Public Articles
Social Media Essay Contest: Tinder
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Graduate school is notoriously lonely- so I’m on Tinder. And so is the rest of my lab. I’ve seen your profiles, guys! For those unfamiliar, Tinder is a dating app that allows you to very simply browse mates by viewing pictures. You swipe left if you don’t like what you see or right if you do. It’s a social networking site in that it allows you to sort through other people nearby and interact with only those that also swiped right on you. All people, not just grad students apparently, get lonely so Tinder represents a relatively diverse cross section of the population. I’ve met people on Tinder with professions from house painter to software developer to professional clown (swipe left, swipe left!).
Now as far as social media goes, it is generally well integrated into my professional life. My advisor is active on twitter, regularly posts on her blog, and encourages us to use online platforms for everything from notebooks to lab organization. We are a modern lab. But this social media communication that we typically practice, such as live tweeting conferences or posting on ResearchGate, ends up being almost exclusively scientist-to-scientist communication. While students should be sure to integrate this sort of communication into their work, most of the world is not populated by scientists. Most people are house painters, software developers, clowns, etc. and my time on Tinder has taught me how utterly incompetent we are at communicating our work with them.
As a bioengineer with an emphasis on genetic manipulation, I tend to get a pretty formulaic response from new people. “Oh wow, bioengineering. Miss smarty pants over here.” There’s a certain level of pedantic shock and surprise when you’re young, blonde, female and a PhD student in STEM. This is usually followed by some joke, always pertaining to possible nefarious activities that I might be undertaking in the lab. “What kind of super virus are you cooking up?” “Resurrect any dinosaurs lately?” When I first started talking to people on dating apps about my career, I was shocked by how many assumed I was getting a PhD in Evil. Most people go into my field with the intention of curing cancer, not causing vast global plagues. But our portrayal of scientists in pop culture as generally a little whacked in the head, and superstitious fears of GMOs explain a lot of this. Many people have no picture of what a scientist, bioengineer, or other STEM professional looks like outside of the general stereotype of an old white man with crazy hair. We have done a terrible job showing non-STEM folks that we can be women, people of color, queer, etc. And we have failed in communicating the motives behind our work to them.
Tinder has put me into contact with more diverse groups of people than any other social media platform. My list of Facebook friends and Twitter followers is full of scientists like me, but I swipe right on people from all walks of life. Over time, I’ve developed an elevator speech for my work that I can give to non-scientists. I’ve figured out ways to define complicated topics like horizontal gene transfer in metaphors that make sense to a broader audience, ie that bacteria swap genes like Pokemon cards. I’ve become able to talk about complex biological engineering with people who haven’t taken biology since the eighth grade. And these new skills from late night chats and many, many first dates, have improved my science communication skills vastly. I have translated them into speaking clearly with possible funding agencies, improving my K-12 outreach, and describing my work to broader media outlets. But I shouldn’t have had to learn this through Tinder. If we ever hope to see strong funding for science, public understanding, science-conscious policy making, and true diversity in science, we need to shift our communication style. We need to learn in the course of our studies how to communicate outside of our special little STEM club. There is a world of house painters, software developers, and clowns out there that is curious but hopelessly uninformed. We’re the experts and the onus is on us to be able to keep them in the loop by including them in our target audience for communication. We have the luxury of knowing how to find answers in databases, understand primary literature, and think critically about data. Joe from Tinder never learned this stuff. It’s our job to make sure that when we publish a paper, we blog about it in a way he can understand and that is still accurate. It’s on us to ensure that this makes it to media outlets that he uses. And it’s our job to make sure that when we match with him on Tinder, we know what to say.
Macalester POTW 1201: Problem 1201. What Goes Up Might Not Come Down
A random walk on the 2-dimensional integer lattice begins at the origin. At each step, the walker moves one unit either left, right, or up, each with probability $\frac13$. (No downward steps ever.) A walk is a success if it reaches the point (1, 1). What is the probability of success?
Note: One can vary the problem by varying the target point. Eg., use (1, 0) or (0, 1) instead. Perhaps there is a good method to resolve the general case of target (a, b).
Source: Bruce Torrence, Randolph-Macon College
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wordpress_basic_es_01_lezione02_Erica Bontempo
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Using Disease Dynamics
Supplementary Materials
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Sequential firing of hippocampal neurons during both running and rest is believed to contribute to episodic-memory encoding. In particular, sharp-wave (SPW) sequences, which normally occur during rest, have been suggested to serve as a physiological substrate of memory. This hypothesis arose because (i) elimination of SPW sequences impairs learning and memory and (ii) the similarity of some SPW sequences to average running sequences (such as place-cell and episode-cell sequences) creates the impression that SPWs “replay” an animal’s experience of running. Using these average running sequences as templates, it has been shown that SPWs can replay the running sequences in both forward and backward directions relative to the templates. This led to the conjecture that SPW sequences are the sequences that are activated bidirectionally (i.e., forward and backward).
We used a novel method to test this bidirectionality conjecture by directly comparing pairs of SPW sequences without the use of average running sequences. Assuming that SPW sequences can be activated in both forward and backward directions, correlations among SPW sequences should be both positive and negative. Surprisingly, our analysis of correlations among SPW sequences revealed a very significant number of positive correlations but only a chance-level number of negative correlations. This lack of negative correlations among SPW sequences suggests that SPW sequences are activated unidirectionally, not bidirectionally as previously conjectured. This same method was also robust enough to reproduce the seemingly contradictory findings that SPW sequences are positively and negatively correlated with running sequences. More than suggesting that backward SPW replay does not exist, this analysis questions the entire “replay” framework since SPW sequences are statistically correlated positively with each other regardless of their similarity to running sequences.
University of Melbourne Advanced Materials Report
Key words α Nucleation, β Titanium Alloy, Strengthening, Alloying elements
gui_es_03_definizione_funzionalità_Chiara_Elzi
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gui_es_03_definizione_funzionalità_Ilaria_De Rosa
This one goes out to all my tweeps.
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How social media has enhanced my education and research
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Former, partager, collaborer en bibliothèques
Cet article est destiné à ouvrir une discussion autour de nos pratiques actuelles en terme de partage et de collaboration. Les exemples donnés dans cet article sont tirés de ce que je connais. Cela fait pencher la balance du côté des bibliothèques académiques.
De même, le titre laisse penser que seules les bibliothèques sont concernées. Ce n'est pas le cas. Mais là encore, il s'agit de ce que je vois de mon point de vue. Ainsi, si vous avez des exemples et des idées provenant ou destinées aux bibliothèques de lecture publique, scolaires ou d'entreprise, aux centres de documentation, archives ou autres types d'institutions que j'ai oubliées de lister ici, partagez-les ! Cet article a été rédigé sur Authorea et peut être commenté directement en ligne: cest.la/hors-texte (pour plus de précisions, rendez-vous à la fin de l'article).
Social Media: The Undeniable Game Changer in the World of Research and Discovery
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Authorea Spotlight: Viputheshwar Sitaraman (Draw Science)
wordpress_basic_es_03_product_website_Caimi_Filippo
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wordpress_basic_es_03_product_website_Aurora Cappello
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wordpress_basic_es_03_product_website_Rebecca_Guzzo
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wordpress_basic_es_03_product_website_Erica_Bontempo
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contest_italianism_stile
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wordpress_basic_es_03_product_website Giulio Bergamo
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wordpress_basic_es_03_product_website Enrico
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wordpress_basic_es_03_Matteo_Bertozzo
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wordpress_basic_es_03_product_website
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