During the July “Postdoctoral Writing Suite” at UMBC, there was discussion about developing Individual Development Plans, or IDPs, as a tool for assessing skills, charting goals, and facilitating communication with your postdoctoral mentor. The IDP, developed by Dr. Cynthia Fuhrmann (formally of UCSF, joining UMass Medical School August 2013), has been used by both graduate students and postdocs, but increasingly, Offices of Postdoctoral Affairs are adopting this tool as means of adhering to regulations for postdoctoral mentoring that have been established by NSF, NIH, and other agencies. The National Postdoctoral Association is a strong advocate for the IDP, and PROMISE will be discussing it more during the August 16, 2013 “Postdoctoral Writing Suite” at the PROMISE Summer Success Institute.

Here are some of the resources that were shared during the July 12, 2013 “Postdoctoral Writing Suite” at UMBC:

Develop your goals so that they match your

ideal performance for an annual review: 

http://www.faseb.org/portals/0/pdfs/opa/SampleAnnualReview.pdf

During the July “Postdoctoral Writing Suite” at UMBC, there was discussion about developing Individual Development Plans, or IDPs, as a tool for assessing skills, charting goals, and facilitating communication with your postdoctoral mentor. The IDP, developed by Dr. Cynthia Fuhrmann (formally of UCSF, joining UMass Medical School August 2013), has been used by both graduate students and postdocs, but increasingly, Offices of Postdoctoral Affairs are adopting this tool as means of adhering to regulations for postdoctoral mentoring that have been established by NSF, NIH, and other agencies. The National Postdoctoral Association is a strong advocate for the IDP, and PROMISE will be discussing it more during the August 16, 2013 “Postdoctoral Writing Suite” at the PROMISE Summer Success Institute.

Here are some of the resources that were shared during the July 12, 2013 “Postdoctoral Writing Suite” at UMBC:

Develop your goals so that they match your

ideal performance for an annual review: 

http://www.faseb.org/portals/0/pdfs/opa/SampleAnnualReview.pdf

Queueing Ajax requests in JavaScript Web Apps can be important, especially if the interface doesn’t always represent database state.

In both Backbone and Spine, the default behavior is to update the user-interface before sending requests to the server, i.e. an asynchronous user-interface. However, this can cause race conditions. For example:

1. User creates a record, say a page
2. Interface is updated and an POST request is sent
3. User immediately deletes page
4. DELETE request is sent to the server
5. The server responds to the DELETE request before the POST request to create the page has finished.
6. Server 404s because it can’t find the referenced page by ID

The solution to this race condition is to queue Ajax requests, particularly destructive ones (POST, PUT, DELETE). I’ve written a very simple jQuery 1.9 plugin to do just this. All you need to do is pass a queue flag when creating Ajax requests.

jQuery.ajax({type: 'POST', queue: true});
    

You can also set queue to a named queue string, effectively name-spacing specific queues.

We still have a problem if a particular request fails, as the interface will now be out of sync with the database. I usually recommend treating this as an exceptional circumstance, and prompt the user to reload the page. Incidentally, this is exactly how Facebook and Twitter solve the problem.

This article is in the Monocle series.

Another chance to catch the most interesting, and important, articles from the previous week on MIT Technology Review.

In the US, recent revelations by the whistleblower Edward Snowden that the NSA was (and is) involved in widespread eavesdropping of phone calls and Internet consumption has alarmed many US citizens. The US Government has often responded that it is not monitoring US citizens without warrants… just nasty foreign folks.

But what if you are a friendly foreign citizen living abroad? And their Government? You must be fair game for the NSA… 

This news is getting America’s allies very cross indeed.

While Americans are paying less attention to the NSA eavesdropping flap, the story is still hot news elsewhere.

There are some business implications.

The fallout might effect how the world uses, or doesn’t use cloud computing, as many of these servers are based in the USA.

It is no news that our friends are feeling frustrated and letting the Obama administration hear about it… assuming the administration hadn’t overheard it before.

In the US, recent revelations by the whistleblower Edward Snowden that the NSA was (and is) involved in widespread eavesdropping of phone calls and Internet consumption has alarmed many US citizens. The US Government has often responded that it is not monitoring US citizens without warrants… just nasty foreign folks.

But what if you are a friendly foreign citizen living abroad? And their Government? You must be fair game for the NSA… 

This news is getting America’s allies very cross indeed.

While Americans are paying less attention to the NSA eavesdropping flap, the story is still hot news elsewhere.

There are some business implications.

The fallout might effect how the world uses, or doesn’t use cloud computing, as many of these servers are based in the USA.

It is no news that our friends are feeling frustrated and letting the Obama administration hear about it… assuming the administration hadn’t overheard it before.