July Scientiae: Fantasy Institute

This month's July Scientiae is from JaneB:

"You have been selected as the Director of a newly endowed research institute. It is your job to decide where the institute will be based, its codes of conduct, its structure, and who you will hire. Dream away! Tell us what would make your institute a haven for scientists." 

Photo by Glisglis

Location:

- Based in warm climate with fantastic public transportation and great restaurants. 

People:

- Nice, smart, and passionate about science. 

Facilities:

- On-site chef

- On-site, high-quality childcare with enough space for all employees

- Lots of green space (trees, shrubbery, etc), flowers, parks, benches, hiking trails, maybe a pond or two

Funding:

- Researchers never have to worry about funding or making a profit.  

- Funds are always available to buy cool research toys, the caveat being that you need to make sure at least two other colleagues have played with your toy.

- Funding is always available to travel to conferences, even if you don't have a paper accepted. 

Administration:

- Fantastic, friendly, helpful administrative support whom are well paid and well treated.

- When reimbursing travel/equipment, no one is allowed to make a fuss over anything less than $50. Ever. 

Work environment:

- Slacking is encouraged, in order to generate brilliant ideas. No one is allowed to feel guilty (or make others feel guilty) for sitting in the park reading a fiction novel, playing sports, going for a swim in the pond, or chatting with others. 

Our motto: Great ideas and great work come from treating people well. 

the great thing about stripes...

is that they look fantastic no matter what the settings....

*images courtesy bippity boppity boo, plush palate, oh happy day, luxe and lilies, tiny white daisies, coco and kelly, lucky boy sunday

Err on the side of "Doctor"

DrugMonkey's post on academic titles reminded me of something I wanted to mention.

Photo by Cybertoad

When addressing someone in an academic context whose gender and/or academic ranking is unknown, it's generally best to err on the side of "Doctor". The worst that happens is you're wrong and they're flattered.

Recently a colleague (C1) invited another colleague (C2) to review a paper. C2 is a woman, and a postdoc. C1 is a male academic researcher. If one searches for C2's name, the first few hits clearly show that she has a PhD, and also that she appears to be a "she". But for some reason, C1 entered C2's information into the reviewing system as "Mr. C2 Lastname". C2 has spent a lot of time in a country which has a masculine culture, so she's probably not phased by this, but I find I am a bit. Why is "Mr." the default?

Another FCS and I were once in charge of allocating a small pot of money and advertised a call for applicants. Several applications we received were addressed, "Dear Sir". I just couldn't wrap my head around this. If we both didn't have photographs on our webpages (which both show us very much looking female) I could maybe excuse this error. But even still, the applicants could have written, "Dear Committee Members" or even just "Dear FCS1 and FCS2." Ah well... too bad about that funding. ;)

what's a girl....

gotta do to sport a cute outfit like this one??! i think it needs to magically appear in my closet. it would be a lot cuter then the t-shirt and gym shorts i am currently living in these days. it's that elastic band that keeps me coming back for more....

*images courtesy of house and home, urban electric, the zhush

Mendeley news

Few months ago I posted about Mendeley, the reference management system. I've been using it all the time and I am really satisfied. It is much more convenient to have your papers on a server than on a flash drive. Also keeping meta-information about the papers makes dealing with them (exploring, reading, citing etc.) more pleasant.

In this month a major update was released and a monetizing scheme was introduced. There are now 3 tariff plans in addition to the free one that allows one to use up to 1Gb of server disk space. There are also restrictions on the max number of shared collections and the number of users per collection. It does not look critical after all: there are no features you cannot use in the free version, so the company seems not evil. However, on the sister project last.fm the radio feature became paid after years of free service, which caused many users drift to grooveshark.

The update has affected the design of the paper info right-hand bar, and the references bar was eliminated. They promise to rebirth the bar in the future releases. It was really unusable before. When you read a paper, it is handy to have the list of indexed references on the bar, especially if the reference-style citing is used (it is the major problem with reading papers from the screen: where the hell [42] is referencing to?) I hope the people in Mendeley realize it.

It would be great to have a possibility to find papers without leaving the application. In theory, you could drag a citation from the references bar to a collection, find its (more) precise details via Internet search, and you are likely to have the link, and if it is direct, you can add the pdf with the Add File dialog using the found URL. In practice, the found URLs usually are not direct, they refer to IEEE/ACM/Springer pages, where the paper could be downloaded (usually not freely). In the same time, the paper is likely to be available for free through the direct link on the author's homepage. Moreover, Google Scholar often finds them too, but Mendeley chooses indirect links.

Mendeley needs to be more "semantic" while working with authors and conferences. It stores the author name as it appears in the paper. When you want to filter your papers by author, you can see "Shapovalov, R", "Shapovalov, R.", "Shapovalov, Roman", "Shapovalov, Roman V." etc. in the list. There are bases like DBLP, Mendeley can build their own index, so the author should be identified. If we know the author (but not only her name appearance in the paper), we are able to filter Google Scholar results and retrieve the direct link to the paper hosted on the author/university site. Finally, it is feasible to create the system, where human don't need to find papers. If I see the reference, I can automatically retrieve the pdf in a few seconds. I want Mendeley to develop in this direction.