The Turret is going to see a few new bloggers this semester, undergraduate students taking the Communication in Engineering course here at McGill.
To kick this off, it is my great pleasure to welcome Pauline (and her little brother).
We are all looking forward to hearing what Pauline will share with us on The Turret (no pressure!).
There is a new hashtag getting attention this week: #SixWordPeerReview
Researchers are expressing their frustrations with the peer-review process and sharing some interesting six word responses from referees.
Open science publisher, F1000Research, sums it up on Storify and points out how their peer-review model addresses some of the concerns.
CTRF invites authors and presenters from academia, public and private sectors to submit their work to our 49th annual conference in support of this theme.
Authors who wish to present their work at the conference but do not wish to submit a full paper can submit a short paper through the conference’s paper submission website.
Particular interests include, but not limited to, papers about: technological, operational and institutional advances to make transportation systems more economical, efficient and reliable; conflicts between transportation and land use activities and how to overcome them; new models of financing that draw on the resources and efficiency of the private sector while preserving an emphasis on equity, sustainability and safety; and issues concerned with creating appropriate balance in regulating the economics, safety and security of transport, while maintaining Canada’s economic competitiveness.
Abstract Submission Deadline is Tuesday January 28th – see the attached Call for Papers or www.ctrf.ca for details.
It’s time to get your groove on! Get your Mojo working and get in the mood for love! McGill’s Freaky Friday series is sponsoring a love-in of sorts with their Science of Love Competition just in time for Valentine’s Day! Open to undergraduate students in science, the six best one-page proposals on the chemistry, biology or physics of all things love-related will be chosen to deliver a 4-slide 4-minute presentation at Redpath Museum for the McLovin’ Science Prize. The big event will take place on Valentine’s Day (of course!) at 5pm in Redpath Museum and is open to the public. Proposals are due Jan. 31. Please click here for further contest details.
In need of some inspiration to get the juices flowing? Check out the BBC’s Three stages of falling in love page, PositScience’s Your brain in love page, Nature’s blog post reporting on research that confirms the existence of love at first sight and Scientific American’s Illusions of love page. Or check out McGill’s home grown talent from the Mini-Science lectures on Science, Sex and Gender delivered by some of McGill’s most renowned scientists like Chemistry’s own Dr. Joe Schwarcz and Dr. Ehab Abouheif from the Department of Biology.
What could be more romantic than seducing the apple of your eye by showing him or her what an expert you are in love talk and winning the grand McLovin’ Science Prize? Go ahead and wear your heart on your sleeve. Share what you know about the Science of Love!
Image from Arif-nma.com
According to Jason Dunn, fail early and fail often should be the mantra for private industry in order to learn and move forward. He is an engineer and a cofounder of Made in Space, a company with a NASA contract to take 3D printer technology and apply it to space missions.
We have posted before on 3D printers in The Turret, and lately articles on the application of 3D printing in the world of food are everywhere: spooky meat-like bio-pastes, chocolate(!), and NASA’s hopes of using 3D printing to make space food. Made in Space is taking this further and proposing that rather than build equipment needed in space on Earth, and spend decades getting it right, it is possible to build everything in space with 3D printers. We can email hardware to space.
After you watch the video from TEDxTalks, you may want to read the book that inspired Jason Dunn to want to build colonies in space – The high frontier: Human colonies in space by Gerard K O’Neillvideo – that he discussed in a previous TEDxTalk.
I am a big promoter of using concept mapping to access the implicit knowledge that is trapped in our brains. Concept maps are graphic representations of knowledge that facilitate the organization of information, whether it is for a project we are planning or for research we are engaged in. I use the CmapTools software since it also allows me to save concept maps on a server and share them online.
It is, however, not the only technique for concept visualization, which is why I have often turned to the Periodic Table of Visualization Methods for inspiration. The table also includes methods for visualizing quantitative data (pie charts, line graphs, etc.) mapped to the alkali metals, methods for information visualization that transform data into images (data maps, flow charts, etc.), strategy visualization used commonly in management (such as stakeholder maps), metaphor visualization to convey insights about information (metro maps, bridges, etc.), and, lastly, compound visualization methods that bring together multiple graphical representation formats. Each element box also has additional information, such as the mode of thinking.
If you have any trouble scrolling over the element boxes and would like to see each of the methods separately, Chris Wallace has implemented an XML page that allows you to hide or view each image and also links out to Google images and Wikipedia entries.
Next week I will be attending the Visual Thinking with Mind-Mapping and Creative Modeling workshop at the School of Continuing Studies. I will be sure to post on what I learn there and share any new resources I come across. If you have any to share please do so in the comments box.
Have fun expressing yourself with these visualization methods!
Web of Science redesigned its website to make it easier to search and review your results. Check it out and let us know if you have any questions. Below is a 5-minute tour of the new Web of Science.
The MSC-CTRF is organizing a conference on the broader aspects of Sustainable Transportation at Concordia University on April 7, 2014. Transportation companies e.g. Via Rail, IBI groups, AECOM, CPCS, CN, Robert Trucking, Gaz Metro etc. will participate in the MSC-CTRF conference 2014. For the details of the conference, follow the link
http://www.ctrf.ca/
You are invited to submit the abstract. Abstract Submission deadline February 24, 2014.
Health information is often difficult to navigate. Try a quick PubMed search and you’ll instantly get a sense of the number of published articles that are out there, and that’s not even everything (Tip: Filter your results using the article type “systematic reviews”–not “reviews”–to narrow down your results, and favour Cochrane reviews for their rigor; alternatively, use PubMed Clinical Queries).
Where am I going with this? Well, clinicians are busy people and it is obviously really important for them to stay on top of things. How are some ways they do this using McGill-licensed resources? These resources just happen to be available to the entire McGill community, so they are worth a look even if you are not a busy clinician.
Many clinicians are huge fans of UpToDate. It’s a really expensive resource and one we have great trouble affording, but it is definitely worth a look. It’s easy to use (designed for free text searching; look for your terms within articles using CTRL-F on a PC or CMD-F on a Mac if they’re not in the article title). Evidence is not always graded, although they are improving this.
An alternative to UpToDate and a nice option if you’re an avid mobile device user is DynaMed. We began licensing it this past spring, and one key advantage of it over UpToDate is that you can download all the content onto a mobile device, which means you don’t need an internet connection to view it. The app is a bit clunky but the content is there. Levels of Evidence are pretty consistently applied.
Health is important to just about all of us, so why not give these point-of-care tools a try?
Google Scholar recently released a new goody – your personal online library at Google Scholar. On the result page, click “Save” below a search result to save it to your library. Click “My library” on the left to open your library. Of course, you can find the full text at any of these two stages when it is available either freely online or from your local library’s collection. To organize your articles in the library, you may click on a result in your library and add a label to it.