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Right now, you and I have access to more information than anyone else in the history of humanity. The richest man alive in the year 1800 could not get the amount and quality of information that a janitor with a $20/month DSL connection has at his fingertips today. This is all so amazing and wonderful that we mostly take it for granted. But it brings up new problems. No one can argue about the amount of information that's just a Google search away, but the quality of what comes up can be a big question mark. Luckily, we also have in place the most successful model of judging the quality of information in the history of man: the peer-reviewed academic journal. So we have an embarrassment of riches, and a great model to follow that has brought constant improvements in science and technology. So what's the problem? Actually performing academic research is horribly broken, and what's worse, there's no good reason. Read on to find out just how broken the system is. 1. There is absolutely no excuse for why I can't get immediate access to every journal article ever published. I'm serious. If I want to learn all about the misinformation effect, there's no doubt it will take me some time to read all the current research, let alone acquire the background in psychology needed to follow along. But even if I have the time, the motivation, and the background, I can't, not without spending a ton of money or being affiliated with a college or university (which translates to "spending a ton of money"). Unlike the web, with it's search engines, directories, and billions of pages hyperlinked to each other, academic research articles are not all available in one place to anyone who wants them. Why not? "Oh, digitizing those articles is such a huge job." "Oh, it will cost so much money." No it won't. No, it won't. The real problem is the tangled interests of various publishers like Elsevier. They are actively preventing access to information and convoluting the search and linking process. If everyone gave Google rights to digitize this stuff, they would do it in a second. If they gave it to the Internet Archive, or Project Gutenberg, or the Wikimedia Foundation, or created a new open-source project to work on it, it would get done. Virtually everything in the past 20 years was already typed up on a computer for submission or layout in the journal. A huge amount from earlier than that has already be digitized and sits in some database somewhere. And anything that hasn't been digitized yet can be taken care of with scanning, OCR, and a few dozed graduate assistantships (and those poor bastards get very little pay). 2. There is absolutely no excuse for requiring people to search this database for this, that database for that, ask their institution to purchase access to this other database to find some other thing, etc., etc. Twenty years ago, there were reasons for things to be in different databases, and for some things to not show up in any database at all. In fact, twenty or thirty years ago it was a nice bonus for anything to be available via a computer search. This has not been true for years. The web model, where everything is available if the search engine is smart enough to find it, is in every way better than the little-empire, walled-garden approach we have now with various publishers and organizations each having their own excusive, semi-overlapping, databases. Expecting searchers to know enough about a subject to come up with good keywords, evaluate how salient the results of a search are, and understand what they find is good. Expecting them to learn about the quirks and coverage of proprietary databases is dumb. Meta-search engines and multi-database searches are a poor solution. 3. There is no excuse for braking the web with your database interface. If you feel so strongly about your need to protect content, or mirror your ancient telnet interface, or whatever, that you break the back/forward buttons, you should quit your job now and let someone with a clue take over. There is no technical excuse for breaking the back/forward buttons. Don't get me wrong, there are genuine reasons to change behavior of a page depending on how the user gets to it. You don't want people to be able to skip the login screen through a bookmark. But searching for and viewing documents are not those kind of situations. Do me a favor. If the idea of flipping me out of a page because I haven't clicked on something within 15 minutes ever enters your head, I want you to stop, take a deep breath, and smack yourself in the face. You deserve it! If you ever ask your web developers if there's a way to disable right-clicking, you get two smacks. In the face. Also, to all my brothers and sisters out there, the programmers, the web developers, the designers, the database admins -- none of this is aimed at you. I know where you all are at, we've all been there. The fact of the matter is that we spend a lot of our careers implementing things we know are stupid, wrong-headed, or counter-productive. 4. The way that citations are done is archaic and simple-minded. Citations are the hyperlinks of academic research. So why are they so much crappier and more difficult than hyperlinks? Listen, I understand how difficult this must have been to figure out and get organized 100 years ago, when everything was bound in volumes. It is no longer the year 1907, so that is no longer a good excuse. Why are there:

• Lame, arcane rules specifying that this goes here, unless it's one of these, but not one of those, or if there's more than 2 but less than 6 authors, on every other Thursday... Here's a rule of thumb: as soon as you have more than two strict rules for a string of text, it probably shouldn't be a string of text.
