Academical Nerd

  On Public Speaking Credentials For an introverted nerd who does not know how to behave in social situations, public speaking is a challenging task. You come up in front of a room of people waiting to judge your presentation and grade it. It rarely goes well, to be honest. I do not claim to be good at this, but there are ways I found to suck less while not distracting myself too much from my nerdy work. The Setup I usually speak bi-yearly at the local conference which is part of my curriculum and required for getting a degree. There is usually a small audience of 20-30 people that ask questions and grade the talk. Most scientific conferences look quite similar to this and pose a significant challenge for people not experienced in presenting. There are a few ways I came up with over the past four years that improved my ability to speak in front of other people and I would like to share them. These are mostly intended for an introvert unskilled in presentation. Practice Makes Perfect Fi

Analogue Note Taking Digital Mess We all need to take notes. Short messages for git commits, ideas from podcasts, quotes from all over the Web. At some point, a question comes up: where do we store these notes? It gets even worse with regular diary entries and to-do lists. One possible solution is to use a premade program like Evernote or Notion. It will store and organize text files for you, but this also means you should trust developers and server owners, as well as the encryption protocol. For anyone who worked with programming, there is a temptation to throw notes into a git-managed folder full of plain text files. Yet managing files by yourself is also a problem: plain text markdown works wonders for a while until there are too many files to keep track of. A system of folders and subfolders will take you further, but at this point navigation and linking become troublesome. The synchronization is an issue as well, although there are good tools that solve it even on mobile and L

Literature Review Guide Definition & Goals The literature review is a process of compiling and studying existing sources of information on a given topic. Researchers conduct it to get a grasp of the existing data in the field and see what others accomplished. It is important, as doing the same work twice rarely pays off. A good literature review can be published as a separate paper and brings a lot of value to the scientific community. It gives new researchers an overview of the field and potential data sources. Working with the existing review is much easier, especially if it has been published recently. Here we will list basic steps and some tips for a researcher willing to conduct their review. The last section is focused on writing a review for a paper or as a separate project. The first three apply to anyone who has to work with many sources. Initial Understanding It is impossible to conduct a good review in the field you are unfamiliar with. So the first step is to go t