Much of scientific communication consists of throwing up a graph and then explaining it. There are some basic procedures for doing this, many of which were probably ignored by the speaker at your most recent department seminar. Don't be that mumbledy jerkface who never explains the numbers on his or her unintelligible axes!
I suggest that you use the following graphic prompt to practice giving talks in the style of your adviser, department chair, or another charmingly be-mannerism'd colleague:
Reload the page to get a new one.
- Log in to post comments
More like this
Avi Steiner emailed me with a set of questions that are too good not to turn into a blog post:
Being a math/science major at a small liberal arts college, I unfortunately never get the "full" experience of a math/science talk. Since I do plan on eventually attending grad school, I thought it might…
Do you ever sit in a boring departmental seminar and scope out the other folks in the room? You'll pick up some odd behaviors. Like the guy picking his nose -- gross! Or the secret couple that can't be open about their relationship because it breaks some university policy sitting a bit too close to…
Stem cells are magic. Stem cells cure everything. They are the next big thing in medicine.
That's the narrative one frequently hears about stem cells in the press and courtesy of offshore stem cell clinics in places such as Italy and direct-to-consumer marketing of stem cells in the US. Of course,…
Dr. What Now? has a nice and timely post about helping students prepare for oral presentations, something I'll be doing myself this morning, in preparation for the annual undergraduate research symposium on campus Friday. Of course, being a humanist, what she means by oral presentation is a…
Correlation implies causation, right? Or is it the other way around?
When you're dealing with combinations like the one I just got -- "Grad student office space" vs. "Unattainable hotties" -- the choice of dependent variable has major consequences.
By convention, whatever's on the Y axis is the dependent variable. However, without plotting a graph of attainable hotties for comparison, you're not going to be able to usefully inform public policy.
Excellent - how ever did you come up with this?
Just outta curiosity, does your ad counter consider each reload to be a new page view?
If so, you might be onto something here...
Lemming: Yes, yes it does.
Next time I have serious case of procrastination on my hands I'll post something similar with ternary diagrams... though I expect that may exceed the number of variables for "funny" and move into the regime of plain ol' surrealistic garbage.
Only three?
Make an n-dimensional one and use it for your thesis.
;)
btw, is it biased towards positive slopes?
Don't overlook the earlier contributions of others in this important field. The potential is limitless.
Further to the theme, Indexed.
haha, I got octopodes per capita vs octopodes per capita, and somehow got:
A) Data with no visible correlation
B) A line of best fit which clearly does not have a slope of 1