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Zotero on steroids
I’m a big Zotero fan. Anyone who has access to the Firefox web browser and needs or wants to keep track of bibliographies, websites, and other material used for research should use it instead of the bloated, overly expensive, difficult to use commercial citation managers such as Reference Manager, RefWorks, ProCite, and the like. Zotero does everything you need and more, and does it better than the competition. Did I mention it’s free?!
Today in the Chronicle of Higher Education there is an article (it’s freely available, you don’t need a subscription to access it) about a proposal made by the creators of Zotero to put it on steroids. Put simply, they intend to make Zotero the tool of choice for researchers, scientists, professors, and others to load their research works into a shared database hosted by the Internet Archive. The article notes the general failure (oh wait, I mean, lack of success) that libraries have had with doing this on an institution-by-institution basis using tools such as DSpace. There is a scathing review about so-called institutional repositories and their use by libraries by one of the people I’d deem to be a foremost expert on utilizing DSpace, Dorothea Salo. It is well worth reading.
Anyway, I think this whole idea — actually, it’s more than that because the Mellon Foundation just dished out hundreds of thousands of dollars to make it a reality — has many beneficial implications and I hope Dan Cohen and his team at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University have all the success they hope for with it. (Thanks to Wally Grotophorst for the mention.)
Falling from a tree
Last night was a bit more exciting than we wanted it to be. I was hanging curtain toppers in our family room while Brinley and Cohen played. Suddenly Brinley started crying and when I turned around to see what had happened, she was walking toward me, screaming, and as she opened her mouth, blood started pouring out. That was scary. I grabbed some paper towel, scooped her up, and rushed upstairs to the bathroom to clean her up and try to see what was wrong. Basically, she fell onto the corner of an ottoman and bit all the way through to the outside just above her chin. The outside looked like a regular screwdriver had pierced it but the inside was a much bigger and messier cut. Off to the emergency room we went. (Why does this kind of thing always have to happen to her? One of my life’s mysteries.)
She needed several stitches on the inside of her mouth and the outside puncture wound was glued shut. She handled the whole thing extremely well, impressing the nurse and doctor very much. For a kid who can be kind of a hypochondriac, she was a trooper.
As a father I now understand where my mother’s gray hairs came from. There were plenty of similar incidents in my family when I was growing up. One of them that stands out the most in my memory is when my brother, Dan, and I decided we would build a tree house down by the river near where we lived. We picked the biggest, tallest tree. Dan stayed on the ground gathering dead branches (!) to use for the floor while I climbed up the tree as high as I could go and made the floor with the branches Dan had gathered, lifting them up with a rope and pulley. After I had done this for a while I thought it might be time to test out the sturdiness of the floor I had made. I remember crawling out onto the floor and hearing a loud crack, then just blankness as I fell. My brother estimated afterward that I fell 30 ft. He said I hit the ground on my back and immediately bounced up as if I was a rubber ball or something. Fortunately I landed on a bit of dead wood branches and that probably saved me from broken bones or worse. I bounced up because among other things, I had had the wind knocked out of me and I couldn’t breathe. I remember being in a lot of pain.
Somehow we both got back to our house, about a mile away. I crawled up into my top bunk bed and just lay there groaning occasionally. I don’t remember if someone called my mother or if it was late afternoon and time for her to leave work anyway. But when she came home I promptly forgot my pain, or rather, it was overridden by fear from my mother’s wrath. Yes, she was extremely angry with me for what I had done. She made me take a bath — I could have been dying but I at least had to be clean before seeing a doctor! — and I remember her sitting in the bathroom telling me to scrub and get myself all clean. Then she took me to the nearest emergency room, about 20 miles away. I was extremely fortunate because I had no broken bones and no internal bleeding or anything like that. I think I had a bruised spleen and/or kidneys or something like that, but basically I was one big, walking bruise from head to foot, and I remember not being able to move much without pain for at least a few days.
Looking back on the incident, I realize just how lucky I was. I also realize that the source of my mother’s wrath was probably fear; fear that I was seriously hurt or fear of what might have been. Anyway, I was surprised to get an email from her this a.m. pointing to a blog post by a mother whose little girl fell a similar distance from a tree in her backyard and who was seriously injured. My mother said it reminded her of that long ago time that I have just described.
