this has been a tough week. I’m really drained. I’m behind in read­ing, thanks to the Michicago Paper. And I’m just sorta feel­ing, i dunno, sep­a­rated from my sur­round­ings. I’ve got less than five weeks to go. Well, after that it’s all thesis all the time until I finish it.

The weird part is, I just feel unsta­t­is­fied. I got an excel­lent grade on a midterm that I wrote in two hours. And that doesn’t feel right. I’m not com­pletely sat­is­fied with the Michicago paper I’ve been work­ing on straight for the last few weeks.

Clearly I’m losing a sense of per­spec­tive. I expect to have it back in a day or two.

Here is the draft of my pre­sen­ta­tion for the Michicago con­fer­ence. These scant eight and a half pages are a sum­ma­tion of the first thirty or so pages of my thesis. Now I just need to figure out how to get through those eight pages in fif­teen minutes.

Any feed­back on the paper will be very, very welcome.

The Michicago paper is done. Its the tight­est 8 and 1/2 pages I’ve ever writ­ten and I still need to find some way to cut out an addi­tional page. Oy. For inter­ested par­ties, here’s a copy for those who wish to read/provide feedback.

Now its time for sleep.

Gaiman was great. And the words are finally sorta flow­ing. For those who are inter­ested a rough draft will prob­a­bly appear on head­notes by tonight.

Neil Gaiman is speak­ing on campus tomor­row. After pulling a number of strings and a couple hair brain plots, I’ll be going to see him. More on that tomorrow.

For the moment, I’m des­per­ately trying to open a vein and write this paper for Michicago. Unfor­tu­nately, all that is coming is air. Less than five days until it’s due. This is not good. Plus I also have a midterm due in the same time frame. So, for the moment, I draw at least some solace from this mini comic from Gaiman call An Honest Answer.

… Divine, I could you a little help here (and no cat suggestions)… read the comic, I swear it makes the last bit make far more sense.

The Pew Inter­net & Amer­i­can Life Project is a god send for those look­ing for quick online demo­graphic infor­ma­tion. Well indexed and all pub­licly avail­able, its a resource that demands you pay atten­tion to it.

For exam­ple a quick search reveals that there are approx­i­mately 77 mil­lion Amer­i­can Adults who go online daily. Of those 58% (44.7 mil­lion) go online daily. Of those folks who are online daily:

• 7% read someone’s blog (3.4 million)
• 4% engage in dis­cus­sions in chat rooms or dis­cus­sion board (1.7 million)
• 2% create blog entries (.9 million)

^{source: Daily Inter­net Activ­i­ties, accessed 4.14.2005}

Google Scholar has been an indis­pens­able tool in gath­er­ing research for my thesis. For those not famil­iar, its a google search engine that is index­ing the con­tent of aca­d­e­mic jour­nals (includ­ing PDF con­tent) and websites.

Inter­est­ingly, the most pow­er­ful aspect of it, in my opin­ion, is that it sep­a­rately cat­e­go­rizes cita­tions. For exam­ple, Sherry Turkle of MIT, has pub­lished a great deal on the sub­ject of inter­ac­tions with arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence online. Her book Life on the Screen is a sem­i­nal work. Google scholar allows you to specif­i­cally search for all the papers in it’s data­base that cite Turkle’s work. Since that returns an ungodly num­bers, you can also restrict it to the papers that cite Turkle’s work AND con­tain “bot” in the body of the paper.

Anyone who is doing any form of seri­ous research and not embrac­ing Google Scholar is, quite frankly, doing them­selves a sig­nif­i­cant disservice.