libroraptor

libroraptor , 2 days ago

@CoinOfNote @numismatics @histodons I think that I might still have some of those from a one-day layover at Narita. "五円" (go[y]en) kinda gives it away, though.

A curiosity of English is that it calls the currency "yen" even though, over the decades during which this coin has been issued, the "ye" syllable has vanished from modern Japanese.

What does the gearwheel mean? I'm wondering whether it signifies irrigation machinery between the water and the rice. Or it's not actually a gear?

libroraptor , 1 month ago

@ml @academicchatter @plantscience Keep a notebook, made from paper. Write in it. Draw in it. Think in it. Remember in it. Ideate in it. A5 is my favourite size, unlined because pre-printed lines interfere too much with sketching.

libroraptor , 5 months ago

@inquiline @academicchatter @sts there's a big tradition of looking to Gibson's framing of environmental psychology to talk about affordances. But most of it, at least in education-oriented computing, does not use the word "affordance" in the same way that Gibson does. Current writers often say "affordance" to mean something like "features" regardless of whether there is any interface design to make those features available or to guide users to finding and appropriately activating them.

libroraptor , 6 months ago

@FantasticalEconomics @academicchatter Nobody? There are plenty of desperate intellectuals who'll take rotten jobs. We know this because so many already do. For some, being able to work in just one institution instead of commuting all over a city (or further) for four adjunct gigs, and even having a bit of money to save afterwards is sure to feel like an improvement and like potential to get into the system, maybe even to fix it from within – or at least as a stepping-stone to elsewhere.

libroraptor , 6 months ago

@FantasticalEconomics @academicchatter P.S. surely they voted "to impose sanctions", not "to sanction" like the article says ... or so I hope!

libroraptor , 8 months ago

@ml @academicchatter I don't think that there's even a good comparison of grad schools within a country! So much comes down to the apples and oranges problem.

My own experience of looking for accessibility is that you can't trust anything that they tell you – institution-level claims can be wonderful, but implementation is often hyper-local, and when the marketing office makes a big deal of it, it can be because they're in the confession phase – solutions won't begin for years.

libroraptor , 8 months ago

@ml @academicchatter The best that I could glean was by visiting incognito, and watching the campus in the same way as I'd run a classroom observation – document the terrain, who's there, what people do. Graffiti and temporary signage and postures and informal interactions and background noise speak so much more informatively than anything else I've ever found.

I've left that line of work now. You make me wish that I'd written it up when I was doing it – it could be helpful.

libroraptor , 9 months ago

@wynkenhimself @bringolo @bookhistodons If there's reason to forgo abbreviations of Latin words, it may be best to quit Latin altogether. I get the impression that most people don't translate "e.g." to "exempli gratia" – hence the unfortunate interchangeability of "e.g." with "i.e.".

Then there's "ect". There's surely no way people are translating that to Latin.

Recto & verso: I prefer superscript because I find it easier to read – the letter doesn't get so jumbled in with the numeral.

libroraptor , 9 months ago

@wynkenhimself @JeffreyJDean @bookhistodons Opposite for me because cognitive deficit makes the visual processing harder without the extra cue.

Maybe we need to find some reading experts to run tests on people with reading disorders, this time using technical texts rather than common newspaper and pop fiction specimens.

libroraptor , 9 months ago

@wynkenhimself @JeffreyJDean @bookhistodons Imagine it in manuscript, having to call a palaeographer in to ask, "is this r or v?" 😜

libroraptor , 9 months ago

@wynkenhimself @JeffreyJDean @bookhistodons

I made a LaTeX macro for when I needed lots of them:
\newcommand{\fol}[2]
{
#1\textsuperscript{#2}
}

One could embellish that with e.g. smallcaps in the superscript, or adding "fol." to the notation.

In manuscript I'm fine because my r and v look nothing like each other. But had I been schooled in an italic-based hand rather than a roundhand, the outcome could be most unfortunate.

libroraptor , 9 months ago

@JeffreyJDean @wynkenhimself @bookhistodons it's true on screen, too, but you have to look quite hard to find those typefaces, and sometimes the software just overrides them anyway and gives you a shrunken one that attracts undue attention for being the wrong weight – same with faked smallcaps.

There are unicode blocks for superior and inferior glyphs.

libroraptor , 9 months ago

@JeffreyJDean @wynkenhimself @bookhistodons

Yes – Word is a blight on literacy.

As an editor now that I've left academia, I see that even the spelling checker and grammar checker have become "power features" that clients think not for them.

Microsoft has worked hard to teach people not to see those red and green squiggles – and hence blinded them to smaller details and all that we convey through them.

libroraptor , 11 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

@spika @actuallyautistic I hate those kiosks because they organise information in weird ways – no doubt to coerce certain categories of group purchase and to make them quick.

But I also hate ordering at the counter because there's no easy way to see the menu. I hardly ever go to McDonald's so takes me ages to make sense of all their silly product names.

There's nothing easy about that place at all (and similarly Starbucks, Subway) unless you are already their target market.

libroraptor , 11 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

@spika @actuallyautistic About a year ago I edited a PhD thesis on last-mile commerce configurations and, ever since then, I've been seeing those same coercive tricks in just about every customer service display. They know what they want you to buy, and they also know what they don't want you to buy. The system's there to manipulate you into their choice, not to enable your choice.

So, if you don't think the way they expect you to, ordering, returns, even asking questions all get hard.

libroraptor , 11 months ago

@natalie @academicchatter @phdlife @phdstudents

I'm an editor. I advocate writing from your notes, not from your head. That way, seeing your notes tells you up-front how much material you have, and you'll gradually get to associate the note pile with the length of the article. (It depends a lot on the size of your handwriting.)

Plus, if your notes are rigorous, you'll have all your refs right there with them and will never have to hunt for the missing one ever again. That can save weeks!

libroraptor , 11 months ago

@natalie @academicchatter @phdlife @phdstudents

Who writes like this? I did when I was inside academia.

This is my pile of notes for a paper about kymographs in medical education from a few years ago.

You sort them into a narrative, then flip through them one by one, converting them into prose as you go. Easier than battling a blank screen.

One of my PhD advisors, John Heilbron, does similarly. And no one says that John's writing is bad.

libroraptor , 1 year ago

@inquiline @academicchatter @ecologies academics get salaries, offices, promotions, computers, libraries, printers, stationery, and often admin assistants and research assistants, and sometimes peer writing critics and editors, for doing this sort of work – is there anything that could be done to help the artists, ghastly hybrids and other potential writers who don't have that resourcing? It might increase the response to your wonderfully open-minded invitation.