Well, according to research you don't need those fancy hand drying machines that you might find in a shopping centre or at work, all you need is disposable paper towels! In fact, paper towels work better than those high-tech hand dyers - be it the traditional ones that blow warm air, or the cool looking and insanely loud Dyson Airblade.

...the use of paper towels consistently out-performed all the other drying techniques, especially with regard to bacteria left on the palms and fingertips. -Snelling, 2010

Not only do paper towels trump everything else, the study conducted by Snelling found that if you rub your hands while drying your hands with the warm-air hand dryers you can actually increase the bacteria count. The Dyson Airblade fares better than the traditional hand dryers at drying your hands and keeping bacteria at bay; but at the end of the day, paper towels are still the most suited for the job.

So next time when you've finished washing your hand, go and grab a paper towel. Or if none are available, look for a Dyson Airblade. If that is not an option either, go for the traditional hand dryer - remember to leave you hands under it for at least 30 seconds and most importantly, don't rub your hands!

Sunday, 22 November 2009

#326 - Hot weather makes me feel lazy.

Today was a super hot and humid day in Sydney and I just simply felt like doing nothing at all. The day was indeed a very lazy day, just sat at my desk doing not much at all. In fact halfway through the day I just decided to lie down and sleep, though not much longer afterwards I woke up because it was too hot. Tried googling to see if there was any explanations to why hot weather makes people sleepy or lazy, but unfortunately didn't come up with anything useful other than a random comment on a forum saying "Cold weather makes me sleepy too. Being awake makes me feel sleepy."

Monday, 23 November 2009

#327 - Tackle things one at a time as they come - don't spread yourself out too thin!

Everyone of us have the same amount of time - 24 hours in a day and it is really up to us how we use these precious 24 hours. Many of us have heaps of things that we want to do, a huge "to do" list that seems to only ever get longer and longer, unfortunately with only 24 hours it isn't always possible to accomplish everything that we want to do. Discussing this with a friend, we came to the conclusion that the best way is to concentrate on a few things and tackle them as they come, rather than spreading yourself out, having a finger in everything and only getting bits and pieces of everything done. We felt it was more important to get a few things done well rather than have lots of things partially done. In fact, this is quite related to one of my earlier musings (Thursday, 29 October) - focus is important in achieving a goal.

Tuesday, 24 November 2009

#328 - USB 3.0 will be here...soon!

Today was the first time I heard about USB 3.0 when I read this article: "Where's USB 3.0?" Maybe I'm slow, but a quick skim of Wikipedia reveals that USB 3.0 was first demonstrated in September 2007, the standard/specifications released in November 2008 and the originally estimated public release was sometime this year.

Reading about USB 3.0 makes me want it right now! It is said to be approximately 10 times faster than USB 2.0 (max transfer rate of 3.2Gbits/s compared to 480Mbits/s) - that is like transferring 700mb (amount of data that fits on a CD) in 1 second! In addition, USB 3.0 will be able to simultaneously send and receive data (current USB devices can only do one at a time).

Unfortunately the good news sort of ends there. If you plug the new USB 3.0 device into a normal USB 2.0 port it will transfer at the USB 2.0 speed. Also, as with many 'deadlines' the public release has been delayed to sometime next year, so still sometime before we get devices using USB 3.0 and computers with USB 3.0.

Wednesday, 25 November 2009

#329 - Be optimistic and don't say something you'll regret.

Watched the TED talk Benjamin Zander on Music and Passion today and despite probably missing his focus on classical music, I still felt it was quite good (he is a great speaker). The two messages that I took from his talk were right at the start and at the end.

The first one was: be optimistic. Benjamin tells of two shoes salesman who went to Africa and saw that the natives were all barefoot. One of them reported "Situation hopeless. They don't wear shoes." The other reported "Glorious opportunity. They don't have any shoes yet." Exact same situation, yet so very different responses. I try to be as optimistic as possible, so I would hope that I can be like the second salesman and have a bright view on any situation.

Towards the end of the talk, Benjamin tells a story about a girl who survived Auschwitz. Unfortunately one of the last conversation with her younger brother ended with her berating him and calling him 'stupid'. So since surviving Auschwitz she made a promise to herself: "I walked out of Auschwitz into life and I made a vow. And the vow was, I will never say anything that couldn't stand as the last thing I ever say." Although this is probably something that is going to be very hard to achieve, I think it is something that we can all aim to do - don't say anything that we'll regret.

Thursday, 26 November 2009

#330 - TEDxSydney

Being a big fan of TED (awesome talks - many of them are must sees) the idea of having TED in Sydney sounds great. Although I don't think this is strictly a TED event per se (the 'x' means "Independently organised TED event"), I hope the talks will be just as great. Since TEDxSydney will be held in Sydney, I would imagine it will have a more local focus with more speakers coming from Australia - it'll be interesting to see what talks come as a result of TEDxSydney!

