Brain Contour

Superbowl 2012

It is known that stressors such as intense sporting events may increase cardiac event rates in fans, but there has been little data available on the demographics of these fans. Based on our linear regression analysis, our study suggested that Los Angeles’ 1980 Super Bowl loss increased total and cardiac deaths in both men and women and triggered more deaths in older patients compared with younger patients. Conversely, the 1984 Super Bowl win showed a trend for reduction of death rates, slightly better in older than younger patients and in women more than men. There were no significant interactions between Super Bowl and race in our linear regression analyses.

Credit: QS World University Rankings

QS, the leading global career and education network, released the 2011 Asian University rankings with mostly universities from Hong Kong and Japan occupying the spots for best universities in the top 10. The rankings were based on Academic Peer Review (index), Recruiter Review, Student Faculty Ratio, Bibliometrics (Papers per Faculty and Citations per Paper), and International Factors (proportion of international students).

Matt Might, University of Utah Assistant Professor, came up with a visual guide to explain in easy manner what a PhD really means. I am sharing the pictures to you.

Imagine a circle that contains all of human knowledge:

I have reread the book “The Craft of Scientific Presentations” by Michael Alley. The first time I read it was four years ago when I was still starting to appreciate scientific research and writing. Fast forward: Now that I often find myself presenting my own research results to the scientific community, I realized that I still haven’t learned the basics and that there are still tons of things to know and avoid when presenting. So I scanned the pages of the book once again and listed all the critical mistakes usually committed in a scientific presentation.

Book Cover: The Craft of Scientific Presentations

1. Giving the wrong speech
This has something to do with not orienting yourself on the various fields of expertise your audience is into. Before any presentation, make a quick background information of the attendees. This way, you will have at least a general idea of whom you are talking to.

The start of the New Year means the start of a new semester. The past days, I bumped into a number of new international students who moved aimlessly around the residential hall and the GIS department where I work, sporting the one unique appearance you’d never doubt for something else. Okay, save your breath, I had the same look when I first came to this town – tolerantly apprehensive, conscience-stricken and bugged up.

This is me promoting the Philippines!

Not counting the predestined academic catechisms, the infrequent chat I had with some American friends, would, most of the time, lead to the proverbial question of “why I have to take my PhD study abroad”.

You have the top-notch ideas but your command of the written English is limited. You can speak in English and understand the language, but you cannot even spell 75 percent of what you say. Your grammar construction is, almost always, something to jeer about. Nevertheless, you possess the academic degree and the know-how you insanely desire to share with your intellectual peers through published scientific papers. Would you ever let a lexical deficiency hinder your rise to the top of the scholastic ladder?

No way – says few of the people I know. I personally know a research scientist whose first language is not English, whose sub-par writing skills could easily send peers to frown, if not, jerk. But he manages to impress people with good write-ups and well-written documents. The key is to be smart — let others do the writing or the editing (read: flipping it 75%, recall that you cannot even spell 75% of your words) for you! Hire or pay for an academic ghostwriter for your scientific papers. Or get it for free by befriending the better-schooled American writers. Or could also be any person whose English skills are par excellence, someone who could spell receive with “e after c” and not “i after c”. A ghostwriter could edit and refine your rough draft or even create an article from start to finish based on your basic idea.

I was informed via email that I got a perfect score for the essay portion of the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) exam when I took it more than 3 years ago. Even before the start of the exam, I was confident that I’d do good and expected a high score. But I never imagined getting it perfect.

My overall TOEFL rating reached 277 — a rating more than enough for admission to Harvard, which only admits international students with scores from 260 to 300.