Thing 30: RSS Feeds and De.li.ci.ous

I subscribe to RSS feeds through LiveJournal for BBC News, Librarian's Internet Index, The Straight Dope, Margaret Cho's blog, and a travelogue written by my friend from Israel. Some people use LiveJournal or their other blogs strictly as RSS readers. I should figure out how to set up RSS feeds through Blogger. I get RSS feeds from the NYTimes through Twitter as well.

I created a de.li.ci.ous account last year to organize my bookmarks for LGBT and culinary websites. I still have a long way to go on that project, as I continue to find excellent websites...they are bookmarked on my home and work computers, and I catch up with entering them in de.li.ci.ous as I have time. I don't keep up with de.li.ci.ous that much because I do not experience as much social networking as I would like. I expected that fellow de.li.ci.ous users would use the site to share websites with others, chat about them, and talk about their research, but this was not my experience. This leads me to believe that most de.li.ci.ous users are using the service simply to organize their bookmarks, in spite of the extra features of the site. I did read the article about The Several Habits of Wildly Successful de.li.ci.ous Users, however, and will give it another shot.

Is An Anti-Racism Conference Racist?

US May Boycott Anti-Racism Conference

The United States, Canada, and Israel might boycott an anti-racism conference because they feel that it unfairly targets Israel as a racist state, and Zionism as a racist policy.

For the record--the UN has gone back and forth on its position on Zionism. I do not normally cite from Wikipedia, but you can find a condensed history of the UN's changing point of view of Zionism here.

If Israel is to be called a racist state, then what about France, whose school history textbooks tell all French schoolchildren (including those descended from Arabs, Africans, Vietnamese, and Tahitians) that their ancestors were the Gauls, and that the French brought civilization and light to the world? If Israel is to be called a racist state, then what about Saudi Arabia and other Arab nations who publish school history textbooks that teach children not to trust Jews, Christians, or other "non-believers"? If Israel is to be called a racist state, then what about Japan, where the government severely restricts immigration from other nations and does not allow immigrants without Japanese ancestry to become full citizens?

Let's be fair, folks, no matter what our political opinions are on the Occupation.

Thing 29: Google Tools

This week I taught my students about online search strategies for Google. Over the weekend they will be using Google Scholar to find articles for their research topic. For my students, I am going to post the link to

Google Alerts On Your Research Question Or Topic

so that they can get updates on the latest news or scholarly articles on their topic.

I personally have used Google Alerts for many research topics, and have found it incredibly convenient as I check my email more frequently than any other website.

Alerts.com is a new service for me. I checked out the Craigslist Alerts through this site, as I am interested in buying a car but don't always have time to check Craigslist every day. Now I will get Alerts sent straight to my email every day for potential cars.

Critical Thinking Gone Out the Window

Growing hate groups blame Obama and Latino immigrants for the failing US economy.

This is a terrific article, referencing the Southern Poverty Law Center's "Year of Hate" report as well as FBI statistics and observations from a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. If you don't believe that this increase in hate crimes is taking place, look up those reports and statistics!

In any case, these hate groups are violating some major guidelines of critical thinking:

Guideline 1: Ask questions; be willing to wonder. Why are the people in hate groups so willing to believe what they are taught? How is it solving their problems?

Guideline 2: Define the problem. If the people who join hate groups followed Guideline 1, they would soon have to follow Guideline 2. The problem may not be immigrants, but immigration policy itself. The problem may not be immigrants "taking" jobs, but Americans "rejecting" them, or Americans simply not qualified to do those jobs. If they could define the problem with more clarity, these people would busily be engaged in overthrowing the government, not attacking minorities!

Guideline 3: Examine the evidence. The US economy was failing before Obama got into office. In fact, the US economy has been failing since the 1980s!

4: Analyze assumptions and biases. The hate groups are making a big assumption that Latino immigrants are "taking" American jobs and not paying taxes. The hate groups do not like Latinos to begin with, and as a result they are allowing their bias to dictate their beliefs.

5: Avoid emotional reasoning. It would be interesting to do a study on the members of hate groups to determine how many of them have been cited for violence due to anger. Also, are these people in hate groups spewing hatred simply because it makes them feel good?

6. Don't use either/or thinking or overgeneralize. Do white supremacist groups believe that all "white" "Aryan" people are naturally good, while all "non-white" people are naturally bad?

7. Consider other interpretations. What type of information about the economy, immigration, and up-to-date government legislation does the average person receive? Adults make choices as to what they will believe as true or not.

No More Happy Hour?

The latest Yahoo! News headline to catch my eye: "More evidence links alcohol, cancer in women." According to the article, 1.3 million British women at breast cancer screening clinics were surveyed about their drinking habits over the course of seven years. Researchers compared women who regularly consumed two or fewer drinks a week with women who drank more. According to the study, each additional drink increased the risk of breast, rectal, and liver cancer. If smokers drank, according to the study, only then were they at higher risk for esophageal and oral cancers.

What I did not like about this article was that it did not indicate who did the study. Because this is news, the research study is probably too new to appear as a research article indexed in a database. It would have been helpful to at least find out if the study had been published in a journal or not.

I am curious to read about the research design of this study, as well as why alcoholic beverages put the body at higher risk for cancer.

Thing 28: Customized Home Pages

I set up an iGoogle customized home page for myself, but a few days later was no longer allowed to access it because I do not have a gmail account. Why would I need to have a gmail account? For customer support from Google in case something goes wrong? Would I get better customer service from them if I did have a gmail account? It seems a bit silly to have to maintain a 3rd email address just for the customized home page. Most of the features on the customized home page I already have on my desktop, and it seems to be very repetitive.

These days I am suffering from technological overload. Every day I check and/or use the following: work email, personal email, online course management system, library catalog and databases, Microsoft Office software, search engines, LiveJournal, Blogger, Facebook, Pandora, and now Twitter. That is at least twelve pieces of technology every day.

I am grateful to have the opportunity to learn about new Web 2.0 tools. To be fair though, they should not force me to set up more email accounts than what I already need, and they should not already replicate what I can do through tools provided through my browser or my desktop.

Thing 27: Twitter

Twitter is described as a "social networking and micro-blogging service". Micro-blogging is right--I set up my Twitter account today, and discovered that "tweets" are limited to 140 characters! In fact, you can watch the number 140 in the upper right hand corner of your "tweet" quickly decrease as you chirp along. Otherwise, Twitter is similar to Facebook.

One of my friends has a Twitter connection to his cell phone, so that he can tweet frequently about what is happening in his life without having to use his computer and without having to actually talk to people. This particular friend is living in Israel right now, doing military service, and of course we are all concerned about him and want to make sure that he is alive. To read his tweets is a comfort. I receive his tweets as an RSS feed on my personal LiveJournal account.

Another one of my friends uses Twitter to take notes for longer pieces of writing (more detailed blog posts or presentations). He used Twitter to follow the presidential campaign and elections, and he also uses it to tweet about court cases in the news.

I can see myself using Twitter more for quick journalistic purposes, and less for social purposes...I have Facebook for that...in any case, I will be tweeting on Twitter tonight while I watch the Oscars. (My Twitter name, BTW, is voxpopulare in case you would like to follow my tweets.)