kathylam.name

Scientific writing: writing that bores, confuses, and frustrates

itskathylam — Sat, 24 Mar 2012 01:07:49 +0000

Lately, I have been pondering (a friend of mine might call it “internally lamenting”) the way science is presented in the written form. That is, why must scientific writing be so terrible to read? Why are certain practices — probably bad practices — encouraged?

I tweeted several links yesterday about scientific writing. Appropriately, today I stumbled across a post in the Science Careers section of Science, called How to Write Like a Scientist. It made me laugh… but also sad.

I don’t think that we should write as if we are trying desperately to captivate or move an audience (for example, poetically), but I also don’t think we should write in a manner that induces sleep… or the desire to stab oneself in the eye with the nearest sharp object. And why is the passive “It was concluded that…” preferable to the active “We concluded that…”? And on that note, I leave you with a few opinion pieces concerning use of the passive voice in technical writing, submitted to Nature in the mid-’90s.

‘Real Lives and White Lies in the Funding of Scientific Research’

itskathylam — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 15:00:31 +0000

I recently read an PLoS Biology Perspectives piece – about how ‘the granting system turns young scientists into bureaucrats and then betrays them’. I found it to be a very interesting read. Often, I look around myself and wonder how things got to be the way they are. I hear people saying that it’s ‘publish or perish’, and, understandably, I see them obsess about publications and publishing. It has always struck me as rather… unscientific. Actually, it’s funny: it kind of reminds me of the way professional school-’bound’ undergrads obsess over things without really stopping to think of… value, purpose, and integrity. I know because I was once swept up in that as well. It’s a widespread problem is what it is: what has happened to the world, and its people?

But I digress. I need to focus on the subset, not the superset. The article criticizes the approach that granting agencies take in giving funding, and discusses the resulting negative effects. I wonder if anything can change — perhaps any time soon. The article ends with this statement: “…only false objectivity is offered by evaluating real people using unreal calculations with numbers of papers, citations, and journal impact factors. These calculations have not only demoralised and demotivated the scientific community, they have also redirected our research and vitiated its purpose.”

Y’know, decorating is not unlike cloning…

itskathylam — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 21:57:05 +0000

Both involve the making of something new. Making things is fun. Particularly when it involves the possibility of an unknown reward. Bring in a door decorating contest. Yes, it’s cheesy; yes,we probably spent too much time on it, but: the Charles Lab door rocks.

Gut microbiome cosmid library: cloned at last!

itskathylam — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 22:27:37 +0000

I have been working on making a cosmid library of the human gut (of seven normal, healthy volunteers) for… a really long time. After it was made, I confirmed that it was indeed a library by sampling 20 random clones (of the ~40K-clone library); the two marker lanes on the left and right are Fermentas’ lambda-HindIII and 1 kb, respectively:

It’s not the best image, but I was very happy to see it! Now that I finally have the library, I am very excited to start screening it. I have a number of screens planned for the near future.

On a related note: yesterday, Adrian Bird, a Gairdner recipient, gave a general lecture at UW about his own scientific journey; in it, he emphasized the importance of studying problems, not techniques. It does depend on what a person wants to get out of his/her experience I think, but it seems like this kind of advice is becoming more and more common (justly so?) as technology in the life sciences improves rapidly. A few weeks ago, at a metagenomics workshop held by Argonne National Labs, James Prosser said that “we have to stop metagenomics from looking like an answer looking for a question”. I am bringing these things up because… well, I guess I am thinking of the kind of work I want to do; the questions I could ask; the problems I could investigate; also, the research space that I do not want to suddenly find myself in.

New home on the interwebs!

itskathylam — Mon, 23 May 2011 03:25:27 +0000

I’ve finally gotten around to putting some basic information about myself online. More to come in the future!

Also, I might have to work on the main page logo. I love bright colours, but I know things that I like can be an eyesore to others…