Whew.
I realize that I pretty much dropped off the face of the earth for a while - the result of a crazy semester filled with endless problem sets, writing papers (both research and for classes), working on experiments/having equipment break down on me, the GREs, grad school apps, and random personal issues. Thankfully things are far less stressful nowadays what with the holidays + new semester and all…
One of the highlights was going to Boston to talk about some of my recent work at the Materials Research Society fall meeting. It was great - I had the chance to meet some very interesting people and go to quite a few exciting talks, both of relevance to my research or of personal interest. I might post about some of the ideas/papers I’ve been thinking about since then, some partly stimulated by some of the MRS talks or talks we’ve had here at Penn, some partly stimulated by my recent experiments.
Random thought: a service that I would love to have (I’ve found myself wishing for this kind of thing both when digging through the literature on a particular subject) is an online ’science network visualizer’ application. Basically an online service (maybe provided by ISI, Google scholar or something of that sort?) that would take a given researcher’s name - or perhaps an individual paper citation - as an input, and generate a ‘map’ of what people/groups of people/other papers cite them, and with what frequency. I know facebook has a few things like this (e.g. the many eyes friend network visualizer), and the awesome people at information esthetics created this map of science (of which I have a poster) using a similar algorithm. This kind of service would be invaluable for figuring out who is paying attention to a particular kind of research (and what else they pay attention to), what ‘cliques’ exist in various scientific communities, what the big results are/who the big players are, what connections are just waiting to happen… actually now that I think of it, this kind of thing probably already exists, hopefully in a more general framework that can be used to visualize other kinds of communities as well. I am an avid rss subscriber of visual complexity, a great site by Manuel Lima that documents various kinds of network visualization, but I don’t think I’ve ever come across something that fits this description.
In other news, I’ve started to write my senior/master’s thesis and have had to relearn 
Speaking of which, another new addition to the blogroll is confused at a higher level, an interesting “professional journal” by a physicist in Minnesota. He has a few posts that I thought were particularly interesting, for example documenting various aspects of the peer-review process (like ref comments) or collaborations that he’s working on. Also, he’s a Tufte fan (see my post from ages ago).
The network visualizer sounds like a good idea. It would be nice to know who to lit stalk (who isn’t on the list already).
Where have you applied for grad school?
Pretty much the usual schools, most in the northeast or in California. I actually just got into one of them!
I applied to a bunch of different departments - some physics, some applied physics, some materials science, and even some electrical engineering, depending on the particular school’s focus.
The algorithm I used to select where to apply to was simple - I made a list of all the people I would want to work with, and then applied to the n departments/groups that contained the largest number of them (where n = # of departments I applied to).
Thanks for the nod, I’m glad you find BibDesk useful, it has certainly turned me from a print-and-stack person, to a sleek and mobile journal reader. It was especially nice on the plane last week to realize that I could pull up that paper I read last week and actually get real work done when the moment struck.
Good luck with grad school, it can be a trying time, but I think you’ve got all the right ideas for finding a place that’s a good match. Welcome back to the blog!