Experimental Research Hints
(Or, things I wish I'd known my first year of grad
school)
Write It Down!
At some point, you will run experiments and later need to reference it in a
paper or progress report (or someone else in your research group needs to
understand the experiment). You will be very happy if you have logged
some of the following:
- motivation for the experiment
- expectations you had before running the experiment
- parameters used in the experiment
- general impression of the results
Lab notebooks are valuable, but web pages are great places to record this type
of information. Not only can you search for keywords, but you can refer others
to your log and link in other documents (plus, if it's in AFS-space, it's
backed-up). Often people will put pictures of graphs and other results on
their experiment web page. Here's
my online experiment
log.
Essential Tools
Help with References
During the course of grad school, you'll read lots of papers. You'll even
want to remember something about many of these papers. Starting an annotated
bibliography early will help you when you're ready to write a paper, your
proposal, the related work section of your dissertation, anything.
You can either start a Word document with references and comments, or use
BibTeX.
If you have any inkling that you want to write papers and/or your dissertation
in LaTeX, use BibTeX for your
references. (Here's my
BibTeX setup.) If you want to use Word, several folks at UNC use EndNote for organizing bibliographies (it's not
free, but is sold at Student Stores).
Archival Data Storage is Plentiful
After you've run lots of experiments, you may find you need additional disk
space. ATN offers a mass
storage system that uses SAM-FS. After your data has been in the mass
storage system for 14 hours, it is backed up to tape. Note that this system
is only for long-term storage of seldom-used files.
Recommending Reading
- The Art of Computer Systems Performance Analysis: Techniques for
Experimental Design, Measurement, Simulation, and Modeling by Raj Jain (UNC
libraries, amazon.com)
- Writing for Computer Science: The Art of Effective Communication
by Justin Zobel (amazon.com)