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TECHNOLOGY: Disaster Technology and Scholarly Tools Revisited LIVING in a coastal city and being an offshore mariner makes me give more thought to disaster preparedness than some. For example, my boat has two of almost everything, including two VHF radios, one a handheld submersible; two bilge pumps; two manual fire extinguishers and one automatic one; a spare storm anchor; a second, never used, "get home" battery; and so on. Since Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, I have been thinking a lot about how technology could be helpful in case my family were ever in the middle of such a disaster. Here are a few thoughts on the topic. If you ever have to evacuate quickly, what do you grab before you go out the door? Family photos, insurance papers, medical records, and the laptop computer are a few things that come to mind. Taking all these things would amount to carrying a cardboard box full of stuff -- not very handy. Fortunately, there's a better plan, and it's an emergency USB flash memory drive you prepared in advance. A flash memory drive, sometimes called a "thumb drive," is a solid-state device and doesn't really contain a disk drive. Last May, Sandisk began selling waterproof USB flash memory drives in various sizes. Sandisk's plan at the time was to sell the waterproof units to resellers in the health-care industry and in the military. I was unable to find resellers of these units, but I believe they will probably be available soon. Until that time, you could always use a tough ziplock storage bag and a plain USB drive. By the way, if you ever have a valuable hard drive fail, don't immediately give up on salvaging the drive's contents. Several firms, such as www.drivesavers.com, are experts at repairing drives that have gotten wet, hot, and even crushed. The advice from DriveSavers for a wet drive is to turn off the computer immediately and place the drive in an airtight plastic bag as soon as possible. If water dries on drive surfaces, it can leave deposits that make recovery difficult. Recovery of drive contents is not cheap, but DriveSavers did offer a 20% discount to Katrina victims. If you are like me, you probably have several USB drives. To mark one of mine as the emergency drive, I simply borrowed some red nail polish from my wife and painted its case. Then I filled the red unit with important files like my family finances spreadsheet with all of our account numbers. I now take the red drive with me everywhere. My drive has 256 MB of memory, which holds an amazing number of files. The optimum size is probably 512 MB, which is about the amount of information you can write to a recordable CD-ROM disk. One problem with such small devices is that they are easy to lose. I suggest attaching a tag of some sort to the drive with your name, address, and telephone number on it. Some people like to put the drives on a lanyard, but I find that cumbersome. Another backup technique is to use an online service such as www.backup.com. Backup.com encrypts and stores files securely. The company offers a variety of plans, from $4.95 a month for 256 MB to $99.95 a year for 500 MB. An even cheaper approach is to simply make it a habit to e-mail yourself important files. You can sign up for a free Gmail account from Google that comes with 2 GB of storage. Since I don't know where Google locates its servers, I would be a little anxious about relying on this approach. Most operations the size of Google use a network of highly distributed servers. It is likely that Google lost servers in the region devastated by Katrina. For serious backup, I use a small portable 60 GB, USB 2+ FireWire 800 disk drive. This is a very fast portable drive that spins at 7,200 rpm. Most portable drives are 5,000 rpm or less. Various newscasts following Katrina often reported that police, fire, and other rescue personnel lost all communications with one another. That is unfortunate because of the easy availability of portable satellite phones. Out of curiosity, I went to www.satphonestore.com to investigate this technology. At the informative website I learned that satellite phones that work in North America are much cheaper than those that work worldwide. For example, a Globalstar phone that uses a series of very low-orbit satellites costs as little as $325. Low-altitude satellites are nice since the talk delay time is less than the pesky 1.5-second delay on phones that use higher satellites. Satellite phone service is not cheap, but it is reasonable. The activation fee on the phone above is $50; then it costs $600 a year ($50 a month) for 600 hours of annual use. Extra use is 99 cents a minute. Short data bursts for instant messaging are much cheaper than talk time. I think somebody needs to buy our emergency service providers some satellite phones. If CNN news can use them, why can't the fire and rescue folks? In an interesting news item, it was reported that the first emergency aid workers to reach New Orleans were a group of, believe it or not, 45 Canadian Mounted Police from Alberta. Go figure. Scholarly Tools Revisited In the March 2003 Technology, I reported on Scholarly Tools: Grammarian and Endnote. At the time, I had not used RefWorks enough to recommend it. All that has changed, and I am now an avid user of RefWorks online bibliographic software (www.refworks.com). But before I discuss RefWorks, I need to discuss access to databases of journal articles. Being a university faculty member allows me access to a substantial number of databases that index periodicals and scholarly journals. Since I am in the process of writing a new book that is a primer on educational research for the layperson, I regularly use these databases and RefWorks. Obviously, our students have the same access as I do. If you are not a university student or faculty member and you happen to live near the university you graduated from, you might be able to use your alma mater's library. If nothing else works, you might be able to access databases at your local public library. Of course, you can search the ERIC database online at www.eric.ed.gov, but I have not figured out a way to export an ERIC search result to RefWorks. As a last resort, you could always sign up for a one-semester-hour course at a nearby university and use the library. Here is an example of the power of RefWorks. In 21⁄2 hours I was able to find 45 references to research studies on three different topics and output the bibliography to a well-formatted Microsoft Word document. RefWorks can format references in many styles, including APA (American Psychological Association) and MLA (Modern Language Association). Generally, I format my references in APA style. RefWorks has a special feature that also prints the abstract of every study just after the citation, thus creating an annotated bibliography. Doing all of this with a word processor alone would take at least two solid days! When I search the research literature, I usually use ERIC (CSA), a database by Cambridge Scientific Associates; ProQuest; and Wilson Web Full Text. Incidentally, I have the best luck using the advanced search feature on these databases, and I always search on "keywords." All three of these databases will export your search results directly into RefWorks. You simply click on the export link and then sign into your RefWorks account. RefWorks keeps all of your search results on its servers in your "last imported" folder until you assign them to a different folder. This means that there is a backup of your search results on the RefWorks website. You can then create additional folders and assign references to them. RefWorks does not copy the references; it just associates them with various folders. My description probably makes using a database and RefWorks sound a little easier than it is. I have found that, if I take the time to thoroughly examine every word, link, menu, and button on the current Web page screen, I can usually figure out what to do next. It's like the old saying "Read to Succeed." Regardless of how long it takes you to learn to use RefWorks, if you need to do bibliographic work, it's time well spent. The second scholarly tool I heartily recommend is Adobe Acrobat 7 Professional. There are several reasons for owning the complete version of Acrobat. First, you can use the Distiller that comes with Acrobat to create .pdf (portable document format) files. Adobe developed the .pdf file format, which has now become a standard. The main advantage to .pdf files is that you can embed the font used in the document into the file so that the document will print well on any computer and any printer. The second reason for owning Acrobat is that you can extract text, graphics, and tables from large .pdf documents. While doing the research for the book mentioned above, I needed to find and use tables from the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Department of Education. If you have the full version of Acrobat, this is a simple matter. You just select a page from a report and export it to a single-page .pdf file. Then you open the single-page .pdf file and, using Save As, save the page to a Word document. Obviously, this is a lot easier than reading Census Bureau pages and manually entering the data into Excel files or Word tables. Don't forget -- back it up! ROYAL VAN HORN is a professor of education at the University of North Florida, Jacksonville (e-mail: rvanhorn@unf.edu; websites: www.electronicscholar.com and www.luckychild.us). |
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