The Grey Literature – Page 19 – The Grey Literature

I almost forgot!

It’s pi day! And for dinner, I had a chicken pot pie. :)

I didn’t even plan for this to happen. It was a pi day miracle. It was ordained before the foundations of the earth.

Some Saturdays are better than others

One day while I was living in China, my roommate woke me up at 7h on a Saturday morning. This was not his usual custom, nor was it mine to wake up so early on a weekend.

He woke me up because he heard a sound coming from the bathroom. The big drain in the middle of the floor was backing up. By this, I mean that whereas usually the drain is the final receptacle of the unwanted fluids coming from our apartment, in this case, it was the burbling and gushing provider.

At first, the flow was manageable. We waited for a little bit, to see if it would stop. The floor of the bathroom of our apartment was lower than the floor of the rest of our apartment, so for the moment, the liquid was contained. We tried the plunger. No effect. When it burst over the threshold into our dining room, we knew something had to be done.

So I called the landlord, who speaks no English, and in my broken Chinese, I told him, “你好。我租你房子。我的厕所有几个问题，” which means, roughly, “Hi, I rent your apartment. My bathroom has some problems.”

Fortunately, the guy got the picture and came over more-or-less right away.

In the meantime, me and my roommate were unplugging everything electric, and using a broom to try to redirect the flow of sewage from the overflowing bathroom drain to the kitchen drain (which was working fine, thankfully). We pulled the tablecloth up on the table, and picked up the kitchen stool and put it, inverted on the kitchen table.

When the landlord showed up, he was startled to see what was happening. In a way, it was both comforting and unsettling to see him shocked by it. On the one hand, it was comforting because if he was shocked, it meant that it didn’t happen very often. On the other hand, it was unsettling because if he didn’t know what to do, then I had no idea who would.

I saw him pull out his 手机 and I thought he was gonna call a plumber, but after a few minutes, to my disappointment, his 太太 showed up, carrying some big rubber boots for him. He tried using the plunger on it, to no effect. He stood back and looked like he was thinking for a while, and eventually called his 朋友 who had some sort of a machine with a long metal extension that could be inserted into the drain.

Upon turning a crank on the one end of the machine, it did whatever it was designed to do and eventually pulled out a grey bundle of what looked like a sweater that someone in the apartment above us must have flushed.

That day was supposed to be a day of alone-time for me, and the first one I had been able to have for a few months, so as soon as the crisis was averted, my roommate graciously offered to mop the floor. I should have taken the time to shower after all that, but I was stressed and I just wanted to get out of that foul-smelling place. It was really 特别麻烦.

When I returned, I was feeling sick (that’s what happens when you fail to shower after spending your morning wading through human waste) but the apartment was in good order, thanks to my roommate.

I walked into the kitchen and looked around—the only thing that remained was just a few pieces of furniture that were inverted and left on the top of the kitchen table. I wanted to make sure they were clean before I put them away, so I asked my roommate, “Did you wipe the stool off?”

“Rethinking the Ethics of Clinical Research” by Wertheimer

I’m reading this book on the advice of my supervisor, since he thinks that it will be useful in writing my thesis. He’s very right. It’s the first edition of the book that has been published, and so, as I’ve been reading it, I’ve been keeping a list of the mistakes in spelling, grammar or typography that I find in the book. If you follow me on Twitter you may have noticed that I’ve been tweeting the mistakes as I find them, too.

Apparently my supervisor and Wertheimer are academic rivals, and so my supervisor was very pleased to hear that I was doing this. He kindly offered to email it to Wertheimer himself for use in correcting future editions. :)

I’ve finally compiled all the tweets, scraps of paper and other places where I recorded the mistakes I found in “Rethinking.” Here they are:

Mistake, p. 5 paragraph 2, “its” should be “it’s”
Mistake, p. 27 paragraph 2, “requires” should be “require”
Mistake, p. 76 “the” shouldn’t be there
Typo, p. 96 closing parenthesis after “Department Meeting” is italicised
Typo, p. 103 “comprehend” should be negated
Typo, p. 111 “by passer” should be “passerby”
Mistake, p. 133 “A risk or a burden?” has no verb in it. Just saying.
Typo, p. 139 space between “society” and period before ellipsis
Typo, p. 139 unmatched quotes around “new miracle cures”
Typo, p. 145 unmatched closing quotation marks after “accept”
Typo, p. 171 opening quote before “it” should be closing quote after “good” in 3rd paragraph
Mistake, p. 181 “anymore” should be “any more” at the end of the page
Mistake, p. 182 “disproportionately” should be “disproportionality” in 2nd (new) paragraph
Mistake, p. 188 whole sentence is copied nearly verbatim.
Typo, p. 198 missing space after ellipsis
Typo, p. 200 only two points in ellipsis at end of 5
Typo, p. 200 need space after ellipsis in 7
Typo, p. 210 weird line break before “competitive” in 1st paragraph
Typo, p. 224 space needed after endnote 60
Typo, p. 269 four points in ellipsis after “reciprocity”
Typo, p. 280 missing period after “B accepts”
Typo, p. 311 four points in ellipsis before “the importance”
Typo, p. 312 backslash between “physician” and “investigators” in 2nd paragraph

Grammar is the greatest joy in life, don’t you find?

