The State Department Should be Using Zotero

Make another mark for wasted money and effort by the government. Zotero is the best tool for organizing literature reviews available. The State Department should be using it. Unfortunately, groupthink and momentum seems to have more weight in decisions than actual facts.

As stated in this article, the State department currently is not using Firefox, which means they are not using Zotero. This has probably been going on for a significant amount of time, and affects many government agencies and big businesses. Who knows how much time and money has been wasted due to this policy.

Microsoft Office incompatibility, shoutout for Zotero

I've been having more problems in Word 2007. Formulas only save as images when you need to save in a style that allows for easy collaboration. For anything technical this incompatibility is a huge problem. Also, I noticed that it would not allow for a direct copy-and-paste from the Gimp. I had to copy it to Paint, and then to Word 2007. I am calling this what it is - incompatibility with common programs. People who talk about Microsoft Compatibility should realize that Microsoft is not compatible with itself.

On other notes, Zotero was given a shoutout by the flagship journal of the SPIE - Optical Engineering. Editor Donald O'Shea talks about Zotero and a mac program, Papers, in an open access article entitled Organizing Your Information. I've linked the HTML, though you can also get the PDF from the page. I'm still struggling with working the way Zotero does, and still prefer the JabRef method of thinking. But, perhaps it is just because I know JabRef better than I know Zotero. Still, I will always appreciate how Zotero allowed me to easily format all my references.

One final software shoutout. If you need real image processing or technical image analysis, try ImageJ. It was helpful to me earlier in my graduate student career, and has also come in very handy recently. The ease of macro scripting makes going through a number of images relatively painless.

Writing a Report with Microsoft Office

I am participating in writing a report with Microsoft Office at my work. It is a rather miserable task. I much prefer the "styles" and "table of content" methods found in OpenOffice. It is very frustrating working with the new Microsoft Office ribbon. It takes many more clicks to find what I am looking for. Also, the help file "features" a video, but all I need is a quick answer to a question - not to have my time eaten up by pointless bloat.

As a final shot, the report came to me in a 26MB format. By compressing pictures, I was able to reduce it to 22 MB. It is crazy to have a file format so inefficient that it produces such huge file sizes. My dissertation had many more pictures and much more text, and still never even approached the file size of the report I am currently working on.

My dissertation is finished

My dissertation is now finished. I did it with OpenOffice on three different computers using two different forms of Linux on my laptop (Ubuntu and Kubuntu), Windows 98 on my wife's computer, and Windows XP on my laptop from work. Thanks to everyone who helped me, and thanks to the writers of OpenOffice.

There are many who want to finish, but do not yet possess the organization and management skills to complete their dissertation. Do not be discouraged - I was in this boat as well, and even today if I had to start another dissertation I would doubt whether I would be able to complete it. But, these skills can be learned, and are really a very valuable part of your graduate education. Here are three articles that sound similiar to "7 Habits of Highly Effective People" by Covey, which I certainly recommend as graduate school reading regardless of discipline. Free registration is required, but it may give you some ideas on other articles you can search for.

The Four Quadrants of Decision Making
Five Principles to Improve Your Leadership Skills
Time Management - How to Create a Schedule

Start the New Year Right - Manage your finances

An important part of graduate school is being able to handle your finances. If you get stuck with a high interest credit card you may end up so worried about finances that your dissertation slips, and the stress and pressure will continue to mount. Thus, it is sensible to compare credit cards before going out and getting your shiny new piece of plastic. You probably will also want to check your credit report, as banks will charge higher rates for people with lower credit report scores -- including automatically bumping up the rate without telling you!

The best site for comparing credit cards that I have found is Credit Card Land You may be especially interested in the sections on student credit cards, secured credit cards, and Canadian credit cards. They also have a "tips" section and various links where you can get your credit report. I highly recommend this site.

I am not affiliated with the site in any way, and I have not received any compensation for this positive review, nor will I accept any compensation. I am simply a satisfied customer, and wish to promote something that is useful.

Dealing with Images

One of the harder parts of a dissertation is getting in your images correctly. My images were typically half a page, which created huge problems in trying to get the text to flow around the images. I finally gave up and just did hard page breaks around my images and longer tables. It was the only way to get it to work to my satisfaction. As an added benefit, it also increases that all-important page count.

Putting it together with a master document

I had hoped to put my dissertation all together as a master document. However, it just didn't work out. The picture were all messed up. I ended up cutting and pasting the chapters together, and then making changes manually. I am not sure there is a way to reliably put together a dissertation using Master documents. While it is theoretically possible, it just doesn't work in the real world. Save your work in chapters, but put it together by cut-and-paste is my suggestion. Perhaps my other suggestion would be to just do your dissertation in LaTex.

On a positive note, I have turned in my dissertation, and did so before the deadline. I have some formatting corrections to do, but they are not too big. Also, I finished my corrections for the third paper. They sent me the author proofs and I sent back a few changes. It should be published soon.