Christmas Soup

This recipe for Pasta e Fagioli (Pasta and Bean Soup) from ChefMD looks like Christmas! The look is entirely coincidental, but I'm glad for a holiday-looking soup all the same. 

Yesterday, I listened to a People's Pharmacy® interview with ChefMD, aka Dr. John La Puma called Healthy Holiday Feasts. I'd heard them talk to him before, but this time I was inspired to check out the recipes on ChefMD.com. Many look quite tasty!

Substitutions
This recipe calls for fennel, which wasn't available at the store yesterday, so I substituted an onion instead. I used Bionaturae's whole wheat macaroni, as that was the smallest pasta I had. On the show, Dr. La Puma talked about using "reduced sodium spicy vegetable juice" which I also didn't have; I used a double can of fire-roasted tomatoes with their juice. I also didn't have peas, so I used string beans.

Tomatoes + string beans + navy beans = Christmas soup!

Musical Accompaniment
Pink Martini's Joy to The World.

Favorite Books read in 2012

Goodreads has been a good way to keep track of books I've read, which was my goal. It's made listing my favorite fiction reads of 2012 very easy! The list is online, and I can even  embed it in this post.

Stephanie's favorite novels read in 2012

American Dervish

by Ayad Akhtar

This was a fascinating book. Interesting insight into the life of Muslims in 1970s Milwaukee, and a horrible betrayal by the narrator. None of the characters was especially positive, but the book was compelling. One tic that bothered me:...

The Sandcastle Girls

by Chris Bohjalian

The Newlyweds

by Nell Freudenberger

Delightful story about a Bangladeshi woman who marries an American man and moves to Rochester. The early story is good, but has been done before. However, the second half - when she returns to "Desh" - is fresh and interesting.

The Cranes Dance

by Meg Howrey

This was a great book for anyone who likes reading about ballet, NYC, or mental illness. The two I know best were handled authentically, and the third was entertaining. It started out a bit lite-n-snarky, but I'd read a good review of ...

The Snow Child

by Eowyn Ivey

This was quite a lovely story -- the "Child" herself was lovely, as were the other characters. Alaska in 1920, too, was a character in the story -- and a very interesting character at that.

Let the Great World Spin

by Colum McCann

This was a lovely novel, though it started out as a series of disconnected short stories. I wasn't sure I'd stick with it - but I'm glad I did. The stories deepened and got very interconnected. I remember when the Twin Towers were being ...

The Night Bookmobile

by Audrey Niffenegger

I loved this book -- all librarians & good readers should read it. I borrowed my copy from the library (most of my reads are library books), but this is one I will purchase, as I could imagine wanting to revisit this one again.

When it Happens to You

by Molly Ringwald

The Wife

by Meg Wolitzer

Clearly I could have added more annotations, but at least I have a good list of books read & loved in 2012!

Chocolate Mooncakes (Gluten-free). Or, Recipes on the Blog!

I've been cooking & posting photos / recipes to my Facebook page for a while now. That turns out to be satisfying because my friends post comments ... but ultimately is unsatisfying because I can't easily refer people to my baked kale recipe or my spicy Thai slaw recipe.

I got a suggestion (or two) to start a blog ... but hey, I already have a blog, and it's not being used. So ... I'm planning to post some recipes here, in addition to the occasional post about teaching or librarianing or cognitive sciencing.

Chocolate Mooncakes

First up: Chocolate Mooncakes (Gluten Free). or, Black bean, gluten-free brownies. I wanted a relatively healthy and wheat-free baked good to take to various holiday events -- but it had to taste good first. So I scoured the interwebs for black bean brownie recipes & settled on Eat Good 4 Life: Dark chocolate and black bean brownies.

The recipe calls for many of the usual brownie ingredients, such as eggs, sugar, and vanilla.

