All previous postings were for a College class I was taking. From here on out, I will be posting my thoughts about topics that are of concern for all Americans and things that will affect the rest of the world as well. I may get preachy, I will voice my anger on some things, I WILL be heard! If you do not like what you see here... then stop reading now. I have been silenced for far too long to really care what others think of my views, thoughts or opinions. You have been forewarned.
Daniel Bigham
Thursday, June 14, 2012
Saturday, December 3, 2011
Uhhhhhhhh.....
http://twoplayfulotters.com/students/danielbigham.html
It is not much but I did have a bit of fun with it... there were no specific instructions as to what I should put in there so I let my mind wander (it still doesn't want to come home!) I helped Tina with putting together a business website about 10 years ago and had to use the HTML coding. Then as now it seemed almost like an alien language. Correction... it would be EASIER to read an alien tongue. I probably will never understand machine language because of my inability to manage what looks like gibberish on the screen... until we switch to preview and all that weirdness makes perfect sense.
I did have fun with it though... I never imagined it would be fun to make a webpage from scratch. Just adding a bit of me to it seemed to take the edge off of the assignment. I now have a much greater respect for those who can actually program these things. I know I would never be able to understand it and I am a linguist.
Daniel Bigham
It is not much but I did have a bit of fun with it... there were no specific instructions as to what I should put in there so I let my mind wander (it still doesn't want to come home!) I helped Tina with putting together a business website about 10 years ago and had to use the HTML coding. Then as now it seemed almost like an alien language. Correction... it would be EASIER to read an alien tongue. I probably will never understand machine language because of my inability to manage what looks like gibberish on the screen... until we switch to preview and all that weirdness makes perfect sense.
I did have fun with it though... I never imagined it would be fun to make a webpage from scratch. Just adding a bit of me to it seemed to take the edge off of the assignment. I now have a much greater respect for those who can actually program these things. I know I would never be able to understand it and I am a linguist.
Daniel Bigham
Friday, November 25, 2011
倉促! 皮一切! 他們為我們來臨!
(translation of title, which is in traditional Chinese) "Hurry! Hide everything! They are coming for us!"
I used Google search for this assignment. The search statement was "censorship penalties" china OR united states.
From .gov website the following page was used:
www.state.gov
Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor
2009 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices
Report
March 11, 2010
The report mentioned was done for the U.S. State Department and mentions censorship within the first 3 paragraphs.
For .org:
http://www.middle-east-info.org/gateway/mostrepressiveregimes.pdf
Author: Freedom House
Title: A Special Report to the 59th Session of the
United Nations Commission on Human Rights
Geneva, 2003
Excerpted from
Freedom in the World 2003
The Annual Survey of Political Rights & Civil Liberties
Freedom House
Washington • New York
Belgrade • Bishkek • Bratislava • Bucharest
Budapest •
This site is credible because I have heard of Freedom House and they author many articles regarding human rights violations around the world.
For .net:
Search did not return any relevant results for my search statement. The terms were broken up and scattered.
For .com:
Returned 52 results but not with the statement intact, rather scattered throughout the web page. I was unable to find any relevant sites that would work for this statement under the .com domain.
For the next part of this assignment I used INFOMINE.
My search strategy was limited to using just "censorship" as using the entire statement produced no results (which I find frustrating to say the least).
There were 104 results listed and of these Number 1 seemed most relevant:
http://www.fepproject.org/
the site name is "The Free Expression Policy Project" and includes many articles regarding censorship in its various forms.
This is the history of this website as listed on the homepage:
The Free Expression Policy Project began in 2000 to provide empirical research and policy development on tough censorship issues and seek free speech-friendly solutions to the concerns that drive censorship campaigns. In 2004-2007, it was part of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law. The FEPP website is now hosted by the National Coalition Against Censorship. Past founders have included the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation, the Nathan Cummings Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Educational Foundation of America, the Open Society Institute, and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
Due to all of the contributors, I find this to be a very credible website and would likely use some of what is there for source material (with proper citations of course.)
One thing I have noticed recently is that sites like Yahoo and Google are limiting the use of Boolean operators, and in the case of Yahoo! the advanced search function has been eliminated completely.
The best sources for a topic such as censorship would be the .gov and .org domains because they deal with the issues more than relying on commercial ads for income. As a result of this, the information is more reliable than that of a commercial website such as Yahoo or Google.
My experience with the subject directories was a bit frustrating at first because we have been learning to refine our search statements and then I had to revert back to the general one word term to find relevant results. Once I had done this, the search was rewarding.
I used Google search for this assignment. The search statement was "censorship penalties" china OR united states.
From .gov website the following page was used:
www.state.gov
Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor
2009 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices
Report
March 11, 2010
The report mentioned was done for the U.S. State Department and mentions censorship within the first 3 paragraphs.
