Dear (Provider of Academic Article Databases),

Article databases are really one of the best things that has happened to academic research in the last, ten or fifteen years. It makes accessing research painless and efficient, and the more available research is, the more valuable it is. I don’t think anyone will disagree with this assertion.

Here’s how it works today, as best I can understand it. (Note this is a fairly psychology centric perspective.):

There are two classes of journals: those published by the APA and it’s partners and those published by for-profit academic presses like Springer and Klewer. The former are the big masthead journals and there are about 30 of them (Developmental Psychology, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, etc,) I suspect this is true of many disciplines: universities and professional organizations publish a number of journals (In Women’s Studies, Signs and differences, are published by Chicago and Hopkins respectively). Anyway, and then there are smaller for profit journals which tend to be less prestigious but can cater to specific niches and sub-fields. These journals are the ones that Google Scholar picks up on and they don’t tend to be archived in the same way that the NFP journals are.

Ok, background, stated. Generally what happens is that the professional organizations or universities create databases (APA and Psych Artcles; AAA, AnthroSource; Hopkins and Project Muse, for instance.) that index all the abstracts and sometimes full text are then licensee the database to a provider (CSA and Ebsco are two examples of this). Some of these databases contain FP journals, many do not. In humanities disciplines, all this content ends up in jstor after a few years anyway.

So it’s incredibly fragmented and the databases, are, to my mind, sort of poorly organized. The metadata is sort of weak, and the searches are straight boolean, so it doesn’t learn, it doesn’t see connections between what you search for and what you find is what you find, it’s very rigid, and very much not the way, we do things on the internet these days.

Now I don’t need fancy ajax crap, lord knows, and frankly, I think some sort of desktop interface for the database, might be really quite effective and be really helpful for people who are actually doing research.

So I guess my suggestions to academic database providers--because this is a letter after all ;)--are as follows:

1. Allow some sort of adaptive meta-data, potentially with some sort of user generated tagging system 2. Integrate/mashup content from multiple 3. Create some sort of more adaptive search capacity that has learning/adaptive algorithms. 4. Have better offline content. 5. Have better BibTeX support (because if you’re asking…). 6. Perhaps a little ajax so that it it can do some predictive caching and the web pages work a little faster. 7. Allow me to paraphrase a lolcat for this: Y it so ugggglry, can has purrrty intarfaces now pls? Because why not.

In any case, It’d be nice, but I’m not holding my breath.

Onward and Upward!

Though you probably won’t notice it I upgraded the software that runs this blog last night, as part of my perverse geeky mission of this past sunday, and I think I’ve finally ironed out all of the kinks. The only evidence of this is the fact that I’ve removed categories from the sidebar, largely because they don’t exist anymore. Wordpress’ latest coup is that they have baked in support for tagging, which will let categories become a more useful tool. (Though I know why this is the case, I’ll spare you because the background on database queries isn’t something I think myself completely capable of.) All in all, its pretty minor, but I’m pleased.

In other news, I think that I’ve also gotten out of a little funk that I’ve been in for the past month or so, in terms of writing and other things. I probably just needed a little closure on the novella, to be done with the GRE, and some time to decompress, but doing the streamlining work that I did regarding how I organize and manage my projects on my computer probably helped jump-start things.

I finished a scene yesterday in the novel, I’m at the 4k word park, and I’ve been actively working on the draft of this project for a hair over a month. So I guess my guideline of a thousand words per week holds true, even if I know for damn sure that I didn’t write a thousand words each of the last four weeks. My only other real observation at this point is that though I’ve outlined this whole thing out, and I know what the pacing is supposed to be like and all that, I’m being very… impressionistic about the beginning. It’ll will work out, particularly since I’ve started writing on it again. My current goal that I’ll probably surpass is to have 5,000 words done by the time november (and NaNoWriMo) is over. That’s by my count 10% of the NaNo goal, and that’s fine by me: there will be nano’ thoughts forthcoming in the next few days, I promise.

Anyway…

Onward and Upward!

1. Podcast.
2. Encrypt your Roommates hard drive.
3. Read the Newspaper.
4. Update your Facebook Profile.
5. Play World of Warcraft.

One of the side benefits of finishing the novella edit effort this weekend was that it meant that I could now restart my computer without fear. (There was a file open that I didn’t want to loose my place in, a minor thing, but none the less).

Now to the windows users out there, this might seem a bit odd, by I probably hadn’t rebooted Zoe--that’s the computer for those of you playing along at home--in at least a month, and maybe more like two or three. And I’m not even using the newest and bestest version of the operating system! But anyway…

I can tell that a new computer isn’t, in the grand scheme of things, that far off. Zoe is great, except that there’s a bunch of stuff that I don’t do because Zoe doesn’t have the power to handle. Like pod-casting and any sort of video editing; and frankly image editing is something that I’m trying to do as little of as possible, because it’s a bit of a strain. Although I have R.app, the open source SAS/statstics package, and even an old version of SPSS, I really can’t fathom a situation where I would want to run such a program for more than a moment or two. And though I would open Excel if I needed it, I’m trying not to need it.

Anyway, so a new computer is something that I’m thinking about. Because of my leading comment, we can imagine that I’m probably not likely to stop using a mac, and frankly I really love these laptops. But after 2 and a half years with a 15 inch pro-level computer, I’m not seeing the great benefit to going with the bigger machine this time around. As near as I can tell the Pro-line has: nicer screens (not just bigger ones, but nicer ones), a card slot which I’ve never used on my present computer (though, with EV-DO becoming cheaper/more available, it’s something to consider), a slightly faster processor (but not considerably), firewrire 800 (something I do actually use), better graphics (but again, sometimes I watch DVDs and youtube, I don’t need power graphics). In contrast the consumer line has: a better (but less familiar) keyboard, a cooler closure, it’s smaller and lighter, it’s a thousand dollars cheeper. The only thing I’d miss is the firewire 800, which isn’t really so big of a loss.

