dealing with a frantic med student today reminded me to schedule more time for myself; quality quiet time. i’ve been writing notes to myself of topics to consider for writing a new article, but haven’t given myself the opportunity to sit with those notes and decide which topic to tackle first. time for reflection is such a critical component of my writing process but it is always the first thing i schedule on top of.
midyear resolution: schedule appointments with myself to just sit and think.
i’ll soon be attending my first medical library conference (medical library association) and was assigned a conference mentor, one who has been to an mla conference before and is willing to guide a newbie. i have been to conferences before and can certainly navigate on my own, but it’s a nice touch that mla would foresee that some may need help. i appreciate that the organization wants to make one’s first mla a pleasant and full experience.
i would say that overall the field of library and information science is good about mentoring. in a previous life i had expectations of working as an educator in the field of fine art, in photography, but i never found a true community there. the field of photography is more insulated and about individual success, whereas library and information science seems to be pushing forward a communal goal. do you agree?
i dumped my blog post commenting on expertise in pictorial perception into the “gender genie,” and it thinks i am a man. what is surprising about this, you ask? i am a woman. here’s the metadata it logged from the text i put in:
(click to biggify)
now that my curiosity is piqued i am going to go read the article on how the algorithm was developed and how the authors decided which are distinctly “male” terms and which are “female.”
oh boy, i have just the thing to perk you up this friday. here’s a snippet of lyrics from the song by hefe, “increase the ‘n'”:
there’s a trend but the error is big
increase the N
the rat’s no good use the guinea pig
increase the N
the antibody’s weak the background high
increase the N
my P value is bigger than pi
increase the N
see? don’t you feel better? here’s a link to the rest of the lyrics: http://www.scq.ubc.ca/?p=180 ,
and the song at hefe’s myspace page: http://www.myspace.com/heferocks
i’m still processing the position paper on “open data,” but so far i’m having a difficult time with the practicality of the concept. the argument falls flat for me because it calls for no restrictions on (certain) scientific data at all, noting that it should be made available for use without permission (or acknowledgment, as far as i can tell from the wikipedia article). the wikipedia article implies that these data are just laying around somewhere, waiting to be used, but in fact their very collection implies some intellectual authority and that, in my opinion, should be respected and acknowledged.
futhermore, murray states in his paper that “the data be Open and be re-used by someone not connected with the original author without the need for permission or correspondence. Legal, syntactic, semantic and ontological questions must be answered by the data themselves.” in a community of scientists where the key for “openness” seems to be about a more active communication, why would you make part of your position that you be allowed to shut yourself off from the data collectors?
any feedback is welcome as i continue to process the concept of “open data.”
i got a chapter accepted for publication (yay!) and am preparing the packet of materials to send to the editors, including the publication agreement. i will be attaching the amendment to the publication agreement that i made. a particularly disagreeable clause in the agreement they want me to sign reads: “Furthermore, author(s) cannot post the contents of the chapter on any personal website or other sites, or distribute the work to others in either electronic or print forms.” if i accepted that clause it would mean that i can’t send my mom a copy of my chapter or post it in my institution’s repository.
i’ll report back with any comments from the publisher. stay tuned!
