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. What is pre-registration? It’s probably most familiar to you in the form of clinical studies, where there was a notor ..read more

 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. I think this “dam breaking” phenomenon can be best thought of in terms of “refusal of the call”, which is a critical part of the classic hero’s journey in the theory of storytellin ..read more

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: This snippet reminded me of some advice I got from my postdoc advisor about giving talks: "You don't want everything to be clear. You should have at least some part of it that is confusing." This advice has really stuck with me through the years, and I have continued to puzzle over it for a long time ..read more

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. The most important thing I learned from Gautham was to consider alternative hypotheses. I know this sounds like duh, that’s what I learn in my RCR meetings, “expected outcomes and potential pitfalls” sections of grants, and boring classes on how to do science, but I think that’s b ..read more

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 journal provides that filter function without the need for the rest of the (costly) trappings of a journal, like ..read more

Guest post by Eric Sanford In medical school, we usually have five lectures’ worth of new material to memorize each day. Since we can’t simply remember it all, we are always seeking “high yield” resources (a term used so often by med students that it quickly becomes a joke): those concise one or two-pagers that somehow contain 95 percent of what we need to know for our exams. My quest of finding the highest yield resources has continued in full force after becoming a PhD student. A major goal of mine has been to improve my scientific communication skills (you know, writing, public speaking ..read more

Guest post by Connie Jiang As has been covered somewhat extensively (see here, here, and here), we are a lab that really appreciates the flexibility and ease with which one can use Illustrator to compile and annotate hard-coded graphical data elements to create figures. Using Illustrator to set things like font size, marker color, and line weighting is often far more intuitive and time-efficient than trying to do so programmatically. Furthermore, it can easily re-arrange/re-align graphics and create beautiful vector schematics, with far more flexibility than hard-coded options or PowerPoint ..read more

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. In processing what Rob was saying, one of the first questions that needed answering is exactly what is a coach? I think most of us think about formal training interactions (i.e., stu ..read more

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. In processing what Rob was saying, one of the first questions that needed answering is exactly what is a coach? I think most of us think about formal training interactions (i.e., stu ..read more

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! But something in the podcast caught my ear. They talked about how when they asked some kids, you had to watch out, because once one kid said, say, 300 pounds (wildly inaccurate ..read more