Wednesday, June 27, 2007
Freeware that's worth it
I just added Zotero to my Firefox browser. It's a reference management software that seems to be pretty snazzy. Although it is not portable, it's got so many nice features that I can't help but be excited. I'll have to check out how easy it is to export references to Word!
Thursday, June 21, 2007
Is it hypocrisy or hilarity?
In vetoing the latest embryonic stem cell bill the president stated that "destroying human life in the hopes of saving human life is not ethical."
What a peculiar thing for him to say, considering that saving lives was precisely the justification he gave for starting the last two wars (the killing part goes without saying). It's the basis for both the mushroom cloud and the liberate Iraq lines of reasoning. In fact, killing others in order to save lives is the 2 second definition of the Just War. Anyone remember the days when we were totting that one out? And it's the only "patriotic" explanation EVER given to explain the nuclear bombing of Japan in WWII ("threatening the Soviets" may be a plausible explanation, but it doesn't win you friends at a 4th of July parade).
Maybe it would all be okay if it were Iraqi cells . . .
What a peculiar thing for him to say, considering that saving lives was precisely the justification he gave for starting the last two wars (the killing part goes without saying). It's the basis for both the mushroom cloud and the liberate Iraq lines of reasoning. In fact, killing others in order to save lives is the 2 second definition of the Just War. Anyone remember the days when we were totting that one out? And it's the only "patriotic" explanation EVER given to explain the nuclear bombing of Japan in WWII ("threatening the Soviets" may be a plausible explanation, but it doesn't win you friends at a 4th of July parade).
Maybe it would all be okay if it were Iraqi cells . . .
Reading Lolita
I just finished Reading Lolita in Tehran for my book club. In one of those happy coincidences, there is a flurry of articles about Iran in the press these days, so I've been able to compare RLIT's view of the 1980s against the contemporary situation. It reinforces one of the themes of the book: whether one should remain steadfast in one's beliefs, or bend a little in order to survive. At several points in the book Nafisi regards the small concessions of the regime as being inconsequential changes compared to overall repression of women. Yet, I keep wondering, isn't lasting change always a bit on the incremental side? In our democracy, which Nafisi prefers to Iranian autocracy, our major law-giving institution, Congress, was purposely designed to be slow to change. And women's rights in America have been two centuries of fits and starts, with a lot of slower social change alongside the leaps of legislation. Perhaps there is still so much of the revolutionary in her, she can't abide any remnant of the revolutionary in the other side. And what happens when two sides lock themselves into a battle of all or nothing?
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Card Catalog Rant
It's happened twice this week, and frankly I'm sick of it. Someone will start complaining about how much easier research was back in the days of the card catalog . . . and they haven't the slightest idea just how IGNORANT that makes them sound. Not in the sense that they don't know how to use the new, electronic databases, but they don't have a CLUE what academic research has looked like for the last century. Sure, in the past you could go to the library and thumb through a drawer of cards, pick out a title or two, and fetch the books off the shelf. And that was a perfectly reasonable way to do research--if you were in the 11th grade!
Real scholarly research has been dependent on peer-reviewed journal articles for decades and decades. In the old paper world that meant spending hours flipping through paper indexes--a different paper index for every single year. Interdisciplinary subjects could push you to several different indexes, one for each year.
It's not fun, and not that easy. I know. I've done it. You thumb through five years of indexes and then suddenly realize that maybe another subject heading might have been better. Do you go back? Do you pretend you did? Just picking the subjects is an adventure in futility. There's no natural language to help you out, no guide to the inner thoughts of those indexers except for that volume of alphabetized words. You have to search an index to search the index! Not to mention the fact that once you find your subjects, and see those beautiful entries listed beneath, you have to scan through all of them. You can't just tell the index to winnow the entries to precisely the ones you want. Why miss out on all that fun?
It makes me wonder why anyone would wish for those tactile, paper days. I still love to read a real, physical book, but reading is a sensual pleasure. Finding journal articles is a task, like scrubbing the toilet. It needs to be done, and can at times be satisfying upon completion, but no reasonable person wishes to throw away a faster, simpler way to do it. It astounds me each day that so much is now at my fingertips, that I can change my mind about a search term or focus, and have a new list of results in just a second or two, that the whole thing can be repeated at the drop of a hat, and that I can repeat it all at the drop of a hat.
I wish all these people would suck it up, spend the 20 minutes learning the technology, and stop pining for a Masters degree that is as research intensive as freshman English.
Real scholarly research has been dependent on peer-reviewed journal articles for decades and decades. In the old paper world that meant spending hours flipping through paper indexes--a different paper index for every single year. Interdisciplinary subjects could push you to several different indexes, one for each year.
