Matthijs Dorst | on the job market

Check this neuron infected with #SARSCoV2 being attacked by a microglia. Is this process beneficial or detrimental? Do we want therapies to inhibit microglia activation/neuroinflammation, but what if it means more neurons infecting other neurons? Neurovirology is fascinating! #FluorescenceFriday

A beach in Mexico, with both a Canadian and Mexican flag visible.

One of the best conferences I ever attended was the International Basal Ganglia meeting in Mérida, so yes, absolutely!

I expect SfN will feel a lot quieter this year. They really ought to consider holding it in Canada in the future.

Pff, I don't even know what I'll be doing next month.

Never ask postdocs what they'll be doing next year, that's considered terribly offensive in their culture.

Just my $0,02 on this, but: back when I worked as an editor, the best manuscripts I saw were always the ones with many authors. Those were always the ones with independent controls, different methodologies to support their conclusions, etc.

Don't be stingy with authorship; your editor may like it!

Ai, afraid I have not seen that one. I assume cleaning the vibratome and vibracheck, and letting them thoroughly dry, is not fixing it? Maybe you can try a different ethernet cable, in case it's a signal failure there?

Everything about those vibratomes is, indeed, stupidly expensive.

Aaah, sorry, yes, I see what you mean.

Fair enough, they do need to maintain a veneer of scientific legitimacy, of course. But that entire category of low-impact journals will publish just about anything, hence the large number of publications - most of which should perhaps not be published at all.

Consequently, nobody is impressed when you publish in Scientific Reports, but everyone is when you publish in, say, Neuron.

I expect this dichotomy will only widen over time, as journals choose to either chase quality or quantity.

My take on this is that it only applies to journals that don't care about their impact factor - the likes of SciRep, PLOS One, MDPI and Frontiers journals, etc.

For those that do care, the incentive is to be as strict as possible, since higher impact factors mean authors are willing to pay more.

Hey, as long as it works...

For what it's worth: my Bose QC35-II's do noise cancelling even when plugged in with a wire. It's definitely possible, if your headphones support it.

Of course, that does drain the battery, so it may not be worth it.

I monitor my microphone with my headphones, and since it's pretty much impossible to do that wirelessly, I will be sticking to wired, too.

Heck, I'm still on a wired mouse: the wireless ones are too much of a hassle for me.

Share your #wfh setup if it's better than what you have at work!

Between Discord and Slack, I find Slack better suited for maintaining and sharing lab knowledge, while Discord's voice-call and screen-share abilities are miles ahead of Slack's.

My current lab essentially never does e-mail, everything goes over Slack.

I have not wrenched on my current bike unfortunately: I moved and don't have garage space. But when I did, it saved a lot of money, and I learned a lot from it; sometimes by screwing up, but so it goes, would recommend! 😅

Never too late to get back to it, ride safe!

A photo of a Yamaha XV535 Virago, parked on grass.

Very true; I almost spend more on my gear than I did on my first bike!

Granted, that bike was a 20-year old Virago, but we had a lot of happy miles together. And a loooot of wrenching.

a close up of a dog 's face with its eyes closed . ALT: a close up of a dog 's face with its eyes closed .

That feeling when an old colleague randomly offers to help you navigate the academic job and funding landscape.

Sometimes, academia ain't all bad

Ooof. Leave some swag for the rest of us, will ya!

A gaggle of geese is looking threateningly at the camera, standing in short grass, with a lake in the background.

A small path through a field of green with yellow flowers.

A motorcycle viewed sideways, with far below a Norwegian fjord. The sun shines almost directly at the camera, just out of frame to the top-right.

An old clocktower, clad in weathered copper, peeks out from above the treetops.

There is something indescribably delightful about shooting with analogue film.

... and now, I am sorely tempted to buy something a bit more advanced than my old Olympus OM-10.

That awkward moment when you read a name and think: "Oh, yes, I know this person!", only to realise you've never actually met and just read all their papers.

The main driver of cost for journals is too many submissions. Every accepted paper has to pay for the handling of those rejected. But I assume you were being facetious.

If anything, I reckon we're going to see AI-assisted desk rejects and reviewer selection.

It happened to me once or twice, that I realised after creating the account, that a potential reviewer had a conflict of interest. You may get lucky!

Thank you! It varies somewhat by cell-type and light power, but I typically see a 25% decrease in signal after 3 minutes of continuous recording, with this sensor (pAce).

I used AutoCAD, since I happened to learn it long ago, but it's not ideal for 3D design. Nowadays, I would probably try to learn Fusion360 or SolidWorks.

Dual-polarity voltage imaging of the concurrent dynamics of multiple neuron types A new suite of voltage sensors enables simultaneous cellular-resolution neuronal activity imaging in awake mice and flies.

This is pAce, of Kannan et all fame: www.science.org/doi/full/10....

Quite!