I learned about “Biblioexpress”:http://www.biblioscape.com/biblioexpress.htm and “Scholar’s Aid 2000”:http://www.scholarsaid.com/aboutsafree.html from the “PhinisheD advice pages”:http://www.phinished.org/faqs/ which might be good bibliographic options if you can’t afford “Endnote”:http://endnote.com/ as both of them are free software. I’ve not tried them myself as the LSE has a site license to Endnote.

Keith Hampton has announced the launch of “i-neighbors”:http://www.i-neighbors.org/, a set of free web services for neighborhoods in Canada and the US inspired by the “research”:http://web.mit.edu/knh/www/pub.html into the connection between virtual and f2f communities done by himself and Barry Wellman. With their software you can

# Meet and communicate with your neighbors.
# Find neighbors with similar interests.
# Share information on local companies and services.
# Organize and advertise local events.
# Vocalize local concerns and ideas.

Alas the site’s services cannot be used by people outside the US and Canada because of legal concerns – particularly about our EU privacy laws, apparently, possibly because the service remains part of an MIT research programme and “data will be gathered for that research”:http://www.i-neighbors.org/privacy.php – but hopefully the BBC will do something similar for the UK at least. Meanwhile, “Upmystreet”:http://www.upmystreet.com/ here in the UK offers some of the necessary services.

I encourage any North Americans reading this to use this software to try to bring together the people in your community and I look forward to reading the research that will come out of this project.

Giving away most of his $45m fortune was not enough for Zell Kravinsky – he gave away one of his kidneys too, to a black woman who was a stranger to him and who would probably otherwise have died. His was one of only ‘several dozen’ nondirected kidney donations made each year in the US. The more I read this New Yorker article about Kravinsky the more admiration I feel for him and the more it saddens me that he seems to be painted largely as a crank. He seems to have been inspired by Peter Singer whose influential essay, Famine, Affluence, and Morality pointed out (to my mind convincingly) that there is no moral difference between failing to save a child who is drowning in a shallow pond right in front of you and failing to give money to charity that would help to save a child’s life in Bangladesh. Moreover it is hard to establish a moral difference between one’s responsibility to one’s family and friends and the same responsibility to any other person in need. (I am not at all persuaded incidentally by Singer’s next step which is to suggest that All Animals are Equal and therefore, ‘ that we extend to other species the basic principle of equality that most of us recognize should be extended to all members of our own species’).

I do believe (uncomfortably) that I should really be living at a minimum comfort level and the rest of my money should be going to those who need it in the third world. Like most people however I would have great difficulty living according to that principle and accordingly I put it to the back of my mind and try to do what I can within the limits of ‘normal’ behaviour. That makes me all the more filled with admiration for one of the few people who seems to be making a serious, conscientious attempt to live according to those principles (albeit imperfectly – he and his family are not living a millionaire lifestyle but neither are they ‘living poor’).

More coverage of his story from The Daily Telegraph.

I won’t run out of the house naked shouting like “Archimedes”:http://www.mcs.drexel.edu/~crorres/Archimedes/Crown/Vitruvius.html but posting here is the next best thing – I think I have finally found a fresh way of looking at personal home pages (and weblogs) that lets me examine what most interests me about them and illuminates several bodies of relevant theoretical literature at the same time.

I’ve been stuck for weeks trying to figure out in my own mind what it is that I am most interested in studying about them (they are interesting in so many different ways!) and at the same time trying to find something that is measurable and theoretically interesting. I won’t tell you all just yet what it is, however, it might be a false start – I’ve had a few of those before!

Still, the new perspective has given me fresh impetus and excitement at last – enough to inspire me to dash into the “library”:http://www.lse.ac.uk/library/ on Sunday to pick up W. E. Bijker and J. Law (1992) Shaping technology/building society: studies in sociotechnical change and P. Du Gay, S. Hall, L. Janes, H. Mackay and K. Negus (1997) Doing cultural studies : the story of the Sony Walkman.

“Alex Halavais”:http://alex.halavais.net/’ decision to produce a page of links to Graduate Student Advice has inspired me to do the same. “Seb Paquet”:http://radio.weblogs.com/0110772/ alerted Alex and me to “his collection of advice”:http://www2.iro.umontreal.ca/~paquetse/cgi-bin/om.cgi?Advice_For_Young_Scholars and to those two I would like to add PhinisheD FAQs from the very useful virtual self-help community “PhinisheD”:http://www.phinished.org/ (which I have to say I have yet to actually introduce myself to).

Last but not least you may also wish to download consult one or more of the presentations and documents provided as part of the LSE’s “Study Skills Workshop”:http://learning.lse.ac.uk/detail.asp?EventID=20. The material is notionally aimed at LSE students but the general guidance is applicable to anyone. “Study-Skills.net”:http://www.study-skills.net/ may also be worth a look.

