Ahhhh… the Holiday Season…Every year around this same time a slew of  “experts on gift-giving” come out with numerous super-ultimate gift lists for mothers, fathers, friends, teachers, babysitters and hairdressers. But when was the last time you’ve seen a great gift giving guide for all of the Engineers in your life?

I have yet to see such a guide. So I am self-proclaiming myself as a gift-expert for scientists and engineers this season! Here is the SUPER-ULTIMATE Gift Guide for every engineer, scientist, and techie-in-general on your list. Enjoy!

(Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with any of the companies below and am not compensated for any of the product suggestions. I own MVP Modeling Solutions.)

SUPER-ULTIMATE Gift Guide

For your co-workers:

Working with Engineers? Thank them for their great work and attention to detail with:

Neocube 216pc Magnet Puzzle

It’s a fun magnetic puzzle that anyone working in front of a computer all day would appreciate! It looks cool sitting on your desk and keeps you entertained while you’re procrastinating… I mean, brainstorming.

$19.95 from www.Amazon.com

Click here to see the cool video of the puzzle.

For your lab mates:

Need a creative gift for a biologist or chemist that will actually help them work better? Get them a stylish looking Molecular Model Set. They are fun to tinker with while…uuuhhmmm…brainstorming, they look cool AND make you look smart while sitting on your desk.

$31.50 from www.Amazon.com

Piled Higher and Deeper comics are an oldie but goody. Created by a Stanford engineering graduate it kept me entertained though out grad school years and students and advisors alike can still empathize with the comic strip’s characters.

For your thesis advisor:

If you are a grad student, praying for graduation - give a small token of appreciation to your advisor! Every little bit helps.

World’s Best Advisor Mug

$12.95 PhD Comics Store

For your friends who are desperate to get out of grad school and start living:

Grad Student Motivation Chart Mug

$12.95 PhD Comics Store

For any of your Techie friends having to survive in the corporate world:

Of course we can not forget about Dilbert as we think of our “could-be” researchers who have sold their souls to the corporate world (yes, that would be me).

Make them a Customized Dilbert gift!

1)      Choose favorite character

2)      Select your favorite comic strip

3)      Choose to print the strip on a mug, card, t-shirt of water bottle

For anyone in the STEMs fields:

Entertaining t-shirts from www.thinkgeek.com. Here are some of my favorites:

T-shirt with a built-in equalizer. Animates to ambient noise or music. $29.99

Stand back t-shirt: Staring at $15.99

Molar Mole t-shirt: (it’s made out of repeated Avogadro’s number!) Staring at $15.99

For your HR, procurement of training manager:

Last but not least, remember that your HR and procurement departments can be helpful in letting you know about various opportunities in the company. Make their job easier by helping them spend company training budgets on courses that engineers would enjoy and managers would approve off:

MVP Courses now on sale! Choose from chemistry, chemical-kinetics and engineering modeling courses.

Students - help the people in charge of seminars and talks at your university. Suggest they look into the entertaining and valuable MVP Keynote talks.

Hope this gift guide will help take care of every engineer and scientist on your list.

Very Happy Holidays!

Masha

Hi Readers,

I wanted to share with you one of my experiences on improving personal productivity. Like many of you, I tend to feel that I have waaay too much on my plate when it comes to work tasks. A few years ago I had to start figuring out how to stop feeling like I was getting nowhere, and to actually start accomplishing stuff. Below is one of my solutions.

If you constantly feel that there are never enough hours in the day to get things done, this post might be of use to you.

——————————————————————————————————

A few years ago I was working on a tech-support e-mail to an important client of the software company where I was working at the time. The customer sent us a lengthy e-mail complaining of numerous bugs that plagued the latest software version. Most of his complaints were a result of his own ignorance, but being in charge of the company’s technical support program I had to be very delicate in my e-mail response.

Right in the middle of the writing process a “Ping!” sound chimed from my PC. Outlook has dutifully informed me of an incoming e-mail message. I stopped writing in mid-sentence and checked the Inbox. My boss needed an “urgent” answer to an engineering question for a client. I typed up a response and attempted to get back to my client e-mail.

In order to regain my train of thought, I had to re-read the first part of my response and then spend about 3 more minutes remembering what I was planning on writing next. It took a total of 5 minutes to get back into the grove of writing. I managed to create another sentence when “Ping!!” Outlook yet again notified me of another in-coming e-mail.

