Time to Think, Time to Work... All Gone!

We live in an information rich society and we are under constant bombardment of information and data. As a student or professor, being able to manage your time and effectively use it is critical to your success. As a librarian, I quickly came to the realization that there is so much that I could learn on a daily basis that I felt overwhelmed. A great resource for dealing with this (currently at my desk, sorry; I'll put it back on the shelf so you can see it) is the "Information Anxiety" series. Information Anxiety and Information Anxiety 2 by Richard Saul Wurman(link to Literature Resource Center: Biography Info). These are a bit dated, especially in their references to the print and internet industries, but the messages are still very applicable. One golden nugget is:

There is a Danish proverb that the one who is afraid of asking questions is ashamed of learning.

The books cover a variety of angles like, how we learn, how much you know and making sense of information. While there are specifics in every chapter, the primary goal is to help you with all of your information intake and output from academia to your 'real life'.

Another big part of having the ability to ingest all of this information is to have down time. I found an interesting bit on the BBC World News site, "No Time to Think?" that says,"I can say that all great creators, without exception, have taken breaks," says Buzan. "A minimum of two a day." "Leonardo Da Vinci had a bed in his studio and when patrons accused him of wasting time, he said 'If I don't do this, you don't get the work.'"

"I can say that all great creators, without exception, have taken breaks," says Buzan. "A minimum of two a day." "Leonardo Da Vinci had a bed in his studio and when patrons accused him of wasting time, he said 'If I don't do this, you don't get the work.'"

"...You have to disconnect from what stops you thinking - just stop the flow for a bit, not to a hermetic extent. You could unplug the TV or not get a daily paper for a few days."

Deep

A philosophy major? Now, what can you do with a philosophy major?

You can think deep thoughts about being unemployed.

from "Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story"

Not so, according to a recent article in the New York Times, which says that undergraduate enrollment in philosophy is on the rise due to its interdisciplinary applications.

You can probably imagine what that means for you philosophy majors out there--it means that you've got some stiff competition. So, this is what you've gotta do: cheat.

I kid, I kid.
. . . Well, sort of.
What you really ought to do is dazzle your peers and professors (and future employers) with a little help from the library. So, it's like cheating, but completely legitimate.

Starting with our Philosophy Research Guide, you'll find a comprehensive, diverse list of online databases, print reference materials, and scholarly websites compiled by our subject expert and a Philosophy Department representative. It's basically a list of tried and true favorites.

Then, check out the complete list of subject-specific databases that we provide access to. There's about a dozen.

And if that leaves you wanting more (or on the verge of an existential crisis), you could also make an appointment with a librarian to show you how to use these resources--me, for example. I tell an awesome philosophy-themed knock knock joke.

Chemistry and the Political

A big word on campuses these days is interdisciplinary. In seeking grant support, academic blessings from on high, or even in developing new programs of study, there's a real push to create collaboration between schools. You'd be surprised at the creative duets that have popped up in recent years (to stoke your imagination just think of "Dance" and pick your favorite science; it's probably occurred already).

My topic for today is Chemistry. At this point, I'd rather not bore you with what is really a very focused science and the admittedly really cool resources they have at the library (I tried "hostess cream filling" on a few of these with disappointing results -further research required was often cited in discussing this mysterious substance). [Please do talk with Daureen Nesdill, or any of our Science librarians for help with these resources 581-7533.] Instead I thought I'd put together an interdisciplinary project; please steal this idea.

Chemistry and Political Science: Acid rain caused by air pollution in industrialized countries is a huge problem. However, is there a bridge between how the problem is identified between the scientific and political communities? Learning to speak politic would be a priceless skill for a chemist, while having the tools to express the problems (and solutions) in chemistry would make for an almost unreal politician (who would inevitably be pulled into a corporate congressional lobby and vacation 12 weeks every year in Monaco, but lets keep our ideals intact for now).

Just a thought.