Sunday morning at home
Michele isn’t feeling well this a.m. so we won’t be going to church. Keegan stayed overnight at a friend’s house to work on a big school project, so things around here are a bit more quiet than usual. Today is my beautiful wife’s birthday! so that makes it an extra special day.
I’ve been watching a lot of football lately. Keegan’s team plays every Friday night and sometimes on Saturday morning as well. Unfortunately his team lost for the first time this past Friday, to Vernon Hills. On Saturday his team played Vernon Hills again, and lost again, but it was great to watch the game because Keegan got to play for awhile and he got in at least one good tackle. (The position he plays is defensive tackle.) Yesterday afternoon while Michele and Brinley went to get groceries, I watched quite a bit of college football while Tristan and Cohen built a fort and played with knight costumes. Those who know me well would understand how unusual it is for me to be watching football! But you know what? I’m kinda getting into it. I was thrilled that Illinois beat Penn State, but disappointed that Michigan State didn’t beat Wisconsin.
In other news, a good friend of mine lost her job Friday due at least in part to blogging at work. She was apparently accused of writing negative things about her job and her co-workers, neither of which is true. It really makes me wonder about the whole blogging at work thing. Personally I do not have a problem with this at all, viewing it as something akin to using the telephone sometimes for a personal call, or writing a personal email while at work. Of course, there is always the possibility for abuse, but then, there always has been. By that I mean, the introduction of Internet access, blogs, or any other computer-related technology provided to staff did not usher in a new era of possibility for abuse or performance issues. Think of the telephone. Persons can abuse their telephone privileges as much or more than their Internet privileges, and the telephone predates computers and Internet access by a long shot. What I’m trying to say is that there isn’t really anything new here, first of all; and second of all, abuse of work equipment — whether it is the telephone, the copier, or the company’s Internet access — is a performance issue. If staff members aren’t getting work done in a reasonable amount of time, then their manager needs to look at how they are spending their time, including time spent talking on the telephone for personal reasons, or time spent browsing on the Internet, or time spent posting to a blog or commenting on other blogs. And it is important to state that how they are spending their time in these ways is only part of the overall picture the manager needs to understand in order to figure out why staff members are not productive. Put another way (and setting aside potential for really negative things, things that other staff might deem offensive), if my staff are getting their work done in a timely fashion or even ahead of schedule, I have no problem with them spending some work time doing personal stuff. Folks, this is just common sense management practice.
It really galls me that so many corporations think they can truly control every aspect of what their employees do during a work day, particularly when it comes to computer and Internet use. It galls me because as I’ve already tried to point out, this is a local, individual management issue. But it galls me even more because work environments will never succeed in shutting down or blocking personal activity. And I think it is extremely COUNTER productive for them to even try to do so. This is particularly the case in this time of instant messaging, personal cell phones, email, blogs, and more. I fully understand and support monitoring of personal activity when it becomes a performance issue, and the potential need for reprimands or other strictures for the few cases where this privilege is abused. But even then, there needs to be a step by step process whereby a warning is issued and the staff member is given an opportunity to improve, followed by progressively stronger measures culminating, finally, with termination.
I don’t know the whole detail of my friend’s situation but I do know that her employer made claims about what she was doing and writing that were simply false, and it seems as if her dismissal came without prior warning. This is the sign of extremely poor management.
A wild wedding weekend in Wisconsin
This past Saturday and Sunday were spent with family in Wisconsin whom we hadn’t seen for quite a while. The occasion for the visit was the marriage of one of Michele’s cousins. It was particularly nice to visit a bit with Michele’s paternal grandma, whom I admire and respect. She, like so many unfortunate others, is a survivor of tremendous spousal abuse. She remains unbowed by that, with her good outlook on life, and her humor, definitely intact. Visiting the small town where my father-in-law grew up is like stepping back in time and into a completely different world. And I don’t mean that necessarily in a negative sense. The wedding itself was novel for me because it was the first time I had attended a Roman Catholic ceremony and frankly, most of the time I had difficulty following the service and at times found myself standing when I should be sitting, and sitting when I should be standing.
