Consider the Internet as a Tool, not a Time-suck

Latest internet-as-a-tool fave: MOOCS!

It's not a secret that I find the internet one of the best inventions of mankind ever. I can't imagine how I'd be communicating with my husband across the Atlantic if we'd have to rely just on calling cards and letters.

Thanks to my uncles who played around with computers in the 80s, I pretty much grew up with a computer. As everybody from my generation, I remember dialing into the internet in the mid-nineties, insanely long URLs, Encarta and the early news websites. What might have been slightly different from my learning style, is that I embraced the internet as a tool very early on.

Of course, I have procrastinated many hours by surfing around on the internet (who hasn't?), but when I am in the flow in my life, I notice that I don't need this procrastination. Those are the moments that I use the internet as a tool.

My first experience with exploring the possibilities of the internet was during the early 2000s. My graduation project from high school was about the political situation in Lebanon (even though I was planning to study engineering, I graduated with a project for History). All the books and theory about the Middle East left me confused. I felt that I simply couldn't grasp it. And so I ended up mailing/chatting with teenagers from there. The social aspect of interaction characterized my learning style.

Another aspect of my learning style was simple tinkering. I never took a formal course in HTML, but I learned it by trying to put together a website. It was tons of fun to learn-by-doing.

As time went on, I became a forum-enthusiast. Again when I needed to study, I procrastinated by replying to silly game topics, but I also learned a lot about music and gigs on a music forums, and I would have never had my signature long hair if it were not for the forums that taught me how to take proper care of it. I picked up some skills as a moderator on different boards, and then lost interest and started exploring the web 2.0.

An essential question to ask yourself when you open up your laptop, is: "What do I want to know?". You don't want to know how person X looks like on the party of person Y that you didn't attend, right? But you do want to know when your train leaves tomorrow, or you want to learn something about, say, a good workout for your poor back muscles.

Try paying more attention to what you really want to know, and also value the skills you pick up along the way. 
You'll start to realize that, once you value the internet as a productive tool, you will feel less tempted to use it for procrastination.

Do you feel that you can be productive by using the internet as a tool? Share your story and reflections in the comments!

Writers' Lab: Seven Short Research Ideas to Discuss in a Conference Paper

Whenever I hear a fellow PhD student tell me that he/she has nothing to write a conference paper about, I get a little antsy.

While the main chunk of your research might not be ready yet, that doesn't mean you have nothing to show to the international research community in your field. Likewise, when your experiment is not finished yet, that doesn't mean you haven't learned something that isn't worth talking about.

When the purpose of your trip to a conference is to spark discussion, there are quite a number of topics that you can touch upon and use to your benefit to get early input from fellow researchers.

If you have travel budget, by all means, get your ass on a plane and go to as many conferences as you can. I truly think that my crazy conference schedule has been one of the key factors to my successful PhD.

Here are some examples of topics that you can write about early on and present at a conference:

1. Case study

Take an example from practice, and use the deeper knowledge that you obtained while making your literature review to delve into this case under consideration.

2. Review paper

A classic - but often overlooked type of paper. If you've spend the right energy in your literature review, you should be able to write great, critical review paper that other researchers in remotely connected fields would love to look at to learn more about your discipline.

3. Mix & Match paper

Why not compare the test results from research X with the theory from researcher Y? Play around with existing data, and see if you can learn something new from this. Doing so will only deepen your understanding of your topic.

4. Parameter study

Parameter studies can teach you a lot, and give you some good food to write about. Even simple Excel-style exercises to study how a certain parameter is represented in different theories and how this is observed in experiments will be a valuable starting point.

5. Bounds and Assumptions

If you've done your literature review correctly, you'll have identified the limitations and boundaries to the major existing theories in your field. You can use that insight and expand on it: what are the limiting assumptions and bounds of some of the most commonly used theories? What should we do as a research community to verify these bounds or to make sure the theory can include more exceptions?

6. Comparison of design methods

Maybe a typical idea for a structural engineering paper, but it's always interesting to compare different codes and design methods. Start with a simple case, and see what is the resulting design if you follow different codes. Make sure you discuss the boundaries and assumptions of the codes you considered.

