Latest Comments on Science and Academia
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Open sourcing research software
In this 15min. video I’ll take you through the basic steps of open sourcing your research software. It covers purpose of open sourcing, the rights situation, license choice, and the actual step of open sourcing. The slides are also available. Please note that the slides and video contain some simplifications so make sure you resp. your lawyers…
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Documenting a lead author’s contributions for a cumulative dissertation
Since 2021, my Ph.D. students have been able to submit cumulative dissertations for promotion rather than the traditional monographs. A cumulative dissertation is a set of published research papers, logically stapled together, and lead by an introduction that puts the research papers into context. This way, a graduate-level researcher can work incrementally towards their dissertation,…
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A short critique of CRediT
CRediT is a system for classifying contributions to research with the goal of documenting who did what for a given publication. Ann Barcomb, formerly a Postdoc in my research group, now a professor at U of Calgary, pointed me to it. The system may or may not be used by journals. As a long-time modeler,…
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Making your theory practical
The output of research is theory, initially just proposed, later validated (or invalidated). A theory is a description or model of phenomena of interest, and its main value is to make predictions about these phenomena. No predictions, no theory. Predictions are turned into hypotheses to put a theory to the test. Sadly, the word theory…
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The role of a literature review in grant proposals
Christmas is coming up, so what’s a professor got to do? Hide from the family and work on grant proposals, naturally. Right now I’m upset about the misunderstanding of the role that literature reviews play in grant proposals (by way of reviewer comments). Reviewing literature is just a general activity, but one that can serve…
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How I work with industry guest speakers
I bring in guest speakers from industry into my courses, a lot. The benefits of doing so are are mostly that (1) industry speakers can cover some topics better than me and (2) the change of pace in teaching keeps students interested. In general, I don’t save time, though, because engaging industry in my teaching…