[HN Gopher] Laboratory Notebook Skills [pdf]
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       Laboratory Notebook Skills [pdf]
        
       Author : Tomte
       Score  : 50 points
       Date   : 2021-09-27 18:12 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.dur.ac.uk)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.dur.ac.uk)
        
       | was_a_dev wrote:
       | I did my Physics undergraduate at Durham, and was given this
       | checklist as a first year. It is so surreal seeing it again on
       | HN.
       | 
       | I really enjoyed having a lab-book to organise all my notes
       | through my degree. It took time to write notes our properly, but
       | it quickly paid off when having to check calculations,
       | assumptions and writing up experiements.
        
         | lifekaizen wrote:
         | That's awesome, love HN has relevant people around.
         | 
         | Could you shed some light on what the 'script' is in 'The lab
         | book is NOT a copy of the experimental script'? Seems to
         | reference homework like tasks 'Task 1: 100 +- 1 kO' but in a
         | more undefined experimental context what would that be...?
        
           | detaro wrote:
           | Maybe "worksheet" is a reasonable equivalent. Describes the
           | the needed context (e.g. what's the goal, what are the
           | principles involved), the experiment itself (setup, steps to
           | do, what to measure, ...), ... for a predefined experiment,
           | especially in a classroom setting.
           | 
           | In the lab notebook you need the details what you did and
           | what you calculated, but don't need to copy all the context
           | for the theory etc.
        
       | lexicality wrote:
       | Every so often I'll see something like this on HN that suggests
       | that software engineers should be keeping similar records of
       | everything they do, if for no other reason than to have a record
       | of problems they've solved that can be grepped when a similar
       | problem shows up. This seems like a good idea.
       | 
       | I wish I could be bothered to actually do it though
        
       | physicsgraph wrote:
       | Enabling reproducibility is a costly investment, but the cost of
       | doing unreproducible work is even higher. This is a calculation I
       | rarely see organization make.
       | 
       | More frequently everything is a one-off, with failure recurring
       | randomly until a working (though not reproducible) approach is
       | found. I'm not sure how to spin this evolutionary approach
       | positively, as it can result in fragile outcomes.
       | 
       | There is software infrastructure that enables reproducibility
       | (virtual machines, and more recently containerization), but this
       | concept rarely makes it to written documentation.
        
         | beckman466 wrote:
         | > Enabling reproducibility is a costly investment, but the cost
         | of doing unreproducible work is even higher. This is a
         | calculation I rarely see organization make.
         | 
         | Hopefully things like Alex Freeman's http://science-octopus.org
         | (or something like it) will take off very soon, which addresses
         | this well (and will make science more accountable).
         | 
         |  _Meet Octopus, a new vision for scientific publishing_ :
         | https://www.science.org/careers/2018/11/meet-octopus-new-vis...
         | 
         |  _Dr. Alexandra Freeman | Octopus: a radical new approach to
         | scientific publishing - 29 October 2018_ :
         | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Af6aITLEoD8
        
       | lifekaizen wrote:
       | Wondering what a modern, digital version would be? Imagine a repo
       | could work for the time-stamping and not deleting mistakes
       | (immutable record). Images, annotations (i.e. 'Circle rogue
       | points') seem much harder.
        
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       (page generated 2021-09-27 23:00 UTC)