Cybersam's Blog - Day 3 of IAP

Wednesday, January 11, 2006

Day 3 of IAP

Funny... Now that I am more engaged with MIT, my life has just become more interesting - and so the incentive to blog more regularly. Today marks day 3 of my IAP at MIT. Sadoway's Electrochemistry class was, once again, exciting. I struggled with my reading on kinetics and mass transfer of electrochemical reactions last 2 days but I think I have a better grasp of the concepts after today's class.

Other than the for-credit class, today's IAP activities are mostly self-discoveries of a great MIT resource - the library. I checked out an iPod containing some 800 sample tracks that were taken from CDs in the Lewis Music Library. I also attended a workshop on EndNote, a powerful software tool allowing writers to create and to manage a database of bibliographic references. It can be integrated to Microsoft Word and Latex to generate citations and bibliographies seamlessly in one's manuscript. Better yet, attendees were taught tricks to download references to published literatures from various journal databases via the MIT library. Great class. What I have learned today will probably save me hours of work in citations and bibliography generation in my future thesis and papers. I urge anyone who is or will work on a thesis to attend this workshop.

1/11/2006 7:28:16 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00) Comments [2] School

1/12/2006 9:30:31 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)

I think EndNote is WAY over-rated. Collecting citations into a bibliography is just not that hard a task. The EndNote team does an excellent sales and marketing job, kudos to them, and it's not a bad tool, it's just not that necessary for many research works. Of course, libraries and the like are constantly afraid of not being needed at all, and to their credit they have embraced a number of these technologies which they teach as part of making themselves relevant again.

Anyways, I'm glad you enjoyed the class, as it can never hurt to learn a new tool in case you do need it some day. And I hope to see a demo some day of an electrochemical reaction from you, something you learned in that Sadoway class ;)

Yoav Shapira |yoavsAT NOSPAMcomputer dot org

1/12/2006 10:19:43 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)

Function wise, I don't think EndNote is over-rated. Seriously, I think I am going to be very productive with this tool. What is over-rated is the price. It is not cheap, they are charging $150 for a copy and there's no student pricing. Ridiculous!!!

Speaking of Prof. Sadoway, you should check out his video lectures at http://web.mit.edu/3.091/www/ (you need MIT certificates). It’s a MIT chemistry 101 course. He is a great lecturer and the videos are both entertaining and insightful. Watch the first and last lecture of the series. The last video explains electrochemistry and fuel cell. Continue watching the video till the very end - it’s both funny and heart-warming.

Cybersam