For .org:
http://www.middle-east-info.org/gateway/mostrepressiveregimes.pdf
Author: Freedom House
Title: A Special Report to the 59th Session of the
United Nations Commission on Human Rights
Geneva, 2003
Excerpted from
Freedom in the World 2003
The Annual Survey of Political Rights & Civil Liberties
Freedom House
Washington • New York
Belgrade • Bishkek • Bratislava • Bucharest
Budapest •
This site is credible because I have heard of Freedom House and they author many articles regarding human rights violations around the world.
For .net:
Search did not return any relevant results for my search statement. The terms were broken up and scattered.
For .com:
Returned 52 results but not with the statement intact, rather scattered throughout the web page. I was unable to find any relevant sites that would work for this statement under the .com domain.
For the next part of this assignment I used INFOMINE.
My search strategy was limited to using just "censorship" as using the entire statement produced no results (which I find frustrating to say the least).
There were 104 results listed and of these Number 1 seemed most relevant:
http://www.fepproject.org/
the site name is "The Free Expression Policy Project" and includes many articles regarding censorship in its various forms.
This is the history of this website as listed on the homepage:
The Free Expression Policy Project began in 2000 to provide empirical research and policy development on tough censorship issues and seek free speech-friendly solutions to the concerns that drive censorship campaigns. In 2004-2007, it was part of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law. The FEPP website is now hosted by the National Coalition Against Censorship. Past founders have included the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation, the Nathan Cummings Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Educational Foundation of America, the Open Society Institute, and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
Due to all of the contributors, I find this to be a very credible website and would likely use some of what is there for source material (with proper citations of course.)
One thing I have noticed recently is that sites like Yahoo and Google are limiting the use of Boolean operators, and in the case of Yahoo! the advanced search function has been eliminated completely.
The best sources for a topic such as censorship would be the .gov and .org domains because they deal with the issues more than relying on commercial ads for income. As a result of this, the information is more reliable than that of a commercial website such as Yahoo or Google.
My experience with the subject directories was a bit frustrating at first because we have been learning to refine our search statements and then I had to revert back to the general one word term to find relevant results. Once I had done this, the search was rewarding.
Thursday, November 17, 2011
"When the last man dies for just words that he said... we shall be free!" Garth Brooks
Note: as the research for this topic has continued, I have been noticing that there are deadly penalties for violating a nation's policies regarding censorship. As such the titles of my postings will now reflect that issue. The title for this posting comes from a song called "We shall be free!" by Garth Brooks.
And now... onward!
The search tool I found that I feel will offer the most for my topic is "Infomine: Scholarly Internet Resource Collections". This seems to be a very useful tool when doing deep research.
In the "Advanced Search and Browse" there are all of the necessary tools for effective searching.
1. Search Options includes a multitude of tools that include but are not limited to: author, title, subject, and keyword.
2. "Search in these Subject Categories" lists a few of the subjects available to search even more in depth and specifically.
3. Limit search to: offers three limits to the search; Record Origin (Expert or Expert and bot), Record Access (Free or Fee Based), and Resource types i.e. article databases, abstracts and indexes etcetera.
4.Display options offers three ways to view the information, Title or full description, ranking by relevance or title only, and the number of results per page.
5. Last but not least are the search tips. Infomine supports full Boolean operators, including truncation, "and, or, not" and more.
I had heard of Infomine but never thought to look into it because at the time I had become burnt out on web searching (or maybe I just needed to go back to College.)
And now... onward!
The search tool I found that I feel will offer the most for my topic is "Infomine: Scholarly Internet Resource Collections". This seems to be a very useful tool when doing deep research.
In the "Advanced Search and Browse" there are all of the necessary tools for effective searching.
1. Search Options includes a multitude of tools that include but are not limited to: author, title, subject, and keyword.
2. "Search in these Subject Categories" lists a few of the subjects available to search even more in depth and specifically.
3. Limit search to: offers three limits to the search; Record Origin (Expert or Expert and bot), Record Access (Free or Fee Based), and Resource types i.e. article databases, abstracts and indexes etcetera.
4.Display options offers three ways to view the information, Title or full description, ranking by relevance or title only, and the number of results per page.
5. Last but not least are the search tips. Infomine supports full Boolean operators, including truncation, "and, or, not" and more.
I had heard of Infomine but never thought to look into it because at the time I had become burnt out on web searching (or maybe I just needed to go back to College.)
Thursday, November 10, 2011
"Our Voices WILL be heard!"