That evening, we attended the wedding reception at a nearby bar/supper club. If you don’t know what that is, you haven’t been to Wisconsin. The number of guests who participated in the family style, homecooked meal was enormous. I think at least 200 people were there. At first we were entertained by a polka band. One of Michele’s uncles used to have a polka band of his own and he enjoyed playing and singing with the group for a while. There was a lot of dancing and general revelry. One of the funnier things that was that our shy, reserved little girl, Brinley, turned out to be a dancing demon. She usually is quite reserved around people she doesn’t know. She is even known to run and hide when someone comes to the door of our house. Yet during the wedding reception, she had a tremendous amount of fun prancing around the dance floor, dancing with her older cousins. I think she danced for two hours straight! Cohen danced for a bit, too. Most of us just sat and watched and chatted. Another of Michele’s uncles is one of the funniest people I know and he kept me in stitches with his pithy remarks on the various guests.
Sunday morning and afternoon we spent at Michele’s grandma’s house, visiting with the extended family. Most of the time, we just sat outside in the garage and driveway, eating, talking, or just sitting there watching the younger children run around and play. It was cooler outside than inside, anyway. Most homes up there don’t have air conditioning. I was able to visit a little bit with Michele’s great aunt Grace. Like Michele’s grandma, Aunt Grace had had a very hard life, yet she was peaceful and upbeat. She told me, more than once, that when she had her latest checkup, her doctor (himself no spring chicken at 70 years of age) said she was in better health than him!
There were a lot of houseplants in Grandma J.’s house and outside on the driveway, more than I ever remembered before. Turns out they belonged to Uncle Tim, and he wanted to get rid of as many of them as possible because he didn’t have room for them any more. It was like having Christmas in September for me! We came home with three different orchids, two clivia miniata (kaffir lily) plants, a firecracker plant, and many more. I have never owned orchids or clivia before and both kinds of plants are usually quite expensive. I was pretty thrilled to get them.
We arrived back home late Sunday night, all tired out. Yesterday was spent just sitting around inside, not doing anything of importance except getting some much-needed rest.
Kids say the funniest things
My kids come up with the funniest things to say sometimes. This morning, for example, Tristan was watching something on TV about the baby beluga whale that was recently born at the Shedd Aquarium. He rushed upstairs to tell me, with great excitement: “Dad! Did you know that zoo we went to recently has a new baby bazooka?!” That really made me laugh.
Michele just IM’d me to tell me another funny anecdote from this afternoon. Cohen was sitting by her while Tristan and Brinley were busy arguing loudly about something. She remarked to him, “They’re crabby!” His reply: “They are fighting. I wish I was in God’s world!”
You just gotta laugh…
The importance of a local public library
While we have a local public library where we now live, it isn’t that great in terms of its collection and physical space, especially its children’s area. Why the library isn’t better, I don’t know, but it isn’t because of lack of a tax base or sufficient funding, or so it seems to me.
It is really important to have a good local library, especially for our children. When we lived in Indiana, the local public library in our small town was a joke. We went there once during the three years we lived there. That was it.
Yesterday we decided to go farther afield to a couple of other public libraries where we knew we could get borrowing privileges. Brinley and Cohen loved seeing their children departments and had a lot of fun playing in an environment that was inviting, full of lots of interesting and fun things to do, and set up for people just their size. The difference between these libraries and our hometown library was striking. One of the libraries we went to also has a very large collection of homeschooling materials set up in its own special room. Very nice. We came home from there with armloads of books. Brinley asked me, “How much do these books cost?” She was quite excited when I told her they are free for us to borrow, and she immediately ran around the children’s area picking out all sorts of books to check out.
One other point that became clear to me yesterday as we visited these other public libraries is how much I dislike — even resent — the vagaries of each library’s circulation policies. One library we went to won’t let reciprocal borrowers check out several kinds of materials, for instance, whereas another one had no such restrictions. Another example is the difference in checkout times for certain materials in various libraries. Our local library only allows movies to be checked out for two days, whereas the other two libraries offered much longer checkout periods. Then there is the oddness of each library’s automation system, all of which are different. Our local library doesn’t even have an automated system. While I have a bit of nostalgia for the card catalog, it is not at all useful to me when I am at home and wanting to check on the library’s collection online. One library may require their specific barcode for patron records, another library may not allow the other library’s barcode to be used, and so forth. Yes, I know, libraries have a great history of cooperation and so forth but frankly it doesn’t go far enough anymore.
Boys gone to Canada
With some sadness and lots of fanfare, Keegan and Tristan left with Grandpa and Grandma Jozwiak on a missions trip to Manitoulin Island, Ontario. This is what Keegan has done each year for the past eight years, but this year is Tristan’s first time. His grandparents promised him that he could go with them once he reached six years of age. He has been looking forward to this for weeks and was unbelievable excited and goofy from the minute he woke up early this a.m. It feels strange to only have two children to ourselves for the next week!