7. Computer modeling

For reinforced concrete, computer modeling sure is a topic in itself that is worth a lot of advanced PhD research. However, you can always start modeling an experiment from the literature, and discuss your observations with respect to the different parameters that you need to assume. This technique will also give you the tools to model your own experiments more easily later on.

Do you feel inspired to go and tinker in the sideline and see what you can learn from these examples?

Silver Linings: What I learned from "Stoppen met Shoppen"

From April 1st 2012 until April 1st 2013, I joined in the "Stoppen met Shoppen" challenge. While the organization promised inspirational e-mails to keep all participants motivated, they only once send a half-baked apologetic mail to tell us that they lost their listserver database, and apparently the website of the challenge is not existing anymore either. In the face of this organizational fail, I kept my spirits high and completed the challenge.

The idea behind "Stoppen met Shoppen" was plain easy: not buying new clothes for an entire year, except for underwear and socks.

First, I need to make a few confessions:
- I bought shoes for my wedding (I think that sin can be forgiven)
- I bought some new underwear and tights (but that was OK, note that I didn't even buy new socks)
- I bought a new bikini because my previous ones had literally come apart
- I bought a sportive swimsuit because the doctor ordered me to go swimming after the accident in which I broke my shoulder
- I bought on March 30th 2013 the clothes for my thesis defense

All in all, I think I did very well, considering that I used to spend a good amount of time hunting for treasures in thrift stores or scoring sales in the US malls when visiting my husband.

For me, this year of clothing-shopping-abstinence helped me to reframe and focus on what truly matters to me.

When visiting my parents, I still went to walk through the shopping street of my hometown, and I even walked into stores, and entertained my mom by commenting on what I was seeing. The first few times I felt the itch to go and get myself something, but later on, I just shrugged my shoulders and said: "I'm not buying clothes this year".
The best part of such an afternoon is being out with my mom and sister, not getting things. It's about the good laughs and catching up.

I still read my favorite fashion blogs, and get me a Vogue every now and then, but just for the sake of enjoying the pretty pictures. The need to own the same stuff is completely gone.

As I started to wear out some of my t-shirts, I developed a 3-step cascade system. T-shirts that aren't good enough to wear on a regular basis became my gym t-shirts. Once wearing them at the gym further stretched them out or made the color too sad, they entered their final phase: sleepwear (no need to buy pajamas anymore).

Moreover, I realized how much clothes I actually own. I rediscovered clothes that I have had for more than 10 years and that I had never worn until now. I got a few more hand-me-downs from my mother and sister. Never I felt like I didn't have the right clothes for the occasion.

The result is that I don't feel like buying much at all anymore. Yes, as I land a job after my PhD, I probably will invest in some quality pieces that can help me grow from grad student to young professional. I will replace some of my worn out t-shirt and polo-shirts by colorful tops. But I feel no need at all to hop onto the next new trend, as I always used to do.

I've saved a good deal of money, and know that buying less is a friendlier way to deal with our beautiful planet's limited resources.

Have you tried to consciously buy less consumer goods?

Teach yourself Speed reading

Recently, I discovered Spreeder, an online tool to help you practice speed reading.

Speed reading can be a great skill to master when you need to skim through a large stack of papers, so start training yourself today!

Two of the most important parts of speed reading are:

1. Eliminating subvocalization

If you have the habit of "reading out loud in your mind", then you are most likely slowing your reading down significantly.
Next time, try reading while chewing gum, or while making some grunting noises (don't do this in the office, your fellow students will think you've gone mad).

2. Clustering words

Instead of reading word by word, try visually bunching up a couple of words together and read these chunks at a time. Start this technique by at least clustering the short, small words with the keywords of the sentence that you are reading.

If you want to practice reading faster, there's a handy tool out there to help you!
Have you tried speed reading to tackle your literature pile?