Today is National Grammar Day. In honour of National Grammar Day, and because grammar is my greatest joy in life, I will give a brief and incomplete list of my favourite grammar- and spelling-related pet peeves, followed by a much shorter list of grammatical mistakes that I’m actually okay with.

Internal pluralisation. Wrong: passer-by’s, court martials, iPod Touches. Right: passers-by, courts martial, iPods Touch.
Reflexive vs. objective pronouns. Wrong: “You can talk to Peter or myself during the break for clarification.” Right: “You can talk to Peter or me during the break for clarification.”
Subject-object disagreement. Wrong: “She say that there’s a problem.” Right: “She says that there’s a problem.” (Usually this one is just a result of failing to check what you wrote after the fact. It’s still really bothersome to me.)
Apostrophes for pluralisation. Wrong: “I bought two carton’s of milk.” Right: “I bought two cartons of milk.”
Using the past instead of the subjunctive. Wrong: “If I was the president …” Right: “If I were the president …”
Using the wrong homonym. Your/you’re, two/to/too, there/they’re/their, whether/weather, past/passed, hear/here. It’s not that hard.
Modals. Wrong: should of, would of, could of. Right: should have, would have, could have.

The following are two grammatical mistakes that I’m actually okay with. They are technically wrong, but I don’t get upset about them. Probably because they’re both restrictions that were placed on the English language because neither can be translated back into Latin.

Ending a sentence with a preposition. This is something up with which I can put.
Split infinitives. If you want to boldly go there, that’s fine with me.

Miscommunication between my professor and me

When I received feedback on the 3rd chapter of my thesis from Dr. Kimmelman, there were three really specific criticisms that didn’t make much sense to me. I went in to his office to ask about them, and he mentioned casually a paper that he had published in Science. (For people outside of academia, Science is one of the most prestigious academic journals in which to have an article published.)

“You had an article published in Science?” I asked.

“Yeah, a lot of your thesis is supposed to be based on it. Are you sure it wasn’t in that package of papers I gave you in September?”

“Pretty sure.”

“Wow. You would have had to do a lot of re-inventing of the wheel, huh?”

I have now read his paper in Science, and everything is so much clearer now. Over the weekend, I was able to write 5 pages on my thesis as a result of reading it. And it was easy writing those pages.

I feel like I’m actually getting some work done now, and like this project is manageable now. Also, I finally understand why my supervisor was so often confused by my confusion over the course of the year.

Endnote X4 and Microsoft Word for Mac

I found a solution to my reference manager problem.

Step one: (Re-)Install Endnote

I had an older version—Endnote X2 installed on my computer from last year when I went to a seminar on reference management at the McGill library. When I installed it the first time, I did not have a copy of Word on my computer. It turns out that if you install Endnote before you install Word, it doesn’t work at all. This caused me some confusion. After upgrading to Endnote X4, it automatically configured itself to work with Word automatically.

Step two: Convert BibTeX reference library to Endnote

I was really afraid that this step would take a long time. And indeed, if I were to do it all manually, it would have taken a long time. That’s why I’m glad I found this: A BibTeX to Endnote converter. It worked really well. Suspiciously well. I’m half-afraid that something is going to go terribly, terribly wrong.

Step three: Insert references into Word document

View > Toolbars > Endnote X4

Then, click on the fourth icon in the toolbar. Away you go.

Step four: Making page numbers show up in in-text citations

This one took me a while to figure out, and if you do a Google search for help on this, you’ll only end up at this unhelpful FAQ.

Here is how I tried to do it: I’d right-click my in-text citation, click Edit Citation(s) > More …, then I’d try adding the page number there, and it wouldn’t show up in my citation. I’d try a million different ways of doing this, and none worked.

Then I tried right-clicking and then choosing “Toggle Field Codes.” This showed me that the page numbers were actually being inserted correctly, but because of the citation formatting choice, it wasn’t being displayed. All I had to do was go back to “Format Bibliography,” then choose a bibliography style that displayed page numbers in in-text citations. APA, for example, works wonderfully.

Things that make me worry about EndNote X4

Maybe this is shallow of me, but for a $300 piece of software, I’d expect the programme’s icon to look a little less ugly. (Don’t worry, I didn’t pay $300 for it. McGill students can download EndNote X4 for free from the Library website.) I mean, it’s an eyesore in my Dock.