Variations: I am not a big brownie baker, so I was less familiar with the chocolate aspect. The recipe calls for dark cocoa powder, but since I didn't know if I was going to like these (and thus make them again), I didn't want to buy a lot of cocoa powder. So I bought a single-serving packet of sipping cocoa. I used Whole Foods semi-sweet chocolate chips for the toppings. I also substituted (and toasted) pecans instead of chopped walnuts, just because I'm in the south.

I was flummoxed at the notion of buying instant coffee -- all I could think of was Sanka, and I didn't know where I might big a jar of Sanka these days. While I didn't look hard, I still didn't find any instant coffee, and so I thought I would do without. Then I remembered that Starbucks is making instant coffee, so I bought a three-pack of their coffee-flavored instant coffee.  (I didn't buy their flavored mochas, nor their Christmas blend.)

The cool thing about this recipe, and this is not a variation, but is, imho, A Good Thing, is the use of a can of black beans instead of flour. The texture is not quite brownie-like, but as my friend Tomasa said, is more like a Chinese mooncake. Actually, according to Wikipedia, this is nothing like a typical Chinese mooncake, but it's more like a mooncake than a brownie, so I'm sticking with the name.

If you're gluten-free, or just want to try a brownie variation, I recommend these.

Free TV News Online!

The Internet Archive has Launched "TV News Search & Borrow" with 375,000 Broadcasts, which they blogged about back in September.

From the blog post: "375,000 news programs collected over 3 years from national U.S. networks and stations in San Francisco and Washington D.C.  The archive is updated with new broadcasts 24 hours after they are aired.  Older materials are also being added."  

A search for "librarians" on TV News on 11/02/12.

My review of the site indicates that all the major U.S. networks are included, as are several Spanish networks (Telemundo and Univision). CSPAN and Comedy Central are there too. (you can see Jon Stewart from 2009-yesterday!)

Access it directly at archive.org or from the Park Library's TV News page.

Reference Questions, Wordled

I am catching up on my blogs and just read Swiss Army Librarian's Sept. 29 post “Cloud of Survey Comments from Library Patrons.” His library did a word cloud based on comments in their recent patron survey, which he shows in his post.

I joked in the comments about doing a Wordle on our recent reference interactions ... and was pleased at how simple it was to set up. I think this will be a good way of showing non-library folks what we do in libraries: help answer questions ... and help folks print. Also, we refer people other places when we can't answer their question or don't have what they need. Note how big the word "chat" is; that's because we code all of our LibraryH3lp / chat reference notes with the word "chat."

Thanks to DeskTracker for the ability to easily download our reference interactions; I simply copied & pasted the comments field into a text file, which I then pasted into Wordle to generate this graphic. The most time-consuming part was standardizing questions and Question to "question" ... and removing the word "patron" since after standardization, it would have been twice the size of the word help!

I was a bit worried that this exercise would violate patron confidentiality, but it doesn't seem to, for two reasons: first, we don't put any personal information in our comments field, and second, because the text of over 600 transactions is in this Wordle, so details like "Times-Picayune" or "HBR Case Studies" doesn't show up.

Concussion Data, Articles, & More

Now that it's football season (Go Giants!), it's also time to rethink concussions in the sport. There have been some good articles lately, such as Melissa Segura's heartbreaking story about three girlfriends/wives of retired NFL players. Also some indications that the NFL and NCAA are taking concussions seriously: Darrelle Revis was held out of yesterday's Jets game due to last week's head injury, and Arkansas' quarterback Tyler Wilson was held out of yesterday's game against Alabama.

Additionally, some of my students are working on sports infographics, including one dealing with concussions. I collected links to data & graphics for that class here as well.

Data on Concussions

• Concussion in Sports and Play: Get the Facts from the CDC. 
• Concussion resources from MedlinePlus, including these videos and medical encyclopedia entries.
• The Concussion Blog, maintained by Dustin Fink, a certified athletic trainer (ATC) working in Central Illinois. Includes weekly NFL Concussion Report, a compilation of reported head injuries in the NFL. Active on Twitter as @concussionblog.

