Breakthrough or Too Good To Be True: Several Smoke Tests

When sharing my Four Steps to Review an Energy Forecasting Paper, I spent about a third of the blog post elaborating what "contribution" means. This post is triggered by several review comments to my recent TSG paper variable selection methods for probabilistic load forecasting. Here I would like to elaborate what "contribution" means from a different angle.

Reading for Writing

Writing skills are badly needed in the professional world, no matter in the industry or academia. I have seen many people (mostly international students, including myself) struggling with their writing skills. I don't believe there is any shortcut but constant and regular writing practice to improve writing skills. In addition, I think reading is a good compliment to writing practice. Here I'm putting together a list of recommended books.

The first two are on general writing (not necessarily scientific writing):

• On Writing Well by William Zinsser
• The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E. B. White

Then here are two books for scientific writing:

• Scientific Writing and Communication: Papers, Proposals, and Presentations by  Angelika Hofmann
• Writing Science: How to Write Papers That Get Cited and Proposals That Get Funded by Joshua Schimel 

I also got a list of classic novels from my colleague Jason Wilson (co-author of my TSG2014 paper):

• Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
• Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
• Ulysses by James Joyce
• Hamlet by Shakespeare 
• 1984 by George Orwell
• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
• Animal Farm by George Orwell
• The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
• A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
• The Old Man and The Sea by Ernest Hemingway
• Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White
• War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
• Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton

Here I'm trying not to recommend a list of scientific papers in energy forecasting. I would rather suggest that we focus on the analytical and technical aspects of those papers.

Happy reading!

Multitasking: Three Steps, Three Tools and Three Tips

A very important skill PhD students should pick up in graduate school is "multitasking". I don't believe that human beings can naturally do two brain-consuming tasks at the same time. Reading newspaper during breakfast is not counted as multitasking. In this post, I'm using multitasking to refer to doing multiple tasks over a planning horizon, such as a day, a week, or even a month or longer.

IIF Student Forecasting Awards for Energy Analytics

Today is Labor Day. Thanks to the International Institute of Forecasters (IIF), I received my first Labor Day gift, an email notification of the IIF student forecasting award for five years.

While the interested readers can get the details from the IIF website, here are a few highlights:

• The awards are offered by the IIF to the top-performing students in undergraduate and graduate level forecasting courses. 
• No more than 20 awards are available across all universities. 
• No more than one subject can be eligible for an IIF award at the same university. 
• Each star student will receive $100, a Certificate of Achievement from the IIF, and one year’s free membership of the Institute, with all its attendant benefits. 

Five Things to Do at the End of a Semester

In the corporate world, there are formal review processes to help keep the business on track. In the academic environment, the only formal review for a student is probably the transcript with the grades, which I think is insufficient for the growth of the student. Many students may be wondering about what to do to best conclude a semester other than getting ready for the break. Below is a list of five things I would recommend my students to do at the end of a semester:

Literature Review in Three Steps

Literature review is a must-have for most scholarly publications, from journal and conference articles to theses and dissertations. Having reviewed and handled many papers for many prestigious journals, I find a very high correlation between the level of understanding of the literature and quality of the manuscripts. The ones with outstanding literature review are often getting accepted at the end, and vice versa. The ultimate goal of literature review is to convince the reviewers and editors that you have advanced the state-of-the-art by identifying a new problem, developing a new solution, or both.

The figure below illustrates the four types of situations when a researcher starts doing literature review, where I use a hammer to represent the core technologies, techniques and methodologies, and a nail to represent a research problem.

Four Quadrants of Literature Review

Five Targets for First Semester PhD Students

The new semester is about to start in a week. Many new PhD students may not have a good plan for the first semester. Below I'm putting together five targets for my students:

1. Figure out if this is the right PhD program

Before joining the program in person, there may be many important questions that a student does not have solid answers:

• How does the mentorship look like?
• Where did the recent graduates go?
• What is the drop-out rate and why?
• How approachable are the professors?
• How flexible is the curriculum?
• How quality are the courses?
• How reliable is the financial support?

Getting a PhD in 20 Months

There must be some lucky factors for anyone to get a PhD in 20 months. I'm no exception. As I acknowledged in my dissertation, my committee, boss, colleagues, customers, friends and family provided me super strong support during those 20 months.

Despite the luck I had, there are things I did that can be reproduced by other PhD students to shorten their years in a graduate program. I'd like to share an ingredient of my secret sauce with my students and the readers of this blog.