(no subject)

[eirias]

Have you ever overheard snippets of a conversation on the bus or in some other public space that makes you really curious what the rest of it was about?

There's an academic version of this experience: when you're reading a photocopied article in a two-page-per-side format, take a look at the "widow" page of the article that preceded or followed it in print. Sometimes it's a fun distraction from what you're actually supposed to be reading.

Interesting, odd, and/or funny widows in my stack:

* A review of "The Secret Self," (by psychoanalyst Theodor Reik) that concludes thusly: "It is with regret that one must, in the face of this, accuse Reik of a major modern crime - guilt by free association."
* "Haptic integration of object properties: texture, hardness, and planar contour" by Klatzky and colleagues
* "Categorical perception of nonspeech chirps and bleats," by Pastore and colleagues
* Something which appears to be a screed against nonparametric statistics
* Something about eyelid conditioning
* Something with an abstract in French about the role of relative adjectives (e.g. "big") in semantic memory
* A complaint that a particular term in cognitive psychology is "so vague and ambiguous as to be virtually meaningless" (who'd've thunk it?)
* Something involving name recognition, including an appendix with all the experimentally-presented names, including such beauts as "Spike Poorhard" and "Rupert Chirney"
* Something about implicit learning, which, hm, maybe I should go back and get
* "A process model of posthypnotic amnesia," by Huesmann and friends
* An ad for a book entitled, "Ultimate Computing: Biomolecular Consciousness and NanoTechnology" ... in 1988

Journal readers, what are some of the good widows in your stack?

Comments

[feuervogel]

You mean people actually use paper journals still? Almost all the ones I need are online, and if it isn't, well, it's either too old to be useful or in some weird, obscure journal that neither Duke nor UNC gets.

Funny, though, I was just thinking about how my boss at the NCI had me photocopy journal articles for her, and I'd spend hours at the copy machine after pulling and marking the articles she wanted. Now tables of contents can be sent to your inbox (I get JAMA, NEJM, Annals, and Archives), and if your institution has a subscription, you can click it and read it. Amazing!

[eirias.livejournal.com]

I'm reading for prelims, so I've been doing a lot of digging in the stacks for older articles. It's kind of fun, actually, in a sick way. Waste of money, but fun.

I can imagine that as a pharmacist you don't read a whole lot of articles from 1955, so your boggling makes sense ;).

[feuervogel]

I can sort of see how it'd be fun to get the weird widow pages. You really miss that with the online journals.

1955? Heck, we don't usually read stuff from before 1995... It's "dated." And usually there's a newer, better study that refutes it. :P Though doctors keep rediscovering things that were well-proven in 1930 but no one bothers to look back that far, so maybe they really should, eh?

[eirias.livejournal.com]

Yup. I was dismayed to read a 1960 article that presaged a number of the objections people have written books about wih regard to a topic that didn't even exist in 1960. It's like, jeez, modern people, can't you at least be creatively wrong?

(Though I hear that viewed through the lens of a developmental psychologist, reading some natural philosophy is the same way. Sigh.)

[eldan.livejournal.com]

This reminds me of how in my field a bunch of people suddenly rediscovered all this really cool cybernetics research from WWII. It was exactly the same problem - we read recent papers, assuming that they in turn were aware of what came before them, but it allows a whole body of research to be collectively forgotten.

[cognative.livejournal.com]

I still use paper. If by paper you mean printed out pdfs. I need a hard copy so I can underline and use my shorthand system of note taking.

I have a few paper references from some odd journals. Why can't everyone publish in a normal journal? Some people just have to publish in the Southwestern French-Canadian Journal of Experimental Cognitive Science. I can't find stuff like that!

[eirias.livejournal.com]

*G* Yeah, there are some odd journal titles out there. Though I often ignore the really bizarre ones, figuring, if you had to take your article to a journal I've never heard of, probably it means nobody I *have* heard of wanted anything to do with it.

[drspiff.livejournal.com]

Thought I'd chime in with a comment on one big advantage of paper over online jounrals. That is that the paper journals have often been annonted by the readers as kind of the low tech version of a wiki. At least that's the way it worked until about 5-10 years ago in department astronomy libraries... if you had something to contribute to an article, you jotted in pencil in the margin. This is why I really like academic libraries... there almost always ends up being good stuff jotted in the margin.

[eirias.livejournal.com]

Interesting!

Our department library kind of sucks and hasn't been updated AFAICT since about 1994, and people don't really write notes in the journals at the main campus library, but it's a cool idea.

My advisor is always embarrassed about the notes in the margins of her journals and books. I don't know why.