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Nature News recent article developers call for lab aids is helping to draw more attention to software for science. As they aptly put it, "It's an unfortunate truism that scientists often have better software tools for managing their music or family photos than they do for tracking their experiments and data." The biggest frustration has been managing papers that I read. Then I discovered Zotero, a free easy-to-use research tool that helps you gather, organize, and analyze sources and then share the results of your research. Zotero was so much more intuitive than EndNote. Mendeley is similar to Zotero in many aspects, but Mendeley offers more space, more uniform user profiles, minimizes the steps to get others to join, and provides some interesting analytic information. The mentioned Nature News story highlighted Mendeley, which I have only recently started using. Thus far, I really like Mendeley and have been telling others about it.
Some of the features that I have explored and like from Mendeley.
This graph shows an increase in the number of PhD graduates in science and engineering, but acknowledges reduced availability of a postdoc or job compared to just a few years ago. A story from Beryl Lieff Benderly in June covered the "The Real Science Gap." "It’s not insufficient schooling or a shortage of scientists. It’s a lack of job opportunities. Americans need the reasonable hope that spending their youth preparing to do science will provide a satisfactory career."  A doctorate supply graph from Nature's "SEVEN DAYS The news in brief." Full PDF available here.
Chris Anderson from TED discusses the power of video in his prezi presentation.
"Crowd accelerated innovation" Three ingredients for "crowd accelerated innovation" include:
The power of web video in science
Chris Anderson highlights JOVE (Journal of Visualized Experiments)! (The part about JOVE starts at 10:42 mins of the video) "Jove is a website that was founded to encourage scientists to publish their peer-reviewed research on video. There's a problem with a traditional scientific paper. It can take months for a scientist in another lab to figure out how to replicate the experiments that are described in print. Here's one such frustrated scientist, Moshe Pritsker, the founder of Jove. He told me that the world is wasting billions of dollars on this. But look at this video. I mean, look: if you can show instead of just describing, that problem goes away. So it's not far-fetched to say that, at some point, online video is going to dramatically accelerate scientific advance." For more basic lab video techniques there is Benchfly.com. I learned how to do colony PCR from Benchfly.com. I really appreciated the ability to replay the protocol before doing it. As a new graduate student, I realize there is only so much time you can reasonably ask for from senior members of the lab. My favorite part of Benchfly.com is that anyone can create and add a video. With their rating system and comments sections in place Benchfly allows its users and the scientific community to have a discussion. (The "crowd" moderates the content) Setting a standard Setting a high standard by highlighting the leaders in the field is arguably the most important ingredient in accelerating innovation. "Clear open visibility of what the best people in that crowd are capable of," is important "because that is how you will learn, and how you will be empowered." What I would like to see The ability to embed videos from JOVE or Benchfly allowing them to be shared just like YouTube clips. Being able to embed video can only accelarate the sharing process and size of the "crowd." |
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