Posts by Bart Janssen
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Hard News: Higgs Live!, in reply to Sacha,
But we do expect them to have the professionalism to know their limits and call in help.
Actually they probably know that if they use the marketing dept for help it will involve a lead time of at least 4 weeks and they will be forced to check every single character the marketing group produces because the marketing group have no idea what the little squiggly bits mean and frequently substitute something more visually pleasing.
If you think that is me being hyperbolic I'm not. This is my own personal experience and I've heard much the same from my colleagues around the world.
The reason we do it ourselves, with varying degrees of success, is because the marketing folks just can't. And yes you are right we should have better marketing people but frankly Sachi buys for the good ones out from under us, except for a few oddballs who for some reason like being paid crap to be good at marketing of science.
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Hard News: Higgs Live!, in reply to Sacha,
However they must have been downright impossible to read from even a few rows back. Good communication design is a valuable skill just like herding particles and crunching numbers.
Ok, now I've seen a LOT of slides in seminars, dating from when they were actually slides. And I've seen a LOT of posters at conferences, trying getting to over 1000 posters while juggling 6 concurrent sessions is a skill.
And I've seen some beautiful slides and some beautiful posters.
But at tea break and in the weeks after a conference nobody talks about the gorgeous colour palette, or the great use of a theme on the poster and how they stayed under the ideal 200 word limit for text that the marketing dept recommends. Instead people will be gathered around a poster which was printed in 12 point times on A4 sheets with a couple of excel (or R) graphs and a photo of a plant that is. just. so. exciting ...
Sure it's nice when great data and great science are presented well. But no scientist cares terribly much when ideal presentation is sacrificed because they need to put 4 more graphs on a slide to prove the point.
However, if your data is ... well ... average ... and fundamentally boring, you better make the effort to make it easy to read.
TLDR No scientist in that room gave a shit how the data was presented.
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Hard News: Higgs Live!, in reply to 81stcolumn,
The enlightened leaders did on our behalf and the scientists proved they could be trusted.
Which is an important point because it highlights the fact that in the main scientists are indeed trustworthy. Perhaps not because they are better people in any way but because they really just want to use the money to find out stuff and they would rather spend the money on reagents than on flying business class.
Which raises the question of why we demand such extremes of reporting by scientists to the funding bodies ... reports that mostly are rarely read and even less often understood by the funding agencies.
It really is true that you could get far better value for money (from science) by not wasting time and money on the oversight process.
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Hard News: The not-so-Evil Empire, in reply to Zach Bagnall,
Do we really need to turn someone’s personal choice of telephone / laptop / tablet / television / toaster into a dividing line between “ordinary folks” and the rest? Please.
For as long as I’ve used computers (27 years) there has always been a vocal group that trashed Apple. They trashed Apple when it was bad and when it was good. It was pure ideology.
Like it or not the folks who trashed Apple created that divide, routinely describing Macs as computers for people who don’t really understand computers. It was meant as an insult and surprisingly was often said with genuine hatred (which of course was stupid).
You’re right of course. Creating such a divide is stupid and wrong. However, after my brother gave my mother a PC, which he upgrades yearly, she has spent a huge amount of money on with PC support folks who charge her ridiculous amounts of money to do the simplest things – I can’t help but think a computer for “ordinary folks” is not such a bad thing.
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Hard News: The not-so-Evil Empire, in reply to Simon Grigg,
I need every part of my screen plus some.
Oh YES! I learned early on that being able to use the entire dining room floor and part of the lounge helped enormously while writing my thesis. The same principle applies to screens. The more space you have to spread things out the easier it is to work. I have two big screens at work and a 27 inch at home for play.
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Hard News: The not-so-Evil Empire, in reply to Don Christie,
Not in the way Apple is
Some data to support this claim would be nice
From my experience, limited, all technology companies patent heavily and when awarded patents defend them vigorously. That is the nature of the business. To accuse one company in particular is unreasonable.
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Up Front: You're Telling My Child What, Now?, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
and then their first degree learning a diverse mixture of translated Proust, quantum physics for non-mathematicians and history of art
We once took a highly respected and very smart visiting professor out for beers at the local bowling alley. Turned out she was a very good bowler since she had taken credits in it during her undergraduate degree.
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Up Front: You're Telling My Child What, Now?, in reply to Carol Stewart,
So, what do Americans make of our system that spits out PhD graduates at such a tender age?
That very much depends on the lab you come from. From the American perspective your age is not that relevant, it is your pedigree. You come from such and such university, from the lab of so and so and hence you are worth considering. That affects kiwis because nobody in the US thinks any of the NZ universities are any good at all. So it comes down to "do they respect your PhD supervisor?"
In the end it is about personal connections, unless you've published in Science or Nature. That's why it's so very very important that kiwi scientists get to travel and spend time in labs overseas either on sabbatical or as post-docs so that if/when they come back as PhD supervisors their own students will have personal connections that can get them into good labs in the US.
Having said all that. Kiwi post-docs have a reputation for being hard working and efficient with their time, we do in 8 hours what some can't do in 12 hours. We also have the odd reputation of sometimes being quick to look for the simple answer rather than the complicated answer. That's ok but in biology sometimes the answer really isn't simple.
And finally there is some acceptance of the fact that the US system isn't as fast as it could be (not true for the elite universities). By that I mean that the first couple of years at Uni are basically teaching stuff kiwis learn in school.
And yes that lack of pace affects women in science because late PhD and early post-doc time is when you need to be in lab the most, it's your best chance to get data for really good publications. But it's also the time most people fall in love with "the one" and think seriously about families. The indirect pressures on woman in particular at that time are enormous. There is a huge amount of educated discussion about how to create an environment where the demands of the science career need to be altered to accommodate the desire of folks to have a "real life" as well. All for the sole purpose of trying to ensure more women get to the top of their field in science.
That's why it makes me so angry to see women's contribution as a PhD belittled. It's hard enough to keep great female minds in science as it is without having their contribution dismissed by tiny minded bitches.
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Up Front: You're Telling My Child What, Now?, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
And what's so fucking disappointing is that there is a huge discrepancy between women in science and women in leadership roles in science pretty much because of the difficulties Lucy describes.
To have some dipshit MD piss all over the idea that women should value their intellectual contribution to society makes me so fucking angry.
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complete their PhDs at 35, and realise the hardest challenge lies ahead
grrrr Thank you for pointing out that the degree which is actually a frigging nightmare to complete is less important than the biological act that pretty much everyone can do (admittedly to varying levels of competence).
Note also the patronizing note of "yes dear your degree recognizing your intellectual contribution to society is all very well ... now be a good woman and get on with being pregnant"
So angry now ... words difficult ....