Recent articles about NFL concussions & related issues

• Battista, Judy. A Player’s Concussion, a Family’s Ordeal: Former N.F.L. Player Mitch White Learns to Adjust To Postconcussion Life. New York Times, September 16, 2012.
• Holt, Bob. Tyler Wilson not OK to play. Alabama.com, September 16, 2012. 
• Leavy, Jane. Neuropathologist Dr. Ann McKee has been accused of killing football, but she may be the sport's only hope. Grantland, August 17, 2012. 
• Segura, Melissa. The Other Half of the Story: Too Often Forgotten in the NFL Concussion Debate are the Wives and Girlfriends. Sports Illustrated, September 10, 2012.
• Shpigel, Ben. Darrelle Revis Ruled Out of Jets-Steelers Game After Concussion. New York Times, September 14, 2012.

Bibliographies & Resources

• NFL Evolution - Health & Safety Resources. News & links from the NFL on their efforts to address concussions in the league. 
• Publications by the Matthew Gfeller Sport-Related Traumatic Brain Injury Research Center at UNC-Chapel Hill, 2008-present. (see a librarian to get the full-text of any of these articles!)
• Prior CogSciLibrarian blog posts tagged concussion.
• Scientific Publications on CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy), generated by the Sports Legacy Institute.

Embedding LibGuides into Course Management Systems

from
http://www.iconarchive.com/show/
color-stroked-icons-by-mfayaz/find-icon.html

My getting-ready-for-school tasks include creating library course guides for each class I plan to talk to about using library resources. Last academic year, I taught 54 groups, including "one-shot" instruction sessions, orientations for new & prospective students, and non-course workshops.  I created 31 course guides in support of these sessions, including the ever-popular page for Penny Abernathy's Digital Media Economics and Behavior, Barbara Friedman's Women and Mass Communication, and Dave Cupp's History of Broadcasting. These three pages were among the top 10 visited pages of the whole Park Library website last year. 

Whoo! those pages are popular! I have long known that, as a student of website analytics.  A recent article in Reference Services Review provides another level of support for this assertion.

Aaron Bowen, reference librarian at the University of California, Chico, conducted a small study of students' use of LibGuides (software for creating library course guides) in Blackboard, a course / learning management system. The LibGuides were embedded in CSU Chico's Blackboard sites, much as UNC library course guides are embedded in our Blackboard / Sakai course management systems. Bowen queried students about their use of resources used to conduct research for their Communication 131 class.

The results were striking: Of the "57 valid responses, 36 students (63.16 percent) responded they did not use any internet resources, other than the Guide, to complete their assignment." In my words: wow! 63% of students who responded to the survey only used library-sanctioned resources to do research required for their assignment. Those students did not use Google or Wikipedia (or they didn't admit to having done so), while 30% used Google and 16% used Google Scholar in addition to the Guide (9% admitted to having used Wikipedia).

Lots of research indicates that students use Google or other resources on the free Internet to research for their courses. Bowen's research is more consistent with Alison Head's 2007 research described in First Monday that only about 10% of students use Google and other free websites to start their research for courses.

So, good news broadly for student research: there are cases when students are more likely to use library resources to complete their assignments. And good news more specifically for me & my UNC colleagues: embedding library guides into course management systems improves students' use of our resources.

http://www.iconarchive.com/show/
red-little-shoes-icons-by-raindropmemory/
Document-icon.html

For More Information

• Bowen, Aaron. (2012) "A LibGuides Presence in a Blackboard Environment," Reference Services Review, Vol. 40 Iss: 3, pp.449 - 468
• Head, Alison. (2007) “Beyond Google: How Do Students Conduct Academic Research?” First Monday, Vol. 12 No. 6.
• JOMC Library Course Guides, Fall 2009-present.