The (rudely named but nonetheless useful) Rasterbator takes any image you give it (no more than 1Mb in size) and provides an Adobe Acrobat file which if printed can reach almost any size you like (if you have enough paper and enough toner). The biggest image produced so far was made up of “352 pages”:http://www.geocities.com/i337o/rasterbator.htm! Apparently the site has been used to produce a total of 324 015 square metres of pictures. There is a “gallery”:http://homokaasu.org/rasterbator/gallery.gas of images produced if you are curious (none of the first few are pornographic, the name of the site notwithstanding).

I recently read (on CNet perhaps?) that anonymous people within Yahoo are promising one stop searching of web, email, hard disk and Yahoo services – sometime. I won’t get too excited about that until it gets close to launch.

Meanwhile, “X1”:http://www.x1.com/ (which admittedly costs $75) has been improving rapidly – it now supports boolean and proximity searching of your hard disk, contacts, email (including Eudora and other email apps as well as – and alongside – Outlook I am delighted to say) and email attachments. With those improvements I am going to start trying to use it again regularly. Download their trial version and/or “enter their sweepstakes”:http://www.x1.com/sweepstakes/index.html to win up to 50 copies.

For more on what Microsoft is up on this see “this post”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_search_engines.html#001134 and for Google’s plan’s “see here”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_search_engines.html#001119.

Update: Jeremy Wagstaff who shares my obsession with hard disk search has just posted a “discussion”:http://loosewire.typepad.com/blog/2004/08/the_new_search_.html of the race to provide good local search and a (probably comprehensive) “list of available programs”:http://loosewire.typepad.com/blog/2004/08/a_directory_of__2.html including three I have not yet tried – all free of charge – “Tukaroo”:http://www.tukaroo.com/, “Wilbur”:http://wilbur.redtree.com/index.htm (which is also open source) and “Blinkx”:http://www.blinkx.com/

Back and forth the pendulum of history swings. First the Aborigines in Australia were savages to be pitied, then they were victims who were pitilessly killed by white colonists – then 18 months ago Keith Windschuttle, a conservative historian wrote a stinging rebuke to those historians who strove to uncover the dark side of Australia’s history, claiming that they appear to have exaggerated or made up the evidence of those crimes. Not surprisingly, it has touched off “a furore”:http://www.sydneyline.com/.

The Australian brings us “up to date with the controversy”:http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,10205639%255E28737,00.html in a manner rather sympathetic to Windschuttle. I don’t know whether he’s right or wrong but the Australian historical establishment’s seeming desire to circle the wagons and attack the man and the media rather than his allegations is un-edifying. It seems to be having the unfortunate effect of turning him into a “martyr among conservative bloggers”:http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/search.html?rank=&url=sydneyline.com.

I hope someone from the Australian historical establishment will come by and make a good case for why things are not as they have been painted by the media and Windschuttle himself…

WebSM (where SM stands for survey methods), ‘is dedicated to the methodological issues of Web surveys, but it also covers the broader area of interaction between modern technologies and survey data collection.’ It chiefly provides a collection of bibliographic references and some full text. Though the site itself is academic a fair amount of the papers are produced by and/or aimed at marketers. It has an index of survey software suppliers but this isn’t very handy as it doesn’t seem to include free software and is only organized by country.

Free commercial hosts for online surveys include my3q (don’t be put off by the Korean – it offers up to 5 questionnaires without question number or respondent number limits!), SurveyMonkey (their free service handles 10 questions and 100 responses), Zoomerang (free up to 30 questions, 100 responses but results stored for limited period). QuestionPro has a particularly good student offer – you can conduct one survey free of charge with unlimited questions and up to 5000 responses as long as you cite them publicly and link to their site from your project.

Castle is a suite of quiz software (adaptable presumably to other survey use) which is created for UK higher academics to use (free of charge) but appears to generate CGI scripts which must then be uploaded to your own server. GetFAST is similarly designed to help teachers get assessments from their students and allows for up to 20 questions but could also be adapted for more broad use I imagine.

I recall learning about a service run by a US university somewhere that was also free for academic use but I can’t remember where it is.

Later… While my3q is tempting I just realised that it doesn’t appear to let you download the results- you have to rely on their web stats which limits its usefulness. Advanced Survey at $25 a month (approx) looks pretty good but it isn’t clear if they support branching – for example, if my respondents answer yes to question 1 then don’t show them questions 2-4.

Zoomerang has a discount for educators for its full version I see ($99 for 3 months) and appears to do branching and allow downloading. QuestionPro allows branching and downloading of data but the non-academic free trial option only captures 25 respondents over a single month.

The Camwear Model 100 from Deja View stores the last 30 seconds of what you’ve been looking at continuously – you press a button and it saves it to a memory card. I’ve been waiting for a gadget like this for a long time (though I’ll wait for a version that is cheaper, less obtrusive and stores enough to be useful!). Also see “this CNET piece”:http://news.com.com/TiVo-like+camcorder+documents+your+life/2100-1041_3-5230733.html about it.