Degrees of Uncertainty - Nick Fahrenkopf

Degrees of Uncertainty - MRS Fall Meeting Day 4

Tue, 04 Dec 2012 19:32:43 -0600

Day 4 was also a travel day so I didn’t get to see much of the conference. I spent time packing, checking out, and getting out of the city before rush hour set in. But I did want to write about one unexpected but interesting talk, and recap some culinary highlights of the trip (sorry, I love food!) First, the science. After lunch was a session in which the invited speaker didn’t show up. Lu; (read more)

Source: Nick Fahrenkopf - Discipline: Materials Science

Featured - MRS Fall Meeting Day 3

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 22:27:56 -0600

To be honest, most of today I was preoccupied getting ready for my talk in the afternoon. But, to take my mind of it I still tried to attend talks. I feel like sometimes conferences are hit or miss. Sometimes you could walk into a 15 minute contributed talk and be blown away. But other times the 30 minute invited talks could be a literature review or incremental research. A lot of the talks I went; (read more)

Source: Nick Fahrenkopf - Discipline: Materials Science

Featured - MRS Fall Meeting Day 2

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 22:25:52 -0600

Before I get started with my summary of Day 2, I need to vent a bit. As a presenter 99% of the time you are not loud enough to not use a microphone, so please don’t try to forgo it. Also, 99% of the time you will cover 1 slide per minute. So, a 15 minute presentation should not have 40 slides. You will never cover all of that material. Please rethink what point you want to get across. I’m cons; (read more)

Source: Nick Fahrenkopf - Discipline: Materials Science

Featured - MRS Fall Meeting Day 1

Tue, 27 Nov 2012 23:00:30 -0600

Today was a travel day, but I was still able to attend a number of biomedical engineering talks which are personally interesting to me, and some talks on memristors, which some of my lab mates work on. I’ve explained elsewhere what a memristor is, but briefly it is a metal-insulator-metal material stack that has two resistance states (high and low). If that sounded like goobldy-gook to you, imag; (read more)

Source: Nick Fahrenkopf - Discipline: Materials Science

Featured - Materials Research Society Fall Meeting

Tue, 27 Nov 2012 09:25:19 -0600

I was a little disappointed to see how little the MRS Fall Meeting was getting mentioned on Twitter, so I decided to summarize some of the cool things I learned day by day. Before I get started, though, why MRS? Materials research might not sound glamorous but without it we wouldn’t have the advanced electronics we have today. Indeed, work continues to advance the development of better, faster, ; (read more)

Source: Nick Fahrenkopf - Discipline: Materials Science

Featured - What's in an error bar anyways?

Thu, 26 Jul 2012 08:47:14 -0500

Standard deviation. Error bars. Significance. Confidence interval. No matter what you call it, or how you calculate it, science is about more than numerical results. It’s about context. What do those numbers MEAN? (Statistics pun intended.) I may have mentioned before, but my college holds a weekly seminar where all students attend and take turns presenting their research. My college is very ; (read more)

Source: Nick Fahrenkopf - Discipline: Misc

Featured - Off Topic: Facilitated Communication and the Scientific Method

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 13:18:47 -0600

Last Friday I was watching 20/20 with my fiancee. Shows like 20/20 or Dateline are usually about some unsolved murder mystery that is just creepy, but TV offerings on Friday evening are slim pickings so we gave this one a shot. This episode by Chris Cuomo (son of former NYS Governor Mario Cuomo and brother of current NYS Governor Andrew Cuomo) dealt with the unexpected consequences of facilitated ; (read more)

Source: Nick Fahrenkopf - Discipline: Psychology

Featured - New Year's (Lab) Resolutions

Sun, 01 Jan 2012 17:23:43 -0600

With 2012 officially here we're all making resolutions. I've pledged to eat breakfest out less (bagel and cream cheese is so good!) and to blog at least once a month (sorry I've been scarce!) I think now is also a great time to make some New Year's Resolutions for the lab too. Here's what I have planned, if you have some more in mind leave them in the comments! Safety First! With the recent n; (read more)

Source: Nick Fahrenkopf - Discipline: Research

Featured - Error, Will Robinson, ERROR!

Sat, 19 Nov 2011 11:17:57 -0600

I’ve unfortunately had to sit through some very rough presentations lately, so in everyone’s best interests, here is my second volume of things to think about when giving a presentation (see: Ten Tips to Give Great Thesis Defense). In this case we won’t be looking so much at the presentation, but instead the experiment and how small oversights can blow up in your face during a presentation. ; (read more)

Source: Nick Fahrenkopf - Discipline: Misc

Featured - Protein Based Memristors- and what is a memristor?

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 09:56:57 -0500

In case you haven’t heard, memristors are a big deal (see NanoLetters, ACS Nano, and Nature). So what are they and why are researchers in academia and industry so interested? Are they going to change life as we know it? Scientists, at least folks like me working at the intersection of biology and technology, are really interested in memristors because they are a fully electronic component that ; (read more)

Source: Nick Fahrenkopf - Discipline: BioTech

Featured - What’s in a title? Engineer versus scientist.

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 21:34:54 -0500

I’m a student at the College of Nanoscale SCIENCE and ENGINEERING (emphasis mine). While we’re clearly not the only college of any kind of science AND engineering, I can’t help but reflect on what unlikely bedfellows such a joint college creates. What follows is an immense amount of opinion and impressions that I get. My undergraduate degree was from a College of Arts & Sciences. And ; (read more)

Source: Nick Fahrenkopf - Discipline: Engineering

Featured - IonTorrent- not a new way to pirate music

Sat, 20 Aug 2011 10:40:31 -0500

One of the research scientists at my college forwarded me a Nature article he thought I’d be interested in. This was the same guy who wanted to know how you feed DNA, so I was wary, but I took a look anyways. Now here I am breaking one of my only blogging rules and am writing about my own research. The paper came out in July in Nature titled “An integrated semiconductor device enabling non-opt; (read more)

Source: Nick Fahrenkopf - Discipline: BioTech

Featured - Carbon, wholly carbon, and nothing but carbon.

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 10:25:45 -0500

I’m a molecular biologist trapped in the body of someone with a physics degree. I’m a member of a bacteriology lab trapped in a college of “Nanoscale Science and Engineering”. As such, while I try to do cool nanoscale things with biological materials, I’m surrounded by physicists and electrical engineers along with their research projects and problems. Don’t get me wrong, it is often ; (read more)

Source: Nick Fahrenkopf - Discipline: Engineering

Featured - What does a grad student make?

Sat, 30 Jul 2011 21:25:58 -0500

I don’t really follow football but someone tweeted earlier today that with his new contract (5 year $90 million) Colts QB Peyton Manning will make $26,510 per pass attempt. Every time he tries a pass in a game, he’ll make what a graduate student makes in a year*. That got me thinking- what does it take to make/earn/rake in what a graduate student slaves away for each year?   &; (read more)

Source: Nick Fahrenkopf - Discipline: Misc

Featured - Hello World!

Sun, 24 Jul 2011 20:12:46 -0500

Hello World! If there's a more overused programming bit (no pun intended) I don't know it. I just wanted to take a minute to share with you all what I'm hoping to do with this space. But first, a big shout out to Brian and the rest of the LabSpaces crew for having me- I'm really excited to be a part of this community!     A little about me: I'm a Ph; (read more)

Source: Nick Fahrenkopf - Discipline: Misc