Uncommon Ground

Monthly Archive: August 2018

The Mindset List for the Class of 2022

20 years ago Ron Nief, emeritus Director of Public Affairs, at Beloit College created the Mindset List. Every August since then the Beloit Mindset List has been a feature of higher education in the US. It’s been maligned (http://www.beloitmindlessness.com/2018/08/19/more-of-the-same/,http://www.beloitmindlessness.com/2018/08/21/here-we-go-again/) and it’s been parodied (https://www.theonion.com/a-look-at-the-class-of-2019-1819592320), but as I wrote a couple of years ago “I always get a kick out of looking it over. It reminds me of how old I am.”

I’m a couple of years older now than I was a couple of years ago, and I still get a kick out of looking the list over. Here are a few of the items that I found especially striking:1

  • Among the iconic figures never alive in their lifetime are Victor Borge, Charles Schulz, and the original Obi-Wan Kenobi Alec Guinness. That last one really hurts. I remember seeing the original in a movie theater.
  • They have grown up afraid that a shooting could happen at their school, too.
  • Presidential candidates winning the popular vote and then losing the election are not unusual.
  • There has never been an Enron.

It you want to read all 60, here’s the link: http://themindsetlist.com/2018/08/beloit-college-mindset-list-class-2022/.

  1. The comments in bold italic are my commentary.

A few thoughts on how to structure a scientific paper

I mentioned last week that I’m reading Williams & Bizup, Style: The Basics of Style and Grace. Yesterday I came across this very succinct advice for the early stages of writing a paper and thinking about how to structure it.

When you plan a paper, look for a question that is small enough to answer but is also connected to a question large enough for you and your readers to care about.

If you’re a scientist and writing a paper,1 you already have the data and most or all of the statistical analyses done. So the “look for a question” part has to happen twice in writing a scientific paper.2 You need to “look for a question that is small enough to answer but is also connected to a question large enough for you and your readers to care about” before you begin collecting data. Then you need to collect data that will answer that question.

Science being what it is,3 after you’ve collected the data you’ll find that there are data you couldn’t collect that you wanted to collect4 and there are data you collected that you didn’t anticipate collecting. In writing the paper you now have to look at the data you have in hand, identify a question that the data in hand can answer that is connected to a larger, interesting question, and (this is the hard part) write the paper using only the data that answer that larger, interesting question. If you’re like me, you5 will have collected other data that don’t fit in this paper. That doesn’t mean they’re useless, and it doesn’t mean you should discard them. It merely means that they’re not useful for this paper. With any luck you’ll find that they are useful for another paper that you’ll write in the future.

  1. Or at least if you’re a scientist like me and writing a paper.
  2. Or at least it has to happen twice if you’re me.
  3. Or at least science being what it is in the way that I do it.
  4. Especially if your research involves work in the field.
  5. In the interest of full disclosure, I have to point out that I almost never collect data myself. It’s my students and collaborators who collect the data. Even when I’m in the field, I mostly hold the field notebook and write down the measurements someone else is making. I rarely make the measurements myself. The closest I usually come to collecting data myself is collecting samples from which someone else derives data.

A few thoughts on writing (inspired by Williams & Bizup, Style)

I do not claim to write well, but I have been writing for nearly 40 years, and I’ve been helping students with writing for more than 30. Along the way I’ve figured out a few things that work for me, so I thought I’d pass a few of them along. Keep in mind that I have no training, and I have no credentials suggesting that anything I write is worth reading. If you find something useful here, use it. If you don’t, ignore it. Better yet, if you find something here you think is fundamentally misguided, leave a comment so that others won’t be misled.

Nearly 30 years ago I bought a copy of Wiliams, Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace. I’ve referred to it frequently ever since. On Wednesday I bought the Kindle edition of Williams & Bizup, Style: The Basics of Style and Grace. I’m just getting started on it, but I can already recommend it. It’s a shorter version of Lessons, but even in the shorter version there’s a lot here that anyone who writes can use.

