1. I care about my work and do not want to see it go to waste.
Preserve your work log
Over time, it becomes increasingly difficult to reliably reconstruct experiments from paper notebooks and data files, even for the author of the records. If the author is unavailable (e.g., left the laboratory), then it is nearly impossible to be sure of what really happened. This leads to a substantial loss of work and experience, e.g.: a doubt about an experiment can lead to redoing it if its record is not sufficiently clear; details critical for consistent replication of results are often lost; incomplete projects or lines of research are often fully abandoned once a person leaves a lab; valuable information is inaccessible for the larger scientific community. Moreover, such mistreatment of important information can have a substantial impact on researchers’ work motivation.
iPad allows you to store your entire work log in an electronic form and in one place, using an open file format that is the industry standard for long-term information archiving. Moreover, iPad helps you to organize this information in such a way that makes it easier to manage and understand, even for others. Finally, iPad allows you to share parts of your worklog with your colleagues or the global scientific community.
Quotes
"Many scientists can barely understand their own scribblings from last week, let alone those of others five years from now — as anyone who has had to decipher the hieroglyphics of a co-worker can testify. It gets to the point, they tell us, where it’s easier to run an experiment again than to try to find the data." Butler D. A new leaf. Nature Vol 436, 2005.
"Many interviewed researchers suspect that their disciplines would benefit if negative results were to get a public airing." Knight J. Null and void. Nature Vol 422, 2003.
"The lack of reporting of null or negative findings is pernicious because it skews the results of so-called "meta-analyses", which compile data from previous studies." The sounds of silence. The Economist, 9 November 2004.
"The future of data-intensive biology depends on ensuring open data standards and freely exchangeable file formats." Wiley H.S., Michaels G.S. Should software hold data hostage? Nature Biotechnology 22, 1037-1038, 2004.