From the group leader

Is grad school a waste of time for those who don't become professors?

No, says an article in Slate.

Are checklists a good idea?

Yes says an article on Boston.com: Deaths and complications dropped by an astounding 36 percent when operating room doctors and nurses completed a simple safety checklist...

Lasers in the popular press:

New York Times: Lasers rise as threat to retinas

2010 National Research Council rankings

On September 28, 2010, the National Research Council released new "rankings" of graduate programs in 59 disciplines; I believe the last ranking was done in 1995.

Of course, one can make a reasonable case to say "rankings, schmankings" but since our school did well, I thought I would pass it along.

The rankings are not given as an absolute number, but a "range" of rankings. If you take the average of the range, you can put the schools in order (which the Council doesn't really want you to do, but I did it anyway). You have to manually go through the data, but I think I have this right.

2010 Neuroscience and Neurobiology Programs (there are many many more, but I only went to 11)

  1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology 1-7

  2. Harvard University 1-10

  3. Stanford University 1-10

  4. University of California, San Diego 2-12

  5. University of California, Irvine (Neurobioogy and Behavior) 2-14

  6. Johns Hopkins University 2-14

  7. Brandeis University 2-15

  8. University of California, San Francisco 2-16

  9. Yale University 2-18

  10. Columbia University 5-25

  11. California Institute of Technology 5-27

So, go us! That's some good company (score differences between positions 4-9 are pretty slight), and this should help us continue to attract good students who might not think of Brandeis for science grad school, since it is mainly known across the country as a strong liberal arts institution.

Finishing

This is from a Facebook post from my friend / fellow grad cohort Jonathan Peelle:

Jonathan Peelle This is writtten about game development, but a lot of it seems applicable to manuscripts/experiments.

http://makegames.tumblr.com/post/1136623767/finishing-a-game