north by Northwest United States?

Do you capitalize cardinal directions (e.g., north, northwest)?

Answer:

Only if they refer to a specific region of a country (eg: Northwest America). Do NOT capitalize if they are used as directions (eg: Looking north...).

Read more:
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Is_north_south_east_and_west_capitalized#ixzz19LaFOHux

Who versus Whom

Haven't done a straight grammar mix-up in a while. So I found a really cool grammar girl entry on this one.

Use who when you are referring to the subject. Use whom when you are referring to the object.

Quick and dirty tip: Like whom, the pronoun him ends with m. When you're trying to decide whether to use who or whom, ask yourself if the answer to the question would be he or him. That's the trick: if you can answer the question being asked with him, then use whom, and it's easy to remember because they both end with m. For example, if you're trying to ask, "Who (or whom) do you love?" The answer would be "I love him." Him ends with an m, so you know to use whom. But if you are trying to ask, "Who (or whom) stepped on Squiggly?" the answer would be "He stepped on Squiggly." There's no m, so you know to use who. So that's the quick and dirty trick: if you can't remember that you use whom when you are referring to the object of the sentence, just remember that him equals whom.

Thanks grammar girl. I don't know who you are, but a bit your not as hot as the cartoon of you on the website.

A Journal Article Takes 12 Weeks to Write

All to often I forget that writing takes time. If I have learned anything about preparing my first manuscript for submission is that it is long and arduous. Also, that you have to not attach any sort of emotion to the words you write because they are all going to be hashed to death beyond recognition and reincarnating in a form that sounds more like your professor's and not yours. Just saying.

So start early and start often.

Some books I will adding to my repertoire:
Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks: A Guide to Academic Publishing Success
How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing

Getting Rid of the Fuzz or Decluttering your Writing

"All writers edit their prose, but great writers edit viciously. The point of editing is to eliminate ‘fuzz’, or excess words which don’t add value. Zinsser compares removing ‘fuzz’ to fighting weeds – you will always be slightly behind. Two examples of fuzz are ‘also’ and ‘very’. Work at keeping them out of your text and your writing will improve."
-The Thesis Whisperer a good writing blog to follow......

Scholarly vs. Popular Sources (the "When to use a newspaper article reference question")

I just had a very good question from one of my REM 100 students:
"For the term paper are we allowed to use newspaper articles or should we stay clear of them?"

I have often wondered when to use popular sources in papers? The answer is basically, depends on the source's stake in the material and the audience in question.

"To understand this difference [b/w scholarly and popular sources], it may help to recognize that when you write for a departmental class, you are writing for an audience more expert than the common reader. When writing about Republican and Democratic voting patterns on stem cells, science reports from a general interest magazine like Newsweek might be considered sufficiently authoritative. But when you write about stem cells for a Biomedical Engineering class, your teachers and classmates are considered more expert than the average non-scientist reader. For this audience, your sources must have stronger science credentials, must generally be working scientists, not journalists.

Newspapers are not as easy to classify as other sources. Newspapers are not scholarly sources, but some would not properly be termed popular, either. Every source must be questioned for its stake in the material. The New York Post is known for its conservative political bias, for instance, and for its high opinions of Fox television shows (owned by the same parent company). You might be able to trust its sports coverage, but it would not be considered a neutral source for political news. But some newspapers have developed a national or even worldwide reputation for fairness and accuracy. The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The London Guardian are a few examples. On issues of fact, major mainstream magazines such as Newsweek and Time are also generally reliable.

Finally, it’s worth noting that many Internet sources are less reliable than print sources."
-Yale Writing Center

Environmental versus Natural Resources, a worthy distinction?

Maybe not a "worthy" distinction, but one that has come up more than once when dealing in environmental economics.
"Environmental economics was once distinct from resource economics. Natural resource economics as a subfield began when the main concern of researchers was the optimal commercial exploitation of natural resource stocks. But resource managers and policy-makers eventually began to pay attention to the broader importance of natural resources (e.g. values of fish and trees beyond just their commercial exploitation;, externalities associated with mining). It is now difficult to distinguish "environmental" and "natural resource" economics as separate fields as the two became associated with sustainability."
-Wikipedia

So I work for a department entitled: Resource and Environmental Management. Environmental management refers to the management of interaction by the modern human societies with, and impact upon the environment. While resource managment refers to the management of natural resources such as land, water, soil, plants and animals, with a particular focus on how management affects the quality of life for both present and future generations. This I think is a worthwile distinction. Now about the management part............

Queens versus American English (analyse v. analyze)

So I continue to fail students who use the queen's English in my assignments. It's not cause I hate the queen, it's cause I thought they were wrong. Turns out there is in fact a "Canadian English" that is allowed to poach from either American or British (queen's) English.

