Universcale

Nikon has a pretty cool flash program presenting the range of scale of human understanding within context of the range of scale of normal human experience. Unfortunately, they left a big empty hole from 10E+05 to 10E+07 meters - where many physical geographers focus.

Learning and Remembering

I have this big challenge ahead of me. I'm starting to read for my comprehensive exams. In my department, Geography, that means I had to select three "subfields" of Geography and create a reading list of about 100 recent, signficant publications relating to each subfield. My three subfields, btw, are "Cartographic Generalization", "Spatial Databases", and "Ontology" (with Spatial Databases being slightly skewed toward multiple representation databases and Ontology being skewed toward formal ontologies for geographic information).

So I have this list of about 300 publications, the majority (95%) of which are journal pubs and the balance are books, textbooks and edited volumes. All very heavy reading. The comprehensive exams are created just for me by my committee and can be very general or very precise. So I need a pretty solid command of this material. Of course, by requiring that the material be "recent", it means I need a solid command of historical material that the recent material draws upon.

My list, right now, is in EndNote and most of the journal pubs are saved as PDFs on my computer. My normal mode of operation is to print out the PDFs I'm reading next and carry them around with me and try to get in some reading time here and there. But I need to start picking up the pace.

The most recent Wired Magazine had an article on Piotr Wozniak's SuperMemo software. The basic idea is you plug the important bits of your reading material into SuperMemo and it feeds it to you a little at a time (Incremental Reading). You can also setup questions and answers and it'll quiz you, measuring your recall and forgetfullness rate, to optimize the amount of material that gets committed to long-term memory.

I'm really taken by the promise of getting this content into my brain in an accessible format. I'm not a particularly fast reader but I have great comprehension. On standardized tests, I always get a perfect score on reading comprehension - if I managed to finish reading the selection in time!

My other concern, being an academic, is that I not only need to be able to recall the information but I also have to be able to cite where the information came from. It would seem that a mix between SuperMemo and Zotero would be the perfect knowledge management and learning tool...