The Best Background Music for the Occasion.

I know that many people have their own personal soundtracks -- background music for the many things they do with their lives. Music played on an ipod, or perhaps just recalled while humming along.

Well, I've just discovered the best background music for grading hundreds of calculus exams: Thelonius Monk. (In particular, Brilliant Corners.) No doubt.

Uh Oh.

This is bad news. But not surprising.

Computer Assisted.

I have frequently pondered just how much easier scholarly research has become with the rise of the internet, digital databases, and search engines. In particular, if I want to find out what has already been written on almost any given topic, I can now do a fairly complete search in a only few minutes. Such a search would take many hours of dull library work before the present age of the internet.

More recently I thought: If ``library'' research is now essentially instantaneous, has there been a corresponding increase in academic output? Are more papers being published per year per scholar? Are better papers being produced?

And then it hit me: Why don't I check the web! Indeed, a Google search on ``internet scholarly output'' produced the following hit:

Bibliometric analysis of the impact of internet use on scholarly productivity, Noam Kaminer, Yale M. Braunstein, Journal of the American Society for Information Science, Volume 49 Issue 8, Pages 720 - 730. Published Online: 7 Dec 1998.

I immediately felt so productive, and efficient, that I called it a day and went to sleep.

Not Recommended.

I had to send several letters of recommendation out Friday, for students applying to graduate school, in advance of February deadlines. (It seems that in the current ``no planning ahead'' culture it's perfectly acceptable to ask your professor for a letter less than two weeks before the deadline.) In any event, I liked the students for whom I was writing, and I was happy to be of service. As is my practice, I put in a couple of hours of work into writing each letter. But what I found frustrating was how long it took to submit these letters over the web. I was (not literally) tearing my hair out. I thought computers were supposed to make life easier.

I eventually figured out (I think -- I'm not sure) that my main problem was in using the Mac Preview program rather than, ahem, that other .pdf viewer. The .pdf forms I was filling out would not save properly, and I had trouble previewing my uploaded files before final submission.

But I've learned my lesson. And maybe I'll be able to do this all more easily next year. Unless everything gets changed again.