"Canadian English should not be described as a mixture of American and British English with an insignificant number of Canadianisms added. Canadian English, like all ‘Englishes’, possesses an important characteristic, referred to as wholesale borrowing, which has allowed it to develop a very rich vocabulary. Canadians have in the past and will most likely in the future continue to borrow freely from both American and British English; however, once a lexeme is borrowed, it has the possibility to evolve differently. In other words, Canadians appropriate it to suit their needs. "

And when it comes to the analyse v. analyze....

"Canadians unlike Americans have a choice in matter pertaining to spelling. Canadians can choose to spell the following words either the American or British way: center/centre, practice/practise[5], analyze/analyse, color/colour. However, consistency must govern usage. Thus, if a Canadian in a formal paper chooses to use British spelling, he or she must take care to use all British suffixes where there are common suffixes to chose from. This is the advice given by the Canadian Oxford English Dictionary in the Style Guide section under Appendices. The aforementioned dictionary is considered, and for good reason, the authority on matters pertaining to style."
-Canadian English


So bottom line: Canada has its own English. It's just either British or American English, but not both.

The making of a new thesis

Probably the worst part of going a new direction in your thesis is having to outline and come up with a proposal of something that is going to change 100 times more before you go through your comprehensive exam and get it approved, only to change 50 more times before you actually get near the formal writing of the thesis. So excuse me if I dont take outlining and the proposal with that much gravity. I suppose I should go the way of PhD comics....

Informatics*

* information science: the sciences concerned with gathering, manipulating, storing, retrieving, and classifying recorded information
-Wordweb
i.e. wicked cool visuals.

One of my supervisors said something that really stuck with me
"I pretty much write my manuscripts [journal articles] around a few good figures"

If you take a look at typical science article you see 1 or 2 figures, each displaying 5-10 sets of data. Clearly this is quite a task. It's no wonder why making figures takes more time than the actual writing (or it seems -there probably is a sub-thesis social survey there).


So there is the big question: How do I jam as many data sets as possible into journal figures while still making it visually appealing?

Edward Tufte and Informatics attempts to answer this question.
Informatics seems like something apart for science. An afterthought. Some visual designers with all the data at their fingertips and a bunch of fancy proprietary software like tableau and time. So how does the scientist dable in this informatics game? Edward Tufte has the answer:
"Copy the great architects" -Edward Tufte

Here is a cool blog on infographics
Edward Tufte's books, posters and works
Of course my favorite infographic:


More on visuals in a later post.

50 REM 100 LCAs

That was a lot of grading. But I did it in one day. 7 pages of poorly cited "scientific" research. Here is my #1 complaint. AMBIGUITY.

ambiguous - having more than one possible meaning; "ambiguous words"; "frustrated by ambiguous instructions, the parents were unable to assemble the toy"
-Wordweb

Here is a list of the most common ambiguous words in the first years writing by category:
Vague Words:
Normally
Generally
Implied Certainty:
Always
Never
All
Every
Comparatives:
Highest
Latest
words ending in "or" or "est"
Words that cannot be qualified:
Efficient
Normal
Faster
Adequate

It was a gold mine......a gold mine of arbitrary

How to use a semicolon

Don't. That used to be my tact on semicolons. Why bother getting it wrong, I will just craft my sentence(s) in a fashion that does not lend itself to the old crotchety punctuation that I only use to make winking smiley faces in texts.

Well that is a pretty ignorant thing to do. My colleagues us "semis" and I always assume they are using them in the correct fashion. To that I say no more! I have ESL colleagues that depend on my to make sure their English is correct. For example:
"The nature of penalty under s.75.21 as a surcharge on stumpage also support absolute liability; there is no defence of due diligence in respect of stumpage payable on the excess volume s.103 of the Forest act."
Is this correct? I need some help.

1. Use a semicolon between closely related independent clauses not joined a coordinating conjunction. When related independent clauses appear in a sentence they should usually be linked together with a coordinating conjunction (and, but, or, nor, for, yet, so). These words signal that there is a relationship between the two clauses. If the clauses are related and if the relationship between them is clear without a conjunction, you can use a semicolon instead.

* I got into an accident; the car was damaged badly.
* I remember the incident well; it happened in 1983.

Semicolons are often used to correct comma splices, which is what happens when we connect two independent clauses with a comma when there is no coordinating conjunction:

* I was late to class today, there was no parking.

This sentence contains a comma splice. While the instinct in correcting comma splices is to use a semicolon here, simply adding a coordinating conjunction would correct the comma splice:

* I was late to class today because there was no parking.

