Using HTML5 features, this is the kind of obvious tool that makes symbol lookup faster than doing it by hand.
Just draw the symbol in the box and up comes the LaTeX code, and the package name that contains it.
I just found this presentation, and thought it’s worth bringing it to the attention of ap.com readers:
Anita de Waard is the director of Disruptive Technologies at Elsevier. A company that has a position with such a name has my sympathy. Looks like publishers are slowly realizing that they can have a huge impact on how science is done, and how fast it moves, if they simply paid more attention to modern trends.
Only habit prevents us researchers from realizing that the media we use the most, a paper article with a review cycle of years, is woefully wrong in this day and age.
A somewhat related idea are the 5 stars of open linked data:
★ make your stuff available on the web (whatever format)
★★ make it available as structured data (e.g. excel instead of image scan of a table)
★★★ non-proprietary format (e.g. csv instead of excel)
★★★★ use URLs to identify things, so that people can point at your stuff
★★★★★ link your data to other people’s data to provide context
If scientists and publishers have opendata in mind (and the trend is there!) doing research becomes more fun immediately (no more mails to the authors asking for data that get no response). Seeing that the academic publishing industry has at least one person (Anita) that gets it makes me feel good. Looks like Elsevier has a head-start.
I’m not sure how big of a problem selecting classes is for students, and how much it can be automated, but now there’s a tool specifically solving this problem. CourseRank tracks scheduling conflicts, together with some other Interesting features. For example, it gathers course/professor reviews, workload estimations and aggregates questions and answers.
Right now the selection of universities is not that great. It makes sense since the service is specifically tailored to each university, so I can imagine the implementation can take a while.
When I started my DPhil, I set myself assignments in order to cover the lit review in easy bite-sized chunks. This worked pretty well but the collated material was scattered across different Word documents, which meant that I couldn’t look at everything at one glance or search the content.
However at about the same time, I also started free-writing to generate ideas. If you’re not familiar with the technique, it’s simply writing for a fixed amount of time without stopping. You don’t delete anything on the fly and just go, writing down anything that comes to mind until the timer sounds or your wrists cramp up, whichever comes first.
Instead of putting this writing into Word documents though, I decided to set up a local installation of the blogging engine Movable Type. In retrospect, I think this was probably just an excuse to play with blogging software but it turned out to be a good decision. I could add content from any computer with access to the server, the basic input form meant that I focused on content not style, and of course, I had all the blogging bells-and-whistles attached. Comments could be added at a later date, the information sorted and searched, shared with my supervisor and so on.
I’m not sure why I didn’t think of it at the time but I would now recommend combining the two ideas: use a blog to write your lit review. (I say “write”, but I really mean “draft”. The structure of blog writing is quite different from academic writing and besides, you’ll want to tidy up references, tables, etc. for the final version. But a blog post is still big enough to cover the bulk of the material and help you organize your thoughts.)
The final stumbling block of course is how to get the content out of the blogging engine and into a presentable format. Fortunately, there’s a script called WPTEX that will convert your WordPress blog into a LaTeX document. I found this software about six months ago and it does what it says on the tin: give it some basic details and it will parse all of your posts, tidying up the code and creating LaTeX source files which you can then compile as a standalone PDF book or for inclusion as part of your thesis.
The script’s not perfect and I can think of several improvements, particularly in the way that it converts URLs for paper presentation. But if you’re starting a PhD, I’d recommend giving it a go. A blog-sized lit review is a great way to manage this difficult task and of course, if you make the blog public, you can engage with the wider community in your field, getting feedback and maybe even making a bit of a name for yourself. Happy blogging!
Google Scholar is probably the most useful tool on the web today for academics. However, there’s no API for it, and seems to add little to no features with time. I don’t think Google is going to give it the Axe any time soon, but … I can’t imagine ads getting clicked on scholar pages. And Google is a for-profit, so one never knows. In any case, it would not hurt to show Google that we care, and there’s one simple thing to do. If you want to support the creation of the API, you could drop by the and express your interest.