To be a blogger is to be the antithesis of being the chairman of committees.
via stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com
Chris Dillow makes several interesting points about blogging and bloggers, highly recommended:
People who don’t blog and so don't have a pixel trail of every fool thought are not smarter than those of us who have. Instead, they are too dull not to have an interesting idea every day, and too poker-up-the-arse wimpish to express themselves
Just something I've noticed recently. In The Economist there's a been a series of adverts for the Financial Times. According to one commentator:
The creatives aim to highlight the discrepencies between the information required, and the information recieved, when conducting searches for financial-related terms. 'Unlike millions of other websites, we know exactly what you are looking for,' the FT claims.
... one execution shows a search for 'EMU' resulting in an image of the emu bird, presumably instead of information on the The European Economic and Monetary Union.
Here's the EMU example, together with a photo I took on First Capital Connect. I'm not sure what my point is, but I found it interesting.
i see the filter as being a forum to
1. declare (broadly) what you want to do, formulate tangential ideas etc
3. refer to what you've done and apply it to new things
i.e. NOT
2. do it
that's the way to play the game
keep yer head done, write write write
If you're not viewing this on an RSS feed you'll have noticed that today I've started playing around with the layout of The Filter^. We've been going for almost 5 years now and I think it's time to reinvent ourselves a little. This process will involve all six editors (this remains a group blog), and will take a few months. Ultimately I want something that reflects the transition made from grad students to fully fledged professionals. If you have any thoughts or comments, please let me know. Thanks for reading The Filter^.
I've recently been trying out software called "Papers". On paper, it sounds good:
The problem is, it doesn't work. When you import PDFs it automatically renames and sorts the files. In theory this is exactly what's required. In practice, it cannot distinguish between different versions of the same name, and only seems to allow automatic editing. For example, I imported about 20 of Peter Boettke's papers, and now have about 20 different authors - "Peter Boettke", "PJ Boettke", "Peter J Boettke", "P Boettke", etc. This is compound by co-authored papers since the programe fails to distinguish between authors and initials. In order to correct this, you use JStor or some other scholarly search function and match the paper. But the search is time consuming and often fails to find the article. So in conclusion this promises to solve a real problem, but falls well short. Back to manual folders and filenames...
Update: an evidenctly when you drag "papers" back onto your desktop it doesn't copy the actual PDF but a text clipping of the filename. Hence I've now lost all my papers of authors beginning with A, B, and C. Sorry George, Peter and Ronald.
Not sure if it's just me, but I've become pretty bored of blogging recently. There was a time when most content was new, exciting, and informative. Perhaps because I have so many subscriptions it's almost a chore to flick through each feed, and I'm familiar enough with each outlet I don't tend to be surprised. Especially since the credit crunch levels of pointless cross-referencing seem to be at an all time high.
That said, here are a couple of online resources that I've recently added to Google Reader and genuinely enjoy:
A few nice things i've discovered since catching up on the blogosphere (apologies for no cites):
p.s. I like the new Facebook and dislike the new EvertonFC.com. It seems i'm the only one with this combination of preference. Strange.
Imagine you're doing a presentation on international trade. You want to do a spot quiz to see if the class know the UK's main trading partners. You ask the question "From which country do most of the UK's imports come from?" and have a brief discussion. You then want to reveal the "solution", which is a pie chart showing the results from here.
You also want to provide lecture materials to students, and to do so in advance. But it defeats the purpose of asking discussion questions if the student's have the "solution" in their notes.
I do not want to have to manage two separate powerpoint presentations (one for handouts and one for projecting) because this would double the class material I have to update etc. In an ideal world I would add the pie chart to the slides as some form of animation, and then convert the presentation to a PDF such that animations are not shown. Does powerpoint have this function? Please help!
In May I received a request from the British Library to archive The Filter^, as part of the web preservation programme. According to the email:
We select sites to represent aspects of UK documentary heritage and as a result, they will remain available to researchers in the future
Having offered vetoes to the other Filter^ contributors - Steve, Andrew, Thomas, James and Matthew - I have accepted the request, and licensed the site. Given the existing technology to archive blogs I don't see this as a big decision. But it's only fair to let you, the readers, know.
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