• One thousand different citation formats, APA, MLA, CBE, Chicago, blah, blah, blah.
• No automatic way to click from one reference to the next to the next? Some databases implement this, and Google Scholar tries to do this, but why don't we have something crazy... like a URL or ISBN... that makes these things automatically easy?

Why is this important? This is not just a string of complaints from a grad student averse to the hard work of research. I like the hard work of research. I don't like spending time working around horrible interfaces and limitations imposed by copyright holders, who often have nothing to do with the actual production of knowledge. This craziness has come to the point where it is limiting progress, because right now your average know-nothing, head-in-the-sand flat earth creationist is more likely to show up in a Google search than real work by real scientists. Your average citizen is operating under no requirements on what sources they cite when they make decisions and many people, even graduate students, have a hard time evaluating sources. It's hard enough to get most people interested enough in a topic to do any kind of research, even politically hot items like stem cell research and climate change.  People are busy leading their lives.  But when someone does take interest, they have no chance of finding some of the best information out there unless they are already at a university.  This is broken.

How may we disappoint you today?

I really used to love my credit card company. That's sort of an odd thing - like loving your cable provider or your electricity company. But every time I interacted with MBNA, I came away pleased. Maybe it's because one always expects poor customer service these days, and a good customer service experience ends up being infinitely more satisfying than you could ever imagine. MBNA and I had a wonderful relationship since 1998. I didn't screw them over (I was the very model of a modern credit-having individual) and they didn't screw me over. They sent me cool perks. They gave me great rates. Their Web site was awesome. It was a dream come true. I was faithful to them and not only did I get myself a second card, I recommended my parents to them and got a business account for my business. In 2006 I was informed that MBNA was merging with Bank of America. Now, I'd not heard much about BOA. MBNA was such a huge presence here in Cleveland that I just assumed MBNA would be swallowing up BOA and millions of new customers would enjoy the same wonderful customer service as me and that'd be the end of it. I was sorely mistaken. Bank of America swallowed up MBNA and within a few short months proceeded to spew its glistening guts all over my pristine view of the credit card industry. This is a really fucking long rant about Bank of America and how it sucks. If you are into this sort of thing... First and foremost, Bank of America is a bank. MBNA was more or less a credit card company. Credit card companies are very good at having solid credit card services for credit card holders. Banks, it seems, are very much into charging fees as well as having antiquated services as a holdover from their beginnings in 1902. Bank of America bills this as "being able to serve you better by offering you more options," while someone like me sees this as "great, more ways to try to confuse me into buying services." Since the above really just makes me sound like an old coot who likes to rant about stuff just because changes have occurred, I'll give some specific examples of their suckitude. Then you can decide more easily on how much sympathy I should have. 1. The merger seems to have come as a surprise to the BOA staff. Especially their Online Services staff. I suspect some stuffed shirts at the very top of the chain said "yes, we can do this merger quickly and efficiently with very little planning and have it all running smoothly within a month" while no one bothered to ask the IT guys doing the actual work if it could be possible. Turns out, it wasn't very possible. Just before the merger I had gotten into using Quicken as my "money management software." Quicken has been around a long time. Most good financial institutions are modern enough to let you download your monthly statements in the Quicken format and with the push of a button import all of your data to the software. Companies who are even more savvy let you download the information directly through Quicken without having to visit a Web site. MBNA had this going. BOA, on the other hand, did not have this going. At least not for their newly-acquired MBNA accounts. First, it took a few months for my statements to even show up online. Once they were there, I wanted to get them into Quicken. But there was no Quicken option - even though the site's skeleton help system gave instructions on what non-existent buttons to push to get your statements in this format. Eventually I found a notice saying to please call this number for Quicken support. I called said number. The unusually rude operator at the other end was not really sure what Quicken was (seriously! At the special BOA Quicken number!)