Dispatches

Being a new graduate student at Northwestern University

Unsurprisingly, questions about your life never end and starting graduate school made me think of some of the questions.

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Using pyenv

Pyenv is a simple, yet powerful, tool that manages different python versions all from within a user’s home directory.

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I wish I knew then what I know now (reproducible methods are awesome!)

I started working in computational research with no meaningful experience. I spent two years in high school “programming” in C++ on a Windows 98 machine with an IDE that made the programs run (sometimes) through what must have been magic. The past five years have been a constant refinement of ...

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Pitfalls of giving talks at seminars and conferences Part I

Bad talks are inflicted upon us all too often at seminars and conferences. You get up early in the morning, feel an excitement about the day’s talks, walk into the room upbeat, and are frustrated by an unprepared, incoherent, and boring lecture. One essential part of research that is often ...

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Historians have a tough job, give them a little slack

Not every discipline has the luxury of being able to bootstrap random iterations to test the significance of their argument

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Fake mathematics is amazing

How the apparently preposterous act of ignoring infinite values can sometimes lead to wondrous results.

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Being in a great lab as part of a college experience

As an undergraduate student, I have never envisioned joining a lab and doing research a year ago, but now (as you can see)––

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Stand up and make a retraction

A Nature paper from 2005 that reported a connection between body symmetry and dancing ability was recently retracted. Whatever for? I Investigate.

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Corporations are people, but some people are psychotic

Communicating with a distant friend twenty years ago meant that I would have to send a hastily composed letter or, gasp, ask my parents if I could call long-distance. E-mail and the internet weren’t pervasive and there were no apps that would alert me to how influential I was on ...

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Why papers are like superhero movies

When you write a paper, you are thinking about science. When you watch a superhero movie, you are being entertained. A paper and a superhero movie appear entirely unrelated to each other. People rarely realize the similarities between them.

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The human side of science

The human side of science I’m not sure how we, as humans, ended up doing science, as we don’t strictly need it for surviving on Earth. But, the search for truth, which surely drives all scientists in the world, has little to do with their personal life. Anecdote #1The oil ...

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The Lunar Standard Time

A calendar for people on the moon. Because you never know when lunar colonization is going to take off. Better safe than sorry!

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Annoying things about conferences (Part I)

I am not gonna discuss those big shots getting drunk and holding court. Whether they qualify as annoying or not, I guess it depends on the particular drunk.

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The Messy Art of Teaching

Teaching is more than just presenting material and giving periodic exams. To truly transmit information to students, you have to be able to recognize how to best communicate with them, and sometimes that involves a little bit of guesswork!

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Looking Good

Researchers need to have a better appreciation of aesthetics; one can not simply avoid rainbow-colored text on a poster with a red-green gradient using illegible font sizes in PowerPoint and call it good.

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OBITUARY-In Memoriam- Celebrating the life and works of François Jacob

FROM A FIGHT FOR FREEDOM, THROUGH THE SEARCH FOR REGULATION PRINCIPLES, TO THE LOGIC OF LIFE.

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Mean to the Regression

A recent PNAS paper teaches us a lot about data fitting, specifically, how not to do it.

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Getting things done, the old fashioned way

There are days where my head is racing with ideas, my fingers are moving a mile-a-minute and I’m at some point faced with the fact that I have without a doubt accomplished more than I do during a normal week. Some might celebrate this flurry of activity. But I’m a ...

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Everything is Almost Obvious

I am a great fan of Pulp Fiction, and one my favorite characters is Mr. Wolf (Harvey Keitel), the gentleman who “solves problems”. In the movie, Mr. Wolf is called to help out two hitmen (John Travolta and Samuel Jackson) who accidentally killed a minor character in their car. The ...

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Bravely holding ground against the five paragraph essay

Ideas on why the structure we learned in middle school might not be the best option for blogging —Irmak

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