Sign me up for RSS!- How can you go wrong with a gap year?
- Advising undergraduates: encourage them to get to know themselves
- Did you join Mastodon yet?
- Is there a book you want to write?
- What I learned from reading my book aloud
- Retraction with honor
- Ten steps to optimizing learning at large conferences
- Do not love your writing
- What have you discovered?
- An easy productivity tip: don’t stop at a stopping place
Category Archives: New ideas
Wissenschaftskolleg: It’s not just time to write, it is connections with fabulous novelists, thoughtful former politicians, historians, and scientists
Ever since I got to the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, I have been trying to understand what I can offer it and what it can offer me. This is the script: I come here for 10 months, take no more than … Continue reading
Posted in Managing an academic career, New ideas, Sabbatical, Social interactions
Tagged culture, discovery, paradox, Wiko, Wissenschaftskolleg
Leave a comment
Why is your lab group so separate from your department?
Few things in research are more exciting than watching ideas build as one person augments the thinking of another. Each can arrive at a place unanticipated and impossible from lone thinking. I feel almost euphoric when this happens. It may … Continue reading
Posted in Collaboration, Creativity, New ideas, Scientific community
Tagged collaboration, creativity, innovation, isolation, new ideas
1 Comment
You are not reading enough! Take a hierarchical approach
I hope by now you have subscribed to a bunch of topics using Google Scholar, including any citations to your own work. This will keep you informed on topics closest to you, even if you don’t read the papers through. … Continue reading
Posted in Creativity, Managing an academic career, New ideas, Scholarship
Tagged abstracts, Journals, new ideas, Reading, table of contents
3 Comments
Exactly how independent should your research be?
The significance of a Ph.D. degree is that you can do much more than excellent research. You can also think of what questions to ask. You know how to push at the most important unknowns. You can read the literature … Continue reading
Posted in Graduate school, New ideas, Postdocs, Undergraduates
Tagged experimental design, independence, Ph.D., Research, scientific literature, techniques
Leave a comment
How to transform research in your field – does Rockefeller University have the answer?
Imagine you have a decade or so to transform research in your field. What would you do? Would you stop doing whatever you are doing to do things differently? What is a transformation anyway? I am thinking about this because … Continue reading
Do mouse people talk outside their group? Do you?
Creativity research says to reach outside your group to come up with innovative ideas. I’ve written before on this topic, referencing Burt‘s work on structural holes and who is at risk for a new idea. Right now I’m at Janelia … Continue reading
Posted in New ideas, Presentations and seminars, Teaching
Tagged communication, creativity, HHMI, Janelia Farms, mice, Research, science
Leave a comment
NSF Preproposals – a failed idea at DEB and IOS?
Preproposals came to DEB and IOS about three years ago to solve the problem of too many proposals and too few willing reviewers. They were also thought to solve the problem of too much investigator time wasted on writing unfunded … Continue reading
Posted in Creativity, Grant proposals, Grants, New ideas, NSF
Tagged DEB, grant, IOS, methods, NSF, preproposal
8 Comments
The trouble with paradigm shifts
We biologists know well the popular version of Thomas Kuhn‘s famous work, The structure of scientific revolutions, and we all want to shift paradigms in our research. This has serious negative consequences. Let me explain. Kuhn in his famous, paradigm … Continue reading
Posted in Creativity, New ideas, Research
Leave a comment
Do you think a lot about scientific predictions?
A couple of weeks ago Alex Broadbent gave a talk in our seminar series on the history and philosophy of science and medicine. The point of the talk was a philosophical one, what is a good prediction? He was interested … Continue reading
Posted in New ideas
Tagged evolution, philosophy, Philosophy of science, Prediction, scientific method
Comments Off on Do you think a lot about scientific predictions?
Who gets to tell the story?
Why didn’t the writer of that important new review cite your work? After all, it is on exactly that topic. This is unfair. It is easy to feel aggrieved. Why should you bother to work so hard on your research … Continue reading
Sociobiology 