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 Perfec...

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...

There is a problem in our world, that is not widely talked about, especially on media. These are scientific journal publishers, or rather the system that they have established a long time ago and keep using (and monetizing) to this day. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for capitalism, it’s when it gets in the way of important things when I get slightly disappointed. Let’s agree on the important stuff first: the era of lonely geniuses is long time over. The science and scientific advancements in the 21st century depend on cooperation of dozens, hundreds and thousands of people throughout the centuries. Information obtained years and decades ago is used to build new knowledge upon. A student in my faculty is required to have at least 20 citations in their coursework in the end of the first year, and it’s not an issue - we usually approach 30 mentioned sources and research even more while doing the literature review. This is a bare minimum to become acquainted with the material. Scientific kno...

Where to gather data and learn new concepts for your research: a more or less comprehensive guide I'll try to not spend your time, let's get to business right away. The first step of any research project is literature review. You need to know what you are doing and what has already been done. There are a few ways to do it: published papers, books, theses. This article in not concerned with the way data is processed, only with sources. Disclaimer: this article doesn't endorse violating law and is purely hypothetical. Please abide by the rules and the social contract (courtesy of John Locke). Papers Peer-reviewed papers are published in journals and avaliable if you or your university (if you happen to be a student) have a subscription. Which is expensive. Very expensive. There are a few ways to get them for free, more or less legal. Everyone uses them so don't be shy, but having proxy or better yet Tor configured is handy in case your government blocked these sites. Sci-...