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?