Throughout the winter, I saw both hairy woodpeckers & downeys at the feeders. They like suet. They were always solitary, though there may have been more than one individual. Now, I’ve seen pairs of both species. I haven’t had a chance to look closely enough to see whether these are pairs of competing males staking out territory, or breeding pairs. Something’s up, though.
Monthly Archives: March 2007
Code: Society for Literature, Science & the Arts
Looks like I’ll be going to this very cool conference next November. I’ve submitted a paper on teaching literature as the teaching of codes (as part of a panel using the novelist Richard Powers as a strange attractor) & the paper has been accepted — we’re just waiting for confirmation from the conference chair that the panel has been approved. I’ve also been invited to read from my poetry as part of a group event at the conference. I’ve dropped out of the conference circuit the last three or four years, but I’m really looking forward to this one.
Bonsai Notes
Warm enough today to take the pine & the juniper off the front porch & put them outside. It will be great if we get the rain that’s predicted. Bonsai love rainwater. This is the time of the year when we humans have to slosh through rain sitting on top of snow; the hardy bonsai begin to emerge from dormancy now, however. On the enclosed front porch over the winter they stay around the freezing point & they get water only every four to five weeks. As the days get longer & the temperatures warm, their soil unfreezes & they need to be watered weekly. In another three or four weeks I will begin to see bits of new growth on these trees.
The indoor trees all seem to have survived the winter, but it will be at least another six weeks before they begin spending time outside and even then it will only be during the day. By early summer they will have all moved outdoors to various places in the yard where light conditions are right.
I take a disinterested pleasure in my dozen or so trees. I’m not competitive about them, though I want them to do well & look good. I think I’ve written before that Carole calls them my “plant pets.” I trim them all regularly & the process of trimming & shaping makes me intimately familiar with each tree’s shape & tendencies of growth. After trimming one of the two romemary trees, my hands smell of the herb. It’s that close familiarity that allows me to make decisions about pruning & wiring branches to give a tree a particular shape. My aesthetic is fairly naturalistic. There is in fact a style of bonsai called “informal upright” that strives for a “natural” shape. I do have one tree I’m shaping into a variation of the “literati” style, though. It’s a little Picea abies. I’m a poet, after all — I need one tree in this poetic style. (Beautiful photos of the various styles here.)
Refworks Workshop
What’s wrong with this scenario?
Instructions:
Create a Refworks account.
Open Refworks.
Open a second (IE) window.
Open Jstor.
Use the export link after the citation to export it to Refworks.
Question: Can I do this in Firefox using two tabs instead of two IE windows?
Answer: I don’t know.
Statement: The link in Jstor is dead.
Response: Oh, sometimes you have to close Refworks, then export, then open Refworks again. We don’t know why.
My (silent) response: This is a waste of my time, get back to me when you know how your own system works.
So I sit back from my monitor, which is showing an Import Aborted message, not wanting to slow down the presentation. After all, others seem to be getting the system to work. The next part of the presentation is about how some of the databases won’t export directly to Refworks, so you have to export a text file to your desktop or documents folder, then import it into Refworks. Why do you have to do this? Not for any inherent technical reason, but because the company that owns Science Web makes a product that competes with Refworks. (I have a visceral dislike of proprietary “solutions” for online technologies. I am a militent for open source repositories & tools.) Then after going through this ridiculous maneuver, when importing the text file, you have to know, not just the name of the database & the file name, but the name of the database provider, which “you just have to know” because it is not given anywhere. That’s when I left.
Note: If you want an elegant way to handle references, use the Firefox browser with the Zotero plugin. Much more flexible & it works right in your browser. Further note: After a bit of testing, I conclude that Refworks will not even load in Firefox, which from this user’s point of view means that the program is broken.
Learning to Read
Does anyone think that children learn to read exclusively phonetically or exclusively by whole word recognition? Well, yes, I suppose some poeple do, mostly people who have a financial interest in selling reading curricula to schools. And apparently the Bush administration believes in phonics. Believes in it enough to create a rigid ideology of reading instruction & impose it on state education systems. More likely, the phonics lobby just had more money & better connections to the Republican Party. Good for Wisconsin for sticking with what sounds like a reasonable system of instruction & refusing to take tainted money to pay for bad pedagogy.
There is a kind of mind that prefers rigid ideological constructions to pluralistic & flexible ones, even when the constructions are ineffective & mal-adapted to getting things done in the world — like teaching reading. Consider abstinence education, bans on stem cell research, outlawing abortion . . . It’s a very long list, but what all the items have in common is a preference for simple answers tol complex questions. And in this administration, any business willing to pander to this nearly hysterical need for ideological rigidity & obedience is all set to make a lot of money. The Bush administration: both weak-minded & corrupt. A twofer.