Music in the lab: how do you like it?

I would just go nuts without music. Hours of repetitive and mind-numbing tasks in the lab would take the best of me if it wasn't for my Sony MP4. Head banging at the laminar hood and dancing while setting a bacterial colony PCR are just one of my many daily moves.

Also, when I'm at my computer writing something or reading papers or whatever, I'm plugged in so that "lab noises" (which almost always include a chatty grad student) don't get in the way of my productivity. This has led to people talking to me for several minutes (to ask my opinion on some results or something) before noticing that I didn't even know they were talking to me! What can I say... I love my system and it helps me stay focused.

Were you talking to me?

There are some labs, however, that keep a radio on so that everyone can listen to it. They just pick a station and leave it there the whole day.

I was wondering then, what my readers preferred: do you rock to the beat of your personal selection of tunes? What's the music protocol in your lab? How do you feel about music while working in the lab?

Feel free to comment on these questions (as I really want to know), and if you listen to music in the lab, do you think sharing is a good thing?

Music in the lab: To share or not to share

(Image credits 1, 2)

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Cool! We got featured today on BlogCarnival!

As you may recall, I'm currently involved in The MolBio Carnival, a blog carnival that focuses on cellular and molecular biology in different systems (more info here and here). In fact, I hosted the very first issue. 

This Carnival, as many others, uses BlogCarnival to manage submissions.

Today, BlogCarnival features our very own MolBio Carnival on its homepage! How cool is that?

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Other quotes: citation metrics

Perhaps trying to find a single metric by which to evaluate authors is a quixotic endeavour at best. It is rather like the three blind men trying to identify an elephant while each feeling a different part of it: each metric is only able to describe a small part of the whole.

-Adam Finch

BioEssays
Volume 32, Issue 9, pages 744–747, September 2010

(Also, take a look at the Wikipedia entry on the blind men and an elephant)

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(Image credit)

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Quotes from the science blogosphere: Misusing the impact factor

"Even a cursory look at the basic statistics should tell any half-competent scientist with an ounce of quantitative analysis in their bones that the Impact Factor of journals in which a given researcher publishes tells you nothing whatsoever about the quality of their work"

(...)

Metrics are unlikely to go away – after all, if we didn’t have them we might have to judge people’s work by actually reading it – but as professional measurers and analysts of the world we should be embarrassed to use JIFs to measure people and papers

On a blog post by Cameron Neylon entitled "Warning: Misusing the journal impact factor can damage your science!". Interesting reading, check it out.

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