Ross’ PhD Blog Memex

• Currently Listening to: Leonard Cohen — Everybody Knows

Many well-regarded universities are actively putting much of their course material up online so that anyone can pull down audio recordings of lectures and teach themselves (here’s ten universities with free science courses). As someone’s who’s never been able to constrain my interests to only the things I’m supposed to be working on, this is both a blessing and a challenge. On top of Google Tech talks and aforementioned TED conferences, that adds up to hours and hours of terrific educational content to load up an iPod with, both audio and visual.

So far I have been using UC Berkeley’s podcasts and am almost finished “attending” the Introduction to Astronomy course (which has been an excellent way to sate my fascination for the subject since catching The Sky at Night on TV is a non-trivial task). I’m planning on brushing up on my heretofore lacking Economics skills next.

• Currently Listening to: Jeff Buckley — Vancouver

Quizlet is a tremendous little web application for helping you to expand your vocabulary or remember facts like dates and names. It looks particularly useful for learning words in a new language.

The demo video will get you up to speed on the main functionality. All very pretty and impressive, especially considering the site is the work of one guy.

Being as I am ebulliently tendentious about language (I keep a list of “words to use in a sentence before you die”), I’m very happy to have found this. Exultant, you might say.

• Currently Listening to: Barenaked Ladies — It’s All Been Done

A literature review is a standard part of any postgraduate’s endeavours, and usually makes up the majority of your first year or two. A good review sets up the landscape that you’re going to work within, saving you from duplicating effort and allowing you to identify the key players in your field. You don’t necessarily have to reel off a big document summarising your reading, but if you do it’s a fine head start on the first chunk of your thesis.

I had started my lit review last year, but it’s easy to fall into the trap of merely printing and filing papers without having read them. Then, in December at our second annual SRG-fest Joe gave an inspiring talk about structuring a literature review intelligently. Among his suggestions were to choose a handful of key conferences in your area and read every paper published in their proceedings for the last few years. For me, these conferences are places like InfoVis, ICAC, Pervasive and CHI.

Secondly he suggested building up a “mindmap” of the research areas that you’re actively engaging in. This has proven to be a very worthy excercise.

My (intimidating!) PhD mindmap

When drawn up like this my research interests seem both nicely structured but also worryingly broad. And I left out the stuff I’ll likely need to understand but currently have no interest in, like semantics, embedded systems and parallelism. My reading has been branching out a bit recently too; since I’ve started tracking my bookmarks on del.icio.us I discovered that I’m actually more interested in things like sociology and psychology than I thought.

If you imagine all the possible research that could be done in our field as a pie chart, the area I’m going to explore will end up being a thin sliver in that chart. Aaron always said that his job as my supervisor was to keep me anchored in that segment and not wander too far outside of it. Looks like he’s got his work cut out for him.

• Currently Listening to: Tom Roger — Timelock

Time management is becoming an increasing concern around the office, with a number of us turning to David Allen’s highly addictive Getting Things Done methodology. Some basic, seemingly-obvious productivity tips I have picked up over the last few weeks:

• Don’t sit beside Mark.
• One of the fundamental tenets of GTD is to get everything out of your head and onto a todo-list. For me, that todo list needs to be web-accessible so that entries can be added from wherever you are. I use Basecamp, which is almost exactly what I need. Though I’m sure when I’m procrastinating about something or other in the future I will decide to write my own, better version .
• Rationalise the mailing lists you’re subscribed to. Some of the ones I’m on (like our internal SRG-members list) need to be always-on, but others, like the list for Gallery developers, is now delivered to me at the end of the day as a digest of the day’s discussions. This has saved me a lot of time.
• Clear your inbox. I’m a big fan of Merlin Mann’s “Inbox Zero” series (and basically his whole site). It warrants re-reading again and again. Using the two-minute rule and systematically whittling your concerns down mail by mail is highly rewarding, and spares you from having to keep your mail client open all day.

• In terms of email management, I’ve found that a lot of the habits I’d gotten into actually resulted in me spending more time hopelessly wrangling messages. For instance, there is little point in creating a folder for mail from a certain person, or filtering based on words in the subject. I’ve noticed some people in the labs with gigantic hierarchies of nested folders. The time it takes to decide on these partitions, set up filters or manually place mails into these folders, and then maintain that arrangement over time where requirements and priorities are constantly in flux is frightening.

  With the search capabilities of modern email clients, these filtering steps become redundant, as email is much easier to find again by simply dumping them all into a single place and then performing a keyword search on a large folder. There are loads of strategies you could try, but right now I’m trying to minimise the amount of folders I use. The only mail I keep in my inbox are those that I need to reply to, or the ones I’m waiting for a reply on.

• In a similar vein, I’ve been realising more and more that GMail is remarkably well designed, once you understand how best to use the “archive” button — which unfortunately seems to have passed a lot of people by. Once you’re finished with a mail that doesn’t require any action on your part, just hit “archive” and you don’t have to think about it again unless you need it in future, by which time it’s nestled safely in your “All Mail” view. You can get similar archiving functionality in Thunderbird with an extension.