Links

Word Whiskers of Self Doubt and Phantom Questions: Like, you know?

by Kelle January 24, 2011

Sorry for the stream of posts on presentations, but AAS was clearly inspiring. Like, you know? | Mahalo.ne.Trash JohnJohn brings up several excellent points about the speech patterns pervasive in the language of our youth (mostly). Not just sentences sung like questions, but also word whiskers and everyday language indicative of self-doubt. Commenter Megan commented [...]

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Learning to Give Better Talks: One Message per Slide. One Slide per Message.

by Kelle January 21, 2011

How to give effective oral presentations | Physicist/Feminist There are some fundamental principles of giving effective talks that everyone should learn and try to implement to the best of their ability. Not everybody is going to give great talks, but all of us can give better ones! Towards that end, one of the professional development [...]

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Mac OS X Hints for 10.6 Snow Leopard

by saurav January 13, 2011

As we look forward to the days of Mac OS 10.7 Lion (Summer 2011) and a flood of hints on how to take advantage of new features in Lion at Mac OS X Hints, I thought it would be a good idea to share the list (from my bookmarks) of my favorite hints  since 10.6 [...]

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Keeping Women in Science on a Tenure Track

by Jessica January 11, 2011

Keeping Women in Science on a Tenure Track | NY Times Some shocking numbers regarding the impact of having children as a graduate student or a postdoc on chances of getting a faculty position and tenure. I like the quantitative nature of the study and they recommend specific actions. … women who are married with [...]

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How to Write a 5 Minute Talk

by Kelle January 5, 2011

How to Write a 5 Minute Talk | Cosmic Variance Required reading for anybody preparing a talk for AAS.  Actually, a lot of the advice in here applies just as well to 50 minute talks. My favorite bits: 1. The key to framing the talk is to figure out that One New Thing, and then [...]

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TUAW List of Best Mac Apps

by Kelle December 30, 2010

The best Mac applications I used in 2010 | TUAW. We’ve told you about DropBox and Mailplane ($25). I’ve been trying out BusyCal (aka iCal pro, $50) and will most likely be purchasing that. I also just started using Divvy, which is similar to Cinch ($7) and SizeUp ($13), for automatically arranging my windows. I [...]

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One Way to the Battle the Gender Gap in the Science Classroom

by Kelle December 29, 2010

Reducing the Gender Achievement Gap in College Science: A Classroom Study of Values Affirmation | Science In this randomized double-blind study, 399 students either wrote about their most important values or not, twice at the beginning of the 15-week course. Values affirmation reduced the male-female performance and learning difference substantially and elevated women’s modal grades [...]

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Recommendation Letter Writing Round Up

by Kelle December 21, 2010

‘Tis the season for writing letters so I thought I would highlight some resources: How Do You Write Effective Letters of Recommendation for Grad School Applicants? and 5 Principles for Writing Effective Letters of Recommendation for Grad School Applicants Post with useful comments and the roundup. Tips on Writing Letters of Recommendation Video from Oberlin [...]

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Unintentional Biases, Band-Wagon Effects, and the Weaknesses of the Scientific Method

by Kelle December 17, 2010

Rethinking the scientific method | The New Yorker (subscription required, unfortunately) Extremely disturbing article about well-intentioned scientists’ experiments and conclusions gone awry. Most upsetting is the lack of reproducibility in many important studies and the likelihood that those works don’t get published. The disturbing implication of his study is that a lot of extraordinary scientific [...]

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Are the Obvious Non-Academic Career Options for Astronomers Not As Attractive as in Other Fields?

by Kelle December 15, 2010

Volatile and Decentralized: Why I’m leaving Harvard Tenured Harvard Computer Science professor describes why he chose to leave academia for a gig at Google. (via Evegenya Scholnick) I get to hack all day, working on problems that are orders of magnitude larger and more interesting than I can work on at any university…At Google, I [...]

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