VWXYNot? Comment(s) of the week:
Nina and Grant for the following exchange: Nina: "Life should be a conference, everyone wearing nametags all the time, with their first name, last name, nickname, country of origin and country of residence. Birthdate optional."
Grant: Nina, I’m sure tech types will suggest we’ll all be bumping cell phones to exchange names in a few years. (Eurgh.)
One more: you know that thing where the person can’t quite read your name tag and leans in close over your chest to read it…
Nina: "ok, how about tattooing your name onto your forehead?"
Grant: "How about a sub-dermal name implant invisible when not active that glows when triggered by trained neural signals beaming your name to the people opposite you?
Failing that we could all wear electrode scalp caps that carry a flip up sign… (Taking as my cue the brain-computer interfaces emotiv and others are marketing.)"
[NB as a chronic tartler, I approve of all the above methods]
Alyssa for "It’s cloudy again
We see it’s cold and dreary
But – we have windows!!!"
Ricardipus for "Bugger me, the grant’s
Finally done. Thank goodness.
Now back to fun stuff."
Bean-mom for "I just clicked on the article on circular RNAs–I’d seen the headline earlier but hadn’t yet read it–and just as I expected, I’m all WTF?! MicroRNAs, long non-coding RNAs, now we’ve got circular RNAs. . . I feel like someone should just write a review titled, “RNA: WTF?”"
Nina again for "edit: my advisor has improved his standing desk further by standing on a wooden board that balances on a small (but sturdy) plastic tube, to make him wobble while standing, so to keep working those balancing muscles, or something like that. The tube comes from one of my experiments. I will miss that “wtf I’ll create my own standing desk – pilates work-out” attitude, I must admit."
Bob O'H for "Reminds me of my youth playing boardgames. There was one called Civilisation, which a friend described as “almost as long as the real thing”."
Chall "it surely looks like the Leafs MIGHT go to play offs for the first time in 7 years…. if I didn’t jinx it by saying it here of course. That said, I find myself wondering how bad it will be to end 5th place if Boston stays 4th. It sort of feels better to play the 3rd (Capitals right now) than Bruins but right now I’ll settle for PLAYOFFS and miracle :)"
[the Leafs making the playoffs is a miracle indeed]
KJHaxton for "Good question! I’d put:
– occasional baker of cakes for meetings
– fair to moderate tolerance for bullshit
– low tolerance for unfairness and willing to get very cross about it (folds arms and glowers at the screen)
– best selection of tea bags in desk drawer (8 kinds at last count)
– prone to wearing scarves and shirts that don’t match
Ah well, I’m not sure I’d find a new job on the basis of those :)"
Ricardipus again for "Pros:
- rarely swears in public
- has few friends, so unlikely to have loud, belly-laughing conversations on phone or in person
- capable of speaking at length about (a) race cars, (b) cameras, or (c) bad science
Cons:
- occasionally swears in public
- has few friends, so likely to have poor social interactions with co-workers
- capable of speaking at length about (a) race cars, (b) cameras, or (c) bad science
I’d also probably include “easily suckered into serving on irrelevant committees” into each category, too."
Bean-mom again for "–Friendly.
–Doesn’t bake, but if you have a potluck I’ll bring killer spring rolls (both crispy fried pork ones, and the vegetarian fresh rice-paper ones).
–Doesn’t bake, but husband bakes. Occasionally, you may be a recipient of his talent.
–Will cheerfully listen to other people’s dramas, but won’t cause any of my own. Not at work, anyway."
and Nina yet again for "As I may have mentioned before, I’m pretty sure my cv point “Love baking (chocolate) cakes” earned me my PhD position, and it definitely often raised questions in interviews (“so, how often do you bake cake? What kind of chocolate do you use?”)"
Post(s) of the Week: Beth Snow for "Modern conveniences" (how on earth did we survive, let alone study and write theses, before Skype and cloud computing?!)
Steve Caplan for "Science education: the generalist vs the specialist" (are 3 year or 4 year degrees better for students?)
Bean-mom for "Leaving scientific research... again" (science SUCKS sometimes)
Eva Amsen, writing at the Occam's Typewriter Irregulars for "The two ideas to fix the gender balance that do not make me cringe" (the panel pledge and the Finkbeiner test)
Bob O'Hara for "Making reviewing boring stuff less boring" (would a stripped-down manuscript format work better for the, um, less exciting papers out there?)
Alyssa for "Just the pants, thanks" (absolutely hilarious take on the modern clothes shopping experience)
Eva Amsen again for "My self-updating address book" (how LinkedIn can be useful)
CromerCrox for "Plagues" (how's God been cursing you lately?)
