Using Barcodes at Scientific Conferences

You may have noticed that some people are incorporating mobile barcodes (QR (quick response) codes) into their presentations and posters. Instead of handing out flyers or reprints that people invariably lose (or throw away) on the way home, you can insert a custom barcode on a corner of your poster, which when scanned with a smartphone, will direct the user to your website or other URL where they can access the information of interest (your profile, a reprint, a detailed method, a pdf of your poster or presentation).

This option not only saves a few trees, it leads people to other information about you and your work. The image inserted into this post is a barcode I generated at one of the websites that provides the service for free.  When scanned with a barcode scanner, this takes someone directly to this blog.

You can also download a barcode reader for your smartphone.  Then you're all set to provide a direct link on your poster to additional information about you or your work and to access similar information provided by others via barcodes on their posters. On your professional website (you have one, right?), you simply set up a page that contains the relevant information and use the page URL to generate the unique barcode.

You can also use barcodes on your business card or your CV to direct people to your website. Another use for barcodes at conferences is to direct job hunters to a website with detailed information about applying.  Instead of posting a flyer listing a long URL that people may not copy correctly, add a barcode that they can scan with their phone.  Just generate a unique code for the webpage advertising the job, fellowship, or other item of interest and add it to the flyer.

Not everyone has a smartphone, however.  To help these people out, you can use a shortened URL instead of a barcode.  Note the text just below the barcode in the above image.  This is a shortened URL that is automatically generated along with the barcode.  If you copy and paste that text into your search engine address line, it takes you to my blog.  You can also generate a short URL at sites such as Google url shortener.  Here is a short URL for my last post: http://goo.gl/arVsx.  This shortened version of the original URL (http://www.womeninwetlands.blogspot.com/2012/08/self-plagiarism.html) is much easier for someone to copy and to tweet.

Have any of you readers used barcodes yet?  If so, how have you used them?

Unforgettable

Is it possible to improve one's memory? That is a question explored in a book I recently read called "Moonwalking with Einstein (The Art and Science of Remembering Everything)" by Joshua Foer. I've been musing about memory (see previous posts) and in the process of Googling for information came across the title of this book. Curious, I ordered it on Kindle. Turns out that Foer is a journalist who became interested in memory and in people who have extraordinary powers of recall. 

On assignment for Discover magazine, Foer attended the U.S. Memory Championship where contestants must do things such as memorize and recall the order of entire (or several) decks of playing cards. He interviews several contestants who are former U.S. champions as well as some memory athletes from Europe. He also visits and interviews scientists who study memory, people who have suffered brain injuries altering their memory capacities, and savants (Rain Man). One of the first things he finds out, from some of the memory athletes, is that anyone can be trained to perform the amazing feats he observes at the U.S. Memory Championship. It only takes time and commitment to the training.

Before long, Foer has become fascinated with the idea that he might be able to acquire these skills and decides to train for the next U.S. championship, a year hence, under the tutorship of a European memory athlete. One of the first things he learns is the basic technique that these memory athletes use...a technique that dates back to a Greek poet by the name of Simonides. In the fifth century B.C., Simonides was attending a banquet and after delivering an ode, was called outside. Just as he exited the banquet hall, the marble building collapsed, crushing everyone left inside.  What happened next forged the way for the technique taught to Foer. Simonides visualized the building and all its contents prior to the collapse and then led each of the victims' relatives to the exact spot in the rubble where their loved one had been sitting.  According to legend, this experience ultimately led to the method that modern memory champions use. Basically, it's all a matter of technique and understanding how memory works.