...but once she figured it out, she was able to tell me that there was no Quicken support for MBNA customers just yet. Try again soon. Five months later now, still no Quicken support. I have the option of getting my statements in PDF or Text format - both pretty useless for importing into software as specific as Quicken. 2. The Web site is very slow, confusing and buggy. I understand that many Web sites can be slow from time to time, but BOA is slow more often than not. Due to the tremendous amount of information they are trying to pack in there about the 400 other services I could be enrolled in, it's extremely hard to find what you want and everything takes several clicks. As I mentioned above, their help system is atrocious. Clicking "help" brings up a new, poorly-designed framed window with very little information on the subject you are looking for. It has plenty of info on making a new account with their various financial services but that's about it. No search, and it's hard to read. Nowhere on the site can you see your monthly finance charge. You have to download the PDF of the statement to get that info. This info is crucial, of course, for people like me who need to balance their accounts by typing all charges into Quicken (as opposed to downloading them). 3. Their phone system is the epitome of "CAN'T I JUST TALK TO A HUMAN NOW?!" First, it seems that in the merger, all of their phone numbers had changed (once again, no one told the Web guys). So you call a number often to hear a voice saying that you must actually call another number. Once you get the right number, the menus start. The computer's voice is friendly enough but the options and menus are endless. Because they want to know which of these seventeen banking services you are calling about. Credit cards are lumped with loan accounts so you have to listen carefully. Yesterday I called to ask some questions about my business account. First I got the "wrong number" message after calling the number prominently placed on the Web site. Then I went through several menus trying to figure out what kind of account I had (they weren't interested in separating my business status from a regular personal account). Of course they asked for the last 4 digits of my Social Security Number, which my business doesn't have. Finally we (me and the computer voice) established that I needed help with my online account (which I did - more on that later) and I was told I was being connected thusly. Then it hung up on me. 4. The MBNA Business accounts didn't switch over to BOA until March 1 (several months after the initial consumer products were switched). This month I got to experience BOA's Business services for the first time. When I logged on, I was met with a barrage of options and restrictions for Business cardholders (I had also gotten all of this stuff in the mail, which included a heck of a lot of rule changes). I was also gleefully extended the offer of being able to "upgrade" my account to be able to download my statements into QuickBooks (Quicken's business-minded older brother), pay bills online and have some sort of "direct deposit" service for my company. Each service cost an extra $10 per month PLUS a base fee of $10 just for the privilege of being able to pay them $10 more per month. I was actually sort of intrigued by the idea of being able to do direct deposit for my employees (except not at $20/mo. They can drag their asses to the bank themselves.) But there was no info on what this entailed. Was it true direct deposit? The link for "more information" went to a dead page. What I really wanted to do was pay my bill online. Just like I had done with MBNA. Just like I do now with my personal accounts. For free, from my bank account, biggity-bam. Well, BOA was insistent that if I wanted to do this, I needed to open a BOA checking account. That sounded absurd...but the message at the top of the page said I could call this number to get it set up. I figured I could at least get ahold of someone who could tell me what I really needed to do to be able to pay my bill online. The number that they showed was the disconnected one (see above) and the one that ultimately hung up on me. I checked out "Transfer Funds" instead. I mean, I just wanted to transfer funds from my bank to their bank. Well, once again I was prompted to open some other sort of account. Not gonna happen. Finally I went to their Customer Service page in the hopes that I might find another number - that actually was in service - where someone could please tell me how I could pay my bill online. And right there, buried 2/3 of the way down the Customer Service page, was a link to "Pay from another financial institution." I cautiously clicked the link, anticipating another application form, when there