Worth watching: Canada’s Federal Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart appears on CBS’ 60 Minutes as part of its report on the TJX data heist.
Some nice visuals show you much more clearly than the dry print-media do exactly how your credit card data gets transmitted and, hence, how it may be breached — or conversely, secured.
Check it out.
A simple but effective way to monitor the Internet is “Google Alerts”. Google Alerts will automatically track news up to 30 days old, blogs, the web, videos tagged with your keywords, and “comprehensive” (a combination of news, web and blogs). Once you have entered your keywords and created your alert, Google Alerts will you send you an email whenever a new page has that keyword.
This is a handy way to stay on top of a field, research a particular subject, find more sources for your thesis, find bloggers writing about your topic (so you can post comments at their blogs or pitch them for publicity), find journalists who cover your area of expertise (so you can research them further by name), get the latest on a celebrity or sports team, or watch for new videos that match a specific topic.
To get the best results, be sure to use synonyms and phrases in quotes separated by the Boolean OR term. If you want to monitor news pages, you can even specify a location (e.g. location:Canada) or a source (e.g. source:globe_and_mail).
Google Alerts can also let you know whenever a new website links to your blog (e.g. link:myblogname.com); but on the other hand, you might find it useful to suppress results from your own website with the “site” operator (e.g. “the search term” –site:mysite.com).
If you would like to be notified when a particular webpage is modified (as opposed to containing your search terms), you can use “Change Detection”. This can be useful to alert you to those pages that are updated semi-regularly (e.g. once a month).
Both Google Alerts and Change Detection are free services and both will help you keep abreast of your particular areas of research interest.
Prof discovers that fish have distinct personalities, which explains differences in behaviours like eating and swimming.
U of G Prof. Rob McLaughlin and researcher Alex Wilson found that fish show extremes for personality traits: staying put or exploring, risk-averse or risk-takers, sociable or aggressive.
One of the traps of keyword searches is the apparent ease with which you get results. The truth is, computers only retrieve what you type in so better results often depend on variations due to synonyms, spelling, common usage versus technical terms, and even singular versus plural terms.
In other words, the key to searching the Internet, databases and even an index at the back of a book is the same: words. The better you are with words, the better you will be at finding the information you want. And in fact, computer databases are not good sources for vague inquiries, so it pays to make your search as precise as possible.
The best way to begin a search, therefore, is by asking whether you know enough about the topic to find accurate search terms. If not, do some background research on a few words and phrases with a dictionary, thesaurus or encyclopedia until you understand enough to go further. You might be surprised by the quality search results a few choice synonyms can yield. And this just means knowing some alternate ways to describe what you are looking for. Databases will often have a help or glossary screen you can use. And be sure to use the thesaurus if it has one. This will save you thinking of alternative keywords and will make your search both more comprehensive and more accurate.
For help searching, visit the University of Guelph library. For archived research tips, visit info tips.
Brilliant suggestion: CIPPIC is calling for a “do not track” list that does to the marketing world online what the “do not call” list does for the telemarketing world of phones.