As I was reading this, I was thinking, "Righhht." However, once I understood the technique, I decided to test it out.  I asked my husband to help me by giving me a list of random words, twelve in all, which I would subsequently recall, in order. Most people, given such a list, would only be able to recall five to seven items (normally, I would be lucky to remember three).  Here is the list:

dog
Einstein (note I did not tell him the title of the book!)
evolution
San Francisco
Hercules
Pinot Noir
Taj Mahal
Mozart
Scrabble
IBM
derivatives
Spartina (a plant genus familiar to both of us)

He wrote each item down as he called them out to me. I took a second or two to commit each item to memory. After hearing the final item, I then was able to recount all twelve items on the list, in perfect order. In fact, that was about a week ago, and I still remember them (as the above list demonstrates).  How did I do it?

The technique involves something called a "memory palace", which is a setting (a building, a landscape with distinct landmarks) that you know intimately. For example, I used my house, which has twelve main rooms. I decided on a set "route" through my house starting in the master bathroom at one end and terminating in our office/library at the other end of the house.  In each room I placed an image representing each word I was given.  It's important to have a very vivid image, preferably someone or something doing some action (the more outrageous, the better).  For the dog, I imagined an Irish Setter splashing around in our bathtub. For Hercules, I imagined the mythical character (specifically, an actor who played Hercules in a movie) standing in our dining room hoisting the dining table over his head. For Mozart, I imagined watching the movie "Amadeus" playing on our TV in the den.  And so on. 

I was vaguely familiar with the idea behind this method, but had never had it explained quite this way or in such detail before. The difficulty is not in remembering, but in being able to quickly conjure up sufficiently vivid images.  It takes a good imagination.  Even so, it is especially difficult to quickly think of vivid images for abstract concepts such as "derivatives".  For that item, I used the stock market meaning, and imagined a moving ticker display in red lights above the guest bathroom mirror. The other difficulty or limitation is having enough "memory palaces" to house your items and then later to "clean house" and remove items that you no longer need to remember.  You might be able to use all the houses and apartments you've ever lived in plus your workplaces to expand your memory capacity.  Foer additionally visited museums and similar places to adopt them as memory palaces in preparation for the U.S. Memory Championship.

How useful is this technique...beyond amazing your family and friends? Well, I can see how it would be great for a student during exams, especially for those courses that require extensive memorization of lists of items. I can recall sitting and grimly trying to remember the last item in a list that I had been asked to provide on an exam and coming up blank.  However, in everyday life, it's too easy to write out to-do lists or to look things up on the internet.  Foer has a nice discussion about all this and how we (modern humans) have come to rely on these external memory sources compared to the past before written language.  In fact, one explanation as to why the memory palace technique works so well is because our hunter-gatherer ancestors had to remember locations of food, water, shelter, and other items essential for survival; our brains are still wired to remember things in association with physical loci.

Anyway, the book is entertaining and quite interesting.  You'll have to read it to find out how the author did in the U.S. Memory Championship.

Photo: In my memory exercise, I imagined Einstein standing in our master bath writing his famous equation on the mirror with red lipstick.

Memory Overload

The other day, while working in my office, I had an experience that we all have from time to time.

I usually have my laptop open to a manuscript I'm writing and also have my desktop computer turned on to check email or to use the internet to search for information.  As I was writing a sentence on my laptop, I realized that I needed to do a quick fact check.  I turned and scooted my chair over to my desktop computer to search for the information I needed. As I moved to do this task, I glanced at my watch to gauge how much time I had until lunch...and had a few other random thoughts. This all happened in a span of 1 or 2 seconds. By the time I touched the mouse connected to my desktop computer, I had forgotten why I was switching from laptop to desktop. Annoyed, I turned back to my laptop and looked at the last sentence I had written...and this, of course, jogged my memory, and I quickly performed the necessary search.

When these things happen, I put them down to a "senior moment".  People often experience this when they are doing some activity in one room and decide to take a moment to do something else in another room.  By the time you reach the other room, you've forgotten why you went there in the first place. How often have you opened the refrigerator to get something and end up standing there staring, trying to remember what it was you wanted? 

These events happened to me when I was younger, but not frequently.  It still doesn't happen frequently, but when it does, it is scarier now.  From reading about the brain and cognition, however, I know that what is happening has to do with short-term memory and that it is not uncommon to fail to incorporate certain information into short-term memory---hence these memory lapses.  We are told not to worry if you forget where you put your keys; only if you forget what your keys are for is there likely a serious problem.

