Search and Research
By Kevin
Looking Up the Web
It has been a long time since I wrote something about handling school work and such. I've been working on a couple of articles for some external parties and doing quite a lot of research and writing. The experience can be frustrating and tiring as I plow through loads of data, informative material and readings and then get lost in bits of thoughts here and there, never settling down to write. Such is research, you ask a few simple questions that you expect could be answered with a sentence or two but end up having loads of related answers and information that leads you to the fact that answers you're looking for is way more complex. Then you realise you have got to put together evidence for each of your claims and explanations. People were asking me how I manage all that stuff, I told them that you've got to work out a plan somehow.
So in this article, I'd be discussing my method of planning writing and research. It's by no means a definitive answer to managing your research or school projects but it might be an option you'd like to choose. I'm writing very generally about the kind of information research that leads to writing a paper/article; the sort that doesn't require you to don on a lab coat and hold up test-tubes.
Ultimate Tool
I recommend that before you start using Google, lay out some fundamental questions your paper/article would answer or specific information it will provide. It can be as general as an overview to a topic, or as specific as the number of petrol kiosk in a particular town. After listing them out, mark out the more specific questions and then hunt for the data first. These are usually the data sets you are going to use to introduce a particular claim or to support your theories. If there's no such data available then you can find other proxy indicators or try and switch the type of evidence. It is important that you start off checking for the availability of the data you need or whatever you're going to write would be groundless anyways.
After gathering the data you need, hunt for general articles on the topic that you are working on. These are the articles that refer to other more specific sources for information, or sites like Answers.com and Wikipedia. They serve as a directory for the topic and also to alert you or anything about the issue/topic that you might have overlooked. Often, these can also be blog entries that link up articles of related topic, much like the ones on ERPZ. When you're clear you have a general idea of the topic and know briefly the issues involved, start planning your writing, listing the arguments, the progression of arguments and the sequence you present information to make your case. Often, some information you will need to provide are things you are not necessarily aware of, perhaps the revenue of a particular firm, the market share in an industry, or the response of a CEO to a recent affair. These are the stuff you didn't initially set out to include but subsequently find rather significant.
Armed with the plan, start searching specifically for the information you need and formulate/sharpen your arguments according to these information. Unknowingly, you have actually slashed down the amount of content that you've read. By using general articles as signposts for your planning, you have drawn up the parameters of your research, something difficult when you've not read up anything or done any research. This explains the preliminary research into key and essential data you need as well as the general articles to get you started. The rest of your writing would build around these anchors that you've found in the beginning.
Then, follow through your plan as you write. This works for any volume of research, those that takes days to weeks and possibly months. For the ones where data sets have to be built from scratch either through ripping apart official statistics or carrying out your own surveys, the process would be placed between preliminary research and the ultimate planning. So happy searching and re-searching!
Sites & Wares
By Kevin
Macheist rocks!
It's been a while since ERPZ featured any Lifehack Tools and lately, I've found quite a lot of useful stuff so it would be great to share with readers and GTD enthusiasts.
Dropbox – File sharing/synchronization, online storage tool. Extremely useful for people with multiple computers and files to be shared between them.
Macheist – Mac Community that raise funds for charity and give you lots of great Mac Ware at amazing prices (sometimes free too).
Ninite.com – Multi-Apps installer; allows you to choose from a list of important "must-install" applications to be installed all at once on your computer. Especially useful when you just get a new computer or formatted your PC and want to have your favourite softwares installed fast.
Growl – Mac Notification tool, it’s basically an alert programme that seamlessly integrate with your mac and several other popular programmes.
Picnik – In case you haven't realised, there's are web-based image-editing tools and Picnik just happens to stand out particularly because it is speedy and extremely user friendly.
Quicksilver – It's not easy to describe what Quicksilver does exactly but it's basically a graphical shell that allows you to perform stuff on your Mac more quickly.
Cost of Being Easy-going
By Kevin
If you're easy-going, and the story here sounds rather familiar to you; take comfort that you're on the right path and life is going to work out well for you.
No problem!
When you were going out for a snack and your mum makes you run an errand to some supermarket further up the street to get some rice? Being easygoing you decided to agree and seeing that, your sister tells you to pass a parcel to her boyfriend who lives in the next street. You might as well, since you're not exactly carrying anything for now. You carry the bulky parcel and pass the snack shop, thinking you should get the snack later; you go up to your sister's boyfriend's place and ring the bell - no one answers.
You wonder why you even agreed to walk an extra 100m or so to get rice for your mum in the first place. You called your sister and she says you'll have to wait for about 10 minutes for her boyfriend to reach home so you decided to wait, now regreting that you didn't get the snack before arriving at the place. Her boyfriend comes, and took the parcel and tried to tip you but you kindly declined.
