A colleague forwarded me a nice blog post by an MIT PhD student on grad school advice.
It is a great list… except exercise is missing from it, as well as timeboxing.
Archive for the 'discoveries' Category
Managing citations well can save you loads of time. I do this with Zotero. It is free for everyone, open source, and always getting better. It has a great community of users including one who created a very useful python script to rename PDF files.
A new version came out today, which allows you to backup your precious database to their servers for free, and follow other researchers (akin to twitter). If you want to see my library, request to follow me. In the mean time, check out the main developers library.
One of my favorite things about zotero is that is standards compliant. It makes use of the COinS standard. More on this later. Good descriptions on what else is new, here and here.
What citation manager do you use? Use Zotero? Give a shout out…
Instead of having multiple email accounts, I have everything forwarded to gmail where I have it rigorously sorted through hundereds of filters and labels. I am currently using 5432 MB or 74% of my alloted space.
I must have been snoozing because offline gmail came out a few weeks ago and I missed it. This should be extremely useful. There has even been a new release already.
Many people are unaware that you can add dots to your gmail adddress. Instead of putting tim@gmail.com I could put t.im@gmail.com, and it would still get to me. I can give online stores my t.im@gmail address, and then filter out those messages if I wish.
Designing software and websites is not at all like designing a building or city planning. This model is quite useful to help understand the process. I found this preparing for class.
Requirements Engineering Design Model
Here is a summary of the model from the article:
Summary: Requirements engineering is an iterative exercise; often, the purpose of going through the exercise is to define the problem itself, and in the process, refine requirements. That is, an initially fuzzy requirement gets clarified through discussion, leading to other, more specific requirements. While the model has been motivated by requirements engineering, its components are generic enough to be applicable across various phases of the life cycle.
The model is from Ramesh and Dhar 1992
, based on the IBIS model by Kunz and Rittel. References below.
Kunz, W., & Rittel, H. W. J. (1970). Issues as Elements of Information Systems. Institute of Urban & Regional Development, University of California.
Ramesh, B., & Dhar, V. (1992). Supporting systems development by capturing deliberations during requirements engineering. Software Engineering, IEEE Transactions on, 18(6), 498-510. doi: 10.1109/32.142872.
The time is soon approaching when I will be writing and defending a dissertation proposal. I have usually liked the idea writing three smaller papers rather than one large monography of comparable size. Today I found a great comment on the AOM OCIS Student Blog which describes some great benefits of the three paper format.
Virtual Computing Labs for students through Amazon Web Services
I have seen some excitement about Virtual Computing Labs for students. This allows students to access software and resources from their home that normally would only be available to them from an on campus computer lab. A need for mobile educational resources, and dropping technology costs are driving the introduction of virtual computing lab environments.
Virtual Computing Labs also solve an age-old problem for students and professors alike. Student’s laptops have various flavors of (often unkempt) operating systems on them, they often encounter snags when installing larger pieces of software (e.g. ones that need SQLServer or IIS to run). By having access to a virtual computer these problems can be avoided.
Traditionally VCL environments are made possible by server arrays in data centers in a university data center.
Today such technology is only available to a few faculty within a very small percentage of universities. Amazon Web Services allow students to remotely connect to machines (Windows 2008 in my case), regardless of their host OS, where they can install any software they wish. Best of all, they are only charged for how long they use the machine.
In December 2009 Amazon announced it is possible to stop and start servers, thereby not loosing any of your data that prior to that would have been lost on terminating the server. In February 2010 Amazon annou
nced consolidated billing, which it would make it easy for a professor to foot the bill for the students. Just hope that the student’s do not forget to “stop” their instances. In April 2009 Amazon announced AWS in Education grants — which give instructors $100 in AWS credits (to give to each student).
How much does this cost?
Well if you get the $100 Education Grant from Amazon… nothing.
If the students use the instance of the machine for an average of 5 hours each week over the course of a 16 week semester the cost would be: 5 hours X 16 weeks = 80 hours @ 12.5 cents an hour = 10$. In addition, the students would need to pay for the persistent storage of their data. This would be 10 cents per gigabyte per month: 30 gigabytes x 10 cents per month = $3 per month or $12 for the semester. This is easily within the $100 education credit from Amazon. And this also assumes that the students “stop” their instance when they are done using it.
I don’t work for Amazon, but I think this service can solve many potential headaches for professors and students alike at almost no cost. It’s also fun… Students get to setup their own servers in the cloud, and who wouldn’t be excited to do that?
If you want to try it out, follow all the directions at EC2 for Poets! And if you have any problems, leave a comment here…