A seasoned engineer’s reflections on presentations, progress, and professional frustrations.

We have reached the end of a busy conference season. I have been at events in Japan, Indiana, Maryland and South Africa and it has been really encouraging and refreshing to see the wealth of young talent that is working on cutting-edge technology in our industry. This gives great hope for the future, and I congratulate all of the young researchers who were brave enough to present their work to the world this summer.

However, at the risk of sounding like a grumpy old man, there have been a few recurring themes across the presentations that raise my blood pressure a bit. It’s not my intention to offend anyone or to disrespect their work, but here are my pet peeves this year. I hope that it will encourage authors next year to improve their offerings. In particular, I hope that their supervisors, who really ought to know better and be guiding them better, will take note.

First in the bombsight is the practice of citing dozens of references that bear very little relation to the topic of the paper. If I am refereeing a paper, I will try to look up all the references and when I find that they only bear a passing acquaintance with the topic, they get the thumbs down. It is particularly bad to cite a reference because someone else used it without even bothering to look it up yourself. If you only have eight or so pages for an account of your work, don’t waste more than half a page on listings of other people’s output.

Another great waste of space is photographs of laboratory test rigs. There is some merit to their inclusion because they indicate that this was not just a desktop study or literature review, but to be honest, if you tell me you built a rig, I will believe you and the pictures will convey so much more in your PowerPoint at the delivery of the paper. In any event, all test rigs look the same when the image is shrunk down to fit on a page, so you are not conveying anything useful.

Equations are perhaps a more controversial pick. Stephen Hawking was told by his publisher that every equation he put into “A Brief History of Time” would halve the sales numbers so he only used one, E = mc2. It may be hard to explain what you have done without equations, but unless you are presenting something novel, they generally do not help the reader understand your work. Matrix notation is even worse. It takes up a lot of space that could have been used to describe your work and doesn’t help the reader at all.

Exergy has been high in the rankings of my pet peeves for a long time now. I think of it as a very Scottish concept: “It doesn’t matter how well you did, it could have been so much better.” Usually when I see the word in a paper, I come to the conclusion that the author is trying to make something that is fundamentally simple sound more complex than it actually is. Just don’t.

Finally, this year’s top pick of the irritants: Neural networks. When someone says “I created an artificial neural network” and shows a diagram of circles connected by lines, my inner monologue is saying, “you used a clever piece of software and you don’t really know what it’s doing.” I’d rather hear details of the clever things that you did yourself.

As I said at the top, I am not trying to offend, but if the cap fits, wear it.