Weekend Reading: Be Careful Out There Edition

So, it turned out to be the wrong week to be teaching a post-apocalyptic novel as a way to lighten things up in the British survey. Yikes. (Former ProfHacker Alex was in the 7/11 the suspects robbed minutes before it all went down!) All our thoughts are with those in Boston and Texas this weekend.

On to this week’s links:

• David Chartier offers a workflow if you want to “screencast iOS apps (and possibly GIF them too),” using Reflector for Mac, Screewnflow, and GIF Brewery. (Handy, but unexcerptable.)
• Katie Floyd shows “How I Organize Documents in Evernote”: Evernote also has the ability to “tag” documents with keywords which I use occasionally, but the practice of tagging never really caught on with me. As a longtime Mac user, I’ve much more comfortable using a nested files and folders system. Evernote uses the concept of “notebooks” to organize documents. Notebooks function similar to folders in that you can nest notebooks within other notebooks, but presently only one level deep.
• Academic Jungle’s GMP offers some reflections on “Giving Talks at Meetings”: Giving talks at meetings stresses me out a fair bit, as the very act of delivering a talk is very uncomfortable. I don’t really suffer from stage fright; instead, I find it’s mostly the external constraints that do it for me.
• Meghan Duffy asks about “prioritizing manuscripts” and the risk of “having data go unpublished for lack of time”: To explain a bit more: every PI that I know – and many postdocs and grad students – has generated more data than they have been able to publish. This means that decisions are being made about which projects to write up and which ones not to.
• Jonathan Rees defends universities from their presidents in “‘It could not be worse than what we now face’”: I think all faculty who quietly sulk down the road towards their own technological obsolescence deserve their fate. It’s not our fault that college is too expensive. If it were, 76% of us wouldn’t be working adjunct. Yet we’re going to let the same people who have set so many American universities on the brink of financial ruin decide what the future of higher education must be?

In this week’s video, Al Pittampali discusses improving meetings in “Read This Before Our Next Meeting”:

Bonus: Tuesday, Frank Turner releases his new album, Tape Deck Heart. That’s good, because I still believe.

Double-bonus: The Hold Steady + Game of Thrones = “The Bear and the Maiden Fair.”

Photo “Boston” by Flickr user Jeff Gunn / Creative Commons licensed BY-2.0.