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Movies galore
I’ve seen two new movies in the theaters in the past few days, and that is extremely unusual. Fortunately I liked both of them very much. Thursday night I went with Keegan to see the latest Harry Potter movie, and this afternoon Michele and I took Cohen and Brinley to see Ratatouille, the latest Pixar movie. Tristan and Keegan are with their grandparents for the weekend.
[tags]harry potter and the order of the phoenix, ratatouille, pixar[/tags]
Another perspective on haves and have nots
A lot has been written in other blogs, in conference reports, in articles and elsewhere about the growing technology gap between the “haves” and the “have nots.” It definitely exists; what is debatable is how rapidly the gap is increasing. I was interested to note on a TV monitor in my company’s cafeteria a brief report about a recent Pew study that estimated that 15% of the U.S. population has neither a cell phone nor a computer, and that prompted me to write this entry.
I am a pretty tech-savvy person. I have probably wasted more time and money on techie things than is healthy for me (although, I would argue, the time and money weren’t all wasted). I have had high speed Internet connectivity at home since 2001 and used dial up connectivity for at least ten years before that. I have used a cell phone since the early 90s. My work has centered on networked connectivity for at least that long, and I use a computer on average about eight hours a day and probably longer, not just at work but at home as well. I haven’t had a print newspaper subscription since the early 90s, relying instead on the Internet to deliver the news and information I needed.
In spite of my techie orientation and experience, I, too, experience this technology gap at times. For instance, when I first heard about Twitter from Steven Cohen several weeks ago, I was intrigued and signed up for the service just to dabble with it and understand what it can do. But it really didn’t “click” with me much; I couldn’t figure out what the big deal was with it and why so many people were so enthusiastic about it. That is, until I bought a Blackberry along with its QWERTY keyboard and constant wireless connectivity. I used my Blackberry to post to Twitter quite a bit to report to friends and family about the trip to Mayo Clinic with my wife. Twitter didn’t make much sense to me until I had the right equipment, something that I had at hand at all times, which I could pull out and quickly type in a brief statement here and there. This may seem a minor example of a technological gap, and it is. But my point is that even among the technorati, so much of what is gushed over and around which enthusiastic user communities are founded, is based on access to equipment (hardware, but software as well) that relatively few people, even today, can afford, or can use, e.g. because of lack of service, low bandwidth, or whatever. The Pew report mentioned above highlights this reality.
I’m lucky. I can usually afford technology. I live in a high population area with a ton of service options that provide high performance and relatively low cost. When we lived in rural east central Indiana for three years, however, it was a far different story. I couldn’t get good cell reception so I stopped using a cell phone, for instance. And although we had high speed cable Internet at home, it was pricey. I mentioned that I now have a Blackberry. I wouldn’t be able to afford that at all if it weren’t for the fact that I work for a large company and as a side benefit am able to receive significant discounts on cell phones and services. Without those discounts, I would not have a Blackberry at all.
Another point about the “haves” vs. “have nots” when it comes to technology, is that not everything shiny and new is highly adoptable. Take RSS vs. email as an example. This blog was set up to mainly communicate with family and friends, and I estimate that only a very small percentage of that target audience a.) knows what on earth RSS is, and b.) cares to make use of it in any way. Instead, anecdotal evidence has shown me that it is far more likely that family and friends will simply go to this website to check to see if I have written anything new. A large portion of my target audience doesn’t even remember to do that. By way of contrast, when I communicate with my target audience via email, it’s an entirely different story. I am able to regularly communicate with family and friends via email, and that is much more accessible and usable to them, than RSS will likely ever be. Another example of a technology gap is with the use of instant messaging services. I love using IM and now I am logged on to at least four different services almost every day. In spite of that, only a very tiny fraction of family and friends regularly uses IM, preferring email instead. I’d love to use IM more regularly to keep in more constant communication with them, but hardly any of them uses it.
I’m certain that I haven’t made any revelatory points here but this issue is something I have been mulling over for a while. Call it the frustration of a technogeek when the people with whom he most wants to communicate don’t use the tools he loves to use for that purpose 
Let’s not even talk about stuff like MySpace or even Second Life, which are really foreign planets.