Blog

  • Science and art: how diverse and unique

    by: in: Musingson April 20, 2016

    Science and art are classically branded with opposing characteristics: science is objective, supports understanding the nature and answers long-standing questions, while art is subjective, elicits new thoughts instead of responding to established inquiries, and in fact, is used as a self-expression tool. The question is whether this classical branding represents science and art truthfully.

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  • The struggle with p-values

    by: in: Researchon April 12, 2016

    For most of my professional life I have thought that “statistically significant” results are marked by a p-value of less than 0.05, and that, if the test is used correctly, everything is cool and dandy and can be published. Well…. “if the test is used correctly” is the important consideration here, and it has always been.

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  • Pigeons know better

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    by: in: Musings, Researchon April 4, 2016

    When your experiments went wrong again, when you just spent another weekend trying to guess what the experimental protocol should be, and, especially if you feel like you’re losing control, talk to a pigeon!

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  • Failure – the great teacher

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    by: in: Musingson April 4, 2016

    “It’s fine to celebrate success, but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure,” Bill Gates said.

    We are all always at risk of encountering failure at one point or another. What truly matters is how one reacts to and learns from that failure instead of personalizing it, or trying to justify or ignore it. When I struggle with failure, I realize that I need to find a way to handle it and take it as an opportunity in a way that can lead me, ultimately, to success. 

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  • Preparing MATLAB figures for publication

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    by: in: Protocols, Researchon April 4, 2016

    For us researchers, writing documentation and preparing manuscripts for publication is a large part of our work. And often, the most important parts of our written documents are the figures that visualize the data we generated. As my tool of choice for most calculations is Matlab, most of my data ends up in the Matlab workspace at some point and gets plotted from there. In order to prepare Matlab figures for publication, some modifications should be made to the figures. In the following, I will explain the main steps I usually take.

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