The Guardian has an article up about studies involving omega-3 fatty acids and populations of alocholics and violent prisoners. Some of the scientists quoted in the article suspect that an increase in omega-6 fatty acids and decrease in omega-3 fatty acids in the diet has affected people’s brains over the last century.
The results are not entirely conclusive, and the article does note that, but I found it to be really interesting nonetheless.
As I’ve noted in previous posts, as I read a paper, I underline relevant passages. I also circle references I’m interested in. The paper then goes into my “to-map” file.
I like to “map” papers when I’m feeling braindead — when I’m too tired or too mentally exhausted to do things requiring extensive thought. This consists of loading relevant details for a paper into a mind map and then looking up all of the references I found interesting and adding them to my Cite-U-Like library.
I am feeling a bit tired today, and I just finished mapping a paper. By my timer, it took about 55 minutes for an 8-page paper. This is a pretty substantial amount of time (about 6.875 min/page). However, it allows me to browse or search a complete list of the relevant facts from papers I’ve read. This is much, much faster than re-reading each paper, and much more powerful than trying to keep track of all of the salient details in my head. I haven’t timed how long it takes me to map a paper before, and I’m going to try to remember to do it more. I’d like to get an average pages/minute. Of course, the times will be longer for “interesting” papers and shorter for less-“interesting” papers.
What do you do to keep track of important information from papers you’ve read?
An article from the BBC covers one man’s theory about a bifurcation in the human race. He presumes that over long periods of time, sexual selection combined with dependence on technology will lead to beautiful, athletic men and women on one end of the spectrum, and hunched ugly little trolls of men (and women) on the other.
He neglects, in his up to 10,000 year outlook, one simple thing that is very likely to happen: we will gain the ability to manipulate and fix our bodies and even our genes. This very likely eventuality, should it come to pass, will nullify his whole idea. It is already coming to pass.
I was reading a paper today about a study on dogs, and it mentioned that the dogs were ventilated with a “Harvard Respirator”. It was pretty easy to find a few pictures on Google Images, but I couldn’t find much other information. Apparently it’s just a veterinary ventilator made by Harvard Apparatus. In case you ever need to know. I thought perhaps it was a particular type of device, like a “Holter Monitor”.
You will find a lot of mentions of Harvard respirators on Google, and they are mostly quotes from scientific papers stating that they used a Harvard respirator. Go figure.
ADDENDUM: The very same paper also mentions the pacing rate they used to stimulate the dog’s heart. They don’t mention the normal heart rate for a (mongrel) dog. I looked it up and found it here. It’s between 60-160 beats/min for average-sized adult dogs. That’s a pretty wide range. I’d like to see a plot of heart rate compared to size in dogs.
I’ve written up a basic introduction, with pictures, to my field of research. I would really appreciate it if any of you could read it over, tell me if you find it understandable, what’s unclear, etc. I need people who aren’t very familiar with this stuff.
It’s lacking some later stuff that’s more relevant to my research (at this point) but I want to get the foundations right before I move on.
Please please please help me with this.
The page is here. Also, sorry if you got this cross-posted on my LiveJournal.