A-squared Plus B-squared Equals C-squared

I was over on CNN.com this morning and read an article about frustrated parents teaching their kids math "old school" style. You know, things like long division written out by hand. Apparently, teachers are more about the theory behind math rather than the rote application of it.

In the end...it's kind of all the same to me.



I hate math. No, I mean I really hate math. A lot.

And I don't think I'm alone.

I can't balance a checkbook without a calculator. I'm grateful every day for online banking that means I don't even need to do that now. All throughout school, though, nothing about math made sense to me. I just. Didn't. Get. It. Math did not compute. Don't even get me started on the time I walked into a calculus class to find the test I thought was the following Wednesday was, in fact, that Wednesday. As in, three minutes from when I walked into class. I almost fainted, and my ears buzzed. It was like every teenage nightmare of showing up to school in your underwear from every bad high school movie.

For a chronic honor roll student, being bad at math was seriously bad news. Math was consistently my lowest grade, right down there with my Physical Education grade. Yeah, I'm not athletic either.

The fact is, a lot of students have math anxiety. It's something teachers have to deal with all the time. So, I was wondering what, exactly, do teachers learn to cope with this phenomenon of evil (aka mathematics).

For the geekly librarian that I am, that means looking it up. Searching for online articles in education databases. What have teachers written or said about math anxiety? How do they cope with it?

To find out, I could go to the Marriott Library homepage, clicking on Article Databases under Research Tools, and then using the drop down menu for Select Database by Subject and selecting Education.

Now there are a lot of Education databases to choose from, and many of them would probably work, but I'm going to go for ERIC. Once I click on that database to access it, I can type in my search for education and mathematics anxiety.

I get all kinds of articles and conference reports about how teachers cope with math anxiety and how to help students get past it so they can grasp the topic more easily.

Interesting stuff. I'm not sure it'll ever make me like math, but it's good to know that the education field recognizes the issue and is making strides to help students overcome it. There are all kinds of articles in education databases, on everything from teaching and learning foreign language skills, arts in school, special education, and a lot more.

Mathematic Bliss

Every night after work, I bike home past the Math Department's LeRoy Cowles Building, which is connected to the T. Benny Rushing Mathematics Center on the northwest side. From the outside, the Center is pleasant enough: a light-filled, red sandstone structure that complements the original building, with a contemporary University of Utah architectural style (an example, another, and another).

I rarely stop to look inside, which is a shame because within is a magnificent, multi-storied installation of math-related artwork by Utah artist Anna Campbell Bliss. It's visually engaging, intellectually stimulating, playful and whimsical, even. This got me thinking about the relationship between math and art in general.

So, I did a library catalog basic (general keyword) search for math and art. One title in the results, "Fragments of Infinity: A Kaleidoscope of Math and Art" caught my eye. In the catalog record, in the left column, I saw the subject heading mathematics in art. When I clicked on that link, the catalog brought back five more books, including "Art for a House of Mathematics", a book about Anna Bliss' installation. Jackpot!

While looking at the catalog records for those six books, I continued to click and follow lots of interesting subject headings which led to more subject headings (and so on). I never would have come up with all these concepts on my own:

• mathematics--pictorial works
• mathematics in architecture
• geometry in art
• art--mathematics
  
• symbolism of numbers
• Islamic art and symbolism
• decoration and ornament--mathematics
• repetitive patterns (decorative arts)
• fractals
  

Really, I could go on and on. Following subject heading links is a fantastic way to find additional, related resources. It can also help to build your vocabulary about a topic.

Now I'm going to curl up with a good book I found, "Gödel, Escher, and Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid".

David Bowie Likes It Scholarly.

I was on Wikipedia the other day, reading about bonobos, when it occurred to me, holy cow, I look things up all day long on Wikipedia.

(FYI, you should check out section 3.1 in the bonobo article. Prepared to be wowed.)