You reach the supermarket only to realise that there's only 10kg sized rice left on the shelves and your mum confirms that she'll need you to buy it anyways because there's no more rice at home. You lug the 10kg nylon sack and pass the snack store, drag the sack into the store to get your snack. The miser boss says he has no change and you will either have to sacrifice your change or walk away without the snack if you don't have the right amount. Only then, you realised you should have accepted the tip from your sister's boyfriend.
Back at home your mum and sister thank you, but you wonder if your efforts should have earned you much more than a word of thanks. The overpriced snack don't quite serve as consolation either.
I spent some time wondering, why do people who are easy-going always end up getting on the bad end of every deal while those fussy snobs always gets to go scot free from work, hassle, errands and trouble? I'm not exactly easygoing but I found that in any environment, relatively easygoing people almost always definitely end up doing the bulk of the work and suffer from the majority of necessary trouble.
Use a prop to vent it
I grew up in a family with a fussy sister who is picky about food, particular about cleanliness and extremely paranoid about people moving her stuff around. And most of the time, I'm 'forced' to give in, letting her eat the rare stuff she loves to eat (despite those being my favourites too) and making way on our common table for her stuff. Using her powerful tools of complaining, whining and sometimes weeping, she pushes work, chores and various little errands around and often over to me.
Yes, so why? It turns out that applying economic thinking about incentives works great on this matter. When you're easygoing, you have less incentives than others to push chores/work away to others; in other words, you would rather do the work yourself than spend the effort trying to find someone else to settle it. For those who are fussy and going all out to slack, they'd have more incentives to force someone else to take up the chore; they'd rather sacrifice a friendship, be unpopular amongst their friends and waste energy flaring up than to do the work themselves. There, you've got the equilibrium - the slacker spends his energy-emotion currency convincing the easygoing dude to do chore while the easygoing dude expends his energy-emotion currency to complete the task.
Alternative outcomes are usually worse off for both parties. In an event when the easygoing guy accidentally manages to push the chore to the slacker; the slacker ends up feeling frustrated, does a bad job, complain wildly, leaving the easygoing guy feeling guilty, and sad that he upset the slacker.
So if you're easygoing and wondering why you've taken over a chore or duty from your friend who needs to go on a date with his girlfriend, you know you're not entirely losing out.
Reading Habits
By Kevin
Piling Up
As books in my home piles up and I am increasingly unable to keep up with finishing the stacks of library books I borrow almost on a weekly basis, I can't help but write something about reading habits; the selection of reading materials, how to go about reading them and what sort of benefits you should be expecting. More importantly, I have to explain what sort of problems you should avoid.
There is way too many means to categorize books but they fall into 'fiction' and 'non-fiction' generally. I am a strongly non-fiction person but I'm not going to ramble on the merits of non-fiction and such. The thing about non-fiction is that they are generally not attention-sustaining for long and that means things can get boring very quickly and you'll have to be able to sustain your interest in the book. Fiction, on the other hand is usually flowing smoothly from one chapter to next most authors have decided that a page break between them would be way too disruptive.
Fiction
Self-sustaining Fiction
Therefore, choose fiction when you need to entertain yourself and prefer to use up less energy paying special attention to what the author has to say. The descriptive words of fiction will just diffuse into your mind as images (accurately perceived or not) and the storyline will flutter pass you with its ups and downs. If the fiction is good, you'll find yourself emotionally drawn towards the characters and their circumstances. Your attention, in other words, would be naturally occurring, something that requires little efforts because the ease of visualization and imagination facilitates the involvement in the contents of the fiction. At times, skipping a couple of paragraph won't even cause you to miss out on anything in the story. And if you're lucky, the story is probably beautiful, like The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger or abstract and deep with loads to learn about like Life of Pi by Yann Martel.
These books are best read while babysitting a passive kid who loves to play on his own, when you're trying to skive from work at your workplace, while waiting for your boss in the conference room before a meeting (especially for bosses who don't require you to look busy) and more. Fictions are generally treated as entertainment and plenty of people read them on board buses and trains just to make the journey to work or anywhere else shorter. Unless your English is pathetic relative to the standard of text you've chosen, the process of reading fiction can be rather mindless. Of course, there are more exciting and information packed fiction like the ones Dan Brown writes and some others with such long list of characters you'll be better off jotting down on paper who is who.
