Curving Normality Blog Carnival #1

Today, I am happy to present to you the first edition of the Curving Normality blog carnival. It is all about the quantitative social sciences, and aims at bringing together high quality blog posts about our lovely profession. With just a few weeks of preparation, I am very pleased with the number of submissions, and especially glad with their quality. Apparently, the quantitative social scientists are quite well represented in the blogosphere!
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Sync BibDesk papers to MobileMe iDisk

Wouldn’t it be nice to have all your scolarly articles stored where you can always reach them for future reference? I’m sure you have them nicely organized on your computer or even laptop, but we don’t want to carry that around all the time, right? Many Apple-users may have selected to use Bibdesk to automagically store their articles, but that does not (yet?) provide any solution of syncing these articles with any kind of device. Fortunately, as part of the MobileMe service, Apple now provides the opportunity to store your BibDesk articles on the web, while retaining full-speed access to them when working on your own computer. Let’s see how to set it up …
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Academic reading without paper: the BibDesk & Skim duo

Most academics will recognize the problem: how to properly manage the abundance of articles, book chapters, and papers that our work is based on. How do we store them, and more importantly, how do we retrieve them after a while? Personally, I very much like to write on the papers I read, indicating and coding important sections. This generally means printing, while I also want to bring the papers I read along, facing me with the impossibility of lugging hundreds of articles around. So what to do? Some papers I only use for quick reference I don’t print, but those meant for close reading, I did. I’ve always been looking for a method to read digitally while allowing me to take notes.

Until recently, that is. I think that I may have found a good combination of two software packages that allow me to orderly store my loads of articles, and to read and annotate them digitally. Ladies and gentlemen: I present you BibDesk and Skim!

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