The following document is the approximate transcript for a directed discussion on the topic of work and family balance. The audience contained mostly professionals in chemistry (academia and industry) but also science educators and magazine editors. The discussion was held at the Pacifichem Conference, 2015, in Honolulu, Hawai’i, USA. The discussion was preceded by a 7 minute slideshow aimed at describing the genesis of the discussion and the aims of the discussion. The transcript represents important information from approximately 10 participants on trends relating to family demographics amongst scientists and how institutions are interacting with the changing demograpics of their employees. The names of paricipants and institutions have been removed. The names of countries and states are revealed in this transcript. It is our hope that this transcipt motivates communicating more anecdotal evidence in this area and gives rise to intense discussion concerning the topic(s).

The following is a short, possibly humorous essay providing two concrete ideas to increase reproducibility in science research. The two ideas are united under the notion of a “culture of reproducibility”. The first idea is hiring different kinds of professionals in the research ecosystem whose job is to ensure reproducibility and impact. The second idea is to require reproducibility risk-management plans in funding applications. Together, these actions are an investment into the infrastructure of research for increased impact and accountability, along with a stronger conception of reproducibility. It will also solve the world energy crisis for under half a million USD by June. No citation software was harmed in the production of this essay.

A document by Matthew MacLennan. Click on the document to view its contents.

Simplified Molecular-Input Line-Entry System or SMILES is a notation scheme for representing chemical structures in a single line of text, encoding atom connectivity and stereochemistry, as well as charge and ring structures. There are a large number of possible SMILES notations for any one chemical structure, which has led to the development of the canonical SMILES notation. In contrast, I describe here a SMILES approach or “perspective” which encodes functional groups into valid SMILES strings. It is shown that this functional SMILES perspective further simplifies the human interpretation of SMILES strings, can be easily formed from reading IUPAC nomenclature, and has the ability to encode limited chemical reaction histories.