The imPerfect Scientist

edurational

This is a podcast from Scientist to Scientist. We want to share our experiences learning to become better at time management, negotiation, conflict management, writing, communicating... Everything around the hard-core science that is so essential but is not really taught in university. Because we believe that scientists learn best from other scientists. And from others' mistakes! So we are going to share our experiences and mistakes - also our successes - and a number of tools to empower you. So that you are better equipped to be the best version of yourself!

  1. The AI tools we use for our research - part I

    23/05/2023

    The AI tools we use for our research - part I

    Immerse yourself in our latest podcast episode exploring the transformative role of artificial intelligence in scientific research. We uncover how AI is reshaping tasks from enhancing text structure to designing experiments and brainstorming ideas with tools like Perplexity, Elicit and ChatGPT. As AI becomes increasingly accessible, discover how it simplifies complex tasks with a single prompt-line approach. We also highlight crucial AI safety measures. This episode is helpful for scientists eager to leverage AI in their work for innovative breakthroughs. Tune in to see the future of scientific work today! Content In this podcast we discuss the impact of artificial intelligence on our work as scientists. We talk about how artificial intelligence has been used for things such as automatically segmenting figure panels in research papers, improving text and making it more formal or structured, designing and controlling experiments, brainstorming for projects, summarizing texts, identifying new ideas, making decisions, strategizing, and for aiding in leadership. We also discuss how this technology has become more accessible and that it can assist science in ways that have previously been limited. 1. AI can be used for literature search, summarization, identifying links and gaps, and predicting reviewer comments. 2. AI can assist with scientific research with tools like Perplexity, Elicit and ChatGPT. 3. ChatGPT should not be used for facts as it produces hallucinated output and is not a useful tool for identifying knowledge. 4. Perplexity is a good entry point for becoming knowledgeable about a topic, as it gives citable sources, and allows for highly specific questions to be asked. 5. Elicit is a search engine for scientific literature which provides a table of titles, authors, citations and a single sentence summary for papers. 6. Users can upload their own PDFs and have them read and summarized. 7. AI can help generate arguments and experiments, brainstorm, and generate images. 8. AI gives the user the benefit of bypassing oftentimes tedious sub menus or knobs to enable a single prompt-line approach. 9. AI safety measures like guiding it towards what is desired should be employed. 10. Enjoy! ;-)

    36min
  2. 10/05/2022

    How to write your thesis - a simple recipe for a smooth journey.

    It´s a journey. Similar to any journey, the beginning is important. And the ending. And it´s also important to use effective transportation. Your journey can be a smooth ride. It´s scientific writing we are talking about. In this episode of our podcast, we address a topic that is very close to our hearts: how to make scientific writing an effective and smooth journey.  We discuss on how to start. For many colleagues it´s starting that is hard, starting to write a paper, a grant, a thesis. Simon Sinek suggests to start with asking “why”: Why do I want to get this message across? Why should they fund my research? Why should they listen to this lecture? The next step in writing is planning and preparing. And believe it or not, the tool for this is the outline. But not just a brief and quick outline. No, sfedit suggests to produce an outline that is 70% of the final product! The outline not only helps you in planning your writing. It will also structure your thoughts (at least it does for me). And it will give you a chance to get feedback early – when it is still easy to fix issues even when they´re fundamental. To make it easier to follow for your audience. Because your audience is key. If it is hard for them to follow your information, they will not like the science. Unfortunately, this not only applies to your talks or your thesis, but also to your manuscripts and to your grant applications. Therefore it is key to have simple and easy to follow text. Fortunately, there are effective rules on how to improve text. To improve text, it´s all about connection: connecting subject with verb, previous sentence to subsequent sentence, paragraph to paragraph. We would even argue that if you work on getting your science across, this will improve your interpretation, your hypotheses, it will improve your science! Because your science is interesting and relevant. But if you don’t get it across, it will not be visible to your colleagues, to the public. Would you like to try? To make application of these writing tools easier, we will in addition give away 100 free-access vouchers to our learning platform “How to Write Your Thesis” – how cool is that! (https://www.udemy.com/course/how-to-write-your-thesis/?couponCode=75B4799145500648FC4F). If this link takes you to the for-pay access, this means that 100 writing aficionados were faster than you 😉).

    46min

Sobre

This is a podcast from Scientist to Scientist. We want to share our experiences learning to become better at time management, negotiation, conflict management, writing, communicating... Everything around the hard-core science that is so essential but is not really taught in university. Because we believe that scientists learn best from other scientists. And from others' mistakes! So we are going to share our experiences and mistakes - also our successes - and a number of tools to empower you. So that you are better equipped to be the best version of yourself!