Mar
27
Writing for Busy People
Filed Under Other Stuff, Work | Leave a Comment
I saw this great article on Writing for Busy People by Ben Googer . Here are the highlights:
Well, I can tell you that’s sage advice. It’s great when people make contributions in the form of ideas and proposals, but it’s even better when they’re written for busy people. Here are some examples:
- Making important points up front
- Clear taxonomy of headings, and lots of them
- Writing clearly and succinctly
- No long, unbroken paragraphs or tracts of text.
- Preferring bulleted lists with clear points to paragraphs.
- Use of emphasis in formatting to make important things clear
These days, I find I don’t have a lot of time to read everything carefully, so the better structured a document is, the more I get out of it. I frequently find I miss entire subsections or points of documents, even when there’s relatively little text, because of incomplete organization. My eyes definitely glaze over when i see a large block of unbroken text with few headings. At the very least, it’d be very helpful if folk would structure their thoughts into: "Problem" and "Proposed Solution".
Before you post, stop and think if you’ve written something in a way that’ll allow others to get the most out of it. Communicating your ideas effectively means you may get a clearer and quicker response from other people.
Mar
14
Personal Knowledge Management for Researchers
Filed Under Open Source, Other Stuff, Work | Leave a Comment
I just finished writing a paper on Personal Knowlege Management for Researchers. You can find a full copy of the paper here. Here the Executive Summary from the paper:
The increasing volume of digital information with which researchers’ work is making the task of finding, capturing, organizing and eventually collaborating with digital data more difficult. Electronic information in multiple formats sitting in multiple silos of data present a challenge to researchers who have difficulty finding a specific piece of information in a timely fashion.
The two major benefits that come from effective knowledge management and knowledge sharing are an increase in the speed and quality of the research being performed. Less time is spent looking for information that has already been identified or created, so that more time can be spent in analyzing and associating disparate pieces of information. Modern electronic tools make possible collaboration between colleagues that in the past would have been difficult, expensive, or impossible. Voice and video conferencing over high speed research networks can facilitate real time collaboration at a fraction of the cost in time and money of flying members of a research team to a central location. On line collaboration tools can greatly facilitate group document creation and editing, and when it comes time to polish the final product, real time document editing makes it possible for groups scattered around the world to review a document together and make edits together.
Once researchers have the appropriate software to manage their data and help them collaborate, they need to make sure that they also have the appropriate hardware and infrastructure to take full advantage of the benefits the new software will give them. Access to high speed research networks is a must for video and voice conferencing, as well as real time document editing. An average desktop computer with two monitors, instead of the traditional single monitor, will give researchers a 10% + boost in productivity. Finally a web camera and good quality head phone/microphone rounds out a well equipped research workstation.
Whether they realize it or not, most researchers are struggling with the mountains of digital data that they have accumulated during their careers. If shown the tools available to them to find, capture and collaborate, many, if not most, will start to use some of these knowledge management tools to increase their productivity and effectively manage and collaborate with their data.
Mar
10
Onfolio is FREE…
Filed Under Work | Leave a Comment
The market leader in web research assistant software is Onfolio . Onfolio allows the user to capture digital content, including web pages off line, organize it, annotate it, share it and publish it. One can either capture complete web pages (or other web based documents like PDF files), or snippets of web pages to the hard drive for safe keeping. No more worrying about whether or not the web page being looked at will still be on-line next year (or next week). One can safely store a copy on the hard drive for future reference. Onfolio captures the available meta data from the web page, including the original web address, author, keywords and capture date, so that that this information can be used as needed for citations it in research documents. Markup (with the digital equivalent of a yellow highlighter) is available to annotate the off line web pages. This can be invaluable when looking at the document a year from now and having a hard time remembering why it was so important when captured. To top it off, all the captured documents are keyword searchable.Items and folders along with comments can be published to the user’s weblog either manually or automatically as new content is added. Published items and folders can also be sent via e-mail to interested colleagues.
There are two ways to use Onfolio. The first is in a sidebar in Internet Explorer. This is the way the author uses it the most. One can also use the Deskbar feature which gives access to all the Onfolio information while the user is still in a word processor or in other web browsers like firefox. The Deskbar simply sits to the left of the word processor, and assuming that the monitor is sufficiently large, one can look at both a word processor document and all the Onfolio data at the same time.
Until recently a licence fee of $29 or $99 had to be paid to use Onfolio. As of March 2006, Microsoft purchased Onfolio and is now giving away free licences for Onfolio as an extension to their “Microsoft Live Toolbar ” product. Currently Onfolio is only available for Microsoft Windows computers (and now that Microsoft owns Onfolio, I suspect we will not see a Mac or Linux version any time soon).
Mar
6
Ice Cream & iPods - for The Vinyl Cafe
Filed Under Family, Other Stuff, Spiritual | 1 Comment
[This is a letter that I sent to Stuart McLean at the CBC radio show ‘The Vinyl Cafe‘]
Dear Stuart,
The Vinyl Cafe has been on my mind a lot these past few days. My wife has finally convinced me to write this letter.
I was in the hospital every afternoon this past week for my latest round of treatments. I shared a room during my stay on the Oncology Ward with a three older gentlemen. During the course of the week different patients came an went, but Cliff, one of the fellow patients, was there the whole week with me. While I was around each afternoon, Cliff was never alone. His wife, Pearl, stayed with him during the day and was kind enough to go get some of those little plastic ice cream cups for us all from the fridge down the hall. It must have been at least 25 years since I last ate an ice cream out of one those little cups with the cardboard peel-off lids. The only change those cups have undergone in the past 25 years is that they do not ship them with those little wooden spoons anymore. The good news is that the taste is exactly like I remembered… cool, creamy goodness, laced with enough sugar that they cannot help but taste wonderful. Cliff, Pearl and I sat around enjoying, or eating one of life’s simple pleasures while our other roommates enjoyed an afternoon nap.
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Mar
2
Day 3 of Chemo
Filed Under Family, Other Stuff, Spiritual | Leave a Comment
Things continue to go well with my chemotherapy treatments this week at the hospital. I haven’t been able to notice any side effects except for being a bit tired, so that is probably a good thing. The nursing staff who have been taking care of me have been wonderful. They seem to like to treat me like a mischievous son… actually they treat me a lot like my mother does 
I guess that makes sense when you consider that while I’m in the hospital for 3 to 5 hours every afternoon I’ve been sharing a room with three elderly gentlemen in their 70’s or 80’s. Compared to them I must look like a young buck.
I did learn something interesting yesterday from my nurse. She was just getting ready to hook me up to My IV drip when I ask her if she knew how much my treatment cost. She said she didn’t know but that she would go and find out. I didn’t expect that she would know off the top of her head, and half suspected that she wouldn’t be able to easily find out the cost either. To my surprise she came back about two minutes later with a small booklet with, among other things, the cost of cancer treatment drugs. After thumbing through he booklet she found my drug, and showed me that the cost was $485 per mg, and that my half liter bag clear fluid contained 10 mg of the drug. So the total cost of the drugs for my daily treatment is about $4,850, and the total for my week long treatment will total over $24,000. Needless to say I think I’m getting my money’s worth out of my federal and provincial taxes this year. UPDATE: My nurse told me that she had mis-read the booklet. The cost was about $500 per day, not $5000 per day. So the treatment was not quite as expensive as I first throught it was.
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