The first and most important lesson is not to worry about style or principles of style at all until you’ve written something down. The only bad first draft is the first draft you haven’t written. Before you worry about whether readers can understand you or whether what you’ve written will capture or hold their interest, write something down so that you can start revising it. This lesson took me a very long time to learn. When I was in graduate school I literally had to start writing with the first paragraph of the Introduction and then write every other paragraph in sequence until I was done. I also struggled to make every sentence and paragraph perfect as I was writing them, because that was how I imagined writers wrote. Even though I’d read and heard it before, it wasn’t until some time after I joined the faculty at UConn that I finally understood that 90 percent or more of writing is rewriting. As Williams and Bizup put it,

Most experienced writers get something down as fast as they can. Then as they revise that first draft into something clearer, they understand their ideas better. And when they understand their ideas better, they express them more clearly, and the more clearly they express them, the better they understand them—and so it goes, until they run out of energy, interest, or time.

They also point out that you can exercise your revising chops on other people’s writing. When you’re reading something that seems complicated and confusing, take a good, hard look at it and see if you can find a way to express the ideas more clearly. If you can, you’ll have the satisfaction not only of having worked out the meaning of that complicated thing, but also of knowing that you had the skill to make something understandable when the author couldn’t or wouldn’t do the Sam thing.

Just telling you to revise doesn’t help, of course. You have to know how to revise. The good news is that Williams and Bizup provide a set of principles that anyone can learn and apply. It’s not easy to apply them, and sometimes you won’t have the time to apply them, but keep in mind that

Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be said can be said clearly. —Ludwig wittgenstein

BioOne is collaborating with SPIE and moving to a new platform

A few of you know that one of the hats I wear is that of Chair for the Board of Directors of BioOne. BioOne is a non-profit organization that provides low-cost access to journals in organismal and environmental life sciences while providing the society and non-profit publishers of journals in the BioOne collection with substantial revenue. Leadership of BioOne includes representatives of both the scholarly publishers and academic libraries. I have found it very rewarding to be associated with such a productive collaboration. The focus on low-cost access increases the availability of the journals to students and scholars everywhere. The focus on providing income to publishers ensures that they can continue to publish the journals. Working together, we help to ensure that scholarly communication within the fields represented in BioOne is accessible and sustainable.

Today BioOne is announcing a new collaboration with SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics. What does optics and photonics have to do with life sciences you ask? Well, like BioOne, SPIE is committed to providing electronic access to a wide audience, and BioOne’s journal collection will be hosted on a new, high-performance web site in collaboration with SPIE that launches on January 1, 2019. SPIE is already providing the technology behind the BioOne Career Center, and we look forward to working with them to provide even better access to journal resources than we do now and to develop new ways of serving the life science community that we haven’t even thought of yet.

Here’s the press release:

BioOne, the nonprofit publisher of more than 200 journals from 150 scientific societies and independent presses, has announced the forthcoming launch of a new website for its content aggregation, BioOne Complete. The new website, to launch on January 1, 2019, will be powered by a nonprofit collaboration with SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics.

This significant partnership leverages SPIE’s proprietary platform technology to meet the needs of BioOne’s community, including its more than 4,000 accessing libraries worldwide. The new BioOne platform (remaining at bioone.org) will give BioOne Complete a more modern and intuitive look and feel, while enhancing user functionality.

Lauren Kane, BioOne Chief Strategy and Operating Officer, notes, “This exciting partnership better positions BioOne for growth in the future, all while redirecting a major cost center to a fellow not-for-profit organization. SPIE has already proven to be a responsive and creative collaborator with an appreciation for BioOne’s mission and stakeholder needs. We are excited to share this news, and soon, our new site, with the community.”

Scott Ritchey, SPIE Chief Technology Officer, adds, “Our partnership with BioOne demonstrates the value that compatible, not-for-profit organizations can create when working together. The SPIE mission is better fulfilled with the shared insights and economies of scale created by our relationship with BioOne.”

BioOne’s goal is to ensure that this will be a seamless and transparent transition for all stakeholder groups. All aggregation content, subscriber licenses, and user profiles are being migrated to the new site. The BioOne team will be in touch throughout the fall with updates, required actions, and educational resources.