Tag Archives: online

Seeking out stronger science: An incomplete, non-systematic list of resources

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Our reporter Monya Baker runs through some of the statistical tools she found when writing her latest story.

As I reported in a Nature feature published this week, I found more online courses that were being developed than were actually in place. Resources to help scientists do more robust research are set to expand quickly. For example, the National Institute of General Medical Sciences has a competitive program that awards funds to institutions to enhance graduate student training; of 15 such supplements awarded in 2015, a dozen involved data analysis, statistics, or experimental rigor. You can find more here, and that is only a fraction of what is available. Some courses are still being developed and piloted to select students; others are being offered only to those in a particular department or training grant. If you find one that interests you, it can’t hurt to ask.

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Craft your connection

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Twitter is the medium du jour, and if you’re like many other early-career researchers, you’re all over it. Fantastic. But digital and social media is about much more, and there’s more to consider than the content that you and everyone else are tweeting and retweeting.

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Don’t forget that you need to nurture your online persona – the summation and entirety of every bit of online information about you or that involves you, both written and visual. Someone may well have already posted some of this. But you can still shape and guide a great deal of the accessible online information about you — and the image that this information creates — by actively managing the content over which you have some control.

This is especially true if you’re looking for a job. It’s safe to assume that potential employers will look you up online and so you need to have control over the information presented about you.

LinkedIn is still one of the most highly used sites for finding out about jobs through your virtual network – and occasionally getting one. You’ll need to make your profile look good — and you’ll need to find a way to stand out from the rest of the pack.

If you’re not seeking employment, though, social media is still a hugely powerful and useful tool. It can help you reach networks of like-minded scientists, build research collaborations and even make friends

Lots of your colleagues find particular sites to be key venues when they want to engage in collaborative discussion, peer-review papers, share negative results that might never otherwise be published, and even upload raw data sets

And through these sites, you can build a powerful virtual network that will yield opportunities, information and advice. Here’s to the click!

Mainz University Egyptologist to create massive digital inventory of hieroglyphic characters

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An Egyptian boy writing. Scribe, hieroglyphs, symbols denoting meaning. Carving in stone or painting. System of sign language. Ancient Egypt.

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Mainz University was given the go-ahead to start a long-term project to study ancient Egyptian cursive scripts – and make all the data accessible and searchable in digital format.

Cursive scripts were used in day-to-day interactions in ancient Egypt – written using rush stems and black or red ink on materials such as papyrus, linen, leather, wood, ceramics, plaster, and even stone, explains the press release by Mainz University. The style of writing was a modification of the detailed hieroglyphs – often seen carved on temple walls and ancient artifacts – and by studying it, the evolution and adaptation of handwriting to suit daily needs can perhaps be traced.

There are two types of scripts: hieratic and cursive. “Hieratic script was used for every stage of the ancient Egyptian language during 3,000 years and was only displaced in some contexts by demotic cursive script in the middle of the first millennium BC,” says the release.

The researchers will continue previous decades-long analysis of both scripts and their relation to hieroglyphs and to demotic script, but for the first time, they’re attempting to “compile a systematic and digital inventory of hieratic and cursive hieroglyphic characters from selected and significant sources, whereby different eras, regions, textual genres, and writing mediums for the documentation period from around 2700 BC to 300 AD will be taken into account.”

The analysis will also focus on the scripts’ emergence and development, the context of their use in additions to aspects such as the economy, the layout of manuscripts and the identification of individual scribes’ hands.

The project is expected to create a “digital paleography database,” a repertoire of characters, that will be available online, could be searched and inspected by international experts. Extensive metadata on all relevant sources will be provided, the project promises. Partial or special paleographies will be downloadable.

The project, titled “Ancient Egyptian Cursive Scripts: Digital Paleography and Systematic Analysis of Hieratic and Cursive Hieroglyphs,” is partly funded by the German government. It will be supervised by Egyptology Professor Ursula Verhoeven-van Elsbergen of the Department of Ancient Studies of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, and will be spread over 23 years, receiving an annual grant of a little over $325,500.

Although the project is centered on the study of ancient Egypt, the actual work will take place in the Egyptology section at Mainz University and in the Computer Philology section at the Technical University of Darmstadt.

Social media tips for scientists

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For many scientists, the thought of spending time on social media sites is distinctly unappealing. To some it’s just a question of time: why add to that to-do list which is already long enough? For others it’s more to do with social media itself, finding the idea of sharing thoughts and ideas with the whole world pointless or self-indulgent.

If that sounds like you, it might be time to reconsider your options – social media includes much more than the usual suspects like Facebook and Twitter, and there are even sites dedicated to academics. Indeed, a vast number of scientists are using social media for tremendous gains – whether that be forming new contacts and collaborations, sharing ideas, communicating science, inspiring others or just entertaining them. Why not join them?

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Starting out in the world of social media can be daunting, especially when you have a serious professional reputation to uphold. So what are the rules and where do you start? At last week’s Naturejobs Career Expo in London, social media guru Nicola Osborne offered her tips on how scientists can get the best out of social media. You can find her tweeting at @suchprettyeyes if you’re already on Twitter. If you’re not, then follow her advice and you soon will be.

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How researchers network

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Researchers rely heavily on networking at conferences and seminars and make little use of personal introductions, online social networking or proactive self-promotion, according to a report published by UK researcher development organisation Vitae.

Vitae surveyed almost 500 researchers at eight UK universities and found that less than a fifth regularly use online social networking to develop existing work contacts or make new ones. Only 14 percent feel comfortable asking someone they know to introduce them to an important person in their field, and 85 percent rarely send copies of their work to these prominent individuals.  

Overall, researchers’ networks show several characteristics of a ‘good’ network as recognised by career theory, such as a large number of work-related contacts spread across a wide geographical area. However, the people researchers know through their work also tend to know each other, which can limit the effectiveness of the network.

“The picture was of networking within a fairly limited set of contacts, with few attempts to become more visible to many of the people with power in the respondent’s field,” said the report.

A recent post on the Guardian Careers blog also highlights the importance of having a diverse network that includes weaker ties as well as close contacts, explaining that acquaintances who hail from a different social circle or industry niche are more likely to have “unique network intelligence” about available job opportunities.

“Working out strategies to connect personally with key people would help researchers manage their profile within their research field, but may also prove useful in applications for roles outside higher education,” says Vitae director Ellen Pearce. “Good networking is about being purposeful as well as widening your contacts.”

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