Update your links, folks!

I'm moving this party over to LabSpaces! I'm way too lazy to keep posting here as well as there, so you might want to update sooner than later.

Here's the link to the RSS feed, btw -
http://www.labspaces.net/labspacesblogs.xml?blog=614


xoxo,
DGT

Journal club

Scientists seem to find a great deal of value in journal clubs. It seems that the "purpose" of journal club is to dissect papers in great detail, and that this somehow teaches your trainees how to be analytical.

This scheme reminds me of the Underpants Gnomes of South Park:

Phase1: Journal club
Phase2: ?
Phase3: Smart & analytical trainees

Now, maybe this is a gradual process - you start being able to identify the weaknesses in terrible papers first, and then find weaknesses in better papers, increasingly up the scale until you can see what experimental holes people are hiding in very well crafted papers. I fail to see how this process is learned at journal club - journal clubs aren't a class; they're a rabble. There's no one leading the dissection - participants point out parts of the paper they liked or didn't like, or ask questions of each other on the nuts-and-bolts of the experiments, but there isn't a concerted effort to make sure people know or understand what the holes are and why they're important.

Perhaps the journal clubs I've been part of have been faulty in some way.

If you just attend enough journal club sessions, does this ability magically reveal itself to you?

Let's be honest.

Being second co-first author is not as good as being first co-first author. The paper will always be "Postdoc et al", even if it's "Postdoc*, Otherpostdoc*, GradStudent* et al (*these authors contributed equally)".

On an amusing note, I came across a paper that had three co-third authors. As in, "Author1, Author2, Author3*, Author4*, Author5*, Author6, Author7". WTF is that about?

Talk talk talk, post-retreat analysis

Woot! My talk went quite well - I felt very comfortable with my material (having practiced the slides a mess of times yesterday certainly helped), and think I handled the questions posed rather well.

I was tremendously impressed with the quality of the presentations by the other technicians. I guess that sounds kinda dickish - I don't mean that I expected anyone to be bad. I mean that I've seen a lot of presentations from a lot of technicians, and the overall quality of these talks was leagues higher than what I've seen in the past.

I thought it was a really great day's worth of talks - I wonder if this is what it's like to go to a scientific meeting?

Observation

I feel that the difference between niceness of clothes you wear on any given day and niceness of clothes you wear on the day of your big presentation decreases with age.

Talk talk talk

My department is having its first annual retreat (of course, held in our own auditorium, and not at some awesome beach-y place). I've been picked to be a speaker at said "retreat".

I am kinda freaking out about it.

It's probably less of a big deal than I'm making out of it. A lot of people are giving talks, so I'm clearly not special in that regard. This also isn't a review (at least not a formal one) of anyone's progress, so no one's project is going to be axed or prioritized based on their talk.

However - I've never given a 15-minute talk before. Come to think of it, I can't say that I've given a "talk" before. I've presented at lab meeting plenty of times, but talking about my stuff at lab meeting is a whole different beast. In that forum, I'm presenting warts-and-all data and looking for constructive criticism. In this instance, I've only got four slides (pretty much) to show as sexy of a story as I can.

How on earth do I do this? Hopefully someone on the internets will have a helpful idea...

Question

1. Does your lab do a journal club?
2. How often is said journal club?
3. How often have you already read the paper that is being sent out for journal club?

My answers:

1. Yes.
   
2. The new schedule is once a week. I think this is grossly too often.
3. In my entire scientific life, there has been only one instance where I have received the "Paper for Journal Club" email and said, "Oh, I read this already." Does that mean I don't read enough papers? Or that journal club selections are often esoteric and unlikely to to be widely read outside of an individual scientist?