Also, the paperclip in the “attachments” column has jagged edges and is not centred correctly.

This sort of thing worries me. It makes me think things like, If they couldn’t even be bothered to fix the paperclip, what else have they let slip through the cracks?

I mean, BibDesk had a nice-looking user interface by comparison. BibDesk’s icon, while it was not beautiful, wasn’t an eyesore. And it was free. The really expensive software looks terrible, and makes me wonder if there’s other things wrong with it.

That said, I’m willing to give it a solid try. It seems to do all the things I want it to, and it has a long list of bibliography formats, including the journal to which my prof wants to submit my 3rd chapter.

A review of Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac

Bright and early yesterday morning I went to the bookstore at McGill to buy a copy of Microsoft Office. If you are a student, at certain places, you can get a cheaper “education version” of Microsoft Office. When I left the store, I was the reluctant owner of a copy of Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac. This happened because my supervisor felt that for editing a paper for publishing, he would be more comfortable using the collaborative tools that are a part of Word. More on that later.

When I got to the bookstore, I was greeted by a young man wearing a red hoodie over a t-shirt with the design featured in the image attached to this post.

“Can I help you?” he inquired.

“Do you work here?” I asked.

When that was settled, he took my credit card and then gave me a receipt and told me to go to the basement, where there would be someone at the pick-up window where I could redeem my receipt for the install CD’s. I got down to the basement and there was a sign on the door of the pickup window, “Be back in 5 mins.”

I rang the doorbell anyway, and after a few minutes, the very same man who had been working upstairs in the computer section had rushed downstairs to meet me. He joked about how he should wear a fake moustache when he works both upstairs and downstairs. I agreed that this was a good idea.

When I took it home and had it installed on my computer and registered, I actually involuntarily shuddered. I usually don’t have such a visceral reaction to computer software, but then it’s actually been a full ten years since I used Microsoft Office. I was in grade 11 then, and it was the first edition of Office for Mac OS X, which was a big thing. I only got the 30-day free trial download version, but I remember thinking that there was something clunky and un-Mac-like about it.

It’s not half as bad as I remember, but there are a few things that I’m still not too happy about.

Initial Review of Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac

In this review I will mainly be focussing on Microsoft Word. Perhaps in the future I will use Excel or the other parts of Office enough to have strong feelings on them.

I’m gonna come clean about my prejudices: I am used to using LaTeX and BibTeX for pretty much all of my word processing. I have used them exclusively for essays and other school projects since 2004 or so. I really appreciate the separation of content and form and the exacting control of all the details of the typesetting that I have when I’m using LaTeX. I can just write, and not worry about where my words are on the page, since LaTeX will take care of that.

I could also separate chapters of my thesis into separate files, which somehow made my work more manageable. Maybe it’s that the scroll bar at the right of the document gets so tiny when your file is huge or something. It would feel unwieldy to have my thesis in a single file, and so I separated the main body text it into four files: I had Thesis.tex, Ch1.tex, Ch2.tex and Ch3.tex. Then, I’d just include each of the chapters inside the Thesis.tex file and have all the formatting and style information in that file, so the other files could just be bare text files with no formatting distractions at all. It was wonderful.

I also really liked the way BibTeX took care of my references. If I needed to change a reference that I make a number of times throughout my thesis, I could change a single file, Sources.bib, then the next time it re-typeset the document for me, all the changes would be made to all the references throughout the document, including the Works Cited. Not only that, but I found a way to have it automatically change repeated references into “ibid.” so that it didn’t look so cluttered. Not having to think about things like this is actually fairly important to me.

Things I dislike about Microsoft Word 2011 for Mac

The most frustrating thing for me right now in using Word is that I can’t turn off the WYSIWYG editor. I feel like I should be able to edit the underlying code that is generating the document, but there’s really no way to do that. This is unsettling for me. I feel like I’m not in control. Word is. I just shuddered again.

Also, it does some things that are very un-Mac-like. For example, if I push command-up, I expect to be taken to the beginning of the document. In every other Mac application, that’s what that combination of keys does. In Word, it moves you to the top of the paragraph. This is a bug. There is already a key combination on the Mac for moving to the top of a paragraph. It’s option-up. (Same thing, mutatis mutandis for command- and option-down.)

Linking Word files together

On the upside: I can still separate the chapters of my thesis into separate files, and then link them together into a single document for formatting. It’s not that hard. I just type up chapter one in one file, save it, then click Insert > File …

The tricky part is that you have to remember to check off the box that says “Link to File” when you insert your Chapter One.docx file into your Thesis.docx file. This way it automatically updates the Thesis with the contents of Chapter One. Unfortunately, it doesn’t do this automatically automatically. Whenever you make a change to Chapter One, you have to go back to Thesis and click Edit > Links … and then update it. This isn’t too bad, except every time I do this, I have to fix the numbering of chapters manually for each chapter, even if I set each individual chapter file’s chapter heading to start numbering at the appropriate chapter number. This is silly.

