Finding your scientific story by writing backwards

To succeed,a scientist must write well.Substantial guidance exists on writing papers that follow the classic Introduction,Methods,Results,and Discussion(IMRaD)structure.Here,we fill a critical gap in this pedagogical canon.We offer guidance on developing a good scientific story.This valuable—yet often poorly achieved—skill can increase the impact of a study and its likelihood of acceptance.A scientific story goes beyond presenting information.It is a cohesive narrative that engages the reader by presenting and solving a problem,with a beginning,middle,and end.To create this narrative structure,we urge writers to consider starting at the end of their study,starting with writing their main conclusions,which provide the basis of the Discussion,and then work backwards:Results→Methods→refine the Discussion→Introduction→Abstract→Title.In this brief and informal editorial,we offer guidance to a wide audience,ranging from upper-level undergraduates(who have just conducted their first research project)to senior scientists(who may benefit from re-thinking their approach to writing).To do so,we provide specific instruction,examples,and a guide to the literature on how to“write backwards”,linking scientific storytelling to the IMRaD structure.

Laser direct writing pattern structures on AgInSbTe phase change thin film

Different pattern structures are obtained on the AglnSbTe （AIST） phase change film as induced by laser beam. Atomic force microscopy （AFM） was used to observe and analyze the different pattern structures. The AFM photos clearly show the gradually changing process of pattern structures induced by different threshold effects, such as crystallization threshold, microbump threshold, melting threshold, and ablation threshold. The analysis indicates that the AIST material is very effective in the fabrication of pattern structures and can offer relevant guidance for application of the material in the future.

Practical Secret Sharing Scheme Realizing Generalized Adversary Structure

Most existing secret sharing schemes are constructed to realize generalaccess structure, which is defined in terms of authorized groups of participants, and is unable tobe applied directly to the design of intrusion tolerant system, which often concerns corruptiblegroups of participants instead of authorized ones. Instead, the generalized adversary structure,which specifies the corruptible subsets of participants, can be determined directly by exploit ofthe system setting and the attributes of all participants. In this paper an efficient secret sharingscheme realizing generalized adversary structure is proposed, and it is proved that the schemesatisfies both properties of the secret sharing scheme, i.e., the reconstruction property and theperfect property. The main features of this scheme are that it performs modular additions andsubtractions only, and each share appears in multiple share sets and is thus replicated. The formeris an advantage in terms of computational complexity, and the latter is an advantage when recoveryof some corrupted participants is necessary. So our scheme can achieve lower computation cost andhigher availability. Some reduction on the scheme is also done finally, based on an equivalencerelation defined over adversary structure. Analysis shows that reduced scheme still preserves theproperties of the original one.