Category Archives: General

Donation for the recovery of Japan

The 2011 ELCA music festical will be held on Friday, March 18th, at 19:00 hrs. Last year, it used to be an activity for people to enjoy music after a year of research. This year the theme has changed. While we were preparing for an evening full of fun, a tragedy happened. After the earthquake, Japan has been bruised again by the wave ‘Tsunami’. More than 10,000 people have been swept away. Nuclear reactors are at the verge of exploding. People in that area can hardy find clean food and water.

We cannot not just watch the news and go to bed without worrying about the Japanese people.

Then a discussion arose in our research group. "How can we help?" The result is: we will dedicate our performance at the ELCA festival this year to Japan. The price of the beer will be 10 cent higher. This is for a donation; the money we get from the drinks will go to Japanese people. We know this is not gonna be big money but every Euro counts.

Dear readers, please come to the ELCA festival in the Pub, Mekelweg 4, Delft, at 19:00 hrs. We have prepared a Japanese song for this. 

Each glass that you drink is meaningful. It is the drink of kindness driven from human symphathy inside you.

Let’s sing together for our Japanese friends letting them know that they are not alone.

See you on Friday.

June

 

BioCAS 2013 in Delft or Amsterdam?

Looking back on a successful BioCAS 2010 in Cyprus, the BioCAS Steering Committee is gradually looking forward to bids to host BioCAS 2013. Looking at the activities in the Netherlands by companies, such as Medtronic, Philips Healthcare, Twente Medical Systems, a.o., and academia in the Medical Delta, viz. Erasmus University Rotterdam, Leiden University and Delft University of Technology, the recent Dutch Innovative Medical Devices Initiatives and of course our own activities in the field of Biomedical Electronics, I think hosting BioCAS 2013 in Delft or Amsterdam would be great! I am currently ramping up the first discussions on this with prospective members of my organizing team.

One thing that we, unfortunately, cannot beat is the very fine weather we encountered at Cyprus. See the picture below of Cees-Jeroen, Mark, Marijn and Wannaya enjoying lunch at BioCAS 2010 in the bright sun. On the other hand, the Netherlands have lots of other good stuff to offer and usually the weather isn’t too bad in November. So stay tuned, to hear more about whether and how these plans come to fruition.

BioCAS 2010

Wouter

Neuropod: the podcast of Nature on Neuroscience

neuropodIf you, just as many members of the Biomedical Electronics Group, have a fascination for the intricacies of the human brain, you may be interested in this podcast from Nature: Neuropod.

Particularly interesting is the feature of January 2011, on why music is so pleasurable, or to find out how to treat tinnitus

Wouter

Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) top rated among Dutch universities.

TU Delft ranking

According to a recent research from the Times Higher Education Magazine the reputation of Delft University of Technology is ranked as 49th among reputations of the world’s best universities. In this ranking, based on the opinion of 13.000 academics around the world, rather than universities’ performance, four Dutch universities, led by TU Delft, can be found in the top 100.

One can argue about the value of reputation ranking but in my opinion many young students will choose their university based on this subjective quality, which will lead to higher economic value for the universities.

Independent of any ranking, I am convinced that the members of the Biomedical Electronics Group will continue to contribute to the science and to society and thereby add to the value and reputation of TU Delft.

Senad

Radio silence on weblog

Dear all,

As you have noticed, not much has been posted to this weblog recently. This is most likely because most of the active bloggers of the Biomedical Group are also musicians in the ELCA band and this is the "silence before the storm", so to speak. As already announced in June’s post, the ELCA festival is upon us in (now) less than a week!

Another reason of the radio silence is due to the earthquake and successive tsunami in Japan, followed by another earthquake. Everybody held his breath when Mother Earth rumbled.

Wouter

Are Americans extraterrestial life forms?

we're not aloneTwo news items caught my attention today. The first one was the news that NASA researchers (albeit in the Journal of Cosmology) have discovered the remains of extraterrestial life forms in meteorites. The second one was that only one (1) out of almost 2000 (!) Americans fulfills all seven criteria of having a healthy human heart. Am I the only one that sees the connection?

The pressure to publish creates many victims a day

Today’s headlines of Science report that a former researcher at the renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology has been convicted of fraud for fabricating and falsifying data. Recently a well-respected German politician copied about 50% of his PhD thesis without giving proper credits to the author(s) of the original work. He had to return his degree and resigned from the government.

plagiarism

As Editor-in-Chief of IEEE’s Transactions on Circuits and Systems-I, I receive every month a socalled "Prohibited Authors List", indicating authors that have been found guilty of plagiarism or other improper scholarly behavior and that are no longer allowed to publish in one or more IEEE journals. Unfortunately, this list is growing every month.

So, what is driving these scientists to commit fraud or plagiarism? In many cases I believe it is career pressure, as received from employers, peers, colleagues, funding agencies, or even from the researchers themselves. Of course, every scientist is responsible for his own deeds. However, the fact that the pressure may also be coming from outside means that others or other bodies can become partner in crime, too.

First of all, there is the supervisor of young PhD students, who, busy as they may be, force their young pupils to submit manuscripts to journals and conferences and inform them that the degree can only be awarded if they have at least two publications in an internationally recognized journal. There are quite a few universities that even require MSc students to have an IEEE publication before they can graduate for their MSc studies.

