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? 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.

I recently asked on Twitter for any recommendations for software to organise my PDFs. I got several replies, but nothing really fitted the bill. This is a brief summary. My situation I have quite a lot of books, textbooks, cheat sheets, manuals, protocols etc. in PDF format and I need a way to organise them.

The charge that Political Science (or other non-STEM disciplines) is lacking relevance and does not produce interesting research is made then and again, with two new pieces published these days. One is written by a political economist, stating that most research is boring;

Lab meetings: love them or loathe them, they’re an important part of lab-life. There’s many different formats and ways to do a lab meeting. Sometimes it feels like we’ve tried them all! I’m going to describe our current format and then discuss some other things to try. Our current lab meeting format is: Weekly. For one hour (Wednesdays at 9am) One person each week talks about their progress. It rotates around.

I was recently an external examiner for a PhD viva in Cambridge. As we were wrapping up, I asked “if you were to do it all again, what would you do differently?”. It’s one of my stock questions and normally the candidate says “oh I’d do it so much quicker!” or something similar. However, this time I got a surprise. “I would write my thesis in LaTeX!”, was the reply. As a recent convert to LaTeX I could see where she was coming from.

Outreach means trying to engage the public with what we are doing in our research group. For me, this mainly means talking to non-specialists about our work and showing them around the lab. These non-specialists are typically interested members of the public and mainly supporters of the charity that funds work in my lab (Cancer Research UK). The most recent batch of activities have prompted this post on doing outreach.

I’ve returned from the American Society for Cell Biology 2016 meeting in San Francisco. Despite being a cell biologist and people from my lab attending this meeting numerous times, this was my first ASCB meeting.

In 1936, Literary Digest magazine made completely wrong predictions about the Presidential election. They did this because they polled based on a bad sample: driver’s licenses and subscriptions to their own magazine. Enough people who didn’t drive or subscribe to Literary Digest voted, and they voted for Roosevelt. The magazine’s editors’ faces were red, and they had the humility to put that on the cover.

Last month I wrote those words on a slide I was preparing to show to the American Association for Corpus Linguistics, as a part of a presentation of my Digital Parisian Stage Corpus. I was proud of having a truly representative sample of theatrical texts performed in Paris between 1800 and 1815, and thus finding a difference in the use of negation constructions that was not just large but statistically significant.