Writers' Lab: How to put a landscape table on a portrait page

One of the major moments of intense frustration I went through in preparing the final draft for my dissertation, was the moment when I needed to revert the landscape pages that contained large tables back into portrait pages.

Why was that necessary?
The printer/publisher needs to have all pages as portrait pages, 17cm x 24cm. Landscape pages should either be rotated, or given as portrait pages, with their contents turned 90 degrees.

I opted for turning everything back into portrait pages, so that I could have my headers and footers uniform throughout the document.

So, I searched online on how to put a landscape table in a portrait page. It looked easy, make a textbox, paste the table into the textbox and turn the textbox 90 degrees.
The problem is: if you convert an MS Word document into a PDF file, these textbox-tables show up as completely empty. I tried different PDF convertors, some of them already crash on the size of my dissertation, all others leave a blank where my table was supposed to go.

After going way over my boiling temperature and feeling ready to throw my chili con carne over the grumpy security dude of the building, I finally found a way to work around this problem.

So, if you meet the same guidelines for the printer/publisher of your dissertation, these steps can help you out:

1. Have you landscape table in MS Word.
2. Convert that one single page with that table into a PDF
3. Open that PDF in Adobe Illustrator.
4. Clean out the "damage" (in my case; the font Times New Roman Bold Italic went lost, and some greek symbols showed up as a crossed-out little box).
5. Clean out everything that doesn't belong to the table.
6. Save the table as an .eps file.
7. Import the .eps file as an image into your MS Word document.

Yes, this method is really tedious, but at least it will print correctly in the PDF document that needs ultimately needs to go to the printer.

Happy dissertating!

Silver Linings: Favorite Flashmob

With its more than 10 million views, you must have seen the Sound of Music flashmob.

But I'm sharing it here:
- because it always makes me smile when the thesis hits me in my stomach
- because it comes from home (my home town is 20 minutes from Antwerp, and I went a few years to school to Antwerp, passing through that very train station)
- because I love the architecture of that massive entrance hall of the Antwerp Central station
- because the Sound of Music is the shiz

Have fun watching this!

PhD Talk among Top 100 Thesis and Dissertation references on the web

I have some lovely news to share with you, my awesome readers... PhD Talk is featured in Online PhD Program's list of Top 100 Thesis and Dissertation references on the web.

Even better, the blog has earned a badge for that (I totally dig badges, ribbons and other rewards).

Last but not least - this blog wouldn't be what it is today without all your support, insightful comments, and Twitter/Facebook interaction. I've learned so much from the online PhD community, and I hope all current and aspiring PhD candidates will find that the internet can be a true source of inspiration (and not just a time suck).

Breaking News: The Dissertation

I'm breaking my regular stream of posts to let you know that my dissertation is now available online through the TU Delft Repository. The printed copies should be ready on Thursday - 250 books in total are coming my way.

Even though I still need to defend the thesis, on June 14th, in Delft the thesis gets printed and published before the actual date of the defense, which also serves as commencement ceremony.

 

Here's the metadata of my dissertation, which you can access here:

Author: Lantsoght, E.O.L.
Promotor: Walraven, J.C.
Faculty: Civil Engineering and Geosciences
Department: Structural Engineering
Type: Dissertation
Date: 2013-06-14
ISBN: 9789088916328
Keywords: reinforced concrete · slabs · effective width · shear · experiments · assessment of bridges
Rights: (c) 2013 Lantsoght, E.O.L. · Creative Commons BY NC SA

The capacity of existing solid slab bridges in the Netherlands is under discussion for two reasons: 1) the increased traffic loads and volumes and 2) the fact that the majority of the existing bridges were built before 1976, and are thus reaching the end of their original life span. Upon assessment according to the governing codes, a large number of slab bridges are found to be shear-critical. However, the shear capacity as prescribed by the codes is based on experiments on beams in shear. Slabs subjected to concentrated loads (such as truck wheel load) are assumed to have additional capacity as a result of transverse load redistribution. This thesis studies the capacity of slabs under concentrated loads close to supports. A literature review, resulting in a slab shear database with 215 experiments from the literature, is used to study the mechanisms at work in one-way and two-way shear. For this research, 156 experiments were carried out on 38 half-scale bridge deck specimens. The experimental results are studied by means of a parameter analysis. To determine the capacity of slabs in shear subjected to concentrated loads, two methods are proposed in the thesis: 1) the Modified Bond Model, a new theory to determine the capacity of slabs subjected to concentrated loads; and 2) by using a code extension proposal that results from probabilistic calculations following the safety philosophy of the Eurocodes. Finally, the link to the assessment practice is made by formulating recommendations, improving the Quick Scan assessment tool of the Ministry of Infrastructure and the Environment, and then applying this to cases of existing solid slab bridges.