Some think that these little lapses increase as our memory system becomes overloaded with information.  With the vast amounts of information coming into our brains via digital communication systems and electronic toys, we are perhaps suffering from cognitive overload.  At least I hope that's the explanation. It certainly makes sense. I often feel that to learn some new fact....really learn it and retain it, get it into long-term memory...I need to make room for it by eliminating some other bit of information.  I don't remember feeling this way when I was a student, despite the fact that I was learning and memorizing lots of things.  There seemed to be lots of capacity in my brain.  But during my student years, the information overload we are now experiencing was still years away....

I've also noticed that older people sometimes have difficulty performing a task (e.g., driving) and talking about a complex topic. Their attention is split between two fairly complex operations, and they have trouble performing one or both well.  The term multi-tasking is often invoked as a positive process, i.e., the ability to multi-task is seen as being advantageous.  I doubt that it is. In fact, I would suggest that your short-term memory is being overloaded while multi-tasking so that whatever you are doing, especially if it depends on learning something new, is being negatively affected by the other distractions. It may not feel this way to you because the effect may be subtle, e.g., taking you ten percent longer to complete the primary task than if you had no other distractions.

Anyway, I've decided that I need to minimize the cognitive overload by focusing on one task at a time, paying attention to what I'm doing at that moment, and not mentally running in multiple directions.

Time Saving Strategies (Part 3)

This is the third part of a series on time saving strategies: 1. Electronic communications (phone, email), 2. face-to-face communications (meetings, office drop-ins), and.... 

3. Other activities that require substantial time, but do not contribute to my scientific productivity.

  a. Scientific reviews.  Discussions with colleagues suggest that more and more of them are simply refusing to do any reviews for journals because they feel so overwhelmed, and the effort is not usually appreciated by superiors at performance review time. This is an extreme, and in my view inappropriate, reaction for professionals. We can't expect colleagues to review our papers if we do not reciprocate. A colleague told me the other day that when he inquired about a manuscript submitted many months earlier, he was told that they had asked and been turned down by 12 potential reviewers and were still looking for someone to accept the invitation to review.

I think if we dealt with reviews a bit more efficiently, however, we might be more inclined to do our share.

I found I was spending a lot of time doing reviews for journals.  I not only accepted too many assignments, but I spent too much time on unimportant aspects of the paper (editing) or tried to make suggestions for improvement when the work was fatally flawed. Some solutions I've implemented over the years:

     i. I decide how many reviews I will do per year and stick to this number. If I've published a paper in Journal X, then I will accept two review assignments from that journal during that year.  Requests from other journals are considered based on how much effort will be required, up to my quota for the year.  This number can be raised or lowered depending on other factors. Currently, I'm serving as assoc. editor for an international journal, which is taking a lot of time, so I'm turning down most requests from other journals.

     ii. I don't review a paper just because I'm interested in finding out what they did (i.e., it's very close to my area and I'm curious). If it's good, it'll get published and I'll see the information eventually. If it's not, then I didn't need to see it.

     iii. When I get a request for a review in my inbox, I don't respond immediately. Some editors send out requests to several people, and when two respond, the remainder are dis-invited.

     iv. When doing a review, I force myself to read the entire paper without stopping to make any comments or correcting any language problems.  I focus entirely on the science.  If there is a fatal flaw, then I focus in on that and don't expend any more time making suggestions for revision (because it's likely that the paper will be rejected and my time will be wasted).  If the work is solid, but the writing or some other aspect is weak, then I will make general comments and suggestions.  I do not spend time correcting typos or grammatical errors, which copy editors will handle later.  If the paper is excellent, then I will point out any minor edits that will improve understanding or presentation of the data.

  b. Administrative tasks. Filling out forms, doing performance reviews, etc.