One common mistake is to use words like “however” or “therefore” as coordinating conjunctions. However, they are not. When connecting two independent clauses with a comma and a word like “however” or “therefore,” you can either divide the sentence into two sentences, or use a semicolon, which can be used to connect two independent clauses without a coordinating conjunction.

If you are unsure whether to use a comma or semicolon, check if both sides are independent clauses, or what can stand on their own as sentences. If both sides are independent clauses, you either need a semicolon or a coordinating conjunction. If only one side is an independent clause, and the other is a dependent clauses, use a comma.

If you are unsure whether to use a semicolon or period, think about why you want to join the two ideas together in the first place: should they be in the same sentence or in separate sentences?

2. Use a semicolon between items in a series of items that already contain commas:

* Some of her favorite deserts are chocolate cake, the kind with cherries on top; banana splits, without any nuts; and rice pudding, but only if it is made without raisins.
-University of Maryland

So taking my new-found knowledge I think my colleague was attempting to fix a comma splice with a semicolon. I would change the sentence to read (also correcting the spelling):
"The nature of penalty under s.75.21 as a surcharge on stumpage also support absolute liability because there is no defense of due diligence in respect of stumpage payable on the excess volume s.103 of the Forest Act."

Straight up. Tell me I'm wrong.

ISO 8601

Canada uses ISO 8601 standards for the date. The ISO 8601 date format is an easy date format to understand because it always starts from the biggest number first and then goes down to the smallest number last, year(2009)-month(12)-day(31), and the format always includes the date with a 4-digit year, so it is free from ambiguity.
yyyy-MM-dd (e.g., 2009-12-31)

In the United States, dates are traditionally written in the "month day year" order, that is, in neither descending nor ascending order of significance. (In computing, this would be called a "endianness" order.) This order is used in both the traditional all-numeric date (e.g., "12/31/99" or "12/31/1999") (said with all cardinal numbers) as well as in the expanded form (e.g., "December 31, 1999") (usually said with the year as a cardinal number and the day as an ordinal number; e.g., "December thirty-first, nineteen ninety-nine"), with the historical rationale that it is indeed big-endian with respect to the month and day, as the year was often of lesser importance. The most commonly used separator in the all-numeric form is the slash, although the hyphen is also common. Dots have also emerged in the all-numeric format recently due to globalization.
MM-dd-yyyy. (eg. 12/31/1999)
-Wikipedia

What are Fuzzy Charts?

Fuzzy charts are things like pie charts or Wordles that are visually appealing but actually do not convey data properly or provide a good medium for analysis.

"Some of the most confusing new visualizations are the popular network diagrams, which are intended to show connections between nodes and invite inferences about the forces that govern the connections. Numerous groups have produced maps of social networks, internet traffic, and other complicated phenomena, but the impression one gets is merely of connectivity, rather than of any of the patterns the visualization purports to convey. Few obey the principles of perception-informed design or Edward Tufte’s rules for graphical integrity, which state that graphics should make viewers think about the subject matter, not design."
--Greenwood from SEED magazine in the article "Getting Past the Pie Chart", February 18th, 2009.

This is odd, as making networks is what how our brain functions and to make those networks spatially appealing is how we discovered the brain worked in the first place. The brain has 100 billion neurons with over a trillion connections. It has been said that emotion and thought are born here [the neurons of the brain], ie. the neuron connections in the brain is what makes us human. However, saying that displaying data similar to how our brain physically works is a jump in logic that is quite flawed. The reasoning mind is simply a set of binary code or switches. Feelings we value are another story. But our mind must interpret visual data in a hierarchical (computational) format. That is why we value bar graphs and lists to break apart or analyze data. The more we can stick to the latter types of data visualizations the less our brains will have to work on transforming the data from a confusing pie chart to a hierarchical list, thereby leaving time for emotion and creative thought and not get tripped up or worried that we are reading the data wrong.

-More on Edward Tufte's rules for graphical integrity in a later post
-More on Psychology (study of ourselves(mind)) and creativity in a later post

Back to emotions and who we are bring us to a man I very much admire, Alan Turing. The Turing test is build a computer that could chat to a human and have the human not know that you were in fact talking to a computer. Alan thought we have this accomplished by the year 2000. He was wrong. The turing test shows that are brains are not entirely a set of binary code and no computer can match our intelligence. Either because something else is a driving force behind what we do and/or we have emotion (ie. we are irrational).

-More on B.F. Skinner and Behavioralism in a later post.
-More on Alan Turing (esp. the chaos theory) in a later post.

Overall, in terms of data visualization the simplest and most hierarchical are the best. When it comes time to analyze that data in your writing, it is best to leave emotion (as defined in this post) to the discussion. Following this logic, the IMRDC format is actually quite spot on. Something I have grappled with for years.