Silver Linings: Podcasts and the Love of Learning

One of the things I enjoy most as an academician is the ability to learn all the time. As I read new publications and get acquainted with new test results or new theories, or try to read about a related field that I haven't explored in depth yet, I feel it very rewarding to see how knowledge grows in the mind.

But besides my field of study, I find it important to keep learning continuously about other aspects of our world.
One of the challenges I imposed on myself for 2013 is to learn something new every single day.

There are several ways to learn something new. I enjoy reading books, ebooks, blogs and follow online courses. But one of my favorite ways of learning is by listening to podcasts while I am cutting vegetables or having dinner.

My absolutely favorite podcast is 15 minute history from UT Austin. I am interested in history, but I have only taken an elective in music history during my engineering studies in Brussels. My barriers for entry to understanding the work of historians are fairly high.

The podcasts from 15 minute history are accessible, thought-provoking and a noob like me is able to follow the contents and actually learn from it. After every episode, I think to myself: "Now that is interesting, I really learned something in these past 15 minutes."

If you want to spark your joy for learning and go outside of your field of study, I recommend you listen to the episodes of "15 minute history."

Five Best Practices for Getting Started with Research

A little while ago, I got this question from a reader as a comment to the Silver Linings introduction.

Also, could you write about starting with a research? I am actually afraid to start with it, to just do it and ask for some tasks at the professor...while I want to. I think it's too difficult for me, and I don't know where to begin in proving myself wrong.

Before burying the idea in my ever-growing list of blog post ideas, I had already quickly chipped in:

As for your question - I'll make sure to write a post on that, but as for now, be sure to realize that research is a process that is built upon the lessons we learn from our failures. So, don't be afraid to jump into the playground - you'll get your knees chafed along the way, but that's all part of growing up to become a fully fledged researcher :)

But let's take a look at this question again. I wrote a post about getting started in a PhD course or in graduate school, but getting started with research is a different topic. You can start on a new research project as a post-doc as well, for exampled.

In my opinion, there are five essential pieces of knowledge to keep in mind when you get started on a research project:

1. Play with your papers

After reading a paper, don't just simply archive it, but apply your new insights. You can try to carry out some calculations with the method that is proposed in a paper, check experimental results from another paper with the proposed method, explore the boundaries of the formula and the validity of its assumptions - the list of options goes on and on.

2. Learn a new skill

The beginning of your research is the moment to assess which skills you will need during the process and which parts of your knowledge need deepening. The early research months are a good time to learn programming in a new language, or study a book in a new subject that will be of use to your research. Don't get too side-tracked by learning new things, try to implement them and connect them with your research question early on!

3. Become independent

Don't wait for your supervisor to give you "homework". Research does not work like that. You are expected to get your hands dirty and play around in the garden until you find your treasure. Whenever you find a glimmer of gold, you can go and show this to your supervisor, and he will give you some input and comments to that, and steer you when necessary.

4. Familiarize yourself with the campus and services

This point overlaps with my earlier post on starting a PhD - but once you are fully engrained in your research, you don't want to go and spend a day figuring out how your library system works. Just figure out what services are at your disposition and how you can benefit most from these.

5. Document your journey

Your early scribblings most likely won't make it into your final dissertation, but I'd encourage you to start writing early on. Explain why a certain paper is of particular interest to you, or outline the strategies you used to find the limits of a theory that you studied. These documents make discussions with your supervisor easier, and they help you practice writing.

