These are the Undead Texts. Their ambition and success inevitably made these works targets of specialist rebuttals. There is probably not a single claim they make that subsequent scholarship has not queried, criticized, or refuted. Yet these texts refuse to die. Novices and experts alike remain susceptible to the spell they cast. – source
(If you are not able to read the content, rest be assured, it is not due to the photo quality, thanks to Harshit for the photo)
The title says it all, do not dump so much text on a slide that it becomes unreadable to the readers. If the purpose of the slide is to show enabling text to the readers (and supporting/cueing text to the presenter) then this goal is lost in most of the presentations that you will see. People tend to cram as much text as possible on a given slide,
“I have only 15 slides!”
But the person doesn’t mention that 8 of those slides have texts which are not readable with 10 bullet points. A particular feature in slide creating softwares (both Free and proprietary) further aids in this by automatically reducing the text size if it exceeds its standard text box. LaTeX based Beamer will just make your text go below the slide, warning you that this might not be readable, use another slide.
Be responsible, keep less text on each slide, make more slides instead.
An Uberized education is when…
An Uberized education is when – as in antiquity – one goes to a specific teacher to get lectures, bypassing the university. The students and the teachers are thus matched. If a piece of paper is necessary, it would be given by that teacher, or a group of teachers. It is not too different from the decentralized apprentice model. This already works well for executive “education”. I give short workshops in my specialty of applied probability (I have given a few with PW, YBY and RD, though only lasting 1-2 days), limited to professionals. An Uberization would consist in making longer workshops, say of 2-3 week duration, after which the attendees would be getting a piece of paper of sorts. From my experience, both students and lecturers are more sincere when they bypass institutions. And, as with other Uberizations, it would be much, much efficient economically. A full education would be a collection of such micro-diplomas, which can be done on top of a conventional one. Finally I would personally like to attend such workshops in disciplines outside my specialty. After my experience with Aramaic/Syriac last summer, I have a list of subjects I would be hungry to learn outside university systems…
Source: The Black Swan Report › An Uberized education is when…
Issues with multiple citations of an author and biblatex-apa
Recently I had to refer an author multiple times in a document. I had recently shifted to biber and biblatex. The American Psychological Association (APA) style was the recommended style.
And in the final references
The author name was, let us, was Wilbur-Markus Rowland, and he had about 10-11 articles. The author had many co-authors, in some cases this author was the first author in other cases he was the second or even third one.
Now the issue that I was facing was this: The same author name was getting cited differently at different places.
For example, in some cases it appeared like
W.-M. Rowland, in other cases Wilbur-Markus Rowland, and in some cases even as Rowland. This was very confusing. And on top of all that the final references had entries like
Rowland W.-M. (W. M.)
Rowland W.-M. (Wilbur-Markus)
Rowland W. M. (Wilbur-Markus)
Rowland W. M. (W.-M.)
I checked and rechecked the bibtex entries in hope of finding some error but it was not to be found. I must have done a Clean All a dozen times, after editing the bib file.. I tried adding same name entries for Rowland as first author to be the same, but it didn’t work. This was really frustrating.
Similarly a couple of references with two different authors with a common surname were giving intials in the main text. For example, D. R. Cook and M. P. Cook. Now all other refernces (except the Rowland one) were coming as per the APA requirement, which is (Author, Year), so ideally they should have been (Cook & Weston, 1999) and (Cook, 2004). But rather they were being displayed as (D. R. Cook & Weston, 1999) and (M. P. Cook, 2004). Now no change in the bib file was changing any of this. I thought there was some issue with the bib entries. I deleted the entries and entered them again manually, but no avail.
Then I chanced upon this link
even though the year of publication differs in the two Campbell (Cook in our case) references, the lead author’s initials should be included in all text citations, regardless of how often they appear.
So the Cook mystery was solved. biblatex was compiling correctly as per the APA guidelines, the initials for the two different Cook entries must be there. This is because
Including the initials helps the reader avoid confusion within the text and locate the entry in the reference list.
Now for the Rowland entry, the next part of the blog gave me a hint towards the possible problem:
Although this rule seems straightforward, one thing that trips up some writers is how to proceed when different lead authors with the same surname are also listed in other references in which they are not the lead author.
After this I checked the entries where Rowland was second or third author. These entries differed from the entries where he was the lead author. And this was causing the problem. For each different entry style of his name, biblatex was considering him as a separate author. Hence the initials and the different references entries with names in brackets. Once all the entries for Rowland were made consistent the problem disappeared. Phew!
This issue bugged me for almost a couple of working days, to find the cause and subsequent addressing was most rewarding.
Note that the bibtex references that I had were taken from google scholar, hence differing styles in author name. Please make them consistent. This is a warning for future me and others who are reading this post.
John Wilder Tukey, one of the greatest Statistician of the last century points to what the purpose of a graphic display should be:
From:
The appeal of the alternative account to current political palates is precisely why caution is warranted: a narrative’s popular appeal is a poor indicator of its truth.
via | Easter Island Controversy
Design is both the disruptor and being disrupted. It’s disrupting markets, organizations, and relationships, and forcing us to rethink how we live. The discipline of design is also experiencing tremendous growth and change, largely influenced by economic and technology factors. No longer an afterthought, design is now an essential part of a product, and it may even be the most important part of a product’s value.
Source: Experience design is shaping our future – O’Reilly Radar
Recently while writing my thesis, I came across a strange error while compiling with LaTeX. The problem arose when I gave a cite command inside a caption environment. The caption was for a figure. For example
\caption{This is the caption for a figure. From \cite{friend2005}}
This gave the following error:
! Argument of \Hy@tempa has an extra }.
<inserted text>
\par
l.89 ...sity estimate. From \cite{friend2005}}
?
Runaway argument?
\@captype {\@firstoftwo {\@ifstar {\HAR@acite }{\HAR@fcite }}}\def \reserved@b
\ETC.
! Paragraph ended before \Hy@tempa was complete.
<to be read again>
\par
l.89 …sity estimate. From \cite{friend2005}}
?
A little googling around I found this site which solved the problem in a second.
So the command should read like:
\caption{This is the caption for a figure. From \protect\cite{friend2005}}
And the problem is solved. In case you are wondering what \protect does look here.
This is a post for self-reference.
There are many LaTeX packages that I come across, and forget about them.
This page will keep a track of those packages. It will be updated with new hacks and packages that are useful.
\usepackage{libgreek}
\usepackage{pgfgantt}
\usepackage{media9}
