Retroid Raving

Anyone else ever wondered why some obscure Web-hosting company from another country should be advertising on the slip road off the M3 into UCT from the south?

I know I have...from long before there were such companies, and I used to come from the south.

But thanks to XKCD, all is revealed.

Find a gem like the Web-based Endnote referencing system via the UCT Libraries site, that is: it is cross-package (ie: supports Macs, about which, more later), integrates with Word up to 2010 version, and your browser of choice (Firefox seems the best option), and (best of all) is free to use for UCT staff, even if you are logging in via EZProxy!!

How many folk know about this?  Was it just me, labouring on in the dark and paying for my own software, or is everyone ignorant of this?

Now the way I found this was, I was trying to find out which bibliographic packages support Macs, me having having gone and got one and all (Mac Mini, since you ask B-) - and the answer was, precious few, and definitely not my 20-year package of choice, Research Information System's Reference Manager.   I do not even mention UCT's publicised offering of RefWorks, which it puts in the shade - which is probably where it deserves to be: I tried to demo that as an alternative to individualised PC-based software last year, and just gave up because it was so clunky.

So I looked at the comparison of offerings, trying to figure out how I would manage to keep my PC-based software and databases, and transplant to Mac, without spending a lot of money - and was struck by the mention of EndNote, which was the only one I knew anything about which supported Macs.  And happens to be in the same stable as Reference Manager.  And while I was mulling, I saw that there was a version which supported "Win, Mac & Linux", and thought, how could that be?

Turns out this was EndNote Web.  With this, your bibliographies and reference collections are accessed via Web - which we can even DO in real time these days, thanks to bandwidth increase (cue: applause for ICTS and partners), and has Word plugins like "Cite While You Write" (CWYW) that made RefMan so useful...and, it dawned on me, would be ideal for a PC-Mac transition, as I could use the same references via the Web on two different computers running different OSs...

<RAVE>WHY DID THE STUPID SYSTEM LOG ME OUT WHILE I WAS TYPING AND MAKE ME LOSE HALF OF WHAT I WROTE??  HEY?  HEY??? </RAVE>

... but what made it for me was the words in tiny print at the top of the screen, which I saw by accident:

EndNote Web is a Web-based bibliographic tool that integrates with the ISI Web of Knowledge...

 Really??  Could life really be that simple??  Because, you see, the ISI Web of Knowledge or WoK, is available via UCT Libraries, and off-campus via EZProxy - and is a VERY powerful reference trawler, and incidentally also very useful for the kinds of detailed bibliometric analyses one needs to do for akademic advancement, as well as the guilty private pleasure of calculating one's own h-factor*.

Well, yes and no, as it turns out.  Yes, one is able to access "My EndNote Web" via WoK access; yes, one can do seriously complicated searches and amass databases and reference lists...and no, not that simple, because using these things requires one to (a) have a login at the site (I had one; not sure why...?), (b) download some quite chunky software to make access via Firefox (or IExp) easier, for both PC and Mac, (c) ditto for interfacing with Word on both platforms for CWYW.

Still, I have managed to set up all these things, and to do searches from within EndNote Web, and import reference lists from out of my PC-based Reference Manager 11 onto the Web, and do WoScience searches (better than internal search machine) that include abstracts and citations, for export to EW in the background.  You can also do a multitude of things with the references on site, including having them in separate folders, publishing bibliographies....

All in all, a truly wonderful find - despite the fact it was not so much hidden under a bushel, as down a well in terms of accessibility!

*= like autoGoogling±, only more specialised

±= Googling yourself, idiot!

As I sit here at home with a cat happily flexing claws into my leg, and the new puppy munching on the office chair - hey, it's sabbatical, I am actually working! - checking out photos and accounts of the untimely Fall of the Two Towers (well, not working right now obviously...B-), my mind is inescapably drawn to thoughts of Architecture.

You get the progression, surely?  Towers - buildings - architecture...with the fall of the towers being a metaphor for the demise of the aesthetic, the beautiful, the inspiring...careful, now, careful; that's South of Jammie Steps talk; that way lies Postmodernity, and madness....

OK; back on track: the Cape Crime Gazette Times this am has a wishlist of buildings people in CT would like to see demolished - and the UCT link is strong, strong.  Top of the list appears to be the unfortunate Disa Towers; high on the list also are - in no particular order - the Werdmuller Centre in Claremont and Leo Marquard and Tugwell Residences.  The link that runs strong between them is that they were designed by the same person, who was a UCT professor, and that they both may have had some aesthetic value once, on paper, but as concrete structures are two of the most unfriendly places to use or to live in that I and many others have ever seen or experienced.  In fact, we used to speculate, when elements of the Retroid Kollectiv lived in LM, and their love interest(s) in Tugwell, that in fact the original design had been for an innovative toilet roll holder, and that someone had gotten carried away and expanded it unnecessarily.

To ten storeys, twice.  I mean, one building could be held to be a simple mistake, but two??  With the Werdmuller Centre, that's actually enemy action - which, together with the barren wilderness of undressed concrete that is the UCT Sports Centre, and the collections of buildings that constitute the whole main campuses of the Universities of East Anglia and Zambia, could be held to be crimes against humanity.  But then, those who can, do, and those who can't...design UCT buildings, apparently.

So the Kollectiv is going to hold a competition, along the lines of the Unguide to Campus Statuary, for folk to nominate their most hated UCT building, with reasons why it constitutes an offence to reason or to humanity in general.  The winning entry will be published in View from the North, and the winner will get...will get...well, may feel vindicated and have a warm fuzzy glow for a while.

But they'll still probably have to look at the offensive structure until it falls down from lack of maintenance.

I was fortunate to be at the launch of the UCT Research Report the other evening - yes, fortunate, stop sniggering out there! - both because there was free food and passable drink, and because someone I didn't even know was a UCT alumnus gave the keynote address.  Which was truly wonderful.

Seriously: a UCT business occasion with a wonderfully good speaker AND talk.  I digress here: the last two such launches have been a pleasure; this may (or may not) have something to do with a new DVC Research...?

But anyway: Lee Berger, it was, presently from Wits, who spoke on his and his son's discovery of not only a new hominid fossil, but of a whole new hominid fossil site in a well-explored area near Johannesburg.  Oh, the story was wonderful; his account of how he was possibly the last person on the planet to discover Google Earth, and then used it to map possible cave sites, was legend; the build up to finding the fossils would have made camp-fire story tellers envious - and then the 3-Dimaging of not only a skull, but a whole fossil site, simply took one's breath away.

And what did it for me, was that this was simple Discovery.  Not a hypothesis in sight - he went out and discovered the sh1t out of something.

Man*, I like that.

Ed Rybicki

* = person if you like...