Mining User Data: E-Books & E-Journals

I've been meaning to blog about the recent Wall Street Journal article "Your E-Book Is Reading You" and now there's a companion post to write: "Mendeley Injects Some Pace into Academia with Fast, Big Data" (reporting by GigaOM).

Both talk about mining user data generated from use of a product. Alexandra Alter reported in the June 29, 2012 print edition of the Wall Street Journal (online July 19, 2012) that e-book vendors (specifically Nook and Kindle) have data "revealing not only how many people buy particular books, but how intensely they read them." The data "focuses on groups of readers, not individuals," and leads Amazon to identify popular passages of books (by looking at the most underlined sentences in books downloaded to their Kindle device). This is moderately interesting: the most underlined is a passage from the Hunger Games trilogy, followed by the first sentence of Pride & Prejudice (see for yourself on Project Gutenburg).

E-book vendors are starting to share data with publishers, "to help them create books that better hold people's attention." (according to Alter's interview with Jim Hilt, Barnes & Noble's vice president of e-books). ACK! Writers may start to use metrics to determine the outcome of their novels, or to shape their nonfiction. As a fiction reader, I would much rather that my authors construct the entire novel from their imagination instead of relying on a reader, or worse, the lowest common denominator of readers, to help guide the novel's conclusion. That's why I read fiction: because I want to inhabit the writer's world. Not the writer's world heavily influenced by my fellow readers' opinions.

Further, as a librarian, I'm very wary of the assertion that the data "focuses on groups of readers, not individuals." That may be true today, but will it be ever thus? Can I opt out of having an e-book reader report back what I am reading? Apparently not. I still read my fiction the old-fashioned way, so no one knows what I read. In fact, since most of my fiction is borrowed from the library, the only one who tracks what I read is me (via Goodreads). Most libraries actively do not keep data on what books patrons read, because we believe so strongly in a reader's right to privacy.  Alter quotes security expert Bruce Schneier, who "worries that readers may steer clear of digital books on sensitive subjects such as health, sexuality and security—including his own works—out of fear that their reading is being tracked."

I'm definitely not a fan of e-book vendors tracking my reading habits on a Nook, Kindle, or any other device.

And yet, I cheer at the prospect of "reference manager and PDF organizer" Mendeley offering me data on journals faculty are reading or not reading. TheNextWeb reports that "Users can gain insight into how academic research is consumed, discussed and annotated with social metrics in granular detail" through Mendeley Institutional Edition ("powered by Swets").  Dutch library subscriptions agent Swets says this would offer "real-time visibility into the usage of your library content," but it is not clear how this data would be shared, or at what level.  For instance, would we see only a list of the most and least popular journals? The most and least popular journal articles? Would we see this by discipline? By university? By university and discipline? The more granular the data goes, of course, the greater the chance for veering into user privacy issues noted above.

• Then again, if I as a librarian who pays a lot of money for academic journals could see which articles or which journals are most and least popular with journalism faculty, or neuro-marketing researchers, I could make better financial decisions about journal subscriptions.
• Then again, if I ceased to purchase journals because they were not popular, I might enhance a journal's demise by not making it available ... which veers towards the idea that the way e-books are consumed might influence the way fiction is written.
• Then again, this seems to offer a viable alternative to the slow-moving and proprietary journal assessment tool offered by ISI's Journal Impact Factor.

I'm definitely conflicted on Mendeley's International Edition, but I look forward to hearing more. I'm not conflicted about e-book vendors keeping statistics on what I read, so I'll continue to use the library for my fiction fix.

For More Information

• Alter, Alexandra. July 13, 2012. "Your E-Book Is Reading You." Wall Street Journal. 
• Johnson, Bobbie. August 6, 2012. "Mendeley Injects Some Pace Into Academia with Fast, Big Data." GigaOM.
• Knowles, Jamillah. August 6, 2012. "Mendeley's Analytics Dashboard Speeds Up Academic Impact." The Next Web.
• Swets. nd. "Organize, collaborate and discover research | Mendeley IE."