Non-Fiction Pop
Loaded with Info Tidbits
Non-fiction popular books are a good choice for those willing to give up a little more attention and energies to entertain oneself while also picking up loads of interesting information about the world that you would otherwise ignore. These books are hard to read in presence of friends who wants to strike a conversation with you but immensely entertaining when you're along in the MRT (for Singaporeans, subway for Americans and the tube for Brits), on-board buses or in a cafe sipping coffee. Now these are the books I'll read most of the time, especially in the area of my interests - Economics! The tidbits of information you gained from these books are going to take you a long way through conversations with different sorts of people, an array of writing works you might engage yourself in or just topics you can cook up and share at a family dinner. Robert H. Frank's series of 'Economic Naturalist' books are great for both students of Economics and the general audience. Of course, I would recommend Tim Harford as well given the many entries with links to his blog and books. Popular science books works the same way - Richard P Feynman have been writing them in the 90s, when the ordinary folks became amused by scientific experiments of all sorts and everyone were hungry for knowledge (at least in most of the Western World). Books on social trends by Malcolm Gladwell and James Surowiecki would probably interest you greatly in the same way.
I usually call these books coffee table books because they're best read when you've spare time for leisure stuff but don't want to be too active. It's best suited as a companion in Starbucks besides the Cappuccino you'll buy. It's fine reading on trains, cars and buses as well but you will have to be a little more interested in case you decide to doze off.
Non-Fiction Reference/Study
Finally, there's the non-fiction serious books that would require undivided attention with serious note-taking. For me, these are economics reference books, heavier books on business and management as well as some textbooks. These are the books that would take up loads of your time just with wondering what a certain paragraph or line means. And these are best reserved for reading in quiet places and when you have plenty of time.
Read these on a table, with a notebook and a pen or pencil, preferably with a technical terms dictionary with you. A highlighter might sometimes come useful. Ensure that the lighting is good around you so that it keeps your eyelids wide open and prepare a good hot drink with a coaster on the table beside you - you're unlikely to be leaving the table any time soon anyways.
You probably have the most to gain from the last type of books, Non-fiction References or Study sort of books but that is the kind of materials you read the least. Fortunately, there is a range of other sort of reading materials you can start on - The Economist, Fortune, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, and many more. These are a cross between the Non-fiction Pop with the Non-fiction Reference and will offer you enriching information without the need to take particular notes and such. Well, with so many choices, choose something you like in each category and get down to cultivating a habit to read!
Planned Reading
One key problem is getting into the trap of wanting to read everything and I often reach that stage of walking into the library hunting for books even when I have loads of them at home unread. There's something satisfying about being able to borrow a book you hope to read and anticipating its contents. So as far as possible, try to plan your reading. Limit active reading materials to a few (it's usually about 5 for me, which is quite a lot; they include a latest issue of The Economist and Fortune, 2 Non-fiction Pop books and a serious Non-fiction book or motivational book).
Don't Force Yourself
If a book is way too high level for you, just drop it. It's not worth the time. When you realise that a writing uses too much references and terms you know nuts about, it's better you go read up on them before getting back to your book/article. You'll gain little finishing a book cover to cover when you don't understand it; worst, you risk losing interest in the issue. It is better to read materials with a little bit of difficult stuff but coupled with loads of friendly information and those that you're interested in; they act as bridges to lead you to higher level materials.
Having said all that, one need not get too technical about reading at the end of the day - when you happen to lay you hands on the materials, just read it!
Taking Notes
By Kevin
We all take notes during lectures; I've got friends who practically pen down everything the lecturer says and others who merely fills up blanks in the notes. I'm pretty sure neither constitutes note taking so I decided to explore what taking notes mean in education and learning. My questions was; how do you take notes that would benefit you in learning the stuff of interest?
Do it right
Lectures
At lectures, I found that the best was stick to the stuff given, filling in blanks wherever necessary and taking note of things not mentioned in the notes given. Don't allow the note-taking to distract you from learning during the lecture. Listening to the teacher and observing the projected slides or images or even looking at the demonstrations that the lecturers are showing are way more important than getting the notes down. The fact is that you're going to remember things more clearly when you focus and not when you write them down. Of course, information locked in paper has their kind of permanence but then you're compromising on some subtle details in those information if you're trying to get down everything during the lecture.
I believe that any knowledge or information impressed upon the mind in the form of the booming voice of a lecturer or the visual memory of a live demonstration in the lecture hall of an experiment would be way stronger than something you try to memorise off a sheet of paper. Besides, these strong impressions tied to your lecturers, professors and tutors would give you the confidence in the information you manage to lock within your mind. Information you read off notes or memorise from textbook would provide less confidence because you would have doubts about your own means of interpretation or your reading of the stuff when you're at exam situation.
