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Complex sensor-based features are turning up in cars, though it seems there’s a way to go yet.
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Anti-patterns are classes of commonly-reinvented bad solutions to problems.
Archive for 2007
Yearly Archive
Quizlet is a tremendous little web application for helping you to expand your vocabulary or remember facts like dates and names. It looks particularly useful for learning words in a new language.
The demo video will get you up to speed on the main functionality. All very pretty and impressive, especially considering the site is the work of one guy.
Being as I am ebulliently tendentious about language (I keep a list of “words to use in a sentence before you die”), I’m very happy to have found this. Exultant, you might say.
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I’m looking forward to doing a few user studies.
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JavaScript is being taken seriously again as a truly capable language, but as seen here there is years of detritus left over from the days when it was mostly hacked together.
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Eventually I will need to rewrite all of my own tutorials for these reasons.
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Nice experiment in plotting social networks, and an illustration of the difference your choice of tool makes.
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“It is often easier to not do something dumb than it is to do something smart.”
A literature review is a standard part of any postgraduate’s endeavours, and usually makes up the majority of your first year or two. A good review sets up the landscape that you’re going to work within, saving you from duplicating effort and allowing you to identify the key players in your field. You don’t necessarily have to reel off a big document summarising your reading, but if you do it’s a fine head start on the first chunk of your thesis.
I had started my lit review last year, but it’s easy to fall into the trap of merely printing and filing papers without having read them. Then, in December at our second annual SRG-fest Joe gave an inspiring talk about structuring a literature review intelligently. Among his suggestions were to choose a handful of key conferences in your area and read every paper published in their proceedings for the last few years. For me, these conferences are places like InfoVis, ICAC, Pervasive and CHI.
Secondly he suggested building up a “mindmap” of the research areas that you’re actively engaging in. This has proven to be a very worthy excercise.
My (intimidating!) PhD mindmap
When drawn up like this my research interests seem both nicely structured but also worryingly broad. And I left out the stuff I’ll likely need to understand but currently have no interest in, like semantics, embedded systems and parallelism. My reading has been branching out a bit recently too; since I’ve started tracking my bookmarks on del.icio.us I discovered that I’m actually more interested in things like sociology and psychology than I thought.
If you imagine all the possible research that could be done in our field as a pie chart, the area I’m going to explore will end up being a thin sliver in that chart. Aaron always said that his job as my supervisor was to keep me anchored in that segment and not wander too far outside of it. Looks like he’s got his work cut out for him.
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The next generation disc format anti-piracy battle looks like it’s going to be a hopeless endeavour.
links for 2007-01-17
Posted by Ross at 12:44 AM under Uncategorized
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An old review, but tremendously well-argued and very constructive.
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Neat personalised visualisation of your network traffic.
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There’s a week’s reading in this list alone.
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UCD Library’s tips on performing a literature review, which I’ve decided I need to start again.
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An interesting viewpoint: “A thesis is like a peacock, its purpose is to strut around showing off how many books you’ve read.”
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