- Currently Listening to:
- Barenaked Ladies — It’s All Been Done
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.
- Subtraction.com: My iPad Magazine Stand
My opinion about iPad-based magazines is that they run counter to how people use tablets today and, unless something changes, will remain at odds with the way people will use tablets as the medium matures. They’re bloated, user-unfriendly and map to a tired pattern of mass media brands trying vainly to establish beachheads on new platforms without really understanding the platforms at all.
The fact of the matter is that the mode of reading that a magazine represents is a mode that people are decreasingly interested in, that is making less and less sense as we forge further into this century, and that makes almost no sense on a tablet. As usual, these publishers require users to dive into environments that only negligibly acknowledge the world outside of their brand, if at all — a problem that’s abetted and exacerbated by the ources of distraction around you — these apps demand that you confine yourself to a remote, suburban cul-de-sac.
- Dan Shapiro » How to read a patent in 60 seconds
- Your Brain on Computers - Plugged-In Parents - NYTimes.com
Much of the concern about cellphones and instant messaging and Twitter has been focused on how children who incessantly use the technology are affected by it. But parents’ use of such technology — and its effect on their offspring — is now becoming an equal source of concern to some child-development researchers.
Sherry Turkle, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Initiative on Technology and Self, has been studying how parental use of technology affects children and young adults. After five years and 300 interviews, she has found that feelings of hurt, jealousy and competition are widespread.
- Introducing Read It Later for iPad « Read It Later Blog
- FXPAL Blog » Blog Archive » To Link and Link Not
Patricia Wright’s work on cognitive prostheses suggests that hiding information behind links made it less likely that people would use that information compared to showing it directly. Her argument (presented as a keynote address at Hypertext ‘91) is that the cognitive overhead of link following makes people less likely to follow links, not that the presence of link anchors is distracting. Of course the implication is that the further from their context you move the anchors, the less likely that people will follow them. This is the point that Daniel Tunkelang makes in his response to Nick’s post.
Another solution, mentioned by JD Thomas in a comment on The Noisy Channel, is to use Javascript to make it possible to defer link-following to a later time without losing track of promising links. This is related to an idea we had for XLibris, which allowed people to mark link anchors with free-form digital ink, thereby making it easier to revisit those promising links later.
- XLibris
Reading frequently involves not just looking at words on a page, but also underlining, highlighting and commenting, either on the text or in a separate notebook. This combination of reading with critical thinking and learning is called active reading (Adler and van Doren, 1972). To explore the premise that computation can enhance active reading we have built the XLibris "active reading machine." XLibris uses a commercial high-resolution pen tablet display along with a paper-like user interface to support the key affordances of paper for active reading: the reader can hold a scanned image of a page in his lap and mark on it with digital ink. To go beyond paper, XLibris monitors the free-form ink annotations made while reading, and uses these to organize and to search for information. Readers can review, sort and filter clippings of their annotated text in a "Reader's Notebook." XLibris also searches for material related to the annotated text, and displays links to similar documents unob
- How do you read papers? - Gobbledygook Blog | Nature Publishing Group
In 2010 I want to use a tool that scans Pubmed or other databases for papers of interest based on the papers stored in my reference manager. The tool would give me a weekly report that can also be printed out for reading and note taking.
- Eye-Tracking Tablets and the Promise of Text 2.0 | Epicenter | Wired.com
Their technology is capable of monitoring your eyes in order to define words if you stare at them puzzled, eliminating non-essential information when you’re skimming, helping you pick up exactly where you left off, swapping images based on what you’re reading, surfacing relevant reference materials and more, as reported by h+ magazine.
- Instapaper For The iPad May Be The First Killer App. And It Will Be Universal.
To be iPad-ready, Arment reworked the latest version of Instapaper (2.2) and now has made a “universal” version of the app. While clearly the iPhone and iPad versions will be different, apparently developers will be able to bundle iPhone/iPod touch versions with iPad versions in one package (the SDK page hints at this). This is interesting as it allows developers to charge one fee for the two different versions. I wonder if more developers will offer similar deals. If Arment was so unhappy with the iPad scaling, clearly others will be as well, and will also be anxious to have an iPad-native version of their app. But telling paying customers they have to pay twice is a bit of a stretch, so this universal approach seems smart. And it conjures up memories of the universal apps that existed as Apple transitioned from its old PowerPC chips to the newer Intel ones.
- Life Below 600px | I Am Paddy
The ‘above the fold’ concept came from Newspapers, the aim being to put the most eye catching story or image on the folded over, most visible part of the paper, with an ULTIMATE goal of encouraging people to then buy the paper to read the rest of it.
Web design adopted this idea, basing their integration of the concept upon the most common browser sizes.
However, the digital fold concept evolved into ‘squash as much content as you can above a certain number of pixels’.
This is wrong, wrong, wrong.
My (intimidating!) PhD mindmap
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