Wednesday, June 30, 2010

World Cup and Politics

Wondering who to root for now that we're in World Cup stage 2? I posted this on Buzz this morning and here's a re-post:


The Netherlands - Because of legalized prostitution, bike culture, and beautiful ball movement.
Brazil - Because they're world beaters.
Paraguay - Because football is their national sport.
Ghana - Because they're the last African team left.
Germany and Argentina - No sentiment here, if you are a betting man, this is where you put your money.
Spain - Because David Villa is the last secretly great football player.
Uruguay - Because they are the true underdogs, and really no one will be rooting for them.


Pick a reason, and work backwards from there to find your team.

In movie reviews, my sweetie and I watched the Weather Underground last night. It was... disturbing. Good, but I had dreams about it and they were sad. It's a historical/political documentary, so if you don't go in for that sort of thing, maybe don't rent. But if you do, it's good, like I said, just sad.

For somewhat related fun, do you know where you stand on the political ideology spectrum? Political Compass gives a test that is actually pretty interesting. I'm right next to the Dalai Lama, near Gandhi: left libertarian. Posting online about your politics is like posting your weight. Kinda scary actually.

em

Thursday, June 10, 2010

EndNote X3

I attended a training this morning on EndNote X3 that was offered on campus, and I've spent most of the rest of my day building up my EndNote Library. Right now I have 45 references stored!


How cool is this software?! I cannot believe how excellent it is to have this citation management tool that is best friends with MS Word. X3 has tons of citation styles built directly into the program. For example, in my papers I cite with Chicago style, so I just set the controls to Chicago 15th B, and when I go to insert a citation into my paper, voila! It appears in perfect format.

Also, importing the references into EndNote has been pretty simple, since most of the academic articles that I have been using have options right on the sites, like JStor or SagePub, which allow you to just click a button and import the citation off the web directly into your software.

If you get a chance, seek it out. There are versions for Mac and PC, and if your school is like mine, you might even be able to get a copy free!

For all you grad students out there, do you use this? I LOVE it!