My search term was modified slightly and came up with some enlightening and previously unknown areas for further research. The term I used was censorship and China and United States
For the periodical search, I came up with the following:
MacKinnon, Rebecca. "Helping China's Censors." Nation 27 Mar. 2006: 8. Academic Search Premier. Web. 10 Nov. 2011. This article summarizes the current atmosphere of censorship within a present tense and presents a look at a conflict arising when governments try to regulate what businesses can or cannot do
For the scholarly journal I used the same boolean search string in Ebsco and found this:
Cheng, Huanwen. "The Effect Of The Cold War On Librarianship In China." Libraries & Culture 36.1 (2001): 40. Academic Search Premier. Web. 10 Nov. 2011. This journal article seems to accurately and specifically address the issue of censorship and the core of the topic. Three things that identify it as a research article are 1. the name of the journal, 2. There is less common language, therefore it is geared more towards fellow scholars, and 3. It is a study of censorship during the Cold War.
The search string was modified slightly to narrow down the results (186). I used the following string in ProQuest for newspaper articles: censorship and China and United States
Michael Wines. (2011, April 29). U.S. Envoy Sees 'Backsliding' Of Human Rights in China :[Foreign Desk]. New York Times (Late Edition (east Coast)), p. A.11. Retrieved November 10, 2011, from ProQuest National Newspapers Core. (Document ID: 2332491041). I chose the following newspaper article because it gives a view on the current struggle for people to be heard in China, as well as demonstrating the disparities between the views of the two nations.
My search term was modified slightly and came up with some enlightening and previously unknown areas for further research. The term I used was censorship and China and United States. The results after refinement were far fewer than when I began this course: 51 results under periodicals, 11 for scholarly journals, and 186 for newspaper articles. Having used the internet since the late 1990's, this is a marked improvement over previous attempts to search for any topic. Thanks Sue.
For the periodical search, I came up with the following:
MacKinnon, Rebecca. "Helping China's Censors." Nation 27 Mar. 2006: 8. Academic Search Premier. Web. 10 Nov. 2011. This article summarizes the current atmosphere of censorship within a present tense and presents a look at a conflict arising when governments try to regulate what businesses can or cannot do
For the scholarly journal I used the same boolean search string in Ebsco and found this:
Cheng, Huanwen. "The Effect Of The Cold War On Librarianship In China." Libraries & Culture 36.1 (2001): 40. Academic Search Premier. Web. 10 Nov. 2011. This journal article seems to accurately and specifically address the issue of censorship and the core of the topic. Three things that identify it as a research article are 1. the name of the journal, 2. There is less common language, therefore it is geared more towards fellow scholars, and 3. It is a study of censorship during the Cold War.
The search string was modified slightly to narrow down the results (186). I used the following string in ProQuest for newspaper articles: censorship and China and United States
Michael Wines. (2011, April 29). U.S. Envoy Sees 'Backsliding' Of Human Rights in China :[Foreign Desk]. New York Times (Late Edition (east Coast)), p. A.11. Retrieved November 10, 2011, from ProQuest National Newspapers Core. (Document ID: 2332491041). I chose the following newspaper article because it gives a view on the current struggle for people to be heard in China, as well as demonstrating the disparities between the views of the two nations.
My search term was modified slightly and came up with some enlightening and previously unknown areas for further research. The term I used was censorship and China and United States. The results after refinement were far fewer than when I began this course: 51 results under periodicals, 11 for scholarly journals, and 186 for newspaper articles. Having used the internet since the late 1990's, this is a marked improvement over previous attempts to search for any topic. Thanks Sue.
Tuesday, November 1, 2011
That is not allowed!
Here are the three questions I have chosen and their boolean counterparts:
1. Does television advertising by the pharmaceutical industry have an impact on prescription drug abuse?
Boolean search string:
"television and advertis*" and pharmaceutical and industry and (prescription or "drug abuse")
2. Does anti-smoking advertising by the tobacco industry lead to increased smoking among youth?
Boolean search string:
"anti-smoking" and advertis* and tobacco and industry and (smoking or youth)
3. Debate the pros and cons of fish farming
Boolean search string:
"fish farming" and (pros or cons)
As to my own topic "Censorship":
Does the impact of censorship differ depending on what nation it occurs in? (I modified the question to make choosing concepts more clear)
Concept terms: censorship impact, national differences.
Boolean search string:
"censorship's impact" and differ* and "national differ*"
1. Does television advertising by the pharmaceutical industry have an impact on prescription drug abuse?
Boolean search string:
"television and advertis*" and pharmaceutical and industry and (prescription or "drug abuse")
2. Does anti-smoking advertising by the tobacco industry lead to increased smoking among youth?
Boolean search string:
"anti-smoking" and advertis* and tobacco and industry and (smoking or youth)
3. Debate the pros and cons of fish farming
Boolean search string:
"fish farming" and (pros or cons)
As to my own topic "Censorship":
Does the impact of censorship differ depending on what nation it occurs in? (I modified the question to make choosing concepts more clear)
Concept terms: censorship impact, national differences.
Boolean search string:
"censorship's impact" and differ* and "national differ*"
Saturday, October 29, 2011
quiet down I said!