Like a couple of weeks ago, I couldn't remember the name of this pictorialist photographer who I like, so I hit Wikipedia. Before that, I wanted to find some quick background information about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And then prior to that, it was something very academic like, "What's David Bowie's real name?"

As a librarian, I know that it's not the most reliable source, since anyone can create and edit the content. But, hey, it's online, and it's easy to use. And most of the time I just want a quick answer. The truth of the matter is that I love Wikipedia, and I will fist fight anyone who doesn't.

There I was in the midst of this major internal conflict, when I got an email about one of our new online databases--Encyclopædia Britannica Online. (Remember those sweet Encyclopædia Britannica commercials in the 80s? A: Yes and fondly.) While it doesn't offer the same democratic, social network-y style as Wikipedia, it's accurate, authoritative, current, scholarly, and it's pretty.

Ahem.

I mean, it has a "user-friendly interface."

So, the next time I want to know about the duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, Bastille Day, or Epicureanism, I'm going to try Encyclopædia Britannica Online.

_{And so should you. Just go to the library's website, click on the "Article Databases" link under "Research Tools," and hit the "E" button.}

Me Talk French One Day

Growing up in California meant I was destined to take Spanish in high school. Just about everyone did, and I took three years. I didn't learn much. I pretty much hated every moment of it. As an academic over-achiever, I found myself slumped in the back of that class with the other slackers passing notes. No, I'm not proud, but I decided when I got to college that I'd try something different. I had a language requirement to fulfill to get my degree, and with the number of native Spanish speakers in California, the Spanish classes in college were a great deal harder than I was willing to handle. I envisioned myself never graduating and still slumped in the slacker back of my Spanish class passing notes twenty years later.

I looked over my catalog options and came up with French. It made sense to a History major because a great deal of legal documents in Europe used to be written in French.

French, I found, was more engaging than Spanish. Or perhaps I was more motivated in college than in high school. I'll never know. But in my quest to learn the language, I needed to find more than my text books to read.

As a librarian now...if I wanted to find out what material University of Utah students could get from the library in French, I could look that up specifically by going to the Marriott Library homepage, clicking on Library Catalog under Research Tools, and then clicking on the box for Advanced Keyword searching. In the search box, I could type in a topic I was interested in, like politics, and then at the bottom under the Language menu, I could limit to just those item written in French.

As amazing as it was to realize I didn't have to buy a new collection of books for myself to get novels in French, I soon found myself bogged down in books that were far too complex for me to read. I had no idea what they were saying, let alone grasping the complexities of French political satire.

To feel a bit less like an insane dunce, I became addicted to the free translation sites online. Most of the students in my classes would swap urls the way kids swap baseball cards. Or at least they did when I was a kid. No idea who swaps what in elementary school now.

The two that seemed universally popular were FreeTranslation.com and BabbleFish.com, but even they, for all their free language swap beauty, could not help me with my French political satires. I just didn't have time to put every sentence into a website, and my vocabulary wasn't sophisticated enough to get past where the author wrote "Je pense que"...for a beginner like me, knowing that that meant "I think that" was a major accomplishment.

So, I found that I had the vocabulary of a toddler. And the frustration of not knowing how to communicate what you want can often make you ready to throw a terrible-twos style tantrum.

But, one of the things I learned was that I might not be able to read a novel in French, but I could read French children's books. Hey, don't mock me, it's a good way to enhance your vocabulary and has pretty pictures, which is more than I can say of the French-English dictionary I own. Or the French verb book. Or the French grammar book.



One of my favorites is Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

And lo and behold, I found we have it in the Juvenile Collection in the library. The basics of finding a specific book in the library is by going to the Marriott Library homepage, clicking on Library Catalog under Research Tools, and then clicking on the box for Author, Title, Journal, etc. From there, I type the title I want into the Title Keyword box and voila, I have a list of the closest matching titles to what I searched for. Luckily, we have the book I want, so it was right on top of the list.