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The Internet Archive also known as "The Wayback Machine" is a San Francisco-based non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly three million public-domain books. As of October 2012, its collection topped 10 petabytes. In addition to its archiving function, the Archive is an activist organization, advocating for a free and open Internet.
Monday, March 30, 2015
Monday, March 16, 2015
Sunday, February 15, 2015
Grammarly | Instant Grammar Check - Plagiarism Checker - Online Proofreader - UPDATED
UPDATE (16.3.15): I have uninstalled Grammarly for a number of reasons. It's grasp of the English language (UK English) was even worse than mine! The WORD plug-in is NOT free and tooo expensive me thinks, particularly when there are free alternatives. There have also been some rather scathing reviews...
A useful one on the Grammarist blog rather supports my experience and identifies a few other short comings, the comments are also of interest...
And another critical review by no less than the Economist, they are less than impressed with Grammarly on a number of counts...
Just glad I did't fork out any cash...
Try Writers Diet it's free and it does a similar job. I have an article here.
Grammarly makes you a better writer by finding and correcting up to 10× more mistakes than your word processor.
Check your grammar right from your browser or Microsoft Office. Improve your writing in emails, documents, social media posts, messages, and more.
Grammarly improves communication among the world’s 2+ billion native and non-native English writers. Our flagship product, the Grammarly® Editor, corrects contextual spelling mistakes, checks for more than 250 common grammar errors, enhances vocabulary usage, and provides citation suggestions. More than 4 million registered users worldwide trust Grammarly’s products, which are also licensed by more than 350 leading universities and corporations. Grammarly is a privately-held company with offices in San Francisco and Kiev.
Check out the Grammarly Blog
A useful one on the Grammarist blog rather supports my experience and identifies a few other short comings, the comments are also of interest...
And another critical review by no less than the Economist, they are less than impressed with Grammarly on a number of counts...
Just glad I did't fork out any cash...
Try Writers Diet it's free and it does a similar job. I have an article here.
Friday, February 6, 2015
Writing Your Way to Happiness
Re-blogged from an article by Tara Parker-Hope from The New York Times - Link
The scientific research on the benefits of so-called expressive writing is surprisingly vast. Studies have shown that writing about oneself and personal experiences can improve mood disorders, help reduce symptoms among cancer patients, improve a person’s health after a heart attack, reduce doctor visits and even boost memory.
Now researchers are studying whether the power of writing — and then rewriting — your personal story can lead to behavioural changes and improve happiness.
The concept is based on the idea that we all have a personal narrative that shapes our view of the world and ourselves. But sometimes our inner voice doesn't get it completely right. Some researchers believe that by writing and then editing our own stories, we can change our perceptions of ourselves and identify obstacles that stand in the way of better health...
A ...study asked married couples to write about a conflict as a neutral observer. Among 120 couples, those who explored their problems through writing showed greater improvement in marital happiness than those who did not write about their problems.
“These writing interventions can really nudge people from a self-defeating way of thinking into a more optimistic cycle that reinforces itself,” said Timothy D. Wilson, a University of Virginia psychology professor and lead author of the Duke study.
...
Dr. Wilson, whose book “Redirect: Changing the Stories We Live By,” was released in paperback this month, believes that while writing doesn’t solve every problem, it can definitely help people cope. “Writing forces people to reconstrue whatever is troubling them and find new meaning in it,” he said.
Comments
Alan GelbEast Chatham
I was fascinated to read your article, as I am publishing a book with Tarcher Penguin this August entitled Having the Last Say: Capturing Your Legacy in One Small Story, which encourages older people to write short narratives that in some way reflect an ethic or moral value that they have lived by. With my pilot group of adult writers who participated in this work, I was able to see the therapeutic results of engaging in that kind of life review through the written word...
IClaudiusUSVI
Daily writing leads to happiness, and one of the best books that I have read on this topic is "The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense" by Suzette Elgin.
Other links which may be of interest:-
The Benefits of Writing
Setting, Elaborating, and Reflecting on Personal Goals Improves Academic Performance
Self Authoring
The scientific research on the benefits of so-called expressive writing is surprisingly vast. Studies have shown that writing about oneself and personal experiences can improve mood disorders, help reduce symptoms among cancer patients, improve a person’s health after a heart attack, reduce doctor visits and even boost memory.
Now researchers are studying whether the power of writing — and then rewriting — your personal story can lead to behavioural changes and improve happiness.
The concept is based on the idea that we all have a personal narrative that shapes our view of the world and ourselves. But sometimes our inner voice doesn't get it completely right. Some researchers believe that by writing and then editing our own stories, we can change our perceptions of ourselves and identify obstacles that stand in the way of better health...
A ...study asked married couples to write about a conflict as a neutral observer. Among 120 couples, those who explored their problems through writing showed greater improvement in marital happiness than those who did not write about their problems.
“These writing interventions can really nudge people from a self-defeating way of thinking into a more optimistic cycle that reinforces itself,” said Timothy D. Wilson, a University of Virginia psychology professor and lead author of the Duke study.
...
