Today's lecture was somehow useful. I think intention to entertain people is what many scholars lack. when I watched presentations done by Japanese companies at international video game conference, i felt what they lack is that they don't know how to catch attention of audience and entertain them. In contrast to them, other western companies did better for this aspects. Also as for the academic papers, scholarly writers seem do not care about its presentation. It doesn't necessarily mean their arguments are bad but even though the argument is good, it's meaningless if people do not read. I think getting attention is important skill that makes difference and anyone can learn how to do it. Thinking about it, it is similar to looks v.s. personality which corresponds with the way of presentation and the contents. Psychologists say first impression of a person has significant effect on one's evaluation for his/her ability. The similar case may be applied to the writings or presentation.

For any application I get recommended, I always become skeptical to install them mainly because of my inclination toward simplicity in computer environment. Picasa is not the exception. After the lecture, I wasn't really convinced to install it, wondering if it stays in memory and uses up resource (by the way my computer is super slow) or messes up my files. I checked its feature and turns out it's like an integration of picture editor and google drive app or dropbox. app. What Picasa does can be done by other softwares or cloud services. The advantage is that it integrates features done in separate software into one software. Well, so far I don't really take pictures and handle image files daily so the software isn't really for me, but oneday if the need comes, I will install it.

Form Test

http://www.zotero.org/support/ja/supported_languages

This link explains the way to tweak config of zotero to export sources in English. It takes just a few minutes without any trouble.If you don't want to install new browser this would be a solution. Last semester, I had a chance to write some papers for my sociology class but zotero doesn't support the American Sociological Association's style. I looked for the way to create own style and find the article explains it.

Find and edit CSL citation styles
http://editor.citationstyles.org/about/

Before, a person need to code by hand to create new style but the tool above enable a person to create a style more intuitively. It may look some how difficult especially if a person start to create new style from scratch but by searching similar style, editing wouldn't take much time. Also, the webpage provides more styles than zotero so that the next place to look for style after zotero should be this page.

Prety much of the class time was spent on management of sources in zotero. Especially I get interested in features of tag and related. As we write longer papar and engage in more loosely connected fields of studies, the importance of information management increases. The problem of traditional file management, the folder, is that it is hard for the user to visualise the relationship between items. i.e. One item which discuss about gender bias in literature maybe put in a folder called gender but it can be also categorized as literature. It gets problematic when a person want to reuse the source later. Using tag and linking items will solve the problem. However, tagging and linking is tedius to do. It needs to be done every time we download a source and tadding just one tag is just like using a folder. It is maningful when there are multi tags or its category is diffetent from its folder's category. Other problem about tag is its consistency among them. An inatitution may tag a dissatation as rerigious sociology but you may want tag it as sociology or Newage. So that we need to pay attention to maintain the consistency of the tags. Over all managing informarion is debatable issue. Nither foldet nor tags seems the best way. Folder ends up separated items but tag management is tedious.

Today, Rab showed us the ways to access on-line resources which is not accessible from popular web engines and ways to access visual materials. It is great that we can access to various kinds of information because it increases the possibility to find information we need, but I'm a little overwhelmed by the amount of sources available. Many of them look interesting and instructive so that I reacted to them like spinal reflection, kept adding to them to zotero or my bookshelf in google books, and ended up lengthy list of materials that I need to read.  On my desk, there's a pile of books that I haven't read yet. Internet definitely increases the speed of growth of the pile. With our limited time of study, it is almost impossible to finish them all so we should now consider how to select what we should read or watch.
As for academic journals, finding credible source is not very hard. If they go through peer review, we can assume they can be trusted (there may be the case like Sokal　though) However, as for the visual materials like documentary and youtube videos, making sure their credibility will become more difficult. Documentaries sometimes made overdramatic and ideological.

I like the idea of free writing. People say the best way to improve writing is writing and it is desirable to write as much as one can write. Since I heard that I had been thinking to keep a personal journal but been reluctant to start. Having this blog is a good opportunity for starting the plan. As a college student, we should have a lots of opportunity to write but they are far from free. They must be error free, logically sound, and many other constraints of ho-it-should-be. On the other hand, free writing do not have such rules, so its more like a brainstorm. I just wonder, though, if it really improves my writing. Improvement may hinge on the balance between effort and casualness.