Being a dutiful employee I never ignored e-mails. So interrupting my thought process for the second time, I popped open my inbox. It was one of the developers asking how to deal with a particular request from marketing. I sent him a quick reply and got back to my client e-mail. After yet another 5 minutes of re-grouping and re-focusing on the task at hand, I was off and running. But not for long… “Ping!!!” Outlook was once again demanding my attention. To make a long story short, Outlook interrupted me about four more times. The task of responding to a client e-mail, which should only have taken 15-30 minutes at the most, ended up taking me over 2 hours to complete, due to Outlook’s “You have mail!” reminder.

I would like to tell you that this was an exception rather than the norm, but that would be lying. Important work tasks were constantly interrupted by the “Ping!” of Outlook and things that should have taken me minutes to finish ended up taking hours. At the time,

I did not think that there was anything wrong with this system. Whoever contacted me would get a reply within minutes, which only demonstrated that I was a stellar employee.

That was until I read The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss (the new 2009 edition is now in bookstores). Ferriss explained that current typical workplaces are designed to promote employees wasting a lot of time on trivial tasks, which prevent them from accomplishing things that really matter to their career, happiness, and life. Tasks that should take minutes to complete take hours and sometimes days.

“Well, of course,” you might think, “that’s because you’re accomplishing other things along the way! You’re responding to other e-mails, calls, etc!” The problem is that many of those “other e-mails and calls” could be ignored. For example, did you really need to respond to a funny Youtube video from your co-worker?

Of course, there might be instances where the Youtube video is actually funny and co-worker that sent it to you is also a friend and you might WANT to respond to it. In this case you should batch it along with any other non-urgent e-mails. Ferriss’ concept behind e-mail batching is that you conduct all of your e-mail conversations at 1 or 2 specific times per day, eliminating e-mail interruptions during important tasks and thus becoming much more effective in managing your workload.

After reading Ferriss’ book I decided to give this idea a try. I showed up to work and took the following steps, following Ferriss’ advice.

Step 1: Turn off Outlook alert for new e-mails. No alert = no need to interrupt an important task at hand. I realize that some of you might be “on-call” and expected to respond to e-mails immediately. What if your boss has an emergency question during a client meeting? Or a co-worker needs your help immediately? Although let’s face it, there are very few “emergencies” that really can’t wait a few hours. For those types of emergences I would request that people contact me via my cell phone (see below).

Step 2: Turn off automatic e-mail send/receive option. This turned out to be extremely useful not just for increasing my productivity but for developing my people skills as well. How many times have you sent an angry e-mail, regretting it minutes later? This step allows you to write all of your e-mails at specifically allocated time. This way, you can digest whether or not to really send the not-so-great e-mail. A number of times, after turning off the auto send/receive option, I ended up going back to my e-mail drafts and re-writing or deleting them completely. It was a relief that Outlook did not actually send the e-mails until I had sometime to think about them.

Step 3: Check/respond to e-mail only twice a day. Granted, not all of you might be able to get away with this step at your workplace, but you can probably get away with some version of it. If you feel that your workplace truly cares about productivity and effectiveness of its employees you can create an e-mail auto-response to train those around you to be more effective with your time.

Below is an example of an auto-responder that I set up, following guidelines recommended by Ferriss. It worked for about a day, until my boss said that although he appreciates my goal of being more productive I should probably get rid of the auto-responder and simply check e-mail twice a day without it declaring that fact to the world. That worked for me.

If your workplace is truly interested in having you solve engineering problems and contribute to the bottom line in the fastest and most effective way, your co-workers would understand if you are not checking your e-mail during that time.

Here is an example of an auto-responder (for more examples see The Four Hour Workweek):

Dear Colleagues,

Due to high workload, I am currently checking and responding to e-mail twice daily at 12PM and 4PM EST.

If you require urgent assistance, please call my cell: 555-555-5555. Thank you for helping me become more efficient and effective. It will help me to serve you better!

Best,

Masha

At first, I was terrified of missing important e-mails. I was nervous about how the rest of my coworkers would respond after receiving my auto-responder. Surprisingly, the transition towards eliminating the most important work interruption went very smoothly.

Although the auto-responder idea did not fly at that particular workplace, I simply started checking my e-mail twice a day. And no disasters happened. The earth did not crack open and the sky did not fall. But I did become a heck a lot more productive with projects that really mattered.

How much better would your work and personal life be if you could accomplish truly important work goals in half the time? The three above steps for eliminating e-mail interruptions might be just the answer.

Try them out and let us all know how it worked in the comments below!

Masha

Brief video that I had to create out of my love for all things Google…

Stay tuned for next weeks post: E-mail: Productivity Heaven OR Interruptions Hell? Hope it will be helpful to a lot of you!

Cheers!

Today’s college students are increasingly scientifically illiterate.

Yes, I said it. This statement might upset you if you are a college student or professor, but you might likely agree with it if you are an engineering manager in charge of new hires.

If you do a bit of searching and speak to some technical book publishers, you’ll find that it is universally agreed that traditional teaching methods (including textbooks, lectures, and pages of homework problems) are becoming increasingly less attractive to today’s students and especially fail with underrepresented populations in science and engineering.

There has to be a way to address this problem. Last year I wrote a post On Teaching where I talked about my experiences with Socratic Method of teaching vs. the traditional lecture.

Because of my involvement with the Franklin Foundation, I had a chance to think a bit more about the issues that face the current state of our science education. I decided that just encouraging educators to use the Socratic Method, is not enough. Aside from the fact that less students are motivated to major in engineering and sciences, those that do, simply do not learn all that much.

A number of studies, such as Why We Must Change: The Research Evidence, by L.F. Gardiner, found that only about 20% of what is taught in a traditional university course is retained by the students. In rare cases that number can be as high as 50%. Meaning that in a traditional university course, 50-80% of instructor’s and students’ time is completely wasted! I do not believe it has to be this way. There is a way increase the amount of information that students retain, whether in class or while doing homework, and I think that can be accomplished with the help of video games.

Although this is not a novel idea, the research on benefits of video games for education purposes is barely getting underway. In 2003, BBC did a piece on how even the action-packed shooting games develop players’ strategic thinking (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/2744449.stm). We know that problem-solving and strategic thinking are closely related and are necessary in learning scientific principles.

USA Today ran an article in 2005 on video games as potential treatment of ADD (http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/games/2005-09-26-video-game-therapy_x.htm). People with ADD tend to be more creative and have shorter attention spans and, generally, tend not to go into disciplines like engineering. Perhaps incorporating video games into engineering curriculum can change that.

There have been a number of attempts at creating a more “active” learning environment in the engineering education community. From what I’ve seen, most of these attempts resulted in very sad power-point presentations with some movies thrown in, and few complicated and bland computer “games” that much more resembled designing a machine part in CAD software, than playing a Play Station game.

Why do I think that science and engineering students will be able to learn better and retain more information by playing video games than by reading a book?

Since humans began to evolve as a species, they have been conducting experiments in order to learn about the world around them. As babies, we constantly taste things, touch things, and throw things so we can understand how they work. As teenagers, we push the limits of our parents’ sanity and try things we shouldn’t try because that is how we learn.

Somewhere in the establishment of our higher education system, the natural tendency of humans to learn by experimentation was stifled. Students are expected to passively sit through hundreds of lecture hours, read about experiments that have been done in the past, or at best, conduct very controlled and predictable experiments in one a few lab courses, stripped of any creativity. A carefully designed video game environment will bring into the classrooms that creative experimentation that allows us to learn so well as humans, without the massive costs associated with laboratory expenses.

Video games thus make it possible to “learn by doing” without making huge investments into elaborate laboratory space and equipment. (That is not to say that all physical experimentation is absolute. Only that a lot more learning should be done via experimentation and video games can allow doing so affordably).

If you think about it, learning via gaming would change the educational focus from passive learning (as in traditional teaching methods) to actively engaging students in the learning process by providing highly simulative, entertaining, and focused learning environment.

Rather than looking at Power Point slides or watching a movie about past experiments, students should be able to create their own experiments, while learning the underlying scientific principles.

I believe that incorporating video games into science and engineering educational curriculum will increase the quality of our scientists and engineers by greatly increasing the retention of technical information learned in school, attracting non-traditional engineering students, and by expanding the student’s minds by stimulating their creative and innovative thinking.

What you think? Do you agree or disagree? Where to you think we should go from here? Would love to hear your thoughts! Please comment below.

Hi MVP Readers,

As promised, here is my “Where has Masha been” video. Please forgive the video editing quality - I am still trying to get the hang of it. Turns out that using Windows Movie Maker is a complete nightmare. If anyone has a suggestion for a better video editing software for Windows XP,  please let me know in the comments!

In this video: My summer 2010 update, TurboExpo, Costa Rica, new book and new ACS courses!

- Description of my 2 hour TurboExpo presentation is here (page 34) http://www.asmeconferences.org/te10/pdfs/TE10_FinalProgram.pdf

-Upcoming ACS courses:

–Essentials of Chemical Kinetics

http://www.proed.acs.org/courses/course_overview.cfm?course_code=KNWEB

–Computer Simulation of  Reactive Flows

http://www.proed.acs.org/courses/course_overview.cfm?course_code=RFWEB

–Chemistry for non-chemists

http://www.proed.acs.org/courses/course_overview.cfm?course_code=CHWEB

All the Best!

Masha

Hello Dear Readers!!

Looong time no blog posts! I apologize for my absence this summer. There has been a LOT of traveling. I promise an update on all that’s been happening with me and with MVP Modeling Solutions in the past 5 months, shortly.

Meanwhile I wanted to give a head’s-up to all of you attending the American Chemical Society Boston meeting this week. I am organizing one of the sessions at the meeting called: Computer Modeling: The Wave of the Future. We have a great variety of wonderful speakers for this session – intention of all of the talks is to provide more information on computer simulation and modeling in sciences and engineering.

Below is the schedule for the talks (to be presented on Thursday, August 26^th). We tried to make sure that there is something for everyone at this session – from modeling of bio-materials to information on patenting of computer simulations (which I am personally very interested in hearing).

I hope to see some of you in Boston this week (please say “hi” if you’re there).

Keep an eye out for a “Where has Masha been?” blog post (or maybe even a Vlog (video blog – term learned from my teenage son:)).

Cheers!

______________________________________________________-

Computer Modeling: The Wave of the Future and its Benefits for Small Business Owners

Location: Boston Convention & Exhibition Center

Room: Room 212

Cosponsored by: CINF, COMP, PROF

Duration: 8:30 am - 12:55 pm

8:30 am Introductory Remarks

8:35 am Best practices in scientific computer modeling Dr. Masha V Petrova

9:05 am New wave of computational tools for the leads selection in biomedical industry

Dr. Aurora D. Costache PhD, Prof. Doyle D. Knight PhD, Prof. Joachim Kohn

9:35 am Computational modeling of soft condensed matter and biomaterials

Dr. Jayeeta Ghosh

10:05 am First-principles computational approach for the characterization and design of novel organic electronic materials

Roel S Sanchez-Carrera PhD, Prof. Alan Aspuru-Guzik

10:35 am Intermission

10:50 am Recent advances in structure-based drug design

Woody Sherman

11:20 am Computer simulation of ligand binding to a flexible protein target

Dr Philip W Payne

11:50 am FAST Predictions of protein stability and flexibility

Prof. Dennis R. Livesay, Dr. Hui Wang, Prof. Donald J. Jacobs

12:20 pm Patentability of computer simulations and models

Noah Malgeri

Dear Readers,

Very sorry for such a long absence from this blog! I recently came back from an ACS (American Chemical Society) speaking tour, which was a very interesting and enriching experience for me. Currently, I am working on a couple of potential book proposals as well. There might be an upcoming opportunity for you to contribute to a book on a subject related to chemical kinetics and computer modeling. So stay tuned!

This was the first time I have gone on an ACS speaking tour and it was a very interesting experience. I would recommend it to anyone looking to grow as a professional in a technical field.

This is how the volunteer speaker service works: ACS puts together a list of experts in various chemical fields who would like to volunteer to be traveling speakers. Various ACS local sections then go through the list and choose which speakers they would like to invite to a specific local meeting.

If you are one of the speakers who has selected by a particular group of local sections (a circuit), you get to travel around that area for a week and present a new talk each day in a new location. I did not realize that the more options for talk topics you provide, the more likely are the chances of various locations picking different topics . So I ended up giving 6 talks in 5 days on 4 different topics. My circuit covered a good portion of Wisconsin, which turns out to be a relatively large state, so I had 3- 5 hours of driving in between different locations.

In case you’re interested, here is what my schedule looked like:

Monday, April 19, 2010

Location: La Crosse, WI

Venue: University of Wisconsin - La Crosse

Topic: Economic Crisis and the Need for Computer Modeling

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Location: Milwaukee, WI

Venue: ACS Annual meeting

Topic: 10 Ways to Increase Your Value

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Location: Appleton, WI

Venue: Lawrence University

Topic: A Wife, a Mother, and a PHD

Thursday, April 22, 2010

Location: Stevens Point, WI

Venue: ACS meeting + university campus talk

Topic : A Wife, a Mother, and a PHD and Economic Crisis and the Need for Computer Modeling

Friday, April 23, 2010

Location: Houghton, MI

Topic: Importance of Perception - Why You Should Care About What Others Think

During each presentation I had a completely different audience. One day it was a large group of students. Another day it was a small mix of professors and graduate researchers. Yet another day I presented to a mixture of chemists from industry and academia.

One of my favorite audiences was in Eau Clair, where I presented the “Computer Modeling” talk to a group of retired industry chemists. Considering that half of my audience has never used a computer for so much as e-mail, it was an interesting presentation. But I have to say the retired chemists were one of the most inquisitive and interested audiences I had on this trip!

Going into the talk I had a bit of a panicky moment. Some of these people have been doing experiments in the lab for longer than two of my lifetimes. How in the world was I going to explain to them that we are on the path of moving more and more of these experiments into this teeny box called a “computer”?!

Amazingly, my audience stayed curious and interested through the whole talk. Afterwards, some of the listeners shared a few stories about how back in the day, you had to use stacks of punch cards to program just a few lines of code. Maybe because the have seen such evolution of science and technology over their lifetimes, the idea of more and more experiments being done virtually, inside of a computer did not seem surprising to them.

Now if only I can have such an open-minded audience at TurboExpo next month!

Hi MVP Readers,

This is a review/tutorial/intro video of KINTECH software tools:  Chemical Workbench - for modeling reactive flow processes, KinteckDB- database for storing species and reaction and chemical mechanism info, and KHIMERA - tool for calculating reaction rate parameters.

The video is in 4 parts.  It gives a good overview of what you might expect from KINTECH tools.  You can request a free trial version of the software by visiting: http://www.kintechlab.com, creating a login name and clicking on the “downloads” link.

DISCLAIMER: I am using the free trial version of this software. This is my personal, unbiased opinion. I am not paid, or in anyway compensated by to do a review of this software.

(I realize you can’t fast forward on these videos, sorry about that! I am using screentoaster.com, guess the fast forward capability is not available)

Part1: Chemical Workbench Overview

(Sorry about the lame background screen during the first 5 mins -  my webcam is lagging behind the screen video just in this first video! Bear with me - the other 3 videos uploaded just fine.)

Part2: Running an example

Part3: KintechDB (database tool) Overview (LOOOOOOOOOOOVE this tool!)

Part4: KHIMERA (Cool tool for creating your own rxn rate constants)

If you can’t view the video, try this link:

http://www.screentoaster.com/watch/stVEpQQkRIR19WSFxZWlxRXlZd

Please help make this blog better! In comments, let me know

1)What other software reviews you would like to see here?

2) How can I make these reviews better for you?

Cheers!
Masha

Today’s interview is with Professor Paul Ronney from University of Souther California.

Here are the questions that Paul, very kindly, agreed to discuss with me during this interview. (If you are having trouble listening to the interview, simply  install a Quicktime plug-in for your web browser).

I am looking for Speakers for the ACS Fall 2010 National Meeting and Exposition in Boston. And it just might be YOU!

DISCLAIMER: this is not a give-away or a lottery. I am offering you an opportunity to work hard to do something uncomfortable (public speaking); to take time out of your day job (or search for a job) in order to prepare a presentation, travel to a conference and to present in front of a bunch of strangers.  If you’re thinking  that that is a pretty crappy “opportunity”, read on

Dear MVP Readers,

I am organizing a session at 2010 ACS Fall meeting, titled: Computer Modeling - The Wave of the Future. The session is co-sponsored by the Division of Computers in Chemistry, Division of Chemical Information, and Division for Small Chemical Business.

Why you should care:

I am selecting speakers for this session and it is a wonderful chance  for many of you to:

-Present yourself as an expert in computer modeling, chemistry, biochemistry, engineering and/or small business development area

-Network with industry professionals in chemical, biochemical and engineering industry

-Grow professionally

-Boost your resume

-Learn what’s new in the chemistry field

-Develop you communication skills

Why might you want to do any of these things? (If you do not know the answer already, you REALLY need the info in my Toolkit!) All of the above can be instrumental in helping you get a job, grow your business, or help you become a more valued industry professional.

What you need to qualify:

- Ability to travel to Boston and attend ACS meeting on August 22-26 (you’ll be responsible for your own travel expenses, but if you are NOT an ACS member, you will get free admission to the conference on the day of presentation).

-Be working (or have worked) in area of computer modeling that has something to do with chemistry, biochemistry, biology or chemical or bio engineering

- Be able to say something about how modeling and simulation can help small businesses (I’d be happy to help you with this part, just contact me at masha@mvpmodelingsolutions.com, if you’re stuck on this one)

I am interested! What to do next:

If you have any questions for me about presenting at ACS, please submit them in comments below. I promise to answer all of them! If you are seriously thinking of presenting, please contact me at masha@mvpmodelingsolutions.com.

Finally, please pass the link to this post to any of your colleagues or friends who are looking to grow as a technical professional!

Best of luck!

UPDATE