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Astrobetter guest post: Mendeley

March 22, 2010 By

Staying on top of the literature, even in a narrow field, is one of the biggest challenges we face in research today. Do you have an ever-growing pile of astro-ph papers on your desk you’ve meaning to read? Yeah, we all have that. In recent years a number of software packages and web applications have come on the market to help researchers organise their literature: Papers, Reference Manager, Jabref, and Zotero. Past AstroBetter posts have introduced Papers and discussed Papers vs. BibDesk. A recent addition that’s been getting good press lately is London-based Mendeley.[...]

I wrote a guest post on literature-management-slash-science.fm-software Mendeley for the Astrobetter blog.  Go read it here!

More screenshots are in my public Astrobetter notebook, alongside those I did for the Evernote post.

Filed Under: Me, Research, Reviews Tagged With: , ,

Don’t be such a scientist

February 3, 2010 By

I just finished reading a book called Don’t Be Such a Scientist: Talking Substance in an Age of Style, by a marine biologist-turned-filmmaker, Randy Olson. Olson quit his research career to go to film school, and is now an established science film director in Hollywood. One of his earliest efforts was this music video about the sex lives of barnacles. In this book, he talks about his experience of being a man of substance in a world of style, and gives advice to scientists on how to communicate research to a wide audience without boring, annoying or patronising them.

For all his good advice, I have to say Olson picked a rather unfortunate title. It’s impossible to buy this book as a gift for someone without seeming, well, rude. Being a scientist, obviously, I did just that for the scientist I share my life with. He wasn’t too impressed (but did finish the book, then placed it on my side of the bed).

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Filed Under: Reviews, Sci & Soc Tagged With: , , , ,

Astrobetter Guest Post: Evernote

January 25, 2010 By

Some time ago Kelle Cruz, one of the writers of the Astrobetter blog, invited me to write a guest post on how I use Evernote for work. It’s just appeared on the blog today, so go check it out.

I created a public notebook in Evernote with some screenshots to illustrate some of the ways I use the programme I’ve described in the post. At the same time this can give Evernote newbies a flavour of the application’s  look and feel.

Filed Under: Research, Reviews, Sci 2.0 Tagged With: ,

Review: The Illustrated Guide to Astronomical Wonders

November 12, 2009 By

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Once upon a time in a country far away I was a young girl who loved looking at the stars. I didn’t know any other keen stargazers and the internet was still in its infancy, so I relied on books to help me work out what I was looking at.

These days, sadly, stargazing doesn’t feature very heavily in my life anymore given my light polluted dwellings but my earliest experiences of looking through telescopes did inspire me to get into helping design them myself, as a profession. So I was keen to have a read of one of O’Reilly‘s publications, The Illustrated Guide to Astronomical Wonders, by Robert and Barbara Thompson, a copy of which found its way to my desk (h/t to Alasdair).

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Filed Under: Reviews Tagged With: , , ,
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