Thesis writing and, in general, academic writing is a skill. Not everyone has that skill, but certainly most can get it. To develop an understanding of the behaviours associated with successful writing, we organized a workshop with the help of AVOK – Centre for Academic Writing and Communication. Under the supervision of Djuddah A. J. Leijen, we started this four-hour workshop with Q&A followed by sessions about time management, in particular how to avoid procrastination, and, of course, grammar.
Some useful notes about LaTeX
First, when advanced spell checking is needed, the LaTeX could be converted to plain-text using: detex filename > filename.txt (note the omission of .tex extension).
Most LaTeX distributions come with detex program which simply strips LaTeX commands.
Second, when working with vector figures it might be a good idea to convert all texts to paths. Remember that eps-format does not support transparency.
Third, in order to count words in the final pdf-file use pdftotext filename.pdf - | tr -d '.' | wc -w. This will return the number of words in our file.
Finally, to generate a pdf-file that is acceptable by manuscriptcentral add \pdfminorversion 4 to your LaTeX-source.
Otherwise, if you use pdflatex to produce your pdf-file, manuscriptcentral will give a notice “failed to convert to the appropriate pdf”. Read this blog-post for details.
ResearchGate note
A notification from ResearchGate: Your publications reached 1,000 reads researchgate.net/profile/Vladislav_Ivanistsev Congratulations!
STSM of Dr. Vladislav Ivaništšev
Our work group member Dr. Vladislav Ivaništšev went to University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain for a short term scientific mission. Thank you for the brilliant work there.
Abstract
In this STSM visit were performed molecular dynamic simulations of mixtures of ionic liquids (ILs) with water, mono- and divalent salts of electrochemical interest both in the bulk and near neutral and charged graphene walls. The focus was on the general trends that determine ionic solvation and solute–electrode interactions in ILs and we show the main mechanisms of ionic solvation in these dense ionic media related to the layered structure of the IL at the electrolyte–electrode interface that imposes potential energy barriers for the ions moving the direction normal to the electrode surface. Specifically, we studied the solvation of mono- and divalent ions in ILs and we also obtained results for structure and single-particle dynamics of mixtures of divalent salts with a 1-butyl-3-methylimidazolium tetrafluoroborate. The effect of salt concentration and of the size and valence of the salt cations on the ionic solvation and on the barriers’ parameters was analyzed. For example, we found that the stronger solvation of Li+ in the ionic liquid leads to a formation of significantly higher interfacial free energy barriers for Li+ to come to the electrode than for K+. Moreover, some preliminary insights were obtained for the interfacial behavior of mixtures of ILs with water, studying the effect of the latter on the structure of the interface under normal and nano-confined conditions.
Self-interaction error in DFT-based modeling of ionic liquids
Self-interaction error appears to be important for certain type of DFT and for some ionic liquids 10.1039/C5CP05922D
Wall Calendars for the Year 2016
Landscape wall calendars are useful for tracking the work progress. It is like a live Gantt charge, only better. Also one can buy a calendar online, unfortunately, I could not buy such in a regular bookshop UK or Estonia. So I created my own, very simple design, and printed in on a plotter for a modest fee. The original design is kept on in a github repository: github.com/vladislavivanistsev/walendar
Hello world!
We are a group of chemists connected by the University of Tartu. Tartu is located in Estonia. Estonia is a small country in Baltic region of Northern Europe.
The University of Tartu was founded in 1632 by the Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus. It was initially called Academia Dorpatensis.