Dr. Wilson, whose book “Redirect: Changing the Stories We Live By,” was released in paperback this month, believes that while writing doesn’t solve every problem, it can definitely help people cope. “Writing forces people to reconstrue whatever is troubling them and find new meaning in it,” he said.
Comments
Alan GelbEast Chatham
I was fascinated to read your article, as I am publishing a book with Tarcher Penguin this August entitled Having the Last Say: Capturing Your Legacy in One Small Story, which encourages older people to write short narratives that in some way reflect an ethic or moral value that they have lived by. With my pilot group of adult writers who participated in this work, I was able to see the therapeutic results of engaging in that kind of life review through the written word...
IClaudiusUSVI
Daily writing leads to happiness, and one of the best books that I have read on this topic is "The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense" by Suzette Elgin.
Other links which may be of interest:-
The Benefits of Writing
Setting, Elaborating, and Reflecting on Personal Goals Improves Academic Performance
Self Authoring
Sunday, January 25, 2015
Google Scholar Alerts
This post is re-blogged from the Google Alert Blog
Google Scholar AlertsTuesday, June 15, 2010 | 10:00 AM
Ever since we launched Google Scholar, people have asked us to help them keep up with current research. Over the years, we’ve made several improvements to help find recently published articles, including the "Recent articles" mode, a simple interface to limit search to recent years, and, of course, more frequent index updates. As the next step in this endeavor, we have recently added email alerts. Now you can create alerts for queries of your interest. When new articles that match your alert query are added to Google Scholar, we’ll send you an email update with links to these articles.
To create an alert for a query, just do a search on Google Scholar as usual (e.g., [prion protein]) and click on the envelope icon which appears at the top of the search results. This will take you to a page with recent results for your query and alert options (e.g., alert options for [prion protein]). If the query returns results other than ones you were looking for, you can tweak it right there and view updated results. Adding more specific search terms often works, and so does placing full author names and multi-word concepts in quotes (e.g., [“quantum computing”]). Then, click on “Create alert” - and bingo! If you’re logged into Gmail, your alert will be created right away. If you’re not logged in, you’ll need to enter your email address and we’ll send you a verification message with links to confirm or cancel the alert. Any email address will do, you don’t need a Gmail account to receive Google Scholar Alerts. Once you click on the confirmation link, your alert will be created and you’ll start receiving email updates on your query.
To create an alert for articles citing a particular paper, first, find this paper in Google Scholar, then click on the “Cited by” link below the search result, and, finally, click on the envelope icon that appears at the top of the list of citing articles. To get updates when any of your papers are cited, it’s often easiest to set up an alert for all mentions of your name in text, e.g., [“E Witten”] with the quotes. To learn of new publications by your colleagues, try registering alerts for their names with an “author:” operator, such as [author:”S Hawking”]. If these alerts return too many results related to other people with the same name, try adding more specific search terms, such as the names of their co-authors, the name of the university they are associated with, or plain old keywords.
So, what does it take to provide an alerts service for the largest collection of research papers on the planet? Good question. To implement Google Scholar Alerts, we had to solve several tricky problems. First, we had to figure out how to quickly find newly available scholarly articles over the entire web. They can and do appear on a variety of locations - on publisher web sites, in scholarly repositories, on researchers’ web pages. Second, we had to determine which of the newly available articles were recently written or published. This can be difficult since many publishers and universities provide archival articles (which are not new) whereas early presentations of a work, such as preprints (which are indeed new), often have no dates associated with them. Third, we needed to update the index much more frequently. Updating a search service while it is being used by a large number of users is somewhat like changing tires on a car while it is going sixty miles an hour. We now add new articles to Google Scholar twice a week; we plan to further increase this frequency. Finally, we had to develop a query suggestion mechanism to help users construct effective alert queries. Our goal was to help people bridge the gap between finding key articles in a large collection (as they’re doing when they search Google Scholar) and finding relevant articles in the much smaller collection of recently published articles (as they would be doing with alerts).
We hope Google Scholar Alerts will help researchers everywhere keep up with the discoveries made by their colleagues worldwide.
Posted by Anurag Acharya, Distinguished Engineer
Wednesday, December 10, 2014
Tuesday, November 18, 2014
Synchronize Folders Between Computers and Drives with SyncToy 2.1
I have just posted this on my Digi-Blog but as it is relevant to those engaged in academic endeavour I thought I should to signpost it from here.
I have been searching for an effective alternative to the now defunct Microsoft "Live Mesh" for syncing files and folders to a variety of storage locations. This Microsoft utility is the best option I have found so far. Unfortunately it does not work in real-time, it has to be scheduled and the most frequent option is daily. However it gives another layer of protection.
It is a repost of an excellent article by Brian Burgess on the How-To-Geek website
See more here...
I have been searching for an effective alternative to the now defunct Microsoft "Live Mesh" for syncing files and folders to a variety of storage locations. This Microsoft utility is the best option I have found so far. Unfortunately it does not work in real-time, it has to be scheduled and the most frequent option is daily. However it gives another layer of protection.
It is a repost of an excellent article by Brian Burgess on the How-To-Geek website
See more here...
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