Second, there are the employers of (academic) staff members, who, busy as they may be, no longer seem to have the time or no longer spend enough time to properly evaluate the quality of the work conducted and thus offload their responsibility of evakuating to a number of anonymous reviewers who may or may not recommend the work be published. Often it is the number of publications that count more than their real impact.

Third, there are the funding agencies. I have evaluated a lot of project proposals over the past couple of years and one aspect to grade the applicants on is their past performance and reputation. If I have been working in the field myself, then this is a piece of cake, as I know the impact of the work conducted by my peers, at least to a certain extent. However, if you are a member of a jury that decides on, e.g., 20 project proposals of which maybe only one or two are in your field of expertise, then what do you do? I bet most people then resort to counting the number projects and publications with incomprehensible names and titles.

At Delft University of Technology, for a long time a large portion of the amount of funding professors, section heads, department heads and deans would receive from the university’s "1st money stream" depended on, indeed, the number of publications, the number of pages published and the (sometimes perceived) impact factor of the journal. I figured that if everybody at our university would only publish 50% of what he published the previous year, nothing would affect the amount of money received per faculty, department and section and this extra time could be well spent on writing better papers, performing better research and offering better education. Or on just going home on time at the end of the day for once.

Before I sign off, I would like to address young MSc and PhD students. I very well remember a case that I got involved in as editor-in-chief, in which a young, bright, PhD student abroad committed plagiarism. The plagiarism was discovered after the publication was made and, in line with procedures prescribed by the IEEE, I installed a committee to investigate the case and to decide on which sanctions should be applied. When I confronted the young author and his co-authors, of whom two were his supervisors, with the allegation made, the supervisors closed ranks immediately and blamed the PhD student for everything that had gone wrong. Despite my correspondence with the authors and expressing my viewpoint that I held also the supervisors resonsible for what had happened, in the end, the PhD degree was never awarded and the PhD student lost his appointment. I am pretty sure the professors are still there!

So my advice to everybody that is in the process of writing his first major journal paper or conference contribution is the following: please familiarize yourself with the ethical code of conduct of your organization and the publisher. For the IEEE, this code of ethical conduct can be found in IEEE’s Code of Ethics and the IEEE PSPB Operations Manual. In case of doubt, always touch base with your supervisors and/or the editor-in-chief of the journal or technical program chair of the conference you would like to submit your manuscript to. They are there to help. I know one author that contacted me well before he submitted his manuscript. By informing him of the possible consequences of his "reuse of phrases crafted by somebody else", I could prevent him from making a serious mistake by mistake and, fortunately, he still has a bright career ahead of him.

Wouter

Finally proven: blogging is good!

pointer at the word "blog"

During the short time that this blog has been up and running, I always enjoyed it a lot to read the contributions from others, as well as writing a few humble pieces myself. Today I was very happy to read that blogging is not only fun, but apparently also good for the productivity! In this paper researchers show that keeping a blog within a company actually works in a beneficial way for the productiveness of the employees.

It suddenly makes me feel a lot better about all those endless hours I spent to write a few words here… 😉

 Marijn 

Today, three Masters of Science in Electrical Engineering graduating from the Biomedical Electronics Group

Today is graduation day, at least for three members of the Biomedical Electronics Group, who will be awarded the degree of "Elektrotechnisch Ingenieur", or the Master of Science degree in Electrical Engineering as it is called in English. They are Gaurav Mishra, Hossein Tajeddin and Mark Stoopman. If you read this blog on time and if you are around, please join in the official ceremony at 13:00 hrs in lecture theater Ampere of the EWI building, or join us about 90 minutes later in the Pub to congratulate the newborn ingenieurs with their well-deserved title.

Wouter

Is darkness only all blind people can see?

Doing research on neural recording & stimulation that are dedicated to recovering human senses, a question like this may come to your mind: "between loss of hearing and vision loss, which one will make me suffer the most"

It’s a difficult question to answer…and for sure noone wants to experience it. But let’s see what famous people say…

Beethoven stated that "….for me there can be no relaxation in human society; no refined conversation, no mutual confidences. I must live quite alone and may creep into society only as often as sheer necessity demands… Such experiences almost made me despair, and I was on the point of putting an end to my life…"

Helen Keller wrote "…I am just as deaf as I’m blind. The problems of deafness are deeper and more complex, if not more important, than those of blindness. Deafness is much worse misfortune. For it means the loss of the most vital stimulus — the sound of the voice that brings language, sets thoughts astir and keeps us in the intellectual company of man." 

Three, my favourite Dutch band 😉 sings in their song ‘Way back from the Hague‘ that "Silence came over me!!!!"   …and " Darkness is all I can see."

Caraboa, the most famous Thai rock band also has a song dedicated to a blind musician called ‘Wanipok‘. In short it says (interpreted by me): ‘when my eyes are covered by darkness, my life is still illuminated… by music.’ 

For me, silence will isolate us from the society and this will lead us to a deep loneliness. Sometimes… just listening to songs, beautiful scenes can occur in our minds. Is the brain playing tricks on us? Or does it imply that losing sense of hearing is more severe than being blind and darkness is not what blind people can only see.

On March 18th, there will be the 2nd ELCA music festival in the EWI student pub Pub, at TUDelft. The Biomedical Group’s band will perform Wanipok, a cover, and many other songs. I really look forward to that 🙂