Academic nerdiness

As an academic in the humanities, a great deal of my research involves tracking down 20-50 page papers published in professional journals. When I was an undergrad, this was mostly a two-step process: First, EBSCOhost and other such search engines would give you matches based on author and title names; occasionally it would also have an abstract, so you could tell whether or not it was worthwhile. Second, you would stalk through the periodicals section of the library, three-page list of citations in hand, tracking down the library's archive copies of all those journals.

By the time I got to Notre Dame, those two steps had been combined. I rarely have to go track down a physical copy of a journal to read an article -- academic search engines now include links directly to electronic archives, and I can typically read or download a PDF of the desired article within about 30 seconds. In preparing the list for my oral exam, I've had to request a handful of articles that were only published in books, one or two published in articles to which my library did not happen to have a subscription, and only one where I had to go down to the basement to get the physical copy of the journal (because the electronic version was of the wrong article).

So today my research consists largely of downloading 5-12 PDFs, skimming them for relevance, and arranging most of them into various folders and subfolders depending on which project they're relevant to. As a result, I have approximately 300 PDFs in various places on my computer. (Think about that for a second: on the order of a 10,000-page library right on my laptop. Thirty years ago, that would have required a small but very, very strudy trunk to transport. Today it all fits very comfortably in my backpack.)

This creates an archiving problem. Obviously many (most) of the projects I work on are closely related. And it would be nice to be able to be able to easily search through and arrange and re-arrange all those documents on the fly. Which is why I was really, really excited when I discovered links to Papers and iPapers.

And then really, really disappointed when I realised they're only for Macs. I guess this means I need to break down and finally buy my new laptop.

10 Inconvenient Truths About File Sharing

The European version of the RIAA has released a list of 10 Inconvenient Truths about file sharing which is a weirdly mixed bag of statements. The linked article does a pretty good job of discussing the list, but I just wanted to comment on a couple of them.

I think Item 9 is incredibly cynical. It's not that people won't stop stealing until the law stops them, it's that people use file sharing because it's super easy and the industry offered alternatives aren't appealing enough. I think the best thing the industry could do to combat music sharing would be to offer drm-free songs at $.50 per song. Turning the screws on punishments works better if you've got reletively few people to punish, but with as many people using file sharing as there are, my guess is that it will only drive them to inovate new ways of avoiding getting caught.

Item 10 also doesn't really approach the question correctly. It's obvious that Metallica would be downloaded a lot through file sharing. This doesn't address whether the people downloading Metallica were already familiar with their works or if they're coming to the music because file sharing made it so easy. It's entirely possible that a person who is a fan of mainstream pop could discover mainstream metal through file sharing. The statement also doesn't address whether the ratio of downloads of mainstream to underground music is higher than the ratio of mainstream to underground cd sales.

Interstellar travel may be practically impossible

but, fortunately, you don't have to go far to see some amazing things. Like this -- it's an ultraviolet image of a transit of the Moon across the Sun, and absolutely amazing, especially if you download the high quality video.

Via the Bad Astronomer, who also gives us information about a lunar eclipse tonight.