Stone Rice Big dot Net

ROTFLMAO!

While surfing the web, I think I found a little gem for managing citations and references in your papers: Zotero.

Screenshot of zotero (from http://www.zotero.org)

Zotero allows you to manage all your references from inside the Firefox. Since the web is the primary site for finding reference anyway, it reduces all the hassle with copying data from the web into other applications, download RIS-files and import them again,… all that time-consuming work.

Since managing literature references, journal papers, annotations, notes etc. is a crucial part of a researcher’s (work) life, you would assume there are plenty of tools out there to help us? Right you are, but most of them are -let me phrase it politely- hard to use.

The one I am using is Endnote. The appearance of Endnote is very old-fashioned and its usability is poor. They release a new version of Endnote every year, but the differences are marginal. For instance, once they announced a alphabetically ordered entry type list (book before journal before thesis) as new feature! On the bright side, Endnote allows to add citations and bibliographies to Word documents fairly easily.

What Endnote completely fails to do, is to provide features that help you to actually work with the literature in the database. It provides a notes area, you can enter keywords, but in a very basic (and thus mostly useless) way.

So what’s better with Zotero? A lot:
- You can grab literature directly from the web/database
- You can import literature
- You can add notes, pdfs, links as many as you like
- You can tag literature and browse by tag
- It is open source
- It comes with a word plugin
- You can export to many common formats

Especially tagging literature and search by tag is a very useful feature. It helps when you go like “Once upon a time, I read something about it, but I don’t remember author, title or the journal it was published in”. With Zotero you just browse your tag cloud.

Disclaimer: Zotero is still in a sort of beta phase, but I already use it regularly without much of a hassle.

… I would probabily look like this.

What do you look like? Check it out here.

The inventor of the ATM, John Shepherd-Barron, can tell you:

“Over the kitchen table, she [the inventors’ wife] said she could only remember four figures, so because of her, four figures became the world standard.”

Luckily, she wasn’t able to remember 8 or 10 digits.

(via Bruce Schneier)

This is an emergeny call! A very important book cart is missing. If you have seen it, please report immediately.

This is, what the book cart looks like:

Martin Horn has seen the book cart in the Englischer Garten in Munich:

The missing book cart even made it into the news of a German newspaper:

The situation seems to escalate since Thursday. Obviously the book cart has been sent back through time and on the moon.

Clearly, this has been too much. Liechtenstein had to react.

Strange though, that the book cart incident had so little coverage in the press despite its importance. Just a few of alert colleagues (thanks!) are trying to inform human mankind - this posting is supposed to help them.

Standford University has made available lectures, interviews, and general information via Apples iTunes. I am just listening to a lecture on Kant by Peter Gilgen. IMHO this is a great idea - the iPod university!

Just visit http://itunes.stanford.edu