Quick notes for data visualizations:
NO
-pie charts
-networks
-wordles, or idea clouds
-colors unless needed to recognize a specific pattern
-unnecessary arrangements
YES
-simplicity
-interactiveness
-few colors

(cf. Murphy and Bloom 1990)

cf in citation means that you must consult the item at which the abbreviation is directing you. The "cf." is a shortening of the Latin "confer," which means "consult" or "compare." The mark will usually come before a citation; when it does, refer to that citation for more information.

-Oxford Dictionary

Its versus It's

Easy
It's is a contraction for it is.

Its is a possessive pronoun.

Thanks: http://garyes.stormloader.com/its.html

Letter of Intents

Man intents are hard to pin down. I have been finding that to get the right angle or hook you need to involve some (perhaps bogus) personal reflection. Here is my latest LOI that I sent off to SOLAS, a summer school for air-sea gas exchange. I expect to change this for other summer school/workshop/grant LOIs.

Letter of Intent

Thomas Rodengen

At a young age I discovered the outdoors and have never gotten over the excitement of setting off into the wild. Being in the outdoors taught me to rely on my own judgment and where I started to learn things by using all of my senses.

It was in the outdoors that I found my passion for geology, the science of Earth’s systems. The outdoors has ever since been my place of devotion, my sanctuary and more recently my laboratory. I obtained a B.S. and B.A. in Geology and Environmental Studies from the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota where I researched lakes and their role in the problem of climate change. I then jumped to the big pond for my master’s work, studying the role of the ocean in mitigating climate change. My sense of wonder for the ocean and its part in climate change continues in my doctoral work.

It is this sense of wonder that has driven me to examine the most prominent ocean CO2 storage options. Eventually, I would like to know whether oceanic storage options compete with other storage solutions (e.g., storage in depleted oil reservoirs). SOLAS can provide me with the tools to assess oceanic storage options through investigation of ocean storage efficiency and deep-sea sediment interactions. Ocean storage efficiency is calculated by the fraction of total mass of injected CO2 that has remained in the ocean relative to what fraction of this CO2 would wind up in the ocean via natural air-sea gas exchange processes. Advancing my understanding of the natural and perturbed air-sea gas exchange processes with much-admired seminars such as “Trace Gasses in the Ocean and Atmosphere” and “Air-water Gas Exchange” will provide me with information to populate oceanic models and calculations of ocean storage efficiency. Additionally, I wish to investigate the effects of interactions between deep-sea sediments (e.g., CaCO3) and stored CO2 in order to optimize the shift of CO2 from the atmosphere to the ocean in modeling. Offering seminars such as “Biogeochemical Changes over Long Time-scales” and “Oceanic Biogeochemical Modeling” can help me model the shift of CO2 from the atmosphere to the ocean in equilibrium, buffering the effect of CO2 on other marine systems (e.g., pH).

Having the opportunity to study air-sea gas exchange first hand and inquire to the top researchers about these topics will undoubtedly benefit my research into formulating the comparison criteria between oceanic storage options and ultimately geologic options.

Thank you very much for taking the time to review my application. If you require further information please don’t hesitate to ask. I can’t wait to get outside and start the SOLAS program.

Cheers,

Thomas Rodengen

Effect versus Affect

Dictionary Definitions:
Effect: Something brought about by a cause or agent; a result.
Affect: 1.To have an influence on or effect a change in: Inflation affects the buying power of the dollar.
2.To act on the emotions of; touch or move.
3.To attack or infect, as a disease: Rheumatic fever can affect the heart.

Quick and Dirty Rule:
Can you replace "effect" with "result" and have the same effect? Might also replace with "cause".

Some rules from yourdictionary.com

1. If you are talking about a result, then use the word "effect."
•Example: What effect did the loss have on the team?

2. It is appropriate to use the word "effect" if one of these words is used immediately before the word: into, on, take, the, any, an, or and.
•Example: The prescribed medication had no effect on the patient's symptoms.
•Example: In analyzing a situation, it is important to take the concepts of cause and effect into consideration.

3. If you want to describe something that was caused or brought about, the right word to use is effect.
•Example: The new manager effected some positive changes in the office. (This means that the new manager caused some positive changes to take place in the office.)

4. Affect can be used as a noun to describe facial expression.
•Example: The young man with schizophrenia had a flat affect.
•Example: The woman took the news of her husband's sudden death with little affect.

5. Affect can also be used as a verb. Use it when trying to describe influencing someone or something rather than causing it.
•Example: How does the crime rate affect hiring levels by local police forces?
•Example: The weather conditions will affect the number of people who come to the county fair this year.

Reference: http://www.yourdictionary.com/grammar-rules/affect-effect-grammar.html

Grand Design

The idea is to start writing more. So posted here will be writing about writing and how to be a better writer.