“PowerPoint makes us stupid.”
April 30, 2010 Filed under Articles, Blog, Featured, Presentations
This story is from The New York Times about how PowerPoint has been used (or banned, in some cases) from military meetings and briefings. “We have met the enemy and he is PowerPoint.”
Eloquent Science won an EXCEL Award
From Sarah Jane Shangraw, AMS Books Managing Editor: Eloquent Science has won an EXCEL award from Association Media & Publishing. Each year the Association, formerly known as the Society of National Association Publishers, bestows EXCEL awards in several categories of media and publication, including two book categories: technical and non-technical. Within each category they award […]
Proper spellings of atmospheric science words
Did you know that shortwave radiation is not hyphenated, but short-wave trough is? Did you know that air mass is two words when used as a noun, but one word when used as an adjective (e.g., airmass modification)? If you are ever wondering how scientific words are spelled or used, the American Meteorological Society has […]
Bad Writing and Bad Thinking
April 22, 2010 Filed under Blog, Uncategorized, Writing
Russ Schumacher pointed me to this article from the The Chronicle of Higher Education: “Bad Writing and Bad Thinking” by Rachel Toor. Call me simple-minded, call me anti-intellectual, but I believe that most poor scholarly writing is a result of bad habits, of learning tricks of the academic trade as a way to try to […]
Terrible use of jargon
———————————————————- 2010-04-05 The Future of Family Science Stan J. Knapp of Brigham Young University conditionally prognosticates a jargon-free future for his fellow family scientists: “Authorizing Family Science: An Analysis of the Objectifying Practices of Family Science Discourse,” Stan J. Knapp, Journal of Marriage and Family, vol. 64, no. 4 (Nov., 2002), pp. 1038-1048. . Knapp […]
Edward Tufte and kittens
April 8, 2010 Filed under Blog, Featured, Humor, Potpourri, Presentations
Thanks to Mark Goetz!
A figure in need of help
April 7, 2010 Filed under Blog, Featured, Posters, Presentations, Writing
I ran across this figure from an American Meteorological Society journal article recently. It’s just a simple scatterplot, which is so easy to construct, yet this figure has so many problems. 1. False alarm ratio and probability of detection are both quantities that can have values between 0 and 1, but the x axis ranges […]
Scott Adams on criticism
This quote could be applied to the review process… “If there is one thing you should always seek in a job, it’s the opportunity to criticize people who are more skilled than you are. This kind of work is both satisfying and easy.” —Scott Adams, creator of the comic strip Dilbert
Bob The Angry Flower: It’s vs Its
On “Breaking the Rules”
The more I lecture on the importance of good communication and the more I point people to what I think are good scientific communication styles, the last thing I would want would be for some people to take these recommendations too seriously. Although I seem to offer such “rules” in my book, in my workshops, […]
