Tips for writing the thesis

And here's another link. This one has some useful tips when you (start) writing your thesis, including typesetting, acronyms, and more. See http://staff.science.uva.nl/~vdham/projects/typesetting-thesis.html.

On the history of evaluation in IR

I'm currently writing my PhD thesis and this paper is one of the gems I found: "On the history of evaluation in IR", S. Robertson, Journal of Information Science 34(4), 2008. You can find it here: http://jis.sagepub.com/cgi/content/long/34/4/439 (there's also a citeseer version for those without access I believe).

I think it's a must-read for any PhD student doing IR since it covers the fundamentals (and history!) of evaluation in IR. It's also written in a light and sometimes even funny style.

Enjoy :)

Don't be a Spock - Adjust your monitor height

Some practical guidance for all you guys working on your PhDs: http://www.xadamdx.com/2010/08/dont-be-spock-adjust-your-monitor.html.

3 shell scripts to improve your writing, or "My Ph.D. advisor rewrote himself in bash."

Fun read!

The hardest part of advising Ph.D. students is teaching them how to write.

Fortunately, I've seen patterns emerge over the past couple years.

So, I've decided to replace myself with a shell script.

See: http://matt.might.net/articles/shell-scripts-for-passive-voice-weasel-words-duplicates/.

Your research career: Academia or Industry?

Dr. Chistoph Bartneck, an assistant professor at TU Eindhoven gave this career talk (~12 min.) at the HRI conference in Osaka recently where he discussed the merits and cons of choosing between academia and industry after grad school. It's a truly 'sobering' talk that's extremely relevant to all of us so I had to pass it on. While many of us are generally aware of these differences, the power of the talk comes from tying it all together neatly.

You can watch the talk here.

Knowing your statistics is a fact of scientific life...

...and it's no exception for us PhD students. Below are three resources that have made statistical concepts and their application(s) truly accessible and intelligible to me (though I admit statistics was never really my strength).

Introduction to Statistics and Multivariate Statistics by David W. Stockburger from Missouri State University and Statnotes: Multivariate Statistics by G. David Garson from North Carolina State University.

Some good advice from the guys at Cornell

There's a long list of links with tons of good advice for PhD students at this site: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/People/czars/mentor/. I loved the one about getting your abstract rejected by Mary-Claire van Leunen and Richard Lipton.