Finding a reference book

Doing research can be as easy as you want it to be, or it can be as hard as you make it. Although a bit boring at times, research is needed in just about every profession known to man. Scientists conduct research for numerous reasons. Those reasons include cures, vaccines, boredom, etc… College students conduct research for papers for the most part. Ask any college student about the more challenging parts of college that you don’t find out about until after you’re actually ENROLLED in one. The most common response will be research papers. The crazy thing about research papers is that professors actually have you do research on material that, often times, have no history! Sorry for the off task statement, but when conducting research, you have to take shots at your professor. Anyway, back to topic.On the flip side, the majority of topics you need to research for school papers, has already been written about in numerous mediums, such as in reference books.  When  this second party conducts this research, it is often stored in a reference book. Finding a reference book has been made easy thanks to recent schooling (THANK YOU JESUS). These few steps will get you to a reference book.

• ·        Go to MSU libraries online
• ·         Scroll down to “Quicklinks” then over to “RACERTrac”  
• ·         You’ll see a search screen, click on the “advanced” tab
• ·         Scroll down to location and click “reference”

After all of this has taken place, you can begin your search. The results that show up will ALL be reference books. That, my friends, is a poor man’s guide to finding a reference book.

Finding a website

Advanced Google search screen

I was doing a paper on the problems of performance enhancing drugs in sports. The rubric for this paper stated that I needed to have at least one credible internet source. So with that said, I had to find a website, but not just any website. The majority of websites out there are just decent when needed for research. There are a lot of websites that look really legit and real but in reality they are fake as a three dollar bill. I needed a website that was reliable. I searched “performance enhancing drugs” in basic search in Google. That was an obvious mistake. Google, of course, comes from the numerical word googol, meaning a lot! So I had thousands of websites to choose from. Probably a very small percentage of those websites were useful to me and an even smaller percentage where useful to my paper. I started to use the truncation symbols to further narrow my search. Looking for information on performance enhancing drugs, I decided to use the organization domain or “.org” as you may know it. Using the site:org feature in advanced Google searching limits all domains to organization. There are multiple ways you can locate the “advanced” feature in the Google search engine. I simple typed in “advanced Google search” on the Google homepage search box. After typing advanced Google search in the box, it will take you directly to the advanced search page. In the end, this is what it looked like before I pressed search; “’Performance enhancing drugs’ site:org”. 

Mickey Mouse vs. The People

The Face Of A Winner

Picking the fifth blog for this project was a no-brainer. I couldn’t tell you all the choices, mainly because I’m too lazy to click the tab below with the reading choices, but the option that I couldn’t pass was an article pertaining to Mickey Mouse and Disney. I must say that I fell for the title of the article; “Mickey Mouse vs. The People”. Look at the title and tell me you didn’t AUTOMATICALLY side with Mickey Mouse.  I started reading the article and immediately fell asleep. Well, not exactly sleep but I’m sure you understood the boredom reference. The article is details on The Bono copyright law (law that extended copyright protection for an additional 20 years) and issues dealing with Disney and publishers. When dealing with Law, copyright cases are among the most explain confusing. I would start to explain the many ins and outs of copyright, but I’m sure I’d be giving almost close to correct, but still very wrong information. So instead, I’ll just take advantage of quoting (Shout out to my third grade teacher Ms. Davis-Watkins for teaching me).

“The previous law, passed in 1978, protected an author’s work for 50 years after an author died, while works for hire — those created for a corporation, like Mickey Mouse — were protected for 75 years. The Bono Act extended both categories by two decades.”

I really didn’t understand it all until they put these legal terms in plain ol’ English. Eric Eldridge, a website publisher, said this about the situation, “I don’t know if you watched the Super Bowl, but think of how the fans would be outraged if the officials tried to move the goal posts in the last seconds of the game.”

At first I sided with Disney because it is their idea and they own it, so I felt like they should be able to do with it what they please. But after that quote from Eldridge I jumped ship. If the refs decided to move the goal posts in the last second of a game I would be livid. I get why Disney wants the Bono Act, but I think Mickey Mouse has been around long enough to become public domain. Besides, Disney has made all the money they can make off of good ol’ Mickey Mouse.

