Philos-L is perhaps the most active philosophy email list. It is the place to subscribe to if you want to hear the latest that is happening in the job market (especially the UK) and with conferences etc. You can sign up to the Philos-L list here: Philos-L
However a fair number of people don't subscribe to it, both because of it's busyness and also because of the occasional 'discussions' that break out there. One way to deal with this is by setting the list to send you out a once daily digest which you can do here: Philos-L settings. Another way to work around this is explained below the fold.
The problem with the traditional digest mode is that you still have to sift through the stuff you don't want to get to read the stuff you do. I've been reading around recently about some people who are no longer reading their email, they are instead forwarding it to a website which converts it into an RSS feed. They can then select which items they want to read at a glance. A light bulb went on, why not do the same thing with the Philos-L list for those people who don't want to subscribe to the emails themselves? It took a fair bit of mucking about using Yahoo Pipes and a few other tools but I've finally managed it. So if you have a personalised home page or a feed reader as I discussed in A motherlode of your very own then you can now add the RSS feed of the Philos-L list to your reader if you want. You can get the feed here: Philos-L RSS feed
Of course I have already added it to the Motherlode.
Monday, July 09, 2007
Philos-L Email list RSS Feed
Friday, July 06, 2007
A motherlode of your very own
You may not realise it but if you like the Motherlode (viewable here: Lode), you can create your own similar resource very easily. Basically the Motherlode is built on RSS feeds which automatically update when things are published on their websites. Most blogs, news sources and philosophy journals now have RSS feeds which is what made putting together the Motherlode possible. However it is quite easy to set yourself up with a similar personalised resource. Below the fold I will tell you how.
Primarily what you need is an RSS feed aggregator of some kind, these are often called News Readers or Personalised Home Pages. The difference roughly is that News Readers live on your computer, and Personalised Home Pages live on the web. Which you use is a matter of personal preference, I prefer Netvibes which is a personalised home page, primarily because I have integrated into it my emails for all my different accounts as well as a few other handy tools and the RSS feeds I like to keep up with. You can start from scratch and build up a list of things you like to read yourself of course, but that can take some time and effort. However if you want a lazier approach then you can use the feeds that form the Motherlode as your starting point. I use opmlmanager.com to host the OPML file that the Motherlode is based on. OPML is basically a file format for making hierarchical lists, and has been adopted by many feed readers and personalised home pages as a means of importing and exporting multiple RSS feeds at once. To get the OPML file for the Motherlode you can just click here: Motherlode OPML
Depending on which personalised home page/feed reader you pick you can either import the feeds directly from that webpage by copying its address into the feed reader or you may need to download the OPML and then upload it into the feed reader/ personalised home page.
I’ve shown below what the RSS feeds from the Motherlode look like in three different feed readers/personalised home pages:
Bloglines:
Bloglines is a popular personalised home page which functions just as a feed reader.
Feedreader:
Feedreader is an open source News Reader.
Netvibes:
Netvibes is my personal favourite personalised home page.
Thursday, May 24, 2007
EqualityExchange
Excellent resource for researchers in distributive justice, especially those of an egalitarian bent (or those who like to criticise those of an egalitarian bent...) can be found here: EqualityExchangeThe purpose of The Equality Exchange:
* to stimulate research and foster communication about egalitarianism
* to allow the members of the network to exchange their ongoing work in a convenient way
* to enable anyone interested to get easy access to this information.
You will find here the following resources:
* an extensive list of publications of the last decades
* downloadable unpublished manuscripts of papers and books
* information about conferences and similar events
* addresses of the members of this network
There are an amazing number of useful papers here, by great authors such as Roemer. There is also an excellent reading list.
Wednesday, March 07, 2007
CiteULike.org
Awhile ago I emailed the philos mailing list with a few tips on being a more efficient academic. This post is regarding one of my favourite websites, www.citeulike.org. This is a free online citation manager with one click integration into your browser, so you can gather citations literally while you read.
Its a powerful tool especially when combined with using rss feeds to keep track of your favourite journal's table of contents. Basically this is an online citation manager website as they say:“CiteULike is a free service to help academics to share, store, and organise the academic papers they are reading. When you see a paper on the web that interests you, you can click one button and have it added to your personal library. CiteULike automatically extracts the citation details, so there's no need to type them in yourself. It all works from within your web browser. There's no need to install any special software.”
We are no doubt all familiar with citation managers like Endnote. But personally I find these too much hard work, they don’t tend to work the same way I do. I tend to do a fair amount of reading online, particular from RSS feeds of the latest published papers. This means that when I find something I like if I was using endnote I would have to start it up, then cut and paste the details across a laborious enough task to put me off. But because CiteUlike is now part of my web browser and it is literally two clicks to store the citation, I now keep a much better track of what I read, which when I come around to writing makes things much easier, I just go to CiteULike and find the relevant references. Likewise if I want to re-read something finding it from CiteUlike is a synch because it keeps track of the weblink for the paper as well, it even keeps the abstract for you.
Finally it has a social aspect to it, as you post things to your library you add tags to help you sort things, these tags and the associated papers can be searched by anyone on the site giving you another way of finding interesting papers.
Their website is here: http://www.citeulike.org/
Hope you enjoy using it as much as I do.
