumblings about (Plant) Sciences
What five decades doing research have told me (Pedro J. Aphalo)
Some good tips on writing scientific papers are given in the post: http://greatresearch.org/2013/10/11/storytelling-101-writing-tips-for-academics/
The blog at http://greatresearch.org/ has several other posts of interest for PhD students. Recommended!
A crucial question, and as usual a spot-on answer by Jochen Wilhelm in ResearchGate’s questions and answers area.
The NIH (USA, National Institutes of Health) has opened a new web site on the subject, which although focused on Biomedical research, provides a good account of current trends and problems, how to overcome them and guidelines that could be easily adapted for the rest of the Biosciences including Plant Science.
Visualizations, specially dynamic ones can help in the understanding of statistical concepts. You can find some wonderful examples at a web site called R <- psychologist.
Do you understand hypothesis testing? and the controversy behind it?
Understanding Statistical Power and Significance Testing
Do you understand confidence intervals (CI)?
Interpreting Confidence Intervals
When you see a scatter plot are you able to guess a value for the correlation?
Interpreting Correlations
Have fun! and get some new insights about statistical tests.
In the interview Jorge has several insights about his career path and also advice for early stage researchers. I have been Jorge’s friend and collaborator for more than 30 years, and been a witness of how he has followed since he was an undergraduate the path he now gives as advice in the interview. The result has been a successful career doing very original research. (The article is not open-access, so the link will give you free access to the article only through the university network.)
Yesterday after our Biophilosophy Society session, I had an interesting chat with Matan about whether switching research subjects is good or bad.
Today, just by chance I ended watching this video from 2008. I think it nicely answers what we discussed. NOW WATCH THE VIDEO… (19 minutes long, but really worth your time)
Only after watching the video, you will understand what follows:
If you you feel that the field your are working on, does not provide enough of a challenge to get you into ‘flow’ at least now and then, then you have two options: find new challenges that you find exciting within your current discipline, or shift your interests to another discipline. Which of these routes you take, is quite irrelevant as long as you can reuse enough of your current skills in the new subject to be within your safe zone of comfort. Reusing the skills does not require the skills to be used in the same way as in the previous discipline, just that you find a way of making use of your skills even if by analogy when analysing a new problem.
I am currently participating in the “Leadership training” organized by the university, and in one recent meetings of my research group when discussing how to better work as a group, I emphasized that for every member of the group their work should be fun. This idea is formalized, and backed with data in the talk in the video I embedded above. So, if you skipped it, scroll up the page and watch it!
University of Helsinki