August 11, 2011 – 11:00 pm
Imagine you are a professor in organic chemistry. You received financial support for a project, and you are ready to hire a Ph.D. student to make it happen. The project requires the synthesis of a new compound. Imagine you interview your best candidate. At the whiteboard, you present him with various problems of how to [...]
Since its release, I got access to Google+ and started playing with it, so I feel obliged to join the crowd and state something about it. I want to first state one important point. I am not a fan of social networks, at all, unless when useful (such as LinkedIn). Why? For four reasons, all [...]
Today, an era ends. Today the last Shuttle, Atlantis, is scheduled to land for the last time , closing the era of the Shuttle missions, and basically the Space age. Why I say so? Well I don’t think I should spend low-grade effort explaining something that has already been professionally written at the Economist. Instead, [...]
I don’t like TV, but occasionally I get to something that pokes my brain. I am an interested observer of a TV “reality show” called “Gordon’s Kitchen Nightmares“. Professional chef Gordon Ramsay travels from restaurant to restaurant in order to analyze and (allegedly?) try to fix their troublesome financial issues, generally due to bad managerial [...]
In this final post, I want to give some form of grocery list to get an idea of the reliability of scientific communication performed by general purpose media. To do this, I necessarily had to introduce some nomenclature in the previous posts, in particular about citations, type of article, structure of an article, Impact Factors, [...]
Suppose someone gives you the chemical formula of a substance, such as and asks you the color this substance is expected to have. Is it possible to give an answer? In most cases, you may have an educated guess, but an accurate prediction is far from trivial: the color of a substance is decided at [...]
This article continues my series of three articles on how to defend yourself from bad scientific communication perpetrated by non-scientific newspapers. The first post detailed the scientific article and the mechanism of citations. In this post I will proceed detailing the peer reviewing process, and two numbers, the Impact Factor and the h-Index, to obtain [...]
Check out this great movie on the BBC website: a young amputee decided to replace his non-functional hand with a robotic one. The new hand allows him to perform tasks as tying a shoe, opening a bottle, and fully rotate around the wrist, something not possible for a human hand. This is impressive on so [...]
Vim is a great, great programming tool. Even after years of experience with it you still get to discover, either by change or by sharing, fantastic tips to make an impossible task incredibly easy. It is the case with my recent problem of exporting the visual aspect of vim (as from terminal) to an HTML [...]
I am really sad to report my utter (but expected) failure with green stuff: the tulips died. From really green sprouts they suddenly became yellow and died within a week. This is the cold body aftermath I have no idea of what went wrong, but I will try again next year. What hasn’t failed however, [...]