Tuesday, March 06, 2007
INEIRA Resources page
As part of this network, and the Philosophy and Bioethics Network we have developed this website here: http://www.pageflakes.com/idmonfish.ashx
The site is based on and hosted by the pageflakes personalised home pages but is public. What it contains is a page with the latest table of contents of major ethics journals, another page with the latest table of contents of political theory journals, and of course another page with the table of contents for bioethics journals. There are two further pages, one with the feeds from bioethics and ethics blogs (broadly conceived) and another collating bioethics news feeds. All of these feeds are RSS feeds and as such will automatically update.
Update:
While the pageflakes site will be maintained, I have found pageflakes to be rather slow and a bit buggy. As such I have incorporated the above resources into this blog which can be gotten at via the tabs at the top of the blog, or via the Resources label or the links below the label.
Updated Update:
An even better way of getting all this information is via the Motherlode tab on the left, which collates table of contents for major bioethics, ethics, political philosophy and general philosophy journals, bioethics news, ethics related blogs and philosophy resources.
Bioethics Journals Latest Table of Contents
Ethics Journals Latest Table of Contents
Political Theory Journals Latest Table of Contents
Bioethics News feed
Ethics Related Blogs
Flash journal table of contents, news, blogs
The last of these links is to a flash based RSS feeder which incorporates all the feeds on the other pages. However at this stage the feeder is a bit hard to navigate because certain journal publishers (Springer here is looking at you...) put their name, rather than the journal name in the title field of the feed.
The page flakes site and the rss feeds incorporated into this blog are still very much a work in process in terms of the available journals, and certainly some significant journals are not represented. This is primarily because either their publishers didn't think having an RSS feed for the journal was a good idea, or because I didn't find it. So if you know of any other ethics, bioethics or political theory journals with RSS feeds for their table of contents, or for that matter other ethics/bioethics related blogs or news feeds, please let me know and I will add them. If others are keen on making similar pages for other areas of philosophy, again let me know I would be happy to help.
Hope the site is of some use to you.
David
Monday, March 05, 2007
RSS Feed Home page
Yet another post in my series on easing academic life, this is the suggestion of making an RSS Feed based home page for yourself to start your day with. This has the advantage of including all the news you want to see, the blogs you want to keep up with, and the journal table of contents you want to keep up with. Of course if you want to really ease your way you could just use this site or the page flakes site that I have described in this post.
But if you have the do it yourself attitude then you can follow my instructions below
Firstly you should understand what RSS is. Basically its a format that allows content from a website to be picked up by other websites. So if you have or use a feed reader either on a website, or on your desktop, then subscribing to a feed allows you to be constantly updated with the goings on of that website. RSS has been around for ages, but it is really starting to catch on, and many people are now using it to broadcast information. As such you can use it to keep up with the headlines, blogs and even journal table of contents. It is even possible to use it to keep track of email lists, although I am still fiddling with that notion myself.
While you can download a feed reader to your desktop, I prefer to use a personalised homepage, it seems more natural. Many sites provide these (just google personalised homepage!) such as Google, Netvibes, PageFlakes etc. And they make the construction of a news page very pain free using RSS feeds.
Personally I prefer Netvibes myself, because this gives you a lovely tabbed home page. Personally I have mine set up with various tools on the first page, News links on the second, Philosophy blogs on the third and Philosophy Journals on the fourth. That way when I get up in the morning I can have a quick glance at the BBC, CNN etc, then I look at the philosophy blogs I like, all at once which saves heaps of time, then I check whether there is anything new in the journals.
I've made my philosophy blog tab and my philosophy journals tab public in the netvibes ecosystem, so in principle you can easily add them to your own netvibes home page. If that doesn't work email me and I can send you a link which I am told will allow you to add them. The disclaimer of course is that these just reflect my own personal predilections of course in terms of journals and blogs, and the effort I was willing to put in (Not that much...)
But it is easy to make your own, the hardest part is usually finding and collating the RSS feeds, if you find you share similar tastes to me, then it might be worth your while going to the Flash page I made collating all the Journal Table of Contents, Bioethics News and Ethics blogs found on this site.
At the bottom of the flash widget there is a link called get this widget, if you click this then you will be taken to a page which allows you to adjust the widget, and you can just copy and paste all the feeds out of that and into your own personalised homepage.
Cheers
David
Foldershare
This is another one of my academic ease series, posts aimed at making the life of academics easier. Again I emailed the philos list with this suggestion awhile ago, but have expanded upon it here. A classic problem for at least me, and I suspect other academics, is making sure that multiple computers ie the office, the home and possibly the laptop and/or handheld have the most up to date files on them. There are a variety of different ways to achieve this, from emailing yourself copies, to putting files on a USB stick and carrying them everywhere you go. Inevitably though each of these solutions carries costs and risks, of having to remember which copy is which, of having large quantities of emails gumming up your computers, copying the wrong file on top of the right one, and leaving the darn USB stick at home. Microsoft have a program which might well solve your problem in this regards, it certainly has for me.
This is a piece of software called Foldershare.
Developed by someone else but now provided for free by Microsoft, basically what foldershare allows you to do is to set it up to automatically sychronise the contents of selected folders on two machines that the program is running on via the internet.
I use this to keep the my documents folder on my home pc, my laptop and my office pc the same. Basically as soon as I save a document, it updates the other machines with the new version of it. This means no more messing about with emailing myself various works in progress, or mucking around with usb drives. It’s a huge time saver and I no longer suffer from the old copied over the top wrong version problem.
Their website is here: https://www.foldershare.com/info/aboutFoldershare.php?
It does work best if you can arrange it so that at least two of your machines are frequently on at the same time. This works for me because my wife often has the home computer on while I am at work.
In any case I hope this helps you.
Cheers
David
