Complete journal scans

Thanks Jim, this sounds like a potentially extremely useful exercise.
Could you say anything more, maybe in the comments, about the process,
like how you will decide whether a particular title is going to be
important and what you do with it then? How much time do you think the
whole thing will take you?

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 29 May 2006 14:13:58 -0400
From: Jim Davies <xxxx@xxxx.com>
To: Daniel Saunders <xxxxx@xxxxxxxxx>
Subject: you can put this on your blog if you want. I just put it on mine

Through Queen's Library webpage I can access PDFs of many journals
going for years back. There are probably around 20 or 30 journals that
I cite from most often. I just realized how easy it is to look at the
titles of every paper published in a journal for the past 50 years or
so.

So my plan is to take the time to work through these journals,
downloading papers and making notes regarding which project ideas the
papers are important for. I'll go back as far as I feel is important.
After this is done once for a journal, then all I have to do is keep
up.

I also have a plan to review the most recent year of articles in all
of these journals every year. I put a repeating date (Feb 12) to
review the journals into my palm pilot. This way I will feel
comfortable that important journal papers will not slip past my
notice. Attached to the date is the list of journals I will review. I
can keep this list updated. I suppose I can do this for conferences
too, if they have online archives.

--
JimDavies http://www.jimdavies.org/

Unpleasant and Overwhelming

Alan Lakein in How to get control of your life and your time lays down
the two basic reasons why we avoid doing things, even avoid thinking them:
because they're unpleasant, or because they're overwhelming. He has a
chapter about dealing with each of those.

For unpleasant, as I recall there are some visualization things, imagining
yourself doing it and it going well or else imagining some ridiculous
catastrophe, and (presumably as a last resort) telling yourself what bad
thing will happen if you don't get it done. For overwhelming it's largely
a matter of figuring out how to break it down into less overwhelming
chunks. One tactic is what he calls the swiss cheese method: make a big
list of tasks that can be done in 5 minutes that will result in progress
on that project, however tiny. Then start knocking them off. Not only can
you cut down the size of a project in that way, by punching a lot of
holes, but also sometimes doing a tiny job leads you to continue working
steadily.

I think the most powerful insight here is just that there are these two
different reasons why you procrastinate on things, and that they take two
different sets of approaches to deal with.

Breaking Bad Web Habits with Privoxy

In the past I've had spells of compulsiveness about visiting certain frequently updated websites, like slate.com, and sites with deep archives, like the Onion A.V. Club and Bob the Angry Flower. I can lose big chunks of time, as though I'm in a trance I can't snap out of. When I started finding myself tempted to get into those same bad habits while waiting for things to run etc. in the lab, I decided to put my foot down and find a technological solution. Just something to raise the threshold of temptation higher so I'll usually be able to catch myself before I get into those same ruts - enough time for my better nature to catch up with me.

All you need is a nifty free utility called Privoxy, that is available for both the Mac and PCs.

1. Download Privoxy from their web page and follow the instructions about how to get it running. But basically this just involves putting the application somewhere, running it, and changing your web browser to use privoxy as a web proxy (by pointing to 127.0.0.1 port 8118). When you are using a proxy, what happens when you ask for a web page, is that instead of requesting it directly you ask a program to go and get it for you - possibly doing some operations on the page before it gets to you. In Privoxy's case, it does a pretty great job of filtering out advertisements and other annoying features of the web.
   
   
2. Try it out on any site that has ad banners and enjoy the relative (visual) peace and quiet. The one thing I should warn you about is that Privoxy can occasionally disable a feature of a web page that you want to use, in particular ones that use pop ups or complicated forms. You might have to temporarily turn off privoxy (by going to http://config.privoxy.org/toggle) if a web page you need is exhibiting strange behaviour. I find it's more than worth it (only like 1 in 100 pages have this problem) for the ad filtering and the selective web blocking, which I will now describe how to do:
   
   
3. Go to the Privoxy Status page (you use your web browser). If Privoxy is set up properly, you will see a page which includes the line "/Library/Privoxy/./default.action" and beside it a View and Edit button. Click Edit.
   