     i. Automate as much as possible (save templates, set up automatic replies to frequent questions, prepare SOPs to guide routines of staff so that you don't have to repeat instructions)

    ii. Delegate (have others fill out forms or find information that takes time to locate, do purchasing and associated paperwork)

    iii. Make decisions quickly for tasks that are either not critical or can be reversed easily (in other words, don't spend hours agonizing over something that can be corrected later)

     iv. If you have a large staff, performance reviews may become time consuming or fall at a time when you have other important deadlines.  One way to decrease the time you spend evaluating subordinates is to have them write up a detailed summary of their accomplishments and progress on projects as well as plans and expectations for the next evaluation interval.  This approach lets the employee or student ensure that no accomplishment is overlooked and frees you from having to locate and collate all this information yourself.

For your own performance reviews, keep a running log of accomplishments by category or routinely add these to your CV.  Don't wait until right before your review (or when you start looking for a job) and then try to remember all of them.

      v. Write out directions for complicated procedures--ones that you spent a lot of time figuring out--so that you don't have to "reinvent the wheel" every time.  I have in mind here those annoying (non-science) tasks that happen so infrequently that they don't go into long-term memory (at least not mine).  All together, these procedures can add up to a lot of time wasted if you have to work them out from scratch each time.  I keep an electronic folder containing directions for various admin. or computer-based tasks and any shortcuts I've discovered.  You would be surprised at how many people fail to do this...even protest that they don't have time....

Well, that's all I can think of at the moment.  I'm sure some of you have pet peeves that consume your time and energy and that don't directly contribute to your science productivity.  Feel free to add to my list.

Time Saving Strategies (Part 2)

This is the second part of this series about time- saving strategies, divided into three categories (1. electronic communications, 2. face-to-face communications, 3. other activities that take time but don't contribute directly to science productivity).

2. Face-to-face communications (work interactions, office drop-ins, group meetings).  Interacting with co-workers, subordinates, or bosses takes up a lot of our time and is often stressful.  People dropping by the office can be major interruptions, because once in your office they tend to stay on talking about multiple subjects. And we all know that most group meetings are unnecessary, right?

What can be done:

  a. Work Interactions. The problem here is with people who want you to make decisions for them or to affirm their decisions. They bother you with a myriad of questions related to their own work--usually things that they can and should work out for themselves. These people may be staff, students, or even bosses. 

     i.  One of the best ways to minimize interruptions by subordinates is to authorize them to use their own judgment in making day-to-day decisions and in spending up to a certain amount (e.g., $100) and tell them you trust them to make the best decision.

    ii. Train staff to research solutions and organize a list of options before bothering you with a question about how to proceed.  Tell them to save up all their questions for weekly meetings, unless there is an emergency that requires your involvement.

   iii. Also train subordinates to put paperwork in your mailbox for signatures rather than knocking on your door.

   iv. If it's your boss who needs hand-holding, then you must use your own discretion. See the suggestions below, one of which might work.

  b. Office drop-ins (semi-social interactions).  Colleagues, staff, visitors, and others will stop by your office with a question or just to say hello.  One person is not usually a problem, but when a lot of people are doing this all day long, then you'll be constantly interrupted.  Sometimes these are people who have time on their hands, want to chat, and will do so for hours if you let them.

      i. If you are working on a deadline, put a do-not-disturb sign on your door. If you have colleagues or staff who ignore these signs and knock anyway, lock your door and don't answer.  They'll go away. I find that adding "conference call" to the sign deters all but the most persistent.

      ii.  If you must answer your door or want to leave your door open, then don't let people who drop by just ramble on.  Immediately say that you are in the middle of something or have a conference call in 5 minutes and ask what it is they wish to talk about. Don't let them leave with the idea of coming back later when you are finished with your call. Make them get to the point and ask whatever is on their mind right then, or tell them to put it in an email.

      iii. If they catch you in the hall, try to keep walking and say you've got to get back to your office for an important phone call.

