Welcome to Face-cage Friday where I comment on the current figurative rat in my metaphorical face-cage. Today it’s about…..
Context
I’m a research scientist by education and training with published work. The rigors of scientific research and academic publishing1 require very concise or specific language to avoid any sort of semantic ambiguity. I take fastidious care to choose and use verbiage that narrows down the meaning, and because words (and images) cost money2 in academic publishing, the final manuscript, while complete, can be somewhat terse. It is information dense. This is a necessary skill, though, as much interpretation of the data requires the context provided.
This is a pic of me in a lab where I was a TA. It expresses the rat in my face-cage.
Happy Friday!
1 Don’t get me started on the recent retractions, AI, and academic fraud in scientific journals. Those are quickly becoming future rats for my face-cage.
2 Publishing to a peer-reviewed journal can be very expensive. Open scientific publishing has tried to address this but has its own problems.