it was - A WAY TO PAY MY BILL ONLINE FOR FREE. Put in the amount, routing number and bank account number and you're all set. That was easy. Easy to carry out - not easy to find. Not obvious or convenient. Of course, there's no sort of fancy "save this information" option so I can easily carry this payment scheme out again in the future. But it's there. Also "hidden" on the site is the ability to download statements in QuickBooks or Quicken format (remember, you can't do this for MBNA-to-BOA personal card accounts yet). The very feature that Bank of America ASSURED me would not be available unless I paid them $10/mo for the "upgrade." ----- So my experience with Bank of America has not been pleasant at all. The customer service has been less than stellar, the Web services are blah and the business service has been nothing but a headache. Plans are definitely in the works for kicking BOA to the curb, as far as my business goes. My personal accounts are sort of set there for a while, as my oldest credit card account is through them and it is a very good practice to keep your oldest accounts open in order to establish good credit. But, with no annual fees, there's no reason to keep using them. My choice so far, the card company that LEAST offends me, is CitiBank. I recently got a personal card through them and while I am not nearly as satisfied with Citi as I was with MBNA, they have so far offended me less than BOA. Citi's sites seem to be confusing too, and their rates don't touch what I had with MBNA, but they have some nice perks and a pleasant-enough customer service staff. And I get $25 a pop for everyone I refer to Citi who ends up getting an account - so everyone I referred to MBNA is going to be getting referred to Citi now. If anyone has any suggestions as to what company I should switch to, that'd be helpful (both business and personal). Or, share your credit card horror stories. Or better yet - give me your email address so I can refer you to Citi! ;)

What can you possibly have against Mormons? They are such gentle creatures, truly the best definition of passive aggressive. How can anyone be so nice? All the time? It's just not...natural. Anyway, I have decided to inform you about Mormons. It's my civil duty as a scientist of sorts to document these strange human-like creatures. I am just going to fill you in on the main "points" of this 177 year old religion. 1. This church was created by Joseph Smith Jr on April 6th 1830 in Western New York. Apparently he was visited God, Jesus and by the Angel Maroni, who is the son of Mormon, an "original" white Native American who was hanging out with Jesus while Jesus was hanging out in North America (Jesus is white, too, in case you were wondering). The stained glass window to the right here shows you the family resemblance that God and Jesus have, proving that Joseph Smith really did speak to them which later helped him to find mythical golden plates and seeing stones called Urim and Thummim (a Hebrew divination process ironically given to Joseph Smith as well) and establish Mormonism. 2. So, our man is visited by such strange visions while praying in the woods, right? God and Jesus. Not just one or the other, but we need both to truly be in awe. God tells Joe that none of the other religions have gotten it right and he needs to correct that. Now, Joe is only 14 at this time, not nearly mature enough to follow orders, so he is told ten years later by the angel Maroni (mentioned above) that he needs to get a shovel and start digging in the hillside for golden tablets that Maroni has recorded the prophecies of Mormon (his dad, if you remember) on before the real Native Americans had wiped out his people. All of them. Convenient? No, this is God we are talking about. Mysterious ways, you know. I mean, if these are God's chosen people and they hung out with the J-man then why let some "heathens" wipe them conveniently out of history with no records at all, nothing ever signifying they existed, like say, I don't know, an abandoned village or maybe some pottery or something? Dental records? Cemeteries? No, they did leave something behind, buried golden tablets with seeing stones for translating purposes. And eventually they would tell someone where to look, not an archaeologist or any of the churches (cause they are all wrong), but good old Joe Smith Jr. 3. Once said golden tablets were translated with the help of said seeing stones and God, Joe Smith Jr somehow convinced some village members that this was not a new religion but the continuation (and the only correct version) of the old religion of Christianity. Now here truly begins the story of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints and the Mormons. Anyway, I think that this will wrap up our beginners course in Mormonology here. In our next class we will talk about the Mormon headquarters and their main beliefs. See, and you felt that no one learned anything on the internet anymore.

