Three may not be a magic number, but if three people independently ask for help with surveys, you can be pretty sure that there are many people who want to make surveys.
The problem with surveys is that there are TOO MANY ways to do them. (In this regard, think of all the Calendaring systems: Meetingmaker, Outlook, iCal, Palm Calendars, Sundial, Google and Yahoo Calendars, even your Fridge--all work well, but not well with EACH OTHER, and you need everyone you know to use the same Calendar to really benefit.) Surveys are more useful, when they are all done in the same way, so that you can change them without learning a new piece of software, and you can analyze the results in the same way--even compare the results--without trying to move between all the different survey tools you are using. With this caveat--its not worth having yet another survey tool if you already have a whole workflow in place for your teaching and research--I am going to recommend a survey tool, which might become your ONE survey tool.
Zoomerang (http://www.zoomerang.com)
Anyone can get a free account and survey up the 50 people with any one survey, creating address books of the respondents you email it to, etc. You can even analyze the results online with some helpful tools (though not export the data in a spreadsheet) so it is an excellent tool to give to students, who want to make small surveys for an assignment, or even a tool for you to survey them. Creating a survey takes minutes: you just go online, pick the type of questions (multiple choice, yes/no, open answer, closed answers, but with follow ups, etc.), create the options, and publish it to a list of emails, or to a web address online. This is a screenshot of how the surveys look when complete.
For $99 a quarter (3 months) or $350 a year you can have a full fledged account, (which can even be branded with Human Biology or your lab logo) and has no limit on the number of respondents, nor limits on exporting the data. You can't share your account, so everyone in Humbio can't use one account, but this doesn't mean you can't delegate a graduate student to set these up for you. Its just that more than one person cannot be doing this at the same time--literally, the interface wiil not allow two different people to log on to it at the same time with the same account and password. I wrote them to ask about this and educational pricing, and I am linking this to the complete letter so you can read the details yourself
Friday, March 23, 2007
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
Zotero
This will no doubt be only the first of several posts on Zotero, as it is both simple to use and has room to grow, if you explore all of its possiblities.
A free plug-in for Firefox that helps you to manage your online research, I first used it last Fall when trying to create documentation to help Medical School faculty and students comply with the General Counsel's advice on copyright law. In the past many of us may have created pdfs of articles that we use in our teaching and research, as it has always been difficult to find reliable and static links to the online articles, which Stanford pays a subscription for affiliates to use. This situation has improved, not only because online journals now regularly provide static links to the page, and tools for exporting references in a variety of formats, but also because Zotero can automatically capture these links and references into a virtual searchable rolodex. Huh?
I will tell you how to download the plug-in at the bottom of this post, but take a look at it first, so you know what you are being offered:
This is a Screen Shot of an article in Nature on Neanderthal DNA
The Green arrow points to the button you click to save articles--and this includes the long-awaited STATIC LINK, the REFERENCE, and an ATTACHMENT, which is basically a stripped down html version of the page. What more could you need? Tools for searching your saved items, libraries for cataloguing them for different projects, and so on and so forth. This tool was made for you, not made for someone in business, and partly adaptable to your research. There are also tabs for taking notes, and more. I leave you to play with this yourself, on an article of your choice.
The Red arrow points to the logo of Zotero in the corner, which is what you click on to open and shut this plugin for Firefox. It will be there after you download it.
In case you don't yet have Firefox (most cross-platform compatible at the moment, so mac and pc alike are good), you will need to download it at:
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/
There is a link to help you find plugins too, but just google Zotera to find the plug in. You may have to "allow" it to be installed--a yellow bar at the top of the screen will say that firefox is blocking the install and you can just click on it and allow. You may also have to restart the browser to get it working but that is pretty much it. click on the zotero logo in the bottom right corner, and navigate through lane library, or wherever else you do online research. Play with it and send me your questions!
moth@stanford.edu
A free plug-in for Firefox that helps you to manage your online research, I first used it last Fall when trying to create documentation to help Medical School faculty and students comply with the General Counsel's advice on copyright law. In the past many of us may have created pdfs of articles that we use in our teaching and research, as it has always been difficult to find reliable and static links to the online articles, which Stanford pays a subscription for affiliates to use. This situation has improved, not only because online journals now regularly provide static links to the page, and tools for exporting references in a variety of formats, but also because Zotero can automatically capture these links and references into a virtual searchable rolodex. Huh?
I will tell you how to download the plug-in at the bottom of this post, but take a look at it first, so you know what you are being offered:
This is a Screen Shot of an article in Nature on Neanderthal DNA
The Green arrow points to the button you click to save articles--and this includes the long-awaited STATIC LINK, the REFERENCE, and an ATTACHMENT, which is basically a stripped down html version of the page. What more could you need? Tools for searching your saved items, libraries for cataloguing them for different projects, and so on and so forth. This tool was made for you, not made for someone in business, and partly adaptable to your research. There are also tabs for taking notes, and more. I leave you to play with this yourself, on an article of your choice.
The Red arrow points to the logo of Zotero in the corner, which is what you click on to open and shut this plugin for Firefox. It will be there after you download it.
