Daily Work Log 2006-07-14

Today was something of a whirlwind. I got in pretty early, have now stayed rather late, and I got a ton done. Items include

  • Weekly Review
  • 4 x 1-hour dashes on several subjects
  • A de-cruftification of my Next Actions system… they weren’t making it onto the right lists at the right times, so I’ve stopped putting next actions on the wiki pages altogether
  • Etc etc…

There’s more I could write about, but honestly, it’s Friday night and Amanda’s at home waiting for me so that we can eat dinner, so I’m going to pack up and head home. Have a good weekend!

Daily Work Log 2006-07-12

In an effort to increase my blogging, I’m going to start making daily logs before I leave work.

I spent most of today reading journal articles to prep for writing the discussion and introduction of my paper. The methods and results have been coalescing for a while, and I think are nearing completion. I received some helpful comments from my coauthor via trans-Atlantic fax this morning, and addressing those comments is next on the agenda for that project.

In other news, I’ve begun work on my prospectus. It needs to be defended before I leave for Baltimore, and that doesn’t give me very long. Luckily a lot of the groundwork has already been done for other reasons, so it should be mostly synthesis. The department does require that I write it up in NIH format in addition to the standard format required by the Dean’s office, so I get to join the wonderful world of people who’ve filled out all of that stuff. I hope it’s simpler than my AHA fellowship application was.

Tomorrow I have to take the day off to go to Mandeville, so I’ll follow my first day of daily posts with a day of no posting. My apologies!

One last note before I go home. Last night I found a great meditation timer for Palm OS, PocketDoan. It’s good for much, much more than meditation, though. People have siezed on it for use in work “dashes” particularly the (10+2)*5 method discussed at 43 Folders. I used it for that today and it was fantastic! I only got 3 dashes in today, and I only managed to finish one of the three without an interruption (though pausing is easy). I’m going to keep trying this and try to squeeze more 1-hour periods in per day. My ideal goal would be 7-8 per day.

Going Camping

I’m going camping in the San Juan Islands north of Seattle until July 6th, so I’ll be out of contact until then. Just FYI.

A Tribute to Tool Time

Does everyone know what … time it is?

Yep! Tropical Depression One is here. I used to find this sort of thing exciting. I was very surprised to find myself physically nauseated when I saw the projection map and the little hurricane symbol in the Gulf of Mexico. I guess Katrina had a deep effect on me. If I weren’t so busy I’d celebrate by drinking… heavily.

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).