Fun with an AI

We're all familiar with the motivational posters popular in workplaces, encouraging employees to greater productivity and better morale with inspirational quotes set against soothing backgrounds. Unfortunately, artificial intelligence has a hard time understanding this concept.

InspiroBot is "an artificial intelligence dedicated to generating unlimited amounts of unique inspirational quotes" and claims, "all I want to do is please humans."

Inspire yourself at inspirobot.me/.

Chemist-trees!

Don't let being stuck in the lab over the holidays get you down, you can still be festive!

See more trees at the Chemistry World Blog.

Rejection of rejection

Cath Chapman and Tim Slade from the University of South Wales, Sydney, Australia, provide the template of a "rejection of rejection letter" in a recent BMJ feature, which begins:

Rejection of rejection letter

[insert university emblem here]

Dear Professor [insert name of editor]

[Re: MS 2015_XXXX Insert title of ground-breaking study here]

Thank you for your rejection of the above manuscript.

Unfortunately we are not able to accept it at this time. As you are probably aware we receive many rejections each year and are simply not able to accept them all. In fact, with increasing pressure on citation rates and fiercely competitive funding structures we typically accept fewer than 30% of the rejections we receive. Please don’t take this as a reflection of your work. The standard of some of the rejections we receive is very high...

Read the rest at BMJ:
Rejection of rejection: a novel approach to overcoming barriers to publication

thanks to Dean McKay for finding this!

Speaking of avoiding jargon...

via Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal by Zack Weinersmith.

"Dance Your Ph.D." 2015 contest finalists

Many writing advisors urge new scientists to "avoid the jargon" when they write about their work; what if you couldn't use words at all? For the past eight years the AAAS, Science and HighWire Press have sponsored a "Dance Your PhD" contest. The winner last year was Uma Nagendra who eared her PhD in plant biology:

The winner for 2015 hasn't been announced yet, and voting has concluded, but you can still view the 12 finalists that are vying for the title:
It's a dance-off! Vote for you 'Dance Your Ph.D. video winner!'

How Professors Spend their Time

In an article in The Blue Review, John Ziker explores how "Homo academicus" at Boise State University spends his or her time: https://thebluereview.org/faculty-time-allocation/

An excerpt:
"The most surprising finding of our analysis of practices was that faculty spent approximately 17 percent of their workweek days in meetings... Thirteen percent of the day was spent on email... Thus, 30 percent of faculty time was spent on activities that are not traditionally thought of as part of the life of an academic. Twelve percent of the day was spent on instruction... and an equal amount of time was spent on class preparation. Eleven percent of the day was spent on course administration... Thus, 35 percent of workweek days was spent on activities traditionally thought of as teaching. Only three percent of our workweek day was spent on primary research and two percent on manuscript writing."
(emphasis mine)

How to Write Like a Scientist

Some not at all helpful tips for writing your scientific articles can be found here (but they are funny!).