Prof-like Substance for "If you don't talk to your kids about it someone else will" (anticipating school-yard talk about religion and other big issues)
and CromerCrox again for "Conferences" (the problem of sexism at conferences)
Archives:
October 2008 - March 2009; April 2009 - September 2009; October 2009 - March 2010; April 2010 - September 2010; October 2010 - February 2011; March 2011 - September 2011; October 2011 - March 2012; April 2012 - September 2012; October 2012 - March 2013; April 2013 - September 2013
I am so going to steal this approach! It is indeed genius!
Comic Sans is, I am reliably informed, The Font Of Champions (TM).
(according to http://www.scaryduck.com)
I do something similar when dropping sections of existing documents into a new one. Typically I leave existing as whatever it was (usually Arial), or whatever default font Word likes to put new text in (Calibri or something) and then change to some other font (Times New Roman, typically) as things get modified. I do use the yellow highlighting trick too.
If you are using Microsoft Word (almost any vintage) there is the option to track changes. This puts your new text in a different colour to your old text. Where you delete old text you can still see it but it is shown as struck through (just like a proofreader would do). You can also pass it to someone else for editing and their changes will appear in a third colour. There is a similar feature in Open Office (and probably in the newer Libre Office) if you use these.
There is also the (very useful) Comment feature in Word, which allows you to put in as much text as you want in the form of a comment that does not disturb the normal reading of the text but can be opened up by another reader. This is also in Open Office.
But you are right about one thing. Comic Sans is really ugly.
Kate, I hope it works as well for you as it is for me!
Richard, I’m disappointed to hear that my idea is not original! Although the motivation-due-to-ugly-fonts may be novel.
No love for Georgia?
Laurence, I use track changes all the time and find it very useful in many different circumstances, but this is not one of them – too distracting! (The old method of highlighting deletions and additions in the right margin rather than in-lining them was much better IMO). It’s not so bad when I’m the only one editing the document, but a recent grant proposal with multiple contributors ended up with five or six different colours of tracked changes, rendering it almost completely unreadable – I had to edit it in “final” rather than “final showing markup” mode, and so couldn’t tell whose changes I was undoing – sometimes a tricky political issue, believe it or not!
After a massively collaborative grant is submitted, do the PIs involved always agree to try using Google Docs or something similar next time? Yes, they do. Does this ever actually happen? No, it doesn’t.
Wow, that does sound like a good idea, Cath. I hate Comic Sans.
I didn’t know there was a way to automatically turn the font red for added sections/words and use strikeout on deleted portions, so once did that by hand for a long draft I was editing. It was impossible to read, but my boss wanted it (sodid it and kept my own clean copy).
I have red fonted (new verb) changes – or sections I know need to be changed – for some time, and have used blue for things I know I need to look up (or stars and questions marks surrounding everything).
Highlighting is pretty hard on my eyes, at least if there’s a lot of it.
Wow, it must have taken forever to do that by hand!
I do highlight very small pieces of text – e.g. if I know I need to look something up / get input from one of the PIs, I’ll put XXX or *** and highlight it. But yes, too much is very hard on the eyes!
Agree 100% on multiple layers of “track changes” – it becomes irritating and unreadable really fast. I also dislike how some small changes are extremely difficult to see (little bit of coloured text inline, teeny little bar in the left margin to indicate it’s there).
Pagination and section spacing is also impossible to figure out with a lot of inline tracked changes. I do use it, but like you, not for complex, multi-edited documents.
We very occasionally get asked by author to track all changes in we make in a manuscript. We don’t, not because we’re all high and mighty, but because every single line of the manuscript is covered in changes when we’re done with it! eXtyles does that, it is much simpler to just make the changes and trust us (you can, really, we’re quite careful…).
You can select which changes to show in Word, it’s the “Show” drop-down menu in the reviewing toolbar on Word 2003, or tab in Word 2007. Still doesn’t help if you have too many authors, but that at least allows you to remove the ones that don’t get offended easily.
My current favourite is Garamond, although that is tiring to read so better suited to short text, or Estrangelo Edessa. For every day, many pages documents I find Times New Roman and Arial hard to beat, but Calibri isn’t too bad. I can’t stand Comic Sans, but my better half has it (or some similar derivative) as the default font on her phone. I think that’s a ploy so that I don’t touch the thing.
Good call on the “Show” drop-down menu – I vaguely knew it was possible to customise the tracked changes view, but hadn’t quite found the motivation to try it!
So nice to read that others have their own tricks for managing edits (and their strong feelings for favourite fonts – I’m a Georgia fan, too, and also like Trebuchet). I will definitely try the font-tracking trick next time I’m updating a report – hmm, that’s today! I agree that the track changes tool can be useful, but as more and more reviewers make changes over top of one another, it can be hard to keep track. And there’s always the one person who suddenly hands me a hand-edited printed copy to keep things interesting. I’ve come to accept that all the tools and tricks are part of the toolbox, and the work and art of editing and assembling a proposal/report/whatever likely never will be replaced by a single solution.
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