Update - JEB cover and Ocean Sciences Meeting

Posted on by mrsoltys
[caption id="attachment_714" align="alignright" width="241" caption="My work on the cover of a special issue of the Journal of Experimental Biology"][/caption] I'm in salt lake this week for the 2012 Ocean Sciences Meeting, alongside 4,000 other researchers.  I'm presenting some exciting research findings on friday, and in the mean time I'm learning a lot and trying to network some for future research...Read More

Tool of the Week: Running Multiple Instances of Matlab on Mac

Posted on by mrsoltys
[caption id="attachment_605" align="alignleft" width="249" caption="Notice There are two Matlabs Running!"][/caption] My research often involves running Matlab Code that can take hours to run. Admittedly, Matlab isn't the fastest language out there, but it has super powerful debugging tools, and image processing packages that make it really easy to use for a non-computer scientist. While matlab is running a bit of...Read More

Tool of the Week: Google Sketchup

Posted on by mrsoltys
Google Sketchup is a Free, easy to use, and intuitive 3D modeling tool. [caption id="attachment_599" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Here are some drawings for a bed i designed, but never built, because i realized my room was too small"][/caption] Because it is free, I've found Google Sketchup to be a great tool to use in the classroom when teaching my high-school classes...Read More

Tool of the Week: Evernote

Posted on by mrsoltys
Evernote is a free app for windows, pc, and smartphones, and is a great way to remember stuff. [caption id="attachment_584" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Evernote Screenshot"][/caption] For research: I love being able to quickly snap screen shots of plots and clip them to Evernote, with a description of what's going on and what i'm working on daily. I can easily e-mail a...Read More

Tool of the Week: Using Google Forms for Research

Posted on by mrsoltys
I love google docs, it's an awesome way to collaborate on word processing files and spreadsheets, and have them available from anywhere.  I have a few google spreadsheets I use daily in the lab with calibration curves and other important info, but I wanted to talk about a less obvious google doc that i find invaluable: Google Forms.  You may have already heard...Read More

Tool of the Week: Pretty(er) Matlab Plots

Posted on by mrsoltys
Matlab can generate some notorisoly ugly plots... but for many grad student's it's our bread and butter. So here are a couple tricks I use to generate better looking matlab plots: 1) Use Matlab's built-in LaTeX interpreter for your figure titles and labels It produces really nice looking titles and axes labels, even for non-math text. title('$rho=frac{left< c_1^prime c_2^prime right>}{sigma_1...Read More

Tool of the Week: Wolfram Alpha

Posted on by mrsoltys
Wolfram Alpha is a math lover's dream.  I've used Wolfram alpha to do everything from help me derive or check equations I've gotten published to helping kids on their math homework. But that's not all it does.  Check out their super cool example page and click around, you'll be amazed at everything Wolfram can do: from telling you what constellations you can see tonight,...Read More

Tool of the Week: LaTeX

Posted on by mrsoltys
Think of LaTeX as the nerdiest word processor you'll ever see. LaTeX focuses on content, and does all the formatting for you (kind-of).  The end result is beautifuly typset documents based on style sheets with auto labeled equations, figures, and tables. I love using LaTeX in conjunction with BibTeX to automatically format my citations and build my bibliography based on the citations I've used...Read More

Tool of the Week: Web of Knowledge

Posted on by mrsoltys
Research can be a real pain.  I've already given a tool to keep track of where you've been, but sometimes it seems hard to know where to go. Web of Knowledge is not only a useful tool for searching through loads of journal articles, but it has really useful citation linking.  Once you find a relevant article can search backwards...Read More