President Bartlet of The West Wing is calling his famous “What’s next” to his secretary after managing a task. I just defended my PhD last week, and one question from virtually every person who attended and stayed for the after-party: What’s Next? Which initially felt a bit weird. After all, I already took my next step three months ago when I joined Open Humans as the Director of Research.
Exactly 5 years ago Twitter started offering the option for users to download their full archive of personal tweets. The archive gives you a change to quickly browse through your personal history and find those funny cat pictures you once posted. But there is additional value in the archive, transcending the trips down to memory lane.
The first month in Berkeley – and with that also with Open Humans – is slowly coming to an end. And while much of this time was spent wrangling various forms of organisational and bureaucratic ordeals (finding an apartment; making sure all visa stuff is in order; getting a Social Security Number;
Previously I wrote about our move to electronic lab notebooks (ELNs). This post contains the technical details to understand how it works for us. You can even replicate our setup if you want to take the plunge. Why go electronic? Lots and lots of lab books and folders. Many reasons: I wanted to be able to quickly find information in our lab books.
We finally took the plunge and adopted electronic lab notebook (ELNs) for the lab. This short post describes our choice of software. I will write another post about how it’s going, how I set it up and other technical details. tl;dr we are using WordPress as our ELN. First, so you can understand my wishlist of requirements for the perfect ELN. Easy-to-use. Allow adding pictures and notes easily.
We are very exited to announce a major new release of the Data Retriever, our software for making it quick and easy to get clean, ready to analyze, versions of publicly available data. The Data Retriever, automates the downloading, cleaning, and installing of ecological and environmental data into your choice of databases and flat file formats.
“an academic career, in which a person is forced to produce scientific writings in great amounts, creates a danger of intellectual superficiality” Albert Einstein Isaacson W (2008) Einstein (His Life and Universe) (Simon and Schuster, New York), 1st Ed, p 79
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Previously, I wrote a post with tips for new PIs on lab organisation. Since that time, I’ve started using Trello to organise operations in my lab. Trello is basically a way to track the progress of projects. Collaborative working is built-in. A friend had begun using Trello as she got involved in building an app. It seems that Trello is popular among teams working to develop software.
A while back I made this little Automator script to convert Microsoft Word doc and docx files to PDF. It’s useful for when you are sent a bunch of Word files for committee work. Opening PDFs in Preview is nice and hassle-free. Struggling with Word is not. It’s not my own work, I just put it together after googling around a bit. I’ll put it here for anyone to use. To get it working: Open Automator.