Indian Veg

Recently, I ate at the somewhat famous London vegetarian restaurant Indian Veg Bhelpoori House in Islington (often referred to simply as “Indian Veg”).

I couldn’t help but imagine that the restaurant had hired Emanuel Bronner as their interior decorator.

Syndicated 2013-06-15 17:00:27 (Updated 2013-06-16 02:46:44) from copyrighteous

Resurrecting Debian Seattle

When I last lived in Seattle, nearly a decade ago, I hosted the “Debian Seattle Social” email list. When I left the city, the mailing list eventually fell victim to bitrot.

When Allison Randall asked me about the list a couple months ago, I decided that moving back to Seattle was a good excuse to work with Allison and some others to revive the community. Toward that end, I’ve put up a little website and created a new mailing list. It’s hosted on Alioth this time which will be reliable than me. Since it has been years, we have not moved over the old subscriber list so you’ll have to sign up again if you were on it before.

If you’re a Debian developer or user and you’d like to hear about infrequent Debian social gatherings in the Seattle area, you should sign up on the list!

Syndicated 2013-06-12 17:00:44 (Updated 2013-06-12 19:21:54) from copyrighteous

London and Michigan

I’ll be spending the week after next (June 17-23) in London for the annual meeting of the International Communication Association where I’ll be presenting a paper. This will be my first ICA and I’m looking forward to connecting with many new colleagues in the discipline. If you’re one of them, reading this, and would like to meet up in London, please let me know!

Starting June 24th, I’ll be in Ann Arbor, Michigan for four weeks of the ICPSR summer program in applied statistics at the Institute for Social Research. I have been wanting to sign up for some of their advanced methods classes for years and am planning to take the opportunity this summer before I start at UW. I’ll be living with my friends and fellow Berkman Cooperation Group members Aaron Shaw and Dennis Tennen.

I would love to make connections and meet people in both places so, if you would like to meet up, please get in contact.

Syndicated 2013-06-08 20:22:09 (Updated 2013-06-08 20:23:10) from copyrighteous

The Cost of Inaccessibility at the Margins of Relevance

I use RSS feeds to keep up with academic journals. Because of an undocumented and unexpected feature (bug?) in my (otherwise wonderful) free software newsreader NewsBlur, many articles published over the last year were marked as having been read before I saw them.

Over the last week, I caught up. I spent hours going through abstracts and downloading papers that looked interesting or relevant to my research. Because I did this for hundreds of articles, it gave me an unusual opportunity to reflect on my journal reading practices in a systematic way.

On a number of occasions, there were potentially interesting articles in non-open access journals that neither MIT nor Harvard subscribes to and that were otherwise not accessible to me. In several cases where the research was obviously important to my work, I made an interlibrary request, emailed the papers’ authors for copies, or tracked down a colleague at an institution with access.

Of course, articles that look potentially interesting from the title and abstract often end up being less relevant or well executed on closer inspection. I tend to cast a wide net, skim many articles, and put them aside when it’s clear that the study is not for me. This week, I downloaded many of these possibly relevant papers to, at least, give a skim. But only if I could download them easily. On three or four occasions, I found inaccessible articles at this margin of relevance. In these cases, I did not bother trying to track down the articles.

Of course, what appear to be marginally relevant articles sometimes end up being a great match for my research and I will end up citing and building on the work. I found several suprisingly interesting papers last week. The articles that were locked up have no chance at this.

When people suggest that open access hinders the spread of scholarship, a common retort is that the people who need the work have or can finagle access. For the papers we know we need, this might be true. As someone with access to two of the most well endowed libraries in academia who routinely requests otherwise inaccessible articles through several channels, I would have told you, a week ago, that locked-down journals were unlikely to keep me from citing anybody.

So it was interesting watching myself do a personal cost calculation in a way that sidelined published scholarship — and that open access publishing would have prevented. At the margin of relevance to ones research, open access may make a big difference.

Syndicated 2013-05-19 16:00:05 (Updated 2013-05-20 15:18:41) from copyrighteous

Sounds Like a Map

I love maps — something that became clear to me when I was looking at the tag cloud of my bookmarks a few years back. One of my favorite blogs (now a book) is Frank Jabobs’ Strange Maps.

So it’s no coincidence that a number of my favorite MIT Mystery Hunt puzzles are map based. Trying to connect the two worlds, I sent Jacobs a write-up of the hunt and of a particularly strange sound-based map puzzle called White Noise that I worked with Don Armstrong to solve in the 2006 hunt. While I wasn’t paying attention, Jacobs did a very nice writeup of my writeup of the puzzle for Strange Maps!

Syndicated 2013-05-15 15:15:48 (Updated 2013-05-15 16:50:57) from copyrighteous