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Inspired by the 180 websites I will understand 52 academic papers in 52 weeks

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Re: Inspired by the 180 websites I will understand 52 academic papers in 52 weeks

#31
post #6

Are you planning to reproduce the experiments in every paper too?

I do not. While I would really like to be able to do that, the reality is that I just can't. I mean, I have a biologist friend who regularly clones bacteria and implements binary functions in their DNA. Not only do I not know how to hold a pipete, I just don't have the equipment to perform experiments like that. The goal is to get a functional understanding of as many different topics as possible. Enough to explain t…

At least for some of the Machine Learning and related papers (specially old ones), to reproduce the experiment should be relatively easy.

Re: Inspired by the 180 websites I will understand 52 academic papers in 52 weeks

#32
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alex! It's awesome that you've decided to do this and you have my support! I'm replying to you because I want to pitch you something: I'm running a free open platform for simplified summaries of scientific papers: http://www.sciencegist.com If you decide to contribute these layman's explanations to Science Gist, I can guarantee you will earn yourself at least one user of the day award :P Award: https://twitter.com/Sc…

I think you need a little quality control on the tags. What's with all the "keyboard mash" tags, ie. ArxicwxQlRqh? http://sciencegist.com/tags

Fixed. Sorry! I had a recent bout with spammers :/ You can add a gist anonymously if you don't like to expose yourself, but having that functionality is quite dangerous online, for obvious reasons. I don't like captchas, but I'll have to add them soon (for anonymous contributions) if this continues.

Re: Inspired by the 180 websites I will understand 52 academic papers in 52 weeks

#33

And in turn, you have inspired me to do something similar. I read (to varying degrees of attentiveness) many, many papers per week, but I never write about them other than to take notes, write questions to the authors etc. For the next 52 weeks, I'm gonna try to write a layman's explanation (with some amount of appropriate background) about a paper every week. I suspect these will center around my work, but I also su…

As somebody who is about to start grad school, blogging about papers publicly sounds like an excellent idea.

At the beginning of my Master's degree, I was quite careful about making notes about every paper I read, but as I gained more background and started focussing on doing on my own work, I'd read papers only enough to get what I needed out of them (fortunately I have a good enough memory that when I needed something I'd already read about, I could often find the paper -- and I was religious about at least saving all the papers I read). Doing it publicly might keep the motivation up.

Re: Inspired by the 180 websites I will understand 52 academic papers in 52 weeks

#36
Reading this article, Jennifer's, and the comments here have really inspired me. I think I am going to join you guys. Starting today, I am going to code for 8 hours every day for my full-time startup job. Hopefully, at the end, I will have a much better understanding of how much total time of how much of my life I am wasting working on other people's dreams when instead I could be reading research papers, building websites, invalidating patents, learning and practicing design...

Re: Inspired by the 180 websites I will understand 52 academic papers in 52 weeks

#39
post #9

Hey I started doing the exact same thing. Only for CS. Minus the understanding part. I think if I can grasp even 20% of it, then the time spent pays off.

If you want to warm up, start with ACM journal articles. They're still pretty dense but aren't quite as formal.

The problem with many CS papers is they're focused at other experts in the same niche rather than to someone with a general knowledge of CS. ACM (and similar journals, I suspect) articles give similar information but are aimed at a more general audience.

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