Cannell Library catalog, Clark College:
For this I just used the subject word as the primary search term. This brought up a book that is part of a series called "Opposing Viewpoints", a title I have had experience with for other topics, but which slipped my mind.
Censorship / Scott Barbour, book editor. Detroit : Greenhaven Press, c2010.
Subject heading: censorship
This is a circulating book
Location: Cannell Library, Second Floor
Call Number: Z657.C397 2010
This title is highly valuable because it asks the same questions of different people and shows me opposite views regarding the same topic, both in stark contrast to one another.
Summit Catalog:
Search term: Censorship
Book: Global Issues, Facts on File Series, author: Frank Caso, Publisher information: New York : Facts On File, ©2008.
Location and Call Number: WSU Holland & Terrell, Z657 .C38 2008
This title appears to be credible because it is part of a series much like the first book mentioned in this posting.
This search differed in that there were multiple college libraries to choose from, however there were no highlighted words in the description.
IT pros acted similar to most online library catalogs in that you could search and modify searches. I have used such systems for a few years and although I still prefer the old card catalog, it is very easy to navigate and refine my research. The most important key to effective searching here is "Additional Fields" section, which allows limitations on what the site searches for.
Google Books:
Let me start this one with one aggravating fact... searching for anything with more than one word here is frustrating. If I just put in censorship for the keyword, then it is fine. If, however, I want something more specific, it seems google says tough luck. They include searches that have to do with "history", "impact" and "censorship" instead of just "historical impact of censorship". Very annoying.
The book I chose for this exercise was "Censorship and selection: issues and answers for schools", Henry Reichman,copyright 2001, American Library Association.
This book is used primarily in the discussion of censorship in the US school system and I would think it most trustworthy because of the publisher. It is used as a book for school libraries and even includes its own call number.
Summary:
I have spent much of my life hanging out in libraries because it gave me a way to to escape the challenges of my youth and my adulthood. I still prefer the company of books. The search and limitations of searching does make things easier within the new system, but the old card catalog was less of a "time waster" because I never had to tell the cards to limit the search to my specific words... I just went and found what I was looking for. Often I would be pleasantly surprised with what I found in the general area of the book I was originally looking for. I learned a great deal this way. I have learned from this section that the old ways are better, less aggravating and preferable to someone like me. I am able to use what we have now, I just feel it is needlessly complicated.
All of these tools were similar in usage, construction and content with expansions at every level after the Cannell Library.
For this I just used the subject word as the primary search term. This brought up a book that is part of a series called "Opposing Viewpoints", a title I have had experience with for other topics, but which slipped my mind.
Censorship / Scott Barbour, book editor. Detroit : Greenhaven Press, c2010.
Subject heading: censorship
This is a circulating book
Location: Cannell Library, Second Floor
Call Number: Z657.C397 2010
This title is highly valuable because it asks the same questions of different people and shows me opposite views regarding the same topic, both in stark contrast to one another.
Summit Catalog:
Search term: Censorship
Book: Global Issues, Facts on File Series, author: Frank Caso, Publisher information: New York : Facts On File, ©2008.
Location and Call Number: WSU Holland & Terrell, Z657 .C38 2008
This title appears to be credible because it is part of a series much like the first book mentioned in this posting.
This search differed in that there were multiple college libraries to choose from, however there were no highlighted words in the description.
IT pros acted similar to most online library catalogs in that you could search and modify searches. I have used such systems for a few years and although I still prefer the old card catalog, it is very easy to navigate and refine my research. The most important key to effective searching here is "Additional Fields" section, which allows limitations on what the site searches for.
Google Books:
Let me start this one with one aggravating fact... searching for anything with more than one word here is frustrating. If I just put in censorship for the keyword, then it is fine. If, however, I want something more specific, it seems google says tough luck. They include searches that have to do with "history", "impact" and "censorship" instead of just "historical impact of censorship". Very annoying.
The book I chose for this exercise was "Censorship and selection: issues and answers for schools", Henry Reichman,copyright 2001, American Library Association.
This book is used primarily in the discussion of censorship in the US school system and I would think it most trustworthy because of the publisher. It is used as a book for school libraries and even includes its own call number.
Summary:
I have spent much of my life hanging out in libraries because it gave me a way to to escape the challenges of my youth and my adulthood. I still prefer the company of books. The search and limitations of searching does make things easier within the new system, but the old card catalog was less of a "time waster" because I never had to tell the cards to limit the search to my specific words... I just went and found what I was looking for. Often I would be pleasantly surprised with what I found in the general area of the book I was originally looking for. I learned a great deal this way. I have learned from this section that the old ways are better, less aggravating and preferable to someone like me. I am able to use what we have now, I just feel it is needlessly complicated.
All of these tools were similar in usage, construction and content with expansions at every level after the Cannell Library.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)