I’ve been invited to blog over at Gradifying, a new grad student run blog at Queen’s University through their School of Graduate Studies! The blog will be focused on life in Kingston and graduate life at Queen’s, but some of the topics will be applicable to anyone in graduate school, like picking a research supervisor. If there’s anything in particular you’d like us to cover, don’t hesitate to let us know.
Click the photo to see more of my work on Flickr! 🙂
So we’re finally coming to the end of 2011, and with lots of things that need to get done before then, I’m going to be taking a short hiatus from blogging. I’ll still be posting my weekly roundups though, and will be back with new content and posts in January.
If you read anything that you think I might find interesting, or have any ideas you’d like me to cover, feel free to drop me a line.
PhD comics has been a staple of my grad student life. Ever since I got into graduate school, the PhD Comics series has been both a humourous look, and a startlingly accurate reflection, of my graduate student career. The feeling of being overwhelmed, the “what am I doing here,” the constant grind, PhD Comics captures it all well. Especially when it comes to grad students and free food. But I’ll get to the movie later.
The joy for me came not from the movie itself, but the joy of watching it with my peers. Let’s start at the beginning.
Movie still - Prof. Smith (Zachary Abbott) explains how research works to the Nameless Grad Student (Raj Katti).
The movie was held in a lecture theatre on campus – one that many of those watching had likely lectured in as part of the graduate training. I’d presented there myself for the Queen’s Health Science Research Trainees day (protip: always remember when your microphone is on, and don’t talk to yourself if it is). It was a fitting location for a movie about our graduate student lives.
The movie began to a packed house. The opening scene set the tone for the rest of the movie – Professor Smith was almost an exact duplicate of his comic self, down the green sweater vest. It was wonderful.
However, disaster struck about 10 minutes in, as the DVD started to skip, and eventually froze! How would the organizing committee resolve this issue!! They had an auditorium full of tired graduate students who were excited for the movie!
They did what anyone would do to occupy graduate students. The Google’d a solution and when that didn’t work, then they put on a video of cats doing funny things to distract us while they fixed it. It was genius.
This picture of Darth Vader is made up of the phrase "Not my father" repeated (click to embiggen)
I like to tweet random things (follow me @MrEpid), but for those who don’t use Twitter, here are some interesting posts I’ve come across this past week:
The piece above was from a series available here. The artist repeats phrases and the entire shot consists of those superimposed on top of each other. Very cool concept. (via Laughingsquid)
I like to tweet random things during the week (follow me @MrEpid), but for those who don’t use Twitter, here are some interesting posts I’ve come across this past week:
The video above is one video from a three-part series available here. They’re absolutely phenomenal.
In honor of shark week, an infographic describing things that kill more people than sharks every year. Number 1? Obesity.
I like to tweet random things during the week (follow me @MrEpid), but for those who don’t use Twitter, here are some interesting posts I’ve come across this past week:
Ars Technica reports on someone who felt that Universities/Colleges were not doing enough to pass on information and research. So he made a 32 GB file with over 18,000 research articles and uploaded it to The Pirate Bay.
Fooducate tells us how tuna goes from being in fish form to canned form.
Andre Picard over at The Globe and Mail reports on whether we should intervene when a child’s obesity becomes life threatening (with comments from Dr Yoni Freedhoff).
The redesign took a while to do, but it’s getting there. I’ll be back to updating next week.
I like to tweet random things during the week (follow me @MrEpid), but for those who don’t use Twitter, here are some interesting posts I’ve come across this past week:
Travis Saunders over at Science of Blogging talks about whether a successful academic career and fulfilling personal life are mutually exclusive or not.
Dr Yoni Freedhoff discusses whether severely obese children should be removed from their homes
Dr Arya Sharma writes about gene-environment interactions
Martin Fenner asks: Did you receive spam because you published a paper?
To completely shift gears, I’ve had smooth jazz Nyan Cat stuck in my head all week (for original Nyan Cat, click here)
And that’s all for now. Come back on Monday for a new entry!
I like to tweet random things during the week (follow me @MrEpid), but for those who don’t use Twitter, here are some interesting posts I’ve come across this past week:
Fooducate posts 12 disturbing facts about obesity, and proposes 5 actions we can take here
Travis Saunders asks if we can trust scientists who deliver TED talks, which I absolutely love, here
Researchers at Johns Hopkins look at if we can track public health outbreaks via Twitter here
Liveitactive writes a compelling post about balancing work and life to be happier here
Epiren discusses the use of infographics and how we present (and can misrepresent) data here
Dr Arya Sharma asks whether it is ever appropriate to laugh at “fat jokes” here
Hello and welcome to Mr Epidemiology! I’ve been hoping to start this blog for a while, inspired by colleagues and friends (a list of whom is on the right).
I’m assuming people have some questions, so I’m going to answer some of the most common ones: Who am I? Why am I doing this? What am I going to do? And finally: Does peanut butter and honey taste nearly as good as peanut butter and jelly?
Mr Epidemiology 