Good Reading!

I joined Goodreads a few months back, and for some reason, that's motivated me to read more. Actually, I can't prove causation - only correlation. Perhaps I joined Goodreads because I wanted to read more. Or because I was reading more, I joined Goodreads.

Anyway, there is something very satisfying about marking books "read" on Goodreads. Additionally, GoodReads is a nice way to save books I want to read, instead of collecting titles on scraps of paper or in my email.

There's no real relation to cognitive science, as my books are primarily mid-list women's fiction, with an occasional science fiction (or even cognitive science fiction) thrown in. No mysteries, no non-fiction.

Here are the last five:

Recently Read

The Condition

by Jennifer Haigh

American Dervish

by Ayad Akhtar

The Red House: A Novel

by Mark Haddon

September

by Rosamunde Pilcher

Women of the Silk

by Gail Tsukiyama

Find Good Research, Free

image source: FindIcons 

I recently spoke to Daniel Kreiss' JOMC 244 class: Talk Politics: An Introduction to Political Communication, and I created this library resource guide for further research.  I wrote this post for the class tumblr (talkingpolitics.tumblr.com) and am reposting it here.

My presentation had two goals:

1. Show researchers how to improve search terms to generate more relevant
2. Show researchers how to access free resources for finding scholarly & newspaper articles. 

I'd like to highlight some of the tips and resources I shared in class in the hopes that they will be useful to those seeking to incorporate research into their reporting.

Search tips: Generating Good Search Terms (any resource)

1. Start with your concept -- such as negative advertising
2. Too many results? Put "quotes" around the phrase to require it be searched as a phrase: "negative advertising"
3. Add another term or two to your search, to make the results more precise:  "negative advertising" AND campaign AND politics

Search tips: More Precise Results (library search engines; won't work in Google)

1. If you're searching a library database / search engine, limit the content type to scholarly articles or newspaper articles
2. To expand your results, but keep them relevant, try the wildcard operator, *: "negative advertis*"  AND campaign* AND politic*, which will search for
• negative advertising; negative advertisements; negative advertisement
• campaign; campaigning; campaigns
• politics; political; politician; politicians
3. To expand results further, while still keeping them relevant, use synonyms for one search term:
• "negative advertis*"  AND (campaign* OR election*) AND politics

Free Search Resources 

Most states in the United States offer multiple free search engines to residents with a library card. I'll focus here on resources for North Carolina residents, but this model exists all over the U.S.!

NC Live offers hundreds of free, full-text resources to North Carolina residents with a library card. Check out this list of search engines to help you find free journals and newspaper articles!  

• Academic Search Complete is incredibly useful for scholarly articles, though it also includes newspaper and trade publications. The full-text of many of these articles identified will be available for free; if not, ask your library to get the articles for you (free! via "Interlibrary Loan" magic).
• Newspaper Source Plus has full-text from hundreds of U.S. newspapers, including over 50 from N.C. as well as the New York Times and the Washington Post.

All you need to access these is a free North Carolina library card.

Note: while these resources are "free-to-you," they cost the State Library millions of dollars. Please use them!

You may wonder about Google Scholar, which is Google's way of finding scholarly articles.  I have mixed feelings about Google Scholar, which I have documented in a blog post.  As long as you know what it does and doesn't have, it's fine to use. But if you need the full-text of an article that's not in Google Scholar, please ask a librarian!

image from IconArchive

Which brings me to my last point: Ask a Librarian!  Many news organizations have an on-site library, including CNN, the New York Times, and NPR -- if you are lucky enough to work at one of them, please make use of your library resources! Luckily, all you need is a public library card to contact a librarian at your public library for research help. They are happy to help all residents, including journalists.  Public universities are also equipped to help members of the public, including journalists.  

If you spend a little time up front learning what library resources are available in your community, it will save you lots of time later AND will help you find more relevant material to write about.