In case you don't yet have Firefox (most cross-platform compatible at the moment, so mac and pc alike are good), you will need to download it at:
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/
There is a link to help you find plugins too, but just google Zotera to find the plug in. You may have to "allow" it to be installed--a yellow bar at the top of the screen will say that firefox is blocking the install and you can just click on it and allow. You may also have to restart the browser to get it working but that is pretty much it. click on the zotero logo in the bottom right corner, and navigate through lane library, or wherever else you do online research. Play with it and send me your questions!
moth@stanford.edu
Thursday, March 1, 2007
More about those fruit
1) More about gapminder:
Google has a subscription service, so you can subscribe to and search gapminder charts.
A year ago this month Hans Rosling presented the story of gapminder's origin at TED (Technology Entertainment Design) in Monterey. The difficulties of his students "seeing" the global phenomena they studied will no doubt be familiar to you.
Many Eyes is a similar service developed in San Francisco, so many of the visualizations are of more local phenomena, like student enrollments at UC Berkeley since 1983. The dataset is there, but also two different ways of visualizing it.
a) By School and Department over time
b) By accumulative enrollments over this timespan, comparing the gender of the enrollees to each School and Department.
You can easily focus in or modify any visualization directly on the webapge, so that many of the commenters will do this and then ask about parts of the dataset not apparent in the original visualization. For example, the inversion of the gender ratio of law students in the past 20 years.
2) More about The protein database. It is possible to export the 3D data of the proteins from this database, and many other databases of cellular processes, and make animations illustrating biological processes. The most sophisticated of these that I have found was made at Harvard: an animation of the workings inside a cell. But there are dozens of similar animations on Discover programs and such, and Alison pointed me to a source of less detailed and dramatic, but in many ways easier to understand animations of biological processes, that are also available online for viewing.
3)I mentioned the Purple Medical Blog.
Science Blogs is an aggregator of blogs and probably the best place to start if you have not found a blog yet that speaks to you.
4)Last time I mentioned Remote Desktop, and its worth underscoring that you can't get onto a computer remotely if its turned OFF. Sounds ridiculous, but in fact there are many things your computer CANNOT do when they are off, including important update and virus scanning functions vital to the health of your computer. Although a computer pulls a passive load of power when it is asleep, it is relatively efficient if your computer is not the sort whose fan never stops humming. I leave mine ON and schedule updates, including virus and SpySweeper
definitions to download at 2am. Then you can set them to do their scans at 2:30am and not worry about your computer being taken over during lunch or still running in the morning when you arrive.
IMPORTANT: you must PASSWORD LOCK your computer if you leave it on, as this will maintain security, particularly if it is in an accessible place, while you are gone.
Google has a subscription service, so you can subscribe to and search gapminder charts.
A year ago this month Hans Rosling presented the story of gapminder's origin at TED (Technology Entertainment Design) in Monterey. The difficulties of his students "seeing" the global phenomena they studied will no doubt be familiar to you.
Many Eyes is a similar service developed in San Francisco, so many of the visualizations are of more local phenomena, like student enrollments at UC Berkeley since 1983. The dataset is there, but also two different ways of visualizing it.
a) By School and Department over time
b) By accumulative enrollments over this timespan, comparing the gender of the enrollees to each School and Department.
You can easily focus in or modify any visualization directly on the webapge, so that many of the commenters will do this and then ask about parts of the dataset not apparent in the original visualization. For example, the inversion of the gender ratio of law students in the past 20 years.
2) More about The protein database. It is possible to export the 3D data of the proteins from this database, and many other databases of cellular processes, and make animations illustrating biological processes. The most sophisticated of these that I have found was made at Harvard: an animation of the workings inside a cell. But there are dozens of similar animations on Discover programs and such, and Alison pointed me to a source of less detailed and dramatic, but in many ways easier to understand animations of biological processes, that are also available online for viewing.
3)I mentioned the Purple Medical Blog.
Science Blogs is an aggregator of blogs and probably the best place to start if you have not found a blog yet that speaks to you.
4)Last time I mentioned Remote Desktop, and its worth underscoring that you can't get onto a computer remotely if its turned OFF. Sounds ridiculous, but in fact there are many things your computer CANNOT do when they are off, including important update and virus scanning functions vital to the health of your computer. Although a computer pulls a passive load of power when it is asleep, it is relatively efficient if your computer is not the sort whose fan never stops humming. I leave mine ON and schedule updates, including virus and SpySweeper
definitions to download at 2am. Then you can set them to do their scans at 2:30am and not worry about your computer being taken over during lunch or still running in the morning when you arrive.
IMPORTANT: you must PASSWORD LOCK your computer if you leave it on, as this will maintain security, particularly if it is in an accessible place, while you are gone.
- On a PC, right-click the desktop and choose Properties from the context sensitive menu. In the Screen Saver Tab, click the check box for "On Resume, password protect" and the number of minutes (long enough that it doesn't keep interrupting you!)
- On a Mac, the equivalent check box is in the Security pane of System Preferences (half way down). You still need to go back to the Screen Saver Pane and select one and the time until it starts automatically.
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