      iv. For the persistent talkers (who ignore your hints), simply don't respond verbally or with any encouraging body language.  Keep looking at your watch.  It's nearly impossible for someone to continue a conversation when the other person is not participating.

  c.  Meetings:

      i. Don't agree to a meeting that does not have an agenda. If there isn't one, ask for an agenda (so you can prepare); this will usually force the organizer to set one up.

      ii. Don't agree to a meeting that has no stated duration. If there is none and is likely to go on for hours, tell the moderator that you have another meeting or conference call 30 minutes after the stated start time and then just get up and leave.

      iii. If possible, have one of your staff attend the meeting and report back to you (in an email) any important decisions (there are usually none). You can also get this information from one of your colleagues when you run into them at the coffee pot later in the day.  Just ask them if anything earth-shaking was announced (rarely happens). When I've done this, I've had meetings that lasted for 2 hours summarized for me in five minutes.

      iv. As soon as a meeting is announced, particularly one that you know will be a waste of your time and in which your absence is unlikely to be noticed, schedule something that conflicts and then don't show up or, if asked, say you will be unavailable due to a conflict.

The next post talks about some miscellaneous activities that take a lot of time, but do not directly contribute to your science productivity.

Time Saving Strategies: Part I

I think we all find ourselves at the end of the day wondering why we've not accomplished anything in spite of being busy.  When this happens regularly, we begin to feel overwhelmed because we seem no closer to accomplishing our tasks, yet are exhausted because we've put in 10 or more hours at the office.

I've been thinking a lot lately about time sinks and how to minimize them or avoid them altogether.  Of course, to be successful at this, one must first identify these black holes and then eliminate them. 

For me, these time sinks fall into 3 main categories: 1. electronic communications (phone calls, email), 2. face-to-face communications (work interactions, office drop-ins, meetings), and 3. other activities that take time but don't contribute directly to scientific productivity (reviews for journals, administrative tasks, service).  This post covers the first category:
 
1. Electronic communications (phone calls, email).  This category covers those communications that involve an electronic device such as a computer or phone.  What distinguishes this type of communication (in terms of time management) is that we have a lot of flexibility in how, when, and where we participate.  We can often postpone or completely avoid some of these interactions if we choose--making this one of the most amenable time sinks to modify.  Many of the calls and email we receive are not important and simply waste our time. There are lots of self-help books out there about time management and how to deal with email. These books often suggest elaborate plans for creating folders and ways of handling email, but the simplest goal to strive for is to avoid the unimportant interruptions and delay the important ones until you are ready to deal with them, preferably all at once.

Here are some of the strategies that seem to work and are simple enough to readily incorporate into your daily routine:

  a. Don't check email constantly (this is a hard habit to break, I know).  Instead, limit checking email to twice per day, just before lunch and around 4 pm. Sticking to these two times allows you to get something productive done in the morning and afternoon and also discourages long email responses due to lack of time.

  b. In the evening or on weekends, don't look at email messages that likely relate to things you cannot deal with until you return to the office. This just sets you up for a night or weekend of worrying--just skip them until you get to your office and can take care of them.

  c. Delete (without opening) those email messages that are mass mailings, e.g., about office recycling, announcements, that don't require a personal response. Get a good spam filter and use it; identifying and deleting spam takes time.

  d. If I get an email that I'm tempted to respond to with a lengthy answer, I wait a couple of days before dealing with it. Often, the urge passes or some other correspondent says the same thing I would have said, but better. 

  e.  Don't answer phone calls from unrecognized numbers or from people who tend to waste your time.

  f.  Set your office phone to go automatically to voice mail and turn off the ringer. Then check your messages near the end of the day and return those that are important. If friends and family call you frequently during the day on your cell phone, turn it off and check messages twice per day (they will eventually stop calling so often).

Some of you probably have other really good suggestions for dealing with email and phone calls. Share them if you like.

Next, I'll talk about face-to-face communications, which require somewhat different strategies.