What would you recommend for someone who is getting started on research?

Writers' Lab: A Quick Hack to Writing with Less Disturbances

Do you recognize yourself in the following description?

You are trying very hard to write a paragraph, and just got into the flow of writing. But then you need to add a table or figure, and you need to start switching between programs. By switching and multitasking, you feel like you lost your momentum again, and you end up slacking around for another 20 minutes, before hitting the keyboard again.

This problem often arises when two programs are both equally important for your work, a situation that can occur when you start writing about results that you have stored in spreadsheets.

You will need to go back and forth between your spreadsheet and your writing, continuously. And this continuous switching might slow you down. In fact, this continuous switching might make you lose your train of thought. You can get tempted to click that internet icon on your task bar and start reading the news or hanging out on social media platforms.

I made huge progress when I applied this super-simple easy trick:

Use two screens

No, seriously, adding a second monitor to my desktop has been one of the best productivity hacks I applied over the course of the past year.

Suddenly, I could place a spreadsheet next to my text document and start discussing my results while looking at the additional screen, showing me the spreadsheet.

For large calculations, I can now easily have two spreadsheets open next to eachother and see if I haven't copy-pasted the wrong column from one sheet into the other (something that has happened to me too often).

When I'm planning out my next week, I have my planning document in the left screen, my Google Calendar in the right screen and my planning on my table.

For me, having two documents available on two screens has been such a lifesaver. Before adding the second screen, I didn't even realize how much friction occurred in my work simply from changing between programs.

Do you use an additional monitor? Do you recognize the benefits I described?

Silver Linings: The PhDcat(s)

If you find yourself procrastinating and watching lolcats or kitty pictures online, it might be time to get yourself your own furry friend.

Petting your cat, walking your dog or playing with your hamster are all incredibly valuable and relaxing activities - the type of activities that you simply should build into your busy daily schedule.

The simple presence of having a pet at home, has some major benefits for your health.

However, you might think the time and cost spent on a pet are too much when you are preoccupied with your PhD research. But then again, if you need to postpone all lovely things in life until after your PhD, you're missing out on too many things, and probably feeling grumpy for that reason.

Another issue you might worry about is the cost of taking care of a pet. If you don't go crazy in the special pet candies and toys, the expenses for food, litter and the annual veterinary checkup are very reasonable. By all accounts, the cost is negligible when compared to the joy of having a sweet little creature around you.

I've written the whole story of me and my beloved Pasha in an earlier post.

Here, again I would like to put things in perspective, and convince you that -if you like pets and have no allergies- it could be very beneficial to take a pet.

Do you have pets, or would you like to wait until after the PhD?

Thinking about STEM

As part of the MIT Medialab Course on Learning Creative Learning, I followed the YouTube lecture on Powerful Ideas.

The interesting idea here comes in around the 27 min mark, in which Alan Kay argues that we shouldn't speak of STEM, but instead of TEMS.

Now, let me take one step back. STEM stands for science, technology, engineering and math, and while spreading the love for my field, I consider myself a STEM ambassador.

An interesting discussion is why STEM courses of study are not that popular, and certainly not popular among women - but I'll leave that topic to those who research the problem.
By all accounts, I think that every young person should have the liberty to study something he/she finds interesting, and not something that would ensure them of a good job, or because someone has pushed them into that direction.
I also think all fields of study are equally interesting and important in society, and get a little nauseous when the Loud Voices of Industry start yelling that social sciences are unnecessary.

With that said, let's look again at the acronym STEM itself. Alan Kay would like to turn it into TEMS, and I fully understand his reasons for this. Technology should be replaced by Tinkering, and this is the oldest discipline. From Tinkering, mankind rolled into Engineering. You don't need to know all the principles at work to actually do Engineering work. When things get a little more complicated, you need Math. And Science itself has only been around for the last 400 years.

TEMS instead of STEM is thus a more chronological approach of ordering the letters of the field in the acronym, and with its 4 letters, gives us an insight into the history.

You can see Alan Kay's discussion here: