Friday 21 March 2014

LinkedIn, groups and profile views

One benefit of LinkedIn is that it is a useful tool for connecting with people after conferences or meetings. It's easier than filing or organising the growing pile of business cards that build up on your desk. It's also good for getting noticed in the world of research but how best to do that?

Another benefit is that there are lots of groups of experts online that you can ask questions of and be pretty sure of an answer. I had a few queries on different multispectral and hyperspectral camera types for UAVs and I thought this might be a good place to start. Added to that, I read an article recently on ways to increase your number of LinkedIn views

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And one of the top 5 tips is, 'start a discussion'. So I decided to kill two birds with the one stone and started a discussion in late January on LinkedIn on UAV cameras. The results were interesting...


Ok - they aren't astronomical figures. I'm not rivalling One Direction's follower numbers on Twitter and I'm about to return to anonymity, but the improvement is undeniable. I made contact with a number of researchers working in UAVs around the world - useful contacts for future queries or joint applications and I even got a promise of free data. But more importantly I got some valuable first hand reviews of different UAV camera types. Once you filter out the guys trying to sell you their latest hardware you can spot the people who have practical experience of hardware and they are willing to share that info, warts and all.

This led to a tough decision - do you openly criticise hardware on LinkedIn? Are you opening yourself up to a barrage of complaints from the manufacturers online representatives, or even worse, are you making yourself liable for any legal proceedings by harming their sales? In my discussion introduction I erred on the side of caution and mentioned that we had had problems with, 'hardware' in the past - and asked what hardware would people recommend? Unfortunately, by far the most common reply was, 'what hardware have you tried?'. So that left me three options - ignore the replies and never log in to LinkedIn again, reply no-holds-barred on the group discussion thread, risking what I have already mentioned, or chicken out and reply in a PM.

I PM'd anyone who replied asking me to name-and-shame the hardware we had tested. I'm a post-doc, not a professor!

Thursday 20 March 2014

Inaugural Post

I should probably explain the name of the blog.

A few months ago I read a blogpost about, 'How academia resembles a drug gang'

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It was this authors take on Freakonomics. There is a chapter in that book called, “Why drug dealers still live with their moms”. The chapter is based based on the findings that in street gangs income is skewed in favour of the kingpins, while the gang members on the corners selling the drugs earn very little (even less than their peers in legitimate low-skilled employment) and have all the risk.



The author of the blogpost had drawn a parallel between people starting out in academia (like me - I'm a post doc) and those low level drug dealers. One thing we both have in common, he claims is that,

''the prospect of future wealth, rather than current income and working conditions, is the main driver for people to stay in the business: low-level drug sellers forgo current income for (uncertain) future wealth'.

It was an interesting viewpoint and that one I could see quite a bit of truth in. But more importantly, when I was scratching my head trying to think of a suitable blog name, it was one that seemed better than some others I came up with. The url of this blog is the initials for the chapter in Freakonomics. Although it's probably not the best title for a blog if I am hoping for random internet traffic, Blogger is telling me I have already racked up 25 hits in the 5 minutes since I set the page up - all from America. Post Docs must really have to work those corners to get that paper in the US.

Edit: Changed the name August 2016 to "Contour Lines", Con referring to Conor - Contour Lines referring to mapping and Lines also referring writing. But you know what they say - if you have to explain it then it ain't funny.

About Me

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My name is Conor. I am a Lecturer at the Department of Geography at Maynooth University. These few lines will (hopefully) chart my progress through academia and the world of research.