   
4. There will be a bunch of items in a list in a light green box. Scroll to the bottom of that first box and click where it says Insert new section below.
   
   
5. There will be a new box with a green, blue and yellow layer. Click the Add button below where it says "URL patterns:" Type in the pattern of a website that is bad for you. Typically that's just a URL without the http:// part, like "www.retrocrush.com" But it has some features for recognizing partial names. For instance www.guardian.co.uk has a number of different sub-sites, film.guardian.co.uk etc. I wanted to block them all, so I put in just ".guardian.co.uk" Any URL ending with that string would be captured. There's a lot fancier things you can do with URL patterns (most of which I have sadly had to employ at one time or another to defeat some attempt of mine to think of ways around my own blocking software)
   
   
6. Keep clicking add until all your fatal attractions are accounted for (you can come back and add more later)
   
   
7. Decide on the image you want your web browser to be redirected to when you attempt to access one of the forbidden sites. At home, my browser simply goes to this image:
   
   
   
   It's Isaac Newton, glaring at me as if to say, "I invented the generalized binomial theorem when I was 22. What have you done lately?"
   
   At school it's a different picture, the renowned computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra:
   
   
   
   Also hard to beat in the productivity department - among other achievements he wrote over 1300 brief manuscripts on computer algorithms and many other subjects (in fountain pen!) . Unlike Newton, I've actually met him, when he came to speak at the University of Waterloo, I believe the year he died. It's a friendly picture, yet a firm reminder that maybe time spent reading articles about the worst dressed at the Oscars could be more fruitfully employed.
   
   Whatever you choose, copy that URL.
   
   
8. Back on your Privoxy Edit Actions screen, just above the list of URL patterns you added, it should say "Actions:" Click Edit. On the line where it says "add-header" in blue, click Enable. Also do that for handle-as-image, and set-image-blocker.
   
   
9. An extra bit for set-image-blocker will appear when you do that, with the words "Redirect the browser to this image URL:" Paste your blocking URL in the box right underneath it, and click submit.

And that's it. Give it a try by trying to access one of the forbidden sites. Sometimes I deliberately do this just to reassure myself that I (and Edgser) am looking after myself.

As I've implied, it can't completely cure you of wasting time on the web, but you can use this to at least break the power of some of your worst temptations. Even when Privoxy is turned off, I still feel much more able to resist their lure.

What is a milestone?

I heard the term "milestone" used a lot while I was working as a co-op student at Amazon.com and other places, and I've also heard it in graduate school, but I realized a couple of months ago I don't really know what it means. So I asked google. There are some conflicting ideas about what it should mean it seems, but here's the one I like best, synthesized out of a few:

A milestone for a project is a measurable set of conditions such that, when they are fulfilled, we can say that progress has been made.

By "measurable" I just mean something that is objective, inarguable. "The finished essay, ready to submit, is sitting printed out on my desk." "All the papers I need are on a list on a piece of paper." "50% of the assignments have a final mark written on the front" etc

By this definition, it's definitely possible to have more than one milestone you're working on at once, and the completions don't have to come in a set sequence. However often there will be dependencies, so that one milestone can't be reached, or even started on, until another one is finished. There may be a milestone that represent a whole phase of a project, so that no more milestones can be reached until that one is, a bottleneck.

A milestone can have a date associated with it. All deadlines are milestones (but not all milestones are deadlines). For your own milestones, you could reward yourself for achieving them, or penalize yourself for not hitting the date on one. But at a minimum they should help you to get a sense of where you are in the progress of a project.

I tried to put this into practice recently with a milestone chart for my psyc 917 project, showing the milestones for the different sections and their dependencies. I didn't really use this effectively - as you can see only one circle is crossed out - but I think that was more due to other project management problems on this assignment, not that there's something wrong with the principle (though one issue: need to be able to change the chart around more easily - at least leave lots of free space) Read it from left to right, so that a circle on the left connected to one on the right means the left milestone must be accomplished before the other one can.
(larger version here)