When you surpass the weight of Homer Simpson, you began to develop an elephantine disgust with oneself. I had done this several months prior, yet kept engorging myself with foodstuffs through the holidays. It is a lucky bit then, I suppose, that ultimate collision of several motivating entities that drove the forging of both form and mind. With continuing fortitude, I shall hammer myself into an ultra-marathoner. What a load of pretentious drek that was… In all seriousness, I had previously heard that the only way the vast majority of people who achieve a drastic change in body type manage to do so is the mindset that comes along with absolute abject misery towards the state of their body. To paraphrase: I was a disgusting fat body. I felt my fat had gained enough experience to go up a level. Somewhere between 230 (Homer’s weight) and my peak of 252 I had slipped into obesity. You can feel this. Your bulges no longer seem to be a part of you, but almost as though you are wearing a coat of lipids. The underside of your arm touches your chest before it’s supposed to. When you sit on the toilet, your gut takes a nap on top of your leg. You sense your wife’s growing abhorrence towards your naked form. I would like to think that that was the kicker, that my need to please the love of my life was enough to push me to better health. For the sake of not delving into the darker, more honest portions of my psyche, we’ll leave it at that. Luckily, several other things simultaneously occurred, the first being that several of my teammates at work expressed a similar desire to shed a few pounds. Competitive nutcases that we are, a bet was formed. Money was put on the line, big money. The second motivating factor was Wired magazine publishing an article on Dean Karnazes. Dean is known as the “Ultramarathon Man� This guy ran 50 marathons in 50 days. He’s ran a marathon at the south pole. He’s won the Badwater Ultramarathon, a 135 milerace from Death Valley up a mountain… in the middle of summer. I was awed at what he had done, and inspired. If this guy could push the limits of human endurance as far as he had, I certainly could push myself 1 50^th of the way there. And I could give myself 2 years to do it, which would give a nice milestone of running a marathon when I’m thirty. I plan on covering the grueling steps to get where I’ve gone, and where I’m going. But right now I’ll just settle for telling you we had our second of 3 weigh ins for the bet. I’ve lost 30 pounds, more than twice the competition. I can run 5 miles on a hill climb program when I’ve never been able to run much more than 1 flat, even when I was in my weight lifting football years. I bought a belt yesterday because I was on my old belts last notch and my pants were slipping off. Best of all, I’ve had a lot of women tell me they can tell I’ve lost weight and I’m looking good. And one of those women happens to be my wife.

I know that you are all bored waiting for the movie 300 to come out whilst surrounded by the sub par offerings of entertainment Hollywood has thrown you like spoiled meat to a bad dog. There is a movie out there to quench your thirst. I guarantee that you will appreciate the homicidal goodness that is the movie Zodiac. Now, I do not pay attention to pop culture like most other people in America. I didn't have any idea what this movie was about or even that one of my top hotties of all times Jake Gyllenhaal was in this movie. I just know that we were bored on a Sunday night in suburbia and decided to go and see a movie. I don't watch TV at all, I get all of my tasty tidbits of entertainment from the internet, so I have not seen any advertisements for this movie. I do go to the movies sometimes, but and I had not seen any previews for this movie, either. Basically my point is that I don't feel that this movie got the advertisement that it deserved. I don't know how much you know about the Zodiac Killer, but this movie will fill you in on all the details. I know you worry about the length. Don't. It says it's three hours long but it really doesn't feel like it at all. At least until I had to pee, then it felt kinda long. But it is three hours long, that's an incredible amount of time for me to hold my bladder, being a woman of small bladder capacity. Jake Gyllenhaal plays Robert Greysmith, a cartoonist working with the San Fransisco Chronicle who decides to write a book on the Zodiac Killer after no suspects are ever apprehended. This is a true story based off of the book by Robert Greysmith by the same name. This movie is intense and the acting is superior. I don't know what else to say here, except that I have heard that David Fincher is perhaps as obsessive as Robert Greysmith and that he is incredibly meticulous when he directs his films. Which is maybe why we get such fantastic films from him such as this movie, Fight Club and The Game. Also, I guess that I am able to forgive James Vanderbilt for Darkness Falls now that he has screen written such a good movie, but he is not completely in the clear as there was already a book written for him to mooch off of. I am just saying some of the shame has cleared his name with this gem, just not all of it. I mean, how seriously can you take a horror movie where the bad guy is the Tooth Fairy? The Tooth Fairy is grounded, yo. Basically, if you go to see this movie, which I highly recommend you do, I just suck at saying why, you will leave the theater feeling like that is one of the best movies you have seen since Children of Men. Unless you didn't see Children of Men, in which case you need to go out and rent/buy it when it's available (yes, I am aware that there is currently no release date set, but I hear from internal sources that it's due to come out March 27) since you happened to miss one of the very best movies of 2006. My grade for Zodiac is 8.9 out of 10 Reasoning: Very good. A little too long. Phenomenal acting. True and scary story.