Having returned from holiday with more books (see Greenflame: Back from holiday (with books)) we all went out a few days back to one of the local secondhand bookshops with a box of books to exchange. A successful trip with all 6 of us finding something amongst the volumes. To my delight I picked up a copy of Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days by a favourite author of mine, Alastair Reynolds.

Reynold’s ‘Revelation Space’ explores, among other things, how human society might shape itself with different responses to technology interfacing with the human body. As such it is a good example of transhumanism in fiction. Wikipedia has an article on transhumanist fiction as a genre, including links through to some works that are available for download.

I see that EndNote now has a basic style for SBL which would have saved me grief a while back. Only problem I’d need to upgrade EndNote to a new version that requires a G4 as minimum. The poor old G3 iBook doesn’t make the cut even though it word processes just fine with EndNote 7. I’d really like an EndNote style for McIntosh too – anyone (Australians?) know of one?

One thing that really annoys me about EndNote 7 (I don’t know about later versions) is it’s handling of (book) reviews as a entry type is non-existent (or I just can’t see it).

Nice summary of a talk given on the influence of Google (and like) upon the identification of critical and helpful knowledge, particularly within the academic world, over at planet telex » Blog Archive » The University of Google – Speed Searching and the Killing of Knowledge. A problem that I come across regularly when marking essays. Seems that the essay question is typed into Google and the first few web sites retrieved crop up in several essays. Darren cites a list of criteria that the speaker, Tara Brabazon, gives to students to constructively educate them in using sources like Google. These include:

• Who authored the document?
• What expertise does the author have?
• What evidence is provided?
• What genre is the document, is it a journal piece, academic paper, polemic or a blog post?
• Is the site funded by an institution?

I talk about the use of internet/electronic resources to students whenever I teach but on the whole it doesn’t seem to have that much affect upon a significant minority. Even citing Internet resources is poorly done. Now however, I think I’ll develop a more constructive strategy.

See also: Greenflame: Google Sociology.

Journal article requires citation format that isn’t one of the myriad available for EndNote. So rather than do it all by hand – and possibly botch something up – I’m going to attempt to create my first EndNote output style. Figure the time invested will be repaid if I ever have to write another article for this style.

AKMA : You want this points to the free CityULike service for organising references and citations online, as well as forming virtual communities around research interests. The experimental import from BibTex format looks helpful as does the ability to set up watch lists on various journals.

I spent a large chunk of today checking some of my footnotes in the section I wrote 18 months ago on the theological interpretation of the image and likeness of God in Christian history. All fine until my footnote for a reference to Justin Martyr arguing that the human body was valuable in God’s sight was incomplete – Lost Fragments should have read Fragments of the Lost Work of Justin on the Resurrection. Erk. Spent a while skimming Lost Fragments wondering what I was on when I wrote that part.

Somewhat ironically, for the missing reference speaks of a rejection of those who would spurn the earthly life, the answer was found on the internet. Incarnational, embodied reference found excarnationally. Here’s the source I used to find it: www.earlychristianwritings.com/. Tomorrow I’ll go to the library and haul out a paper tome to peer at.