Noosphere

The internet as the noosphere

The noosphere is the mental part of the universe. I like to remember the noosphere by using an example. Let us say, for instance, that every Bible on the face of the planet was to magically vanish. Not a single Bible in a church, house, museum, library, etc… There are people who have studied the Bible enough to where, if they were to all vanish, those people could come together and from memory be able to recreate the Bible. Another example? Let us say that the Mona Lisa painting was to burn up in a fire. The recreations of the paintings would disappear. Even though we physically don’t have a copy of the real Mona Lisa, we all have the image burned and installed in our mind and we know what it looks like.

Al Gore has attempted to take credit for creating the Internet, and people laugh it off.  Many people believe it was a group of professors and scientists; they wanted to share information through the computer. But some people believe that Teilhard da Chardin is the person who deserves the credit of creating the Internet in 1925. Teilhard de Chardin refers to the noosphere as a concept of the Internet as an evolution of thought and consciousness. The Internet alone can be used as a form of the noosphere. This quote by John Perry Barlow should further explain. "Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.”

Information Cocoon

The article of choice for this here particular blog is entitled “Information Cocoons." The majority of readers know what information is, but for those who do not, here is a very simple definition to go by: information is facts provided or learned about something or someone. A definition for cocoon would probably get too scientific for what I am going for right now. So off the top of my head, a definition you can use is the enclosed shell that caterpillars are inside while they transform into butterflies.  When information and cocoon are used together, it creates for me a picture of information that is stuck inside an enclosed barrier. That is what the majority of the article concerns. The article defines an Information Cocoon as “communication universes in which we choose and only what comforts, and pleases us.” The article had a couple points that I felt were very informational. Two philosophers, James Fishkin and Bruce Ackerman, suggested that we have a national holiday in which we have big group deliberations and name it Deliberation Day. Irving Janis did research on groupthink, defined as “the practice of thinking or making decisions as a group in a way that discourages creativity or individual responsibility.” He stated that groupthink would be the reason that Deliberation Day would never work. People become less creative in groups due to informational influences (failure to disclose what they know out of respect for the information publicly announced by others) and social issues (people silencing themselves to avoid the disapproval of peers and supervisors). This article was very informational.  

Information Obesity

Little kid who took in too much weak information..The food didn't do it to him.

A couple weeks ago our class had to read an article that talked about information as a resource. Before I do any reading, I like to first debate with myself and my other personalities, about what the article would be about just by looking at the name. The article was entitled, as stated earlier, “Information as a Resource”; the subtitle was “Information Obesity.” So I thought to myself, “Self, this article is obviously about information making us full, which is probably a great thing.”  Ya know? Why else would you assign a reading about information? Educators always want their pupils to be very well informed and/or full of info. After I and my wide range of personalities finished deliberating, we dove into the reading. I discovered that I was way off with my assumptions. The article was more about how too much information will make you obese. You can be fat and not be unhealthy, but any time one uses obese, he/she is not meaning it in a good way (same goes with the message being delivered). I agree with the article’s message wholeheartedly. For years, I have been stressing to not listen to everything you hear or take heed to everything that you read. Information, in a sense, can make you DUMB! A few points in the article jumped off the computer screen at me. One key point in the article stated that information was human.  I gave it a confused face (sort of like this o_O). But to be honest, that is a great comparison. Information, like a human, is mental, ambiguous, personal, and subject to personal interpretations. The article started off boring, but it proved to be most informative.

The Tree Octopus

Today (September 6) in class the assignment was to pick one website from a list of 10 or so, and then investigate them. After the investigation process we were to answer a couple questions on the authenticy of the website. Well, being the curious guy that I am (slightly worse than George the Monkey), I picked the craziest website that I saw. The website I chose was The Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus. If we were not in class the amount of "LOL'ing" coming from me would have been uncontrollable. At first glance this website seems very much legit, since it has a ton of info, a bunch of links, and some footage. But c'mon, a "Tree Octopus"...Really though? I’m giggling while I'm typing, hoping you don't see the amusement on my face. The photos where all doctored! Thanks to the one photography class I took in high school I was able to notice it. The information was all small talk - simple stuff to get the readers to skim over it. The links were all books either on fictional creatures and fictional stories or non-fictional books on octopus. Not to mention that the website is asking you to donate a dollar, but the way to donate is to hand the dollar directly to the tree octopus. The biggest give away was the Kelvinic University page. The page is the worse university website known to all educational websites. Its displays zero art, no color, the words are misspelled and no contact information. It screams HOAX. Most importantly, Octopi are classified as cephalopods (marine creatures with long limbs, big heads, and big eyes).They must be fully submerged in water to survive because if not in water they will begin to lose their shape. That shoots the entire website down. You have to love a comical read though!