Book Review: "Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss what Matters Most"

Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss what Matters Most is a good book offering an objective analysis of what goes on and into difficult conversations. Difficult conversations are those on topics that may be difficult and uncomfortable because of its ability to cause pain and negative, if not destructive, results.

By dissecting such conversations into three pieces that people can affect, viz, the "what happened" conversation, the "feelings" conversation, and the "identity" conversation, this book provides recommendations on how to diffuse and create constructive conversations instead.

This book provides examples of what to do and what not to do in some realistically common situations and this improves readers' understanding of the theories they lay out. The focus on actionable behaviours makes this book useful and insightful for the general audience, rather than merely inspirational.

General Purpose Computers and Tinkering to Learn

I sympathize with Mark Pilgrim's thoughts on the Apple iPad and the Tinkerer’s Sunset. As I said in Disappearing Technology in Praise of Closed Systems, for narrow purpose appliances, the closed-ness of the Apple iPad is a good thing:

When it comes to narrow purpose appliances, it sure seems that closed software and hardware is good while open is bad...The iPad is to the traditional personal computer, as a modern house's in-wall plumbing is to exposed pipes.

It's a real shame though if through law, or otherwise, all computers turn into narrow purpose appliances. I personally prefer general purpose computers, especially for it to be available for some students to use (but not necessarily for all). Why would that be?

Book Review: "Religion and Science"

Religion and Science (Gifford Lectures Series) is an excellent introduction to historical and contemporary issues and views in the interaction of science, religion, and society.

Very detailed in its presentation of scientific topics, although for those who are already well versed in various popular general scientific topics, certain sections describing relativity, quantum theory, astronomy, etc, might be a bit repetitive.

The same could probably be said of the theological topics for those already well versed in them. That is, of course, why this book makes for an excellent introductory text.

This book is not a one or two sided view but instead presents many of the nuances in the interface between science and religion in society. I recommend this book, and especially more so in conjunction with Midgley's Science as Salvation: A Modern Myth and its Meaning, which I've reviewed as well.

Disappearing Technology in Praise of Closed Systems

Bottom line: When it comes to narrow purpose appliances, it sure seems that closed software and hardware is good while open is bad. If the iPhone is any indication, something like the iPad is the way of the future of narrow purpose appliances. [1]

Within Education research, there are educational technologists studying how computer technologies can be integrated to learning and teaching. Some of the things they study, for example, is how Second Life could be used in education.

What bothers me about this kind of research [2] is that it assumes the successful use of "technology" in the classroom is something extraordinary, and that it can be successful only with cutting edge research on their classroom applications.

Reference Management Software

I totally should have started using a reference management software to take care of my bibliography six months ago. Now I'm spending hours catching up on finding references to papers I've read as I start working towards my thesis.

Since I'll be writing in LaTeX, I knew I wanted to use BibTeX to organize my bibliography. Although I write the LaTeX files in Emacs, I really didn't want to do that for my bibliography. I wanted a nice GUI software for that.

Looking around, I found Pybliographer to be quite nice. Until I started pasting in some text from web sites with odd text encodings, and things started to not be so nice, making me hunt for characters in the wrong encoding, etc, was definitely not what I was supposed to be doing.

Fed up, I went looking for a web based tool for managing my bibliographic database. I had a few criteria I needed fulfilled, and with Wikipedia in hand, I started looking at my options. Here's what I found.