Advice and Links

Advice

The following is a very partial list of things written others that I’ve found useful – thank you to the authors!

• Guidelines for Academic Requesters on Mechanical Turk, WeAreDynamo
• A Guide To Using Corporate Data for Academic Research, Andrey Fradkin
• The Unwritten Rules Of PhD Research, Marian Petre and Gordon Rugg
• You and Your Research, Richard Hamming
• A Few Tips On Writing Papers With Mathematical Content, John Tsitsiklis
• How NOT to review a paper: the tools and techniques of the adversarial reviewer, Graham Cormode
• Many good links at the bottom of the page here, on how to do and present research. (Somewhat focused on CS theory)
• How to get startup ideas, Paul Graham
• Michael Bernstein on Velocity and Vectoring in research: useful tips on how (and why) to prototype on the biggest risks to your research.

Software

• How I create plots in Python, including LaTeX support for text
• latexpand is a perl script that flattens a tex file (expands \input, \include) and strips comments. Useful for uploading to arXiv.
  • Usage: latexpand –empty-comments mytexfile.tex > mytexfile-stripped.tex
• Tool to find grammar, spelling, and style mistakes in LaTeX. Gracefully handles tex files that input other tex files.
  • Usage: textidote –output html main.tex > report.html