CELL*WISE

I don't know if I'll have much time to write my own posts this week because of a lot of work and Thanksgiving (but trust me, they will start happening soon, and then I will stop with any excuses), so I would like to share these fun, thoughtful, and brief articles written by other people.

"Ten Simple Rules for Doing Your Best Research, According to Hamming" (Erren TC, Cullen P, Erren M, Bourne PE (2007) Ten Simple Rules for Doing Your Best Research, According to Hamming. PLoS Comput Biol 3(10): e213 doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.0030213), which is basically a condensed and annotated version of the excellent and timeless suggestions made by mathematician Richard Hamming in his 1986 talk "You and Your Research".
This was also summarized yesterday by the entertaining and informative blog Bayblab, with "10 Simple Rules to Be a Successful Scientist".

"15 Reasons to Be a Scientist" by a happy Nick Oswald at the very clever and helpful blog Bitesize Bio.

"10 Reasons NOT to Be a Scientist" by a frustrated Nick Oswald at the very clever and helpful blog Bitesize Bio.


And because I will be giving several presentations in the next couple months...

"10 Tips for Better Presentations" by Nick Oswald at Bitesize Bio.

Plus two more from the "Ten Simple Rules" series in PLoS (Public Library of Science):

"Ten Simple Rules for Making Good Oral Presentations" (Bourne PE (2007) Ten Simple Rules for Making Good Oral Presentations. PLoS Comput Biol 3(4): e77 doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.0030077)

"Ten Simple Rules for a Good Poster Presentation" (Erren TC, Bourne PE (2007) Ten Simple Rules for a Good Poster Presentation. PLoS Comput Biol 3(5): e102 doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.0030102)

Thank you to Richard Hamming, the authors of the PLoS articles, Bayblab, Bitesize Bio, and to Jorge Cham at PHD Comics for the above comic strip image.

This is kind of old, but I found out about it when I started this blog (about 1 month ago), mainly because another blogger, Hope for Pandora, wrote a great detailed post about it here. It was new to me, so I just wanted to write about it briefly as well.
Although the real Fall 2007 school semester only has about 1 month left, you still have about six months to "take a course" in Tissue Engineering from a joint program of Harvard and MIT. The course "HST (Health Sciences & Technology) 535, Principles and Practice of Tissue Engineering" has been available online since the beginning of September. Available free to the public (anyone with an internet connection), with no login necessary, are all the lecture Powerpoint slides and even webcast videos of each lecture (although these are 90 minutes long). The lecturers are definitely some of the top and leading researchers in the field of tissue engineering! How cool is that!
As an added bonus, you can even email questions to the Course Coordinator during the lecture times. Of coure, any person that is not registered as a student at Harvard or MIT cannot receive course credit.
I will be looking at all the slides when I have a chance, and there are a few that are of particular interest to me. For me, probably some of the material in the lectures will be review, but there will also be details of new and exciting research going on in some of the best cell and tissue engineering labs. For anyone interested learning more about detailed aspects of Tissue Engineering, this would be an excellent place to start. There is a lot of content covered, so you can always look at the lecture schedule and find specific lectures that are of interest to you.

This "online course" is only a very small part of the ambitious and large MIT Open CourseWare (OCW) initiative. Here is a brief description on Wikipedia.
MIT's OCW shares resources (lecture notes, homework, exams) for more than 1700 undergraduate and graduate courses spanning MIT's entire curriculum! That is an insane amount of lectures and knowledge!
I only featured the Principles and Practice of Tissue Engineering course above. But here are all the undergraduate and graduate courses offered by the Departments of Biological Engineering (at MIT) and the Health and Sciences Technology (at Harvard-MIT), and they all have their lecture notes free and available to anyone on the internet. Wow.
Of course you can also search through all 1700+ Courses that are part of MIT's OCW, and also find any subject/class that may interest you. It looks like now there about 1800 courses available online.

I was just thinking, if people want to really gain knowledge about a certain subject, and they are not enrolled in school/college, they can always buy books (even textbooks on the internet), or find articles on the internet (Google Scholar) for free, or read books and articles in libraries for free. But with MIT's OCW, there is such a great convenience of anyone with internet being able to freely view and download lecture notes (or even videos) from almost any class, and also the content of the lecture should be current. Now you just need time and motivation!

That kind of leads me to the current state of this blog, CELL*WISE. My initial plan was to be writing more interesting posts than I have been, which of course takes time and motivation. And an internet connection.
I'm not overly concerned about the quantity or frequency of posts, because honestly I don't have the time. There is definitely not a lack of material, and most of the time I get too overwhelmed with the amount of science / stem cell / tissue engineering-related things or news that I could write about or at least link to.
But, CELL*WISE is intended to be more of a weekly blog, compared to other daily science news blogs. What I want to be sure to have, are quality posts at least every week so that CELL*WISE stays alive and going strong.
But I also need to decide on a style that I want to have for my posts. So far, my posts have been in the style of longer articles, with some originality but also with a lot of linking to other sites that I am writing about. Since I just started this blog a little more than 1 month ago, I guess I am still finding the style that I want to have for CELL*WISE. I am still trying to figure out how I can maximize the originality of my posts, yet still have enough interesting content to really keep this blog going at a steady rate. I would also like to write posts (maybe weekly) that cover and link to several significant news items (scientific research, business, etc.), and I am thinking about how I would like to do that as well.

One thing that I had to work on for a while was putting all the links in sidebars. Having all the links and categories mainly started as a resource for me, so I could have all the relevant websites and companies available in one place on my blog. Hopefully, other people that visit this blog will find the organization of all these links helpful too.
Recently I have also added a way to make CELL*WISE printer-friendly, if you want to print out a post to read during your commute or when not online, or just to have a hard-copy of it. Instructions and the printer-friendly "Print this Page" Link are available at the bottom of the left sidebar.

As I mentioned in my first "welcome" post, there are many other blogs (listed in the left sidebar in "Blogroll") that already exist and are well-established, and that cover the similar topics and news that are to be the focus for this blog.
I am still finding my "niche" within the science/stem cell/tissue engineering/regenerative medicine blogosphere. We'll see what all this blog "differentiates" into with time.

Above image reference: MIT HST.535 Prin. and Pract. of Tissue Eng. (Fall 2007) course homepage.
http://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/HST/fa07/HST.535/index.html