Category Archives: Writing

Writing

The most important issues in scientific publishing

I’m in a bit of a pickle with a paper I’ve been writing for a while, and this post (which I had bookmarked because I thought it would have good writing tips — and it did, but not the kind I wanted) gave me a little bit of comic relief.

Actually, a lot of comic relief. If you’ve ever done research, applied for a grant, or tried to write a scientific paper, I’m 90+/-5% sure that you’ll get a kick out of this guy’s writeup.  I give an except below to give you some idea about how it reads:

Improbable Research

3. Scientific Writing
You have spent years on a project and have finally discovered that you cannot solve the problem you set out to solve. Nonetheless, you have a responsibility to present your research to the scientific community (Schulman et al. 1993d). Be aware that negative results can be just as important as positive results, and also that if you don’t publish enough you will never be able to stay in science. While writing a scientific paper, the most important thing to remember is that the word “which” should almost never be used. Be sure to spend at least 50% of your time (i.e. 12 hours a day) typesetting the paper so that all the tables look nice (Schulman & Bregman 1992).

Test post with mo:Blog on Treo

I’m going to Heart Rhythm this year without my laptop for the first time in three years. In fact, it’s probably the first time I’ve gone much of anywhere without a laptop, and I’m looking forward to having a ligher load. I acquired a few items yesterday that should help me work without it, which I’ll talk a bit more about in the next post.

Electron Band Structure in Germanium… a lie?

Someone tells it like it is, or at least pretends to… the 100%-real data is nice (read the whole article, it’s not all in the quote below)Kovar/Hall;

Electrons in germanium are confined to well-defined energy bands that are separated by “forbidden regions” of zero charge-carrier density. You can read about it yourself if you want to, although I don’t recommend it. You’ll have to wade through an obtuse, convoluted discussion about considering an arbitrary number of non-coupled harmonic-oscillator potentials and taking limits and so on. The upshot is that if you heat up a sample of germanium, electrons will jump from a non-conductive energy band to a conductive one, thereby creating a measurable change in resistivity. This relation between temperature and resistivity can be shown to be exponential in certain temperature regimes by waving your hands and chanting “to first order”.

The Paper and Writing Daily

I’ve been working on this paper for some time, and it’s become clear that if I’m to finish it by the deadline I must make a dogged effort to devote time to writing it regularly: writing occasionaly for hours at a time hasn’t been working for me.

Today is the first day. I intend to do an hour a day for five days a week, no matter how productive it feels, until it’s done. I may vary the plan as I go, but that’s it for now.

Advice?