Friday, 27 November 2009

#331 - Be grateful - it's good for you

As kids I'm sure we've all be told to be grateful for what we have and thank people who help us etc. So it was quite interesting to read this article Does "counting your blessings" really help? It explains a 10 week experiment where three groups of participants, one group was told to list five things they were grateful for, the other five things they found a nuisance and the other five to just list events during the week. The group that listed five things they were grateful for were in general more positive and also healthier. Other studies have shown that gratitude is not only related to feelings of happiness, hope etc but it might actually cause you to be happier!

Saturday, 28 November 2009

#332 - WordPress doesn't have tables!

The fact that there is no simple way to insert tables in WordPress came as a big surprise to me when I started writing the "Firefox Multitouch Gestures" post. Googling about it only led me to various WordPress plugins for adding tables, though none of them seemed to do what I wanted to do - a simple table! I had always assumed that being a fairly mature blogging platform, WordPress will support simple tables 'out of the box' by unfortunately this is not the case. So I resorted to the HTML mode and manually entering table tags for the table. As expected, switching between HTML and WYSIWYG mode in the post editor screwed up the HTML, but luckily it wasn't that bad. The table works, but it appears slightly malformed (there is no right border) - will do for now I suppose.

"Copy from one, it's plagiarism; copy from two, it's research."
Wilson Mizner

Research is probably something that uni students can't escape from - especially if they're doing honours and have to write up a thesis. Well, recently for one of our subjects which is a bit like preparation for thesis, we needed to write a research proposal. While searching through the Internet for credible sources, I discovered (or got told) a few tips and felt it would be a good idea to share them. So here are my 10 tips to hopefully make research a less stressful task!

1. Use EndNote
   If you're going to have more than 10 or so sources, then I strongly suggest you use EndNote. It might take some time to learn and set up properly for the referencing style you need, but it's definitely well worth it! You should be able to find a free download link in your uni website.
2. Use Google Scholar
   It is quick, easy and will save you heaps of time compared to using to your uni's online e-library catalogue. Google Scholar will pretty much search all scholarly databases at once. While chances are you will need to search multiple times using the uni catalogue because each service will only search within a select set of databases.
3. Tweak Google Scholar
   A bit of tweaking will make Google Scholar even more user friendly.
   1. Go to 'Scholar Preferences'
   2. In the Library Links section, search for your uni
   3. Hopefully your uni will be listed, if so tick the check box (If not, maybe ask a librarian and see if the uni can get listed)
   4. In the Bibliography Manager section, select EndNote
   5. Click on 'Save Preferences'
   Now when you search, for the papers you usually need to login to download you'll see a link similar to "Find it@UNSW" next to it. When you click on the link, it'll take you to your uni's login page and once you login you'll be taken directly to the article. Nice isn't it? Also, with EndNote, all articles should now have an "Import to EndNote" link, click on it to import into your EndNote library - no need manually enter the details (though be careful there are times when Google doesn't reference properly, but it's rare, and usually an easy fix)
4. Work at uni
   Do your research at uni. The Internet will likely be faster, you won't need to login to download the articles, and hopefully they'll be less distractions...
5. Google the Author
   Sometimes you'll find that your uni doesn't subscribe to a particular journal, or for whatever reason you just can't find the article. There is still one more option! Chances are the author of the article is from an university. I've found that if you Google them, and if you can find their staff page, 99% of the time they'll have their publication list...all free to download
6. Take notes while you're reading
   I still need to work on this, but I suggest while you are reading take notes! Don't just highlight important bits, summarise what you've read - otherwise after reading so many articles you'll surely forget where you've read what. Haven't tried this, but Google Notebooks have recently added "labels" function - so putting your summaries/highlights in there and tagging them will probably become useful later on, since you can easily search for what you need/want.
7. Organise your PDFs
   My suggestion is to name you PDFs in this fashion "LastnameF_year.pdf" (eg. SmithA_2007.pdf). If you've named your PDF, it makes it heaps easier to find! (a bit of time spent early on, saves heaps of time later). Though I've heard that EndNote links the PDFs nicely as well - will need to give this a try.
8. Reference List/Cited By
   This is something I was told and is very very useful! Any decent paper you have will have a reference list (if it doesn't maybe it's not all that credible). Guess what? A lot of those references will also be useful to you. Also, Google has a "Cited By" link - other papers that have used the paper you're reading; again, a lot of those references will be useful. Start with one or two papers and you'll end up with too many to read!
9. Pick a topic you like
   Probably not always possible, but if you can try to pick a topic you are interested in. It's very likely you'll have to read a whole pile of articles, and if you're not interested in the topic, it will be a very boring and painful process.
10. Start early!
    Sleep deprivation and stress is no fun

The last two are probably the most obvious, but also the hardest ones - though they will make a huge difference! If you have your own tips for researching please share them