Organizing Papers...

I really hate organizing papers.  I love Zotero, a program that manages references.  It syncs across multiple devices and interfaces very nicely with LaTeX.  I have used it for a long time, so I have a lot of references saved in it.

Unfortunately, I've never mastered organizing references beyond putting them in Zotero.  I made "collections", but not in a way that has been helpful or useful.  For instance, I made a subfolder in the collection (folder) that corresponds to my main research topic.  I called this folder "recent", because at one point those were new papers on the topic... a few years ago.

But beyond the references is the issue of the papers themselves.  In graduate school, I typically printed the most important papers.  This was especially useful for making notes by hand, my preferred method.  But, how do I organize those printed papers?  How do I remember if I printed it already?  And do I really want to take those big binders with me when I travel...

When I graduated I ran into a new problem: I could no longer access journals.  I didn't save many papers, because I could always go back to the online journal and access them there.  But I had that access through Stanford!  While Agnes Scott has access to some journals, I cannot directly access the majority of papers that I need for my research.  The library is able to get the papers for me, but there is a delay and a cost associated with it.

Now that I am at a major research institution, I have been able to access most papers that I need.  I've downloaded all of them, so that I could access them later.  But how do I organize them on my computer so that I can ever find them again?  The papers I already had typically ended up in many different places and I could rarely find what I needed.

The obvious solution is to create some sort of folder structure and then associate each file with the Zotero reference item.  This way I can use Zotero to search and organize, but then I still have a copy of the paper when I lose journal access.  Perfect!... except that at the hospital, my laptop cannot access the internet.  This means that I've been using other computers there.

While I've read (in many cases, skimmed) well-over 100 papers, I haven't saved any of them to Zotero.  Oops!  I have 5 days at the hospital left, so I really need to make good use of the journal access right now.  But it turns out, I hate this step.

I'm going through all of the PDFs that I have saved and am pulling up the journal website on my computer to save the reference to Zotero and then associate the file.  I have to do this at home, where I have internet.  But I'm also trying to look for the important references that I already have in Zotero that I don't have a file for and then getting the file.  But this has to happen at the hospital.  So while these two tasks are related, I can't do them in the same place.

I've sunk many hours of work into this already, and I am maybe not half-way done.  There are entire topics that I've forgone creating Zotero references for since the papers aren't associated with my current projects (but are important for a future project).  I really dislike this task and wish it wasn't needed.  Viva open access publishing!

Life as New Faculty: Technology!

I'm trying to sort out how to use laboratory experiments in my Modern Physics class. I plan on doing one lab as a "demo" on the first day - measuring the speed of light with a modulated laser. I think it is a cool experiment, and one that is finicky enough (and a little risky with the laser alignment) to do as a group. I had read the lab guide, which I found in a folder of past course material. "Cool" - I thought - "but what laser do I use?" Then, wandering around the Modern Physics Lab, I found a shelf... labeled "Speed of Light", with all of the equipment and the instruction manual. I got it working in less than an hour, a good fraction of which was spent looking for appropriate laser safety glasses. Because I am a big wimp.

Awesome, now I have a demo for the first day of class. Then the question was: how to do the data analysis as a group. I figure I will slap together a python program (basically, fit to a line) that will make it easy to enter in the data and quickly get the result. But I want to be able to show the class the data - I suppose it is a small enough class, we can just crowd around my laptop... but my classroom does have an AV system.

And what an AV system it is! I've met some nice AV systems before. There is a touch-screen interface, so you push one button and the screen rolls down and the projector warms up and then you tell it to use the laptop output (which Ubuntu can do nicely these days!) and maybe you can even control the room lights. But this goes beyond that. Way beyond. In addition to the "screen" and "projector" options... it can control the curtains. There are about 4 windows in the room, with "black out" roller blinds and a screening roller blind. And the AV system can control the blinds.

Clearly, I live in the future and work in a very fancy building.

Putting it out there

I first had a webpage around the time google was founded. Since then I have designed and maintained a variety of web pages - for student groups, EXO, surveys, petitions, and most recently the Undergraduate Women in Physics Conference. Unfortunately my technical ability to do things with HTML is not matched by any ability to design things that look nice.

For some time I have thought about making some sort of personal/professional website. I had imagined something that would be an HTML equivalent of my resume, and decided I could use it as an opportunity to learn the magical new world of HTML 5. I didn't start it for some time, but then the press coverage of my Cerenkov work made me realise how little control I had on the information available about me.

So I created a website for myself. It doesn't look as amazing as I would like, and doesn't have all of the functionality I would like. But it has my papers, talks, and activities. It is what I want the world to see of me.

But there is one problem, of course. It doesn't seem to show up in google searches! I have tried to link to it on my profiles (linked in, facebook) in a few places. But yet, it just doesn't show up in the Google results. I have google analytics running on it, which shows me what search terms ARE getting people there. For reasons I don't understand, the search phrases that have brought people to my website are "adc mapping osirix plugin", "stanford html template sandstone", and "stanford software".

Now I must find ways to actually make my page exist in the great Google database. Or, re-craft my career to be about adc mapping osirix plugins.

The Computer Culture War

Our household will be increasing its quantity of computer gadgets. Some number of laptops/tablets/smartphones will be purchased in the next few months due to expiring contract, expiring backlights, and a general sense of patriotic consumerism (lol). While the majority of the responsibility of this lies with Tom, I am part of conversations and the phone decisions. The upcoming purchase is quite different in tone to my recent (few months ago) purchase of a netbook. I hadn't appreciated the capability-to-cost ratio in modern netbooks until a vist to Fry's, after which I did some online research and returned to Fry's the next day to purchase one. I knew I would be working in Ubuntu ~100% of the time, especially after installing more memory than Windows would support.

Now Tom is going to buy an apple product or two. Other products have been considered, but some sort of iThingy looks like the new addition to our digital household. Through this process I have decided that digital gadget monopolies - I mean, brands - are a sort of geek culture war. There is often little room for compromise and we may view those who hold different opinions as being responsible for the current destruction of society. Here are my sides in this battle: