Bibliography tool for students and teachers

I’ve installed a bibliographic tool that allows you to create your own account and enter bibliographic information. One of the very nice things about this tool is that it formats your entry in the style of your choice (APA, MLA, Chicago, etc.) This is nice because it’s a pain to remember how to format an entry.

Go to http://cailab.net/wikindx3/index.php to get started.

WIKINDX

WIKINDX
Bibliographic and quotations/notes management and article authoring system for students and teachers and their friends and neighbors and dogs and cats and anyone else even remotely connected to National Pingtung University of Education.

Would you go skydiving without a parachut?

Apparently, more Taiwanese students are deciding to make the leap without putting on the necessary safety equipment.

Taipei Times – archives

Most HIV-positive blood donors are students: report

By Shelley Huang
STAFF REPORTER
Thursday, Jun 24, 2010, Page 2
The Taiwan Blood Services Foundation yesterday said that up to 40 percent of newly reported cases of HIV-positive blood donors were students.

The foundation said that from January to March, 22 new blood samples collected from blood donation centers nationwide were found to be HIV positive. Of the newly reported cases, nine donors were still in school, accounting for the largest group of new HIV-positive donors at 40 percent.

When compared across age group, more than 86 percent of samples that tested positive for the virus came from those between 17 and 29 years old, said Lin Ming-chang (林敏昌), a director at the foundation.

The figures also showed that last year, one out of every three HIV-positive blood donors were students, surpassing the 22.5 percent who were in the military.

Lin voiced concern over the drop in the average age of people contracting the HIV virus.

“The number of young people contracting the HIV virus may be growing and is worthy of our attention,” he said.

At the same press conference yesterday, Taiwan AIDS Foundation publicized the results of a survey of adults living in Taiwan, which showed that about one out of every three respondents believed that only people who led unethical lifestyles would contract the HIV virus.

Nearly half of those surveyed said they normally did not pay attention to AIDS-related information or were not willing to work with people who have AIDS.

Foundation secretary-general Lin Chiung-chao (林瓊照) said that although condoms have been proven as an effective deterrent against AIDS and other forms of sexually transmitted diseases, only about 4 percent of parents surveyed said they had taught their children how to use them.

To avoid AIDS, it is important to have proper knowledge about the disease, avoid high-risk behavior and undergo regular screening, she said.

Radio Diaries

Here’s a gem of a site. Along with StoryCorps, this is one of the best sites I’ve stumbled across in a long time, and I’m surprised I hadn’t learned of it sooner. One thing very nice about RadioDiaries is that you have the option of downloading in mp3 format, and it includes transcripts. This is an excellent education tool.

http://www.radiodiaries.org/radiodiaries.html

*Radio Diaries*

One more reason to delete your Facebook account

What sites such as Facebook and Google know and whom they tell

Eben Moglen, a Columbia University law professor and director of Software Freedom Law Center, calls Facebook “one big database of hundreds of millions of people containing the kind of information far beyond what the secret police in 20th-century totalitarian regimes had.”

The company knows which social contacts are closest to you and can guess your moods, he said. And if you’re obsessively checking another person’s profile at the same time he or she is doing the same with yours, Moglen claims, “Facebook can even tell you’re going to have an affair before you do.”

Antisocial media sites don’t give a rat’s behind about your privacy

At this point, there have been so many stories detailing how Facebook and similar sites give away personal information, that I have little pity for anyone still using these sites who might be surprised or offended to learn that their profile is essentially 100% accessible to advertisers and others. 

Facebook, MySpace caught releasing user data – Yahoo! News

In a seemingly never-ending string of damaging disclosures about its users’ privacy concerns, Facebook has reportedly been releasing user data to ad companies that hadn’t even asked for the info.

Facebook isn’t alone this time: rival social-media site MySpace has also been called out in Friday’s Wall Street Journal report by Emily Steel and Jessica E. Vascellaro — together with the content-sharing sites Livejournal and Digg.

The report says that the companies have delivered user data to major online advertising companies such as Google’s DoubleClick and Yahoo!’s Right Media, despite explicit pledges to protect such information. The released material includes user names and ID numbers, together with data that could be used to accumulate a host of additional information on individual users, such as where they live, their names, occupations, incomes and places of employment.(emphasis added)

Jessica Watson

Even the most cynical person must be impressed by this young lady.


China Post looking for proofreaders…

Can you tell why the China Post is desperately seeking proofreaders??

China Post needs proofreaders.

Yet more on Taiwan as the origin of many Pacific Islanders

Taipei Times – archives

Pacific Islanders’ history

With reference to your review of my book, Surviving Paradise (“Notes from a very small island,” May 9, page 14), and Bradley Winterton’s doubts about my claim that Taiwanese Aborigines colonized the Pacific Islands, I would like to clarify and support this claim.

It is the orthodox view among linguists, anthropologists and archeologists that the origin point for the colonization of the Pacific Islands was Taiwan. Between 5,000 and 7,000 years ago, the ancestors of the modern Taiwanese Aborigines expanded out of Taiwan into the Philippines, Indonesia, New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, mixed with local populations, and then colonized previously uninhabited islands in Melanesia, Polynesia and Micronesia — including the Marshall Islands.

So modern-day Pacific Islanders and modern-day Taiwanese Aborigines have common ancestors who lived in Taiwan and some of the Taiwanese Aborigines who lived 5,000 to 7,000 years ago were responsible for setting off the expansion that would eventually lead to such feats as establishing a civilization on the remote Easter Island and discovering Hawaii and Madagascar across vast stretches of empty ocean.

One reason most academics agree that Pacific Islanders originated in Taiwan is that the Taiwanese Aborigines speak Austronesian languages related to the languages spoken by Pacific Islanders. The rich diversity of Austronesian languages spoken in Taiwan indicates that the language family developed there for many thousands of years and then, more recently, was carried to other islands like the Marshall Islands.

This is similar to the Germanic languages found in Europe that shows (if we didn’t know already) that the Germanic languages arose there and were later carried to places like England, rather than vice-versa.

Modern-day Pacific Islanders feel no sense of connection toward Taiwan as an ancestral place of origin, but that is almost certainly where they came from.

PETER RUDIAK-GOULD

PhD student in anthropology, Oxford University
This story has been viewed 585 times.

Yet more privacy concerns over Facebook

It seems that articles are coming out every day about how mostly young people are handing over way too much personal information to, well, everybody. Once that information is online, it’s in the public domain forever. Keep that in mind the next time you post all sorts of mundane personal details that only marketing scum and criminals care about.

What gets me is that young people are particularly vulnerable to Facebook’s “bait and switch” tactics because they may feel they have nothing to lose; they’re broke and innocent. But their identity will travel with them as they acquire wealth, and their loss of innocence won’t be able to protect them from the information that they’re putting on Facebook now because it’s out there for good. They won’t be able to ‘erase it’ later , even if they decide to eventually cancel their accounts.

CLICK HERE TO DELETE YOUR FACEBOOK ACCOUNT!

Consumer Reports: Half of Social Network Users are “Oversharing,” Endangering Privacy

Consumer Reports, a longtime trusted name in product ratings and reviews, has today released its annual “State of the Net” report, which finds that over half (52%) of social network users post risky information online. Among the transgressions: using weak passwords, listing full birth dates, ignoring privacy settings and making mention of when you’re away from home, to name a few.

The report looked closely at Facebook and Twitter, two of the top social networks used today, and found that on Facebook, the percentage of those engaged in this type of risky behavior was even higher, at 56%. However, what’s more interesting is how the survey inadvertently reveals that Facebook users clearly have no idea about how much they’re publicly sharing on the network.

…it’s not just the users themselves who are to blame for this “risky” online behavior. The networks have been created so that risk is a factor built into every sharing feature. Facebook especially is now exploiting its earlier, implicit agreement between itself and its users so that people are publicly sharing what they think is private information.

Survey Shows Facebook Users are Clearly Confused

Something else we found decidedly telling regarding this issue is the fact that the reports states 73% of adult Facebook users only shared content with friends but only 42% of users said they customized their privacy settings.

These numbers clearly show the study’s flaws. You can’t just ask Facebook users about their privacy: They’re uninformed.

In December, Facebook made sweeping changes to their default settings, prompting users to accept the new recommended settings or edit those settings to their liking. Those who took Facebook’s recommendations without making any changes immediately began sharing status updates, photos, videos and links publicly, likely without realizing they had done so.

That means that a good many of the 73% of Facebook adults who think they’re sharing just with friends are sadly mistaken. Only those in the 42% who customized their settings (hopefully properly) are actually restricting their content from public view.

I knew I was right to delete those accounts… or try to anyway

I posted this to another blog of mine already, but I’m putting it here as well because I’ve had a number of discussions with my students about social web sites, privacy, the history of the web, and other exciting topics (well, at least to me.)

I think you’ll find this a very interesting interview.

Why The Co-Developer Of The World Wide Web Isn’t On Facebook (Video Interview)

Why The Co-Developer Of The World Wide Web Isn’t On Facebook (Video Interview)

by Robin Wauters on Apr 30, 2010

One of the most interesting speakers that took the stage at The Next Web conference held in Amsterdam this week was Robert Cailliau, a Belgian computer scientist who, together with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, developed the World Wide Web now almost 20 years ago.

After his talk, I had an interesting conversation with the man, which I captured on video.