Revision
Most people I know don't take notes during revisions. Revisions are the time to read through notes you've written, they say. Wrong! The thing about writing notes is that it's not so much for your reading pleasure later but for the act of doing it. The act of writing notes (in the right way, a point to be elaborated later) actually helps you absorb and remember the concepts. The idea is to transfer facts and knowledge into your mind and not on to another piece of paper. The paraphasing, the need to look up dictionaries for technical terms you're unsure about, the work involved in finding out what each concept or theory seeks to explain are all part of the process of note-writing when you're revising for your exams or tests and these are exactly the same things that will contribute to your learning.
And when you take notes during revision, synthesize materials and knowledge you obtain from different sources - the textbooks, the reference materials, your readings, lecture notes and the informal stuff you've written down yourself. Write things down because they guide you to learn the concept/subject in question and not because they've been printed on the sources where you try to copy them from.
The Right Way
After being a student for so many years, I've come to believe that there's a 'right' way to take notes. First, take down only concise materials and not chunks off textbooks, readings and lecture notes. Next, write only things you understand and find out things that you don't during the process of note taking. In other words, get beside a computer and google stuff you're unsure about as you try to take notes from your readings and so on. Just don't become distracted by the computer and end up being on Facebook. Finally, draw diagrams whenever necessary but don't get too concerned with trying to beautify your notes and take hours sketching brilliant artworks - the whole point is to practice applying, penning the stuff you learn.
A final note is that your notes should ideally be comprehended only by people who are already familiar with the things taught in class or have already read through everything that you've read to compile the information. Your notes should not be a duplicate of everything explained on your lectures and end up becoming another textbook of sorts.
Here to Stay…
By Kevin
Books: No Way Man!
I love books, and I guess it's obvious. In fact it's not just about reading the text on them or the intellect of the contents; I love every bit of it: the pages, the preface, the introductions, acknowledgements, the blip which almost all books would have and the book covers (hard or paperback) - in short, everything about it.
Like Megan Buskey, on It is possible to read anything serious on computer?, I'll be real sad to see real physical books go but on another hand, I'm actually encouraging people to read on computer more by starting this blog - and I'm hoping people would read serious stuff on the computer when I write here. Implicitly, I believe that news bites, short pieces of contents here and there can be published and read online but at the end of the day, long writing ought to be enjoyed on books. I do loads of parallel reading (that is, reading many different books at the same time, hopping from one to another when I get bored and so on; it works great with non-fiction because they don't exactly hold on to your attention as much as fiction), which means that I would miss out the fun of picking up another book and looking at where I last ended off if I used a device like Kindle.
Nicholson Baker, New Yorker contributor also doubts Kindle is anything superior to the good old paper-based books in his recent writing, 'A New Page'. In his account of his experience with Kindle, he cited the influence of advertisements, the story behind the Kindle development, the pros and cons of the device and the various competitors. It was a long account although not the longest I ever got to read on New Yorker, written in a story-like manner that flowed continuously - the usual New Yorker style.
But Kindle still represents a great leap from the past. In 2000, The Economist published a survey on E-Entertainment and pondered over the reasons one could spend hundreds of bucks on a device to read a limited pool of publications available and in a dozen different kind of formats. It cited the chicken-and-egg problem facing commercialization of e-books, problems with copyrights, and that the only advantage the e-books had over their off-screen counterparts was that most were free and concluded that e-books were something not many would want.
5 years later, The Economist reported on the rise of digitalized copies of books made available online (though often incomplete) by the tech giants like Google. They made no mention about e-book reader technologies although they discussed the fact that the ability to search the content of published materials is a good thing for publishers since users could preview book contents over the net and be enticed to make their orders.
Kindle is a great success today to be able to find the market of people who don't mind purchasing the gadget and to fork out just a little below the printed book prices on those virtual gray text on the gray screen of their Kindle. Nevertheless, it will probably have a long way to go before even barely resembling a book or replicating the experience of reading a real one - books are here to stay, at least within my lifetime I hope.
Best Before
By Kevin
I remember a time when I opened a Kit-Kat Chunky in my fridge to consume because I was feeling a little hungry and that chocolate bar seem to have been lingering around for a really long time (a sign that no one in the family claims ownership to it; besides, my Dad is a real sucker for chocolates and if it was his it would be gone by then). Unfortunately after eating half a bar I saw the 'Best Before' date on the wrapper I was holding and to my horror the date passed a month ago.