This leads me to the other computer related thought that I’ve had recently: There are a bunch of tasks that I do with my computer which, are by normal standards, insane. I run a bit torrent client, my subversion repository is locally hosted (I have a backup repo, never fear), I organize and manage a small herd of hard drives, also doing production work (image/video/sound), even web design work on a laptop, is kind of crazy. Buying a Mac desktop is really out of the question, but I’ve figured that a Ubuntu/Linux could probably do a pretty good job with this. I priced one of the Dell Ubuntu boxes for about 500, which seems really quite good by my standards. Not counting a monitor, but this is the kind of box that probably wouldn’t get a lot of direct use: I’d probably just ssh/telnet in and mount the drives over the network. If it were stuck doing all the things that the laptop couldn’t/shouldn’t deal with, I think I’d be a happier camper. And, you’re (I’m) still under the price of the pro-level desktop.

Anyway, that’s enough for me.

Onward and Upword!

I guess I didn’t have time to mention this the other day, but I finished reading Babel-17 by Samuel Delany. It was great, and I quite liked the way that it wrapped up.

I posted earlier about how I had the perpetual feeling of not getting the story, but I think it totally worked out, and I will totally accept that I was pretty scatter brained while I was reading the book, and it took me too long, so it’s probably my fault. I enjoyed it none the less, and while I’m not going to start reading it for a second time (or frankly, reading “Empire Star,” the accompanying novella) quite yet, I will re-read this.

From here, I think I’m going to spend some time with the short story collection that I bought a while back. I’m usually not one for short stories, but I think it’s important that I at least try. That sounds like the beginning of a doomed project, and perhaps it is. However:

1. I’m not going to avoid starting to read a novel because I want to read this. 2. I don’t plan to read it sequentially. 3. I’m actually quite interested in most of these authors and their work, so I hope that curiosity is worth something.

Onward and Upward!

1. Clapotis
2. Jaywalker Socks
3. Twinkle Sweaters
4. Fingerless Gloves
5. Novelty Yarn

(In Fairness, my complaint about fingerless gloves is not that I don’t think they’re useful, just that I cannot imagine having the tolerance to make gloves and then not finish the fingers. In this case, it’s about the process not the product.)

tycho: hey `andy <http://tychoish.com/anduril>`_: sup tycho: not much andy: fun stuff andy: bought a 320Gb external seagate and trying to get all my mp3s transferred but its not cooperating tycho: :( tycho: I am downloading xcode tools so I can get mac ports to work so that I can upgrade ruby so that I can blog from textmate tycho: also, I was about an inch away from upgrading the tychoish wordpress, but cyberducky crashed, so I stopped

Pause.

tycho: … silence… andy: lol

And now for a comedic interlude.

I love the drawing nonsensical graphs on index card meme. It needs to come back. I’m going to go look for for more.

You heard it here first, with apologies to Merlin Mann.

1. Seven of Nine
2. Captain Jack Harkness
3. Billy Keikeya
4. Gabrielle, Warrior Princess II
5. Ensign Ro Laren

Today is the first day that I’ve had in a long time without the GRE hanging over my head. Sure I have a lot to do, and that is daunting, but it’s not oppressive in the same way. I’m not claiming that this calm I feel is particularly real but things have lined up in the right way to give me a few days off…

Last night I finished reading the Samuel Delany book that I’ve been working on for, far too long. I have a pile of other things to read now, and I think I’m going to try and dive in to a short story collection and see how long it takes me to get fed up with that.

Handspun News:

In other news I finished spinning my fiber stash. Which may sound impressive, but I basically worked through everything that I had that I was going to spin two summers ago (I must confess to abandoning a pound of soy silk to R.’s much more impressive fiber stash.) And then I bought a mere 6 ounces of fiber (tencel merino none the less), which constituted my stash. Actually as I think about it, there’s a sweater out of my handspun that I’m making very slowly, that has some fiber in the project bag for when I run out of yarn again: so maybe I’m not quite completely out of handspun.

Anyway, this morning I finished plying the last of this 6 ounces of tencel/merino that constituted the bulk of my fiber stash for most of the last year. I think the total yardage was in the end 415 yards. I have no clue what I’d do with it, yet.

This leaves me planning for my next spinning adventure. I’m thinking of buying some white roving and spinning it up, and then finding someone (you know who you are! don’t worry, if this is in fact a real plan, it’s a long way off. Many moons.) to dye it in exchange for some percentage.

This last spinning accomplishment raises the precepts that I could conceivably--in the not too distant future--spin yarn for my own knitting, and not just a pair of socks, or a hat, or even the occasional bulky sweater that takes years and that I’m constantly avoiding, but the kind of two-color sweaters that are my normal fare. The questions is, do I really want to do that?

You all can feel free to answer that, but I don’t really feel like I’m making sweaters that just need to be made out of handspun, and I think it might even be easier to relax if I were knitting with yarn that I knew I could always just buy another skein of at work/a LYS/webs if it ever came to that. And given that, I’m thinking that selling or giving away my handspun is really the way to go. We’ll see.

Oh, and there is a movement afoot to take picture of things for ravelry this afternoon, so there will be pictures. Also, additional blogging, I’m thinking.