Productive (adj)

Last week I gave a talk at the annual meeting of 4S, the Society for Social Studies of Science , in Copenhagen. It was a great excuse to visit a city I'd never been to before, and a nice change of scenery from an autumn devoted to reading for my comprehensive exam (and in York's STS program, is it ever comprehensive !) After giving myself permission to enjoy my trip and not feel guilty for not keeping up the reading pace, I ended up doing much more work than I expected; mainly writing notes on pdf files of papers in my Documentary Film list. I use GoodReader to read and annotate files on my iPad, which was much easier than lugging stacks of printed papers or books on a transatlantic flight. The difficulty is that I find the iPad sluggish when I try to type notes and work off the pdf file at the same time, so I just wrote in my moleskin notebook and typed them up later. The conference itself was vibrant and well-designed, much like Copenhagen. Based on the theme of "De...

This summer there are many balls in the air. I'm ostensibly on vacation in Maine, but there are some significant responsibilities to take care of before heading back to Canada in August. In decreasing order of importance, these are: 1) Wedding planning. People warn you about how many details need to be looked after, but I severely underestimated the amount of work it would be. And doing many things ourselves (especially of the craftier variety) reduces cost but increases time and effort. Even though we're holding a low-key, casual affair, the to-do list goes on and on. Fortunately, this kind of project is agreeable to work on, and Isaac and his family have been doing a tremendous amount. 2) Reading for comps. My exam has been scheduled for the beginning of December, and there are so many books to read! 150 in all, in 3 lists. I have a handful under my belt so far, but it never really feels as though I'm going fast enough. My problem might be that I'm a fast, retenti...

It's starting to be clear to me that I am no good at keeping this blog updated. My last post was from last November, and it wasn't a "real" post; instead it was advertising a conference I slightly helped to organize. It was a wonderful conference, mind you, but having recently heard all about the benefits of having online outlets for our thoughts and musings, academic and otherwise, for graduate students by the visiting postdoc at my department, Melinda Baldwin , I'm motivated to update more frequently. The last time I worked on my online presence, about 6 months ago, I maxed out my facebook privacy settings, started to tweet , and built an academia.edu page . The next step is probably to build my own academic website, and most universities offer their graduate students the resources to do just that. Some of my friends have blogs that integrate their professional lives (CV, publications, etc.) with some outside interests, and some run more research-nuggets type...