.jpg "KitKat")
No Expiry
I promptly discarded the wrapper with whatever left of the chocolate bar and pray I wouldn't suffer a stomachache later. Fortunately it didn't happen and for a while, I wonder how chocolates really turn bad since they are so sweet. In fact, I now realise 'Best Before' dates are really not so important per se, after reading Lifehacker's Read and Understand Your Food Expiration Labels; I'm convinced we shouldn't take those dates that seriously. The suggestion that canned food can last forever, unfortunately, is quite shocking...
Brain Hack
By Kevin
Real good stuff for those who have a flexible schedule to accomplish a hell lot of stuff, Dustin Curtis teaches you how to sleep to maximize your activity time in the day.
Being Literate
By Kevin
Literacy is commonly defined as being able to read and write; I'm sure readers would all consider themselves literate. This entry is actually for this wikiHow article on 'How to Become Literate', which really doesn't have anything to do with learning to read and write but more with cultivating the habits of reading to appear knowledgeable on a wide variety of subjects. I've personally exposed myself to a vast array of subjects in my readings and I found what this article describe to be very true and helpful for those who are trying to get themselves to read and profit from it.
Some of the advice there includes:
1) Just get yourself to start reading, regardless of the material you pick up, as long as they inject some form of information, storyline into your mind.
2) Then progress to harder materials and read short, newsy articles if you can't stand long novels.
3) Make it a point to talk about things you've read; it can be deliberate or unintentional.
4) If possible, make notes about the things you read, take down quotes you like.
The starter reading list they provided is pretty limited though. Go to your bookstores' Best Seller shelf and see what they have to offer. Recently my friend picked up 'Wuthering Heights' by Emily Bronte and was positively shocked by the complexity of the language arising from the fact that descriptions used were the very classical ones used more than hundred years ago. So do make sure you browse the first couple of pages or at least paragraphs before you pick the book up. As a start, choose something you believe you'll enjoy very much. After that, you might like to challenge yourself (like I always do) by reading something pitched at a higher level; for me, I pushed this frontier by forcing myself to read The Economist articles around the age of 15 to 16. Even when I don't understand the economic concepts or literature references in their articles, I make the most of my abilities and eventually read up enough of other areas to complement the articles from the magazine.
Students trying hard to appear smart or at least just to improve GP, there's really only one means with no short-cuts or substitutes for it - READ!
Calendars
By Kevin
Somehow people are preoccupied with time and dates since quite a while ago. Ancient people have been obsessed with building clocks that doesn't stray out of time, that tells the time of the day accurately and much interest have been vested in calendars, making sure that your Sunday is not actually my Monday and that the number of days in a week on mine corresponds to yours. We often take civilization for granted these days and it takes these fundamental developments in standardization of time, calendars, days of a week and days of a year to get people to coordinate, cooperate and collaborate. And that's why planners are nothing but calendars blended with a notebook.
These days however, things comes on a screen would have more functionality and can be improved by the 'manufacturers' more easily and so I would usually go online for my planner solutions. Long ago Yahoo! Calendar would be good for slotting in a couple of important events and then you are reminded if you request to be. That was a time when using a planner online isn't that serious an affair because it was tedious to enter different details in so many fields on the 'event' forms and everything seem to be treated like some huge event on the online calendar even a gentle reminder to shop for ant traps for the family seem to appear like a big affair on my email inbox.
These days when the pressure to digitalize my information, including more private ones like planner activities breech my threshold I decided to hunt for a good online solution. 
And I stumbled on Google Calendar. The first thing that impresses me is how its use of AJAX allows the web application to behave almost just like a calendar application on my computer (stuff like Outlook Calendar or iCal). And of course, it'd be a good idea to make use of Google Chrome to run the Calendar off an Application Shortcut, making it even more like an application on your computer.
Of course at times you decide you need an offline copy of things just to ensure you have backup or access to your calendar when you can't access the Internet so readily. It's definitely useful to synchronize the Google Calendar information with your local iCal or Outlook and then make them synchronize with your Palm as well and it'd be perfect although it seems quite a messy process.
You'd ask, wait a minute: I do have the Palm or smartphone synchronization software and it does work with Outlook or iCal but how to get Google Calendar's data over to these desktop applications in the first place? The solution is Calgoo.
Calgoo Connect is a powerful software that helps you get the job done and perhaps more. Because it allows you to synchronize across Outlook/iCal and Google Calendar, you can synchronize data between desktop computers as well, from your office to your online account and then synchronize the data over to your home computer from your online account. This is an additional data store besides using your handheld device to deliver the information. The initial process may be a little daunting and beware of messing up your calendars but once you get the hang of things, it should be fine. Be sure to set your time zones and dates correctly because that is always the reason for your calendar getting messed up and it's not a joking matter specially if you are into efficiency.