Take the Poll: Color Schemes in Presentations

In Eloquent Science (p. 279), I made the argument that light-colored text on dark-colored backgrounds was preferable to dark-colored text on light-colored backgrounds for three reasons. 1. Red lasers (especially if the laser light is weak) may not show up well on white backgrounds. 2. Slides with white backgrounds lose contrast if the room is […]

One of the most challenging (and satisfying) articles I’ve written

I recently coauthored a paper that has now been accepted for publication in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. Schultz, D. M., and G. Vaughan, 2011: Occluded fronts and the occlusion process: A fresh look at conventional wisdom. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 92, doi: 10.1175/2010BAMS3057.1. This paper is the first one I’ve written solely […]

Upsidence?

Dave Mechem (University of Kansas) and my Manchester colleagues have been telling me about a new term that has been adopted from geology into atmospheric science: upsidence. My understanding of upsidence is that the term means ascent in an environment with otherwise large-scale descent. The term is used to refer to an “upsidence wave”, a […]

Eloquent Science at the AMS Annual Meeting

If you’ll be at the American Meteorological Society Annual Meeting in Seattle in January, please stop by one of the Eloquent Science events. 1. Sunday 23 January: Improving Your Writing Skills for Students and Scientists, at end of the AMS Student Conference. 2. 9:45-11:00 a.m., Tuesday 25 January: Book signing at the AMS Books Booth […]

Losing Your Way

This section is published in the October 2010 issue of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Volume 91, p. 1416.

How to Fail in Grant Writing

Curtis Wood (Univ of Reading) sends this article from The Chronicle of Higher Education. How to Fail in Grant Writing Another in the series of “How Not To…” papers… Fourteen Ways to Say Nothing with Scientific Visualization. How to Make a Scientific Lecture Unbearable. How to Get Your Paper Rejected. How to Write Consistently Boring […]

A heretical parenthetical thought

George Bryan sent me this article from the 9 November 2010 issue of Eos. Robock, A., 2010: Parentheses are (are not) for references and clarification (saving space). Eos, 91 (45), p. 419. Prof. Robock makes a strong case that sentences like the following are not clear, and that the added space in writing the sentence […]

A title in need of some help

This paper was published in Nature Geoscience in 2008. “Recent Antarctic ice mass loss from radar interferometry and regional climate modelling” My first reaction was “If radar interferometry and regional climate modelling are causing ice mass loss, then stop it, for the Earth’s sake!” — Photograph by Tim Laman/National Geographic Society

Teaching Scientific Communication Skills – BAMS article

My experiences teaching a scientific communications laboratory course based on Eloquent Science is described in a recent article published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. Schultz, D. M., 2010: A university laboratory course to improve scientific communication skills. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 91, 1259–1266, ES25–34. Download the article here, along with its Electronic […]

Checklist for Statistics

I came across this statistical checklist from Nature. It details some common errors that many authors make in their manuscript, and Nature encourages authors to check this list before submission. I thought some were pretty obvious, but, then again, maybe people need to hear the obvious anyway. http://www.nature.com/nature/authors/gta/Statistical_checklist.doc Nature also has encourages additions to this […]

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