Another thing that I like about this is that if you use the Styles at the top of the ribbon instead of formatting everything manually (for example, when formatting a book’s title, choosing the Book Title style rather than just hitting the italicise button), then when you link your Chapter files into your Thesis file, the formatting that you chose in your Thesis file is applied even to the content that is automatically pulled from the Chapter files. This is nice. If I accidentally change the formatting on one of my chapters at some point, it will all be consistent in the final Thesis file.

Microsoft Word’s citation manager

I have found Microsoft Word’s built-in citation manager, which isn’t pure evil, either.

Here’s a couple things I’d like to know how to do: insert a citation without parentheses, and how to have it automatically put “ibid.” when appropriate. Also, I’m not sure that it will automatically update the citations in the body text if I change something in the citation manager, but I have a bad feeling it won’t and this will cause me endless grief later.

Can anyone suggest a good solution for citation management that’s compatible with Microsoft Word for Mac? I don’t trust the built-in one.

Comment spam in WordPress

Something that shocked me when I first started blogging was the existence of “comment spam.” I had no idea that spam existed outside the world of emails. But then, every day there’s roughly 50 comments for my blog that aren’t real comments from real people.

They have different levels of sophistication, too. The simplest ones are just extensive lists of URLs for places to buy drugs online. Those are easy to pick out.

However, the majority of them look, at first glance, like an actual comment. They don’t have any links in the body of the comment, and many of them just have (usually) flattering but unspecific comment.

For example:

Essentially, the article is actual the sweetest on this noteworthy issue. I consent with your consequences and will eagerly look forward to your next updates. With your authorization allow me to grab your feed to be up to speed with future articles. Thank you a million and please keep up the fabulous activity.

This is an actual comment spam that is pretty typical of a lot of spams that I receive. And of course, there would be a link to some site that they would put in the “website” field, so that they can get some links from my blog to theirs. (Being linked to gives one a higher spot in Google search results, and of course just makes it more likely that someone will click the link in error, which is why there’s so much spam of this type.)

Then, there are also comment spams that are just weird or ungrammatical:

I not to mention my guys were found to be looking at the good hints located on your web blog and so immediately got a horrible feeling I had not expressed respect to the web site owner for those secrets. My young boys appeared to be totally stimulated to see all of them and now have certainly been using these things. Thanks for truly being really thoughtful and for making a decision on this kind of important guides millions of individuals are really desirous to understand about. My honest apologies for not saying thanks to you sooner.

My temptation is to remove the back-links, but keep the vague and flattering comments and respond to them all as if I actually believed that these spammers found my website helpful in such a nonspecific way.

Here’s an interesting and somewhat related question:

Recently, I went to my (actual, physical) mailbox in my apartment, and found an unsolicited print advertisement had been delivered there. I took it out, and remarked to my friend that I had only received spam. At that point, we both wondered whether something can be spam if it is in print, or if that appellation is suited only for emails? Can I get spam by post?

Chez Ben in Granby, QC

Québec is full of wonderful poutine restaurants. Chez Ben is a restaurant in Granby that sells pretty good poutine, and really small hamburgers.

I was very strongly tempted to order the “poutine burger.” And yes, a “poutine burger” is exactly what it appears in the photograph to be: A big aluminium foil pie-plate full of poutine, with a hamburger patty on it.

I love Québec.

The slogan for the restaurant is, “On s’bourre la bedaine,” meaning roughly, “We stuff our bellies.”

Here’s a fun bit of French vocabulary. If you wanted to say that someone is “shirtless,” you’d say he is “en bedaine.”

In the attached video, please note that the big giant figure of “Ben” moves, demonstrating that he is stuffing his “bedaine” in front of the restaurant.

Contemporary Moral Issues at McGill

I’m one of the TA’s for the Contemporary Moral Issues course at McGill this semester, and I really appreciate Dr. Reisner, the professor for the course. He gives me a lot of freedom in which to conduct my conferences, provides good structure, and never micro-manages. Further, he often anticipates things that will go wrong.

For example, at the beginning of this semester, he had me take the entire first conference of the year to give an open-book “course syllabus quiz.” Basically, I stood up at the front of the conference and explained to everyone all the potentially troublesome sorts of course details regarding cheating and unacceptable conduct so that later on in the course, they couldn’t say things like, “But I didn’t know it was mandatory to attend every conference!”

Not only that, but when problems happen, like catching students cheating or when they want an excuse from doing required work, I can just send them to Dr. Reisner, and he deals with them.

While I can’t tell you any of the details about what happened this week, it has been very eventful, and I’m very thankful for the forethought of Dr. Reisner.