Seamless integration of Papers and DEVONthink

Two of my favorite programs on the Mac are Papers and DEVONthink Pro Office. Papers provides a terrific interface for storing and organizing journal articles, and DEVONthink Pro Office offers powerful indexing and searching of PDF files.

Recently I was thrilled to find an easy way to use the two programs together. If Papers is configured to store your PDF files in its library (the default), DEVONthink can index these without duplicating them in its database. To configure:

• Launch DEVONthink
• Open an existing DEVONthink database or create a new one
• Choose “Index…” from the “File” menu
• Locate and select the folder where your Papers library is stored (by default the folder is called “Papers” and it’s stored in the “Documents” folder in your home directory)

If you have a large number of papers, it may take a while for DEVONthink to index them. Once indexing is complete, you’ll see a folder structure that mimics the structure of your Papers library. You can now search your PDF files in DEVONthink!

To update your DEVONthink index (e.g., after adding articles to your Papers library), click on the “Papers” folder in your DEVONthink database and choose “Synchronize” from the “File” menu.

NSF concludes “science hard”

From The Onion, a bit of humor related to my previous post:

INDIANAPOLIS—The National Science Foundation’s annual symposium concluded Monday, with the 1,500 scientists in attendance reaching the consensus that science is hard.

“For centuries, we have embraced the pursuit of scientific knowledge as one of the noblest and worthiest of human endeavors, one leading to the enrichment of mankind both today and for future generations,” said keynote speaker and NSF chairman Louis Farian. “However, a breakthrough discovery is challenging our long-held perceptions about our discipline—the discovery that science is really, really hard.”

See National Science Foundation: Science Hard for the rest of the article.

The Really Hard Science

Social scientists sometimes take flak from physical scientists for not doing “real science.” If you’re a social scientist and you’ve experienced this, you may appreciate the following excerpt from “The Really Hard Science” by Michael Shermer (Scientific American, September 16, 2007):

Over the past three decades I have noted two disturbing tendencies in both science and society: first, to rank the sciences from “hard” (physical sciences) to “medium” (biological sciences) to “soft” (social sciences); second, to divide science writing into two forms, technical and popular. And, as such rankings and divisions are wont to do, they include an assessment of worth, with the hard sciences and technical writing respected the most, and the soft sciences and popular writing esteemed the least. Both these prejudices are so far off the mark that they are not even wrong.

I have always thought that if there must be a rank order (which there mustn’t), the current one is precisely reversed. The physical sciences are hard, in the sense that calculating differential equations is difficult, for example. The variables within the causal net of the subject matter, however, are comparatively simple to constrain and test when contrasted with, say, computing the actions of organisms in an ecosystem or predicting the consequences of global climate change. Even the difficulty of constructing comprehensive models in the biological sciences pales in comparison to that of modeling the workings of human brains and societies. By these measures, the social sciences are the hard disciplines, because the subject matter is orders of magnitude more complex and multifaceted.

The remainder of Shermer’s essay discusses the relationship between theory, observation, data, and communication. Definitely worth reading, if you’re interested.

On setting goals

I have a different approach. I look to see what things I enjoy doing and just try to figure out how to spend my time doing things that I enjoy. —Paul Buchheit

Source: 5 Startup Tips from the Father of Gmail and FriendFeed, Mashable

Writing for Social Scientists

Writing for Social Scientists: How to Start and Finish Your Thesis, Book, or Article by Howard Becker is much more than a guide to writing; it is a guide to becoming a prolific (and thus successful) academic. Whereas many books on writing focus on style and grammar, Becker takes a broader view, covering everything from the writing process (”writing is a form of thinking”) to common pitfalls (the “One Right Way”) to writing’s place in research (think “working draft”). Becker illustrates his ideas with examples from his career as a professor of sociology, and his sociological perspective is refreshing, even liberating. If you’re an academic looking for ways to put off writing that next paper, I highly recommend this book.

You are what you write

In the academic world, texts and their authors are inseparable.

Source: Kamler, B. & Thomson, P. (2008). The failure of dissertation advice books: Toward alternative pedagogies for doctoral writing. Educational Researcher, 37, 507-514.

Made to Stick

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die is a must-read for anyone charged with communicating ideas or influencing others. Chip Heath, professor of organizational behavior at Stanford, and Dan Heath, co-founder of Thinkwell, distill the secrets of effective communication into six principles: simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotions, and stories. To illustrate their framework, they employ numerous anecdotes and case studies. Well-written and fun to read, it’s no surprise this book is a New York Times bestseller.

Blink

Master storyteller Malcolm Gladwell surveys research on the unconscious mind in Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. Adeptly weaving research findings with anecdotes, Gladwell engages the reader in a fascinating exploration of the power of the unconscious. If you’re interested in how people think, you’ll likely enjoy this book. Also check out Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious and Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind: How Intelligence Increases When You Think Less.

Who gets the credit?

It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit. —Harry Truman

Proust was a Neuroscientist

Proust was a Neuroscientist explores the sometimes curious relationship between art and science. In each chapter, author Jonah Lehrer reveals how a particular artist—Walt Whitman, George Eliot, Auguste Escoffier, Marcel Proust, Paul Cézanne, Igor Stravinsky, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf—anticipated later discoveries by neuroscientists. Simultaneously, Lehrer considers how the artists themselves were influenced by scientific thinking at the time. Even if science isn’t your cup of tea, Lehrer’s insights into the artists’ goals, thought processes, and influences should prove fascinating.