It's not fun, and not that easy. I know. I've done it. You thumb through five years of indexes and then suddenly realize that maybe another subject heading might have been better. Do you go back? Do you pretend you did? Just picking the subjects is an adventure in futility. There's no natural language to help you out, no guide to the inner thoughts of those indexers except for that volume of alphabetized words. You have to search an index to search the index! Not to mention the fact that once you find your subjects, and see those beautiful entries listed beneath, you have to scan through all of them. You can't just tell the index to winnow the entries to precisely the ones you want. Why miss out on all that fun?
It makes me wonder why anyone would wish for those tactile, paper days. I still love to read a real, physical book, but reading is a sensual pleasure. Finding journal articles is a task, like scrubbing the toilet. It needs to be done, and can at times be satisfying upon completion, but no reasonable person wishes to throw away a faster, simpler way to do it. It astounds me each day that so much is now at my fingertips, that I can change my mind about a search term or focus, and have a new list of results in just a second or two, that the whole thing can be repeated at the drop of a hat, and that I can repeat it all at the drop of a hat.
I wish all these people would suck it up, spend the 20 minutes learning the technology, and stop pining for a Masters degree that is as research intensive as freshman English.
Monday, June 18, 2007
Saturday, June 16, 2007
False Alarm and What We See
I've just started reading False Alarm, which is about the culture of fear that we seem intent on living in. It's generally a good, if somewhat thin, treatment of the subject.
But it contains one of my great pet-peeves about supposedly observant authors: he assumes something that is not actually true. This typically happens when normally academic or scholarly people (it's a doctor in this case) imagine something about the quotidian world around them that is easily debunked by casual observation (regular people do this as well, but they have less claim to authority). In this case he is remaking on the irrational fear of lyme disease in a patient when he mentions that the patient lives in Los Angeles, which he says has no deer. But, of course, there are deer in Los Angeles. I have seen several in my few trips to the city. Has he never been to L.A.? Has he just not bothered to look at the hills along the freeway? Does he just assume that there aren't deer in major metropolitan areas?
I found the most glaring example of this in an article in Smithsonian several years back. A professor who took his students around Boston specifically to encourage them to look at the world around them mentioned that he knew that all ironwork in the United States is now coming from India based on his observations of manhole covers. Yet, if he had bothered to come to the Midwest and peruse our streets he would have immediately been disabused of that notion. I have seen civic applications of ironwork from Neenah Foundries (located in Wisconsin) in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Ohio. Many examples are in older neighborhoods, but I have seen some in relatively new suburbs as well. While this doesn't prove that the foundry is in business today, it must have been when the streets were laid.
I guess it's all a matter of where you look.
But it contains one of my great pet-peeves about supposedly observant authors: he assumes something that is not actually true. This typically happens when normally academic or scholarly people (it's a doctor in this case) imagine something about the quotidian world around them that is easily debunked by casual observation (regular people do this as well, but they have less claim to authority). In this case he is remaking on the irrational fear of lyme disease in a patient when he mentions that the patient lives in Los Angeles, which he says has no deer. But, of course, there are deer in Los Angeles. I have seen several in my few trips to the city. Has he never been to L.A.? Has he just not bothered to look at the hills along the freeway? Does he just assume that there aren't deer in major metropolitan areas?
I found the most glaring example of this in an article in Smithsonian several years back. A professor who took his students around Boston specifically to encourage them to look at the world around them mentioned that he knew that all ironwork in the United States is now coming from India based on his observations of manhole covers. Yet, if he had bothered to come to the Midwest and peruse our streets he would have immediately been disabused of that notion. I have seen civic applications of ironwork from Neenah Foundries (located in Wisconsin) in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Ohio. Many examples are in older neighborhoods, but I have seen some in relatively new suburbs as well. While this doesn't prove that the foundry is in business today, it must have been when the streets were laid.
I guess it's all a matter of where you look.
Updating LibraryThing
I'm trying to add the books I've read to library thing, and also add some meaningful tags about the themes I find interesting. It's been so long since I've read some of them that it's hard to remember which book had what . . . it's funny how a single author's works can start to merge in my mind. It's also hard to go back and add tags to the books I've already entered, not to mention reducing the number of words in my tags while retaining meaning.
Friday, June 15, 2007
New widgets
I've finally learned how to IM, and now I have added some cool widgets to my blog. Check out the meebo window on my blog, and also the sitemeter. I'm so excited - maybe someone will visit!
I've also learned how to put search engine shortcuts in Firefox. I can now search Google Scholar or Google without having to open up the window. Very cool.
I've also learned how to put search engine shortcuts in Firefox. I can now search Google Scholar or Google without having to open up the window. Very cool.
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