Thanks for all the great feedback. I’m going to move forward with cloning the survey, and I should be able to have things operational soon.

Last call for input.

We’re taking our second vacation. This time we’re headed to Florida.

I should have decent access to the internet, so I may get a chance to post a little philosophy while lounging next to the Gulf of Mexico.

(Posted from my android phone)

A few days ago, I mentioned that I really like the philosophy journal wiki, but it would be nice to have more automated system that presents the data in an easier to digest format. I have since been experimenting with various ways to do this, and I think I’ve settled on a method.

The following will do what philosophers want the journal wiki to do. It combines the easy submission style of a survey with the easy data presentation of a spreadsheet.

To get an idea as to how this will work, I ported data about Mind from the philosophy journal wiki and entered it into a Google Spreadsheet. I created a survey form that will add new data to this spreadsheet in the desired order. Below you can see the results. You can also see the survey below the results. Notice that you can click on the “Raw Data” tab to see all of the results.

If people like this method, I could have everything up and running very soon. So…what you you all think?

UPDATE: The really important questions that need to be answered are: Is there any thing about the surveys that should be changed? Is there anything about the data tables that needs to be changed? I don’t want to clone this thing 90+ times without having the format fine-tuned the way people want it.

UPDATE: I’ve been asked about spam bot protection. Google forms doesn’t come built with that, but I think I have something I can do that’s (a) simple for us philosophers, and (b) will help keep the spam bots away. It’s not quite captcha, but the principle is the same.

I may have found a slightly better way to run journal surveys. It’s inspired by the discussions of the journal wiki here and here.

I found a spreadsheet plugin for Wordpress that may resolve some of the issues discussed in those posts, but I want to post a spreadsheet in this post and see what it looks like.

It turns out, I can set this up (I think) so that the spreadsheet can be edited by anyone in real time. See if you can edit it.

The Journal of Testing This Plugin: Spreadsheet

UPDATE: I think I’ve found the method I’m going to go with. I’ve got a sample survey with corresponding data table here. I’d appreciate any feedback.

I really like the philosophy journal wiki, but it would be nice to have more automated system that presents the data in an easier to digest format. I’ve been planning on experimenting with the best way to do this for a while. Now is as good a time as any.

I’m adding a page to this blog called “Journal Surveys”. Any journal that I create a survey post for will automatically show up on that page. Survey posts for a journal ask people to provide four pieces of information on a single paper that they submitted to that journal: Initial Verdict, Review Time, Comment Quality, and Verdict after a Revise and Resubmit (if an R&R was given in the initial verdict).

There is no restriction on the number of times you may take the survey, since philosophers (of course) submit to the same journal more than once. To take the surveys for a journal again simply refresh your browser.

I’m starting with just a few journals this week. My hope is that by next week or the week after, I’ll be able to launch with some 90+ journals. However, before I commit to putting in the time to generate survey pages for some 90+ journals, I’d like to figure out the answers to (a)-(c).

(a) What is the best method to administer/display the surveys?
(b) What are the most useful questions to ask?
(c) For each question, what are the best/most useful answer options to include?

Launching with a few journals will enable me to see how this is going to work, and it will enable other philosophers to give me feedback. Once I work the kinks out, I have a fairly automated format to generate the other survey posts, and populate the list on the Journal Survey page.

To take a survey (or see the results) click on the Journal Survey page. Then click on one of the journals.

Take a look at the way the surveys are set up. Are there any questions/answers you think should be there? Are there any questions/answers you think shouldn’t be there? Are there any questions/answers that should be clarified? I want to get these kinds of details hammered out now. Once I do that, I can quickly generate a bunch of survey posts.

I’d appreciate any feedback. Hopefully, the philosophical community will find this to be useful.

It’s the end of June. Here are the top 10 submissions for the month over at Sympoze. If you’re a philosopher and you don’t have a Sympoze account, email me and I’ll set you up. You’re missing out on all the fun!

1. Open Access Journals in Philosophy: Why Aren’t There More Better Ones?
2. Mathematical and linguistic syntax: different brain areas
3. Q & A With Mark Van Roojen, a Philosophy Professor and Cabin Builder
4. The death of scholarly journals?
5. Independent Study on Experimental Philosophy
6. The ethics of the faculty furlough
7. Lectures online, Arche
8. Understanding (Zombie) Conceivability Arguments: Part I
9. Do Intuitions about Reference Really Vary across Cultures?
10. Phightclub

In this post (Google Phone = Pocket Xerox Machine), I discussed some web apps that can turn an Android phone (and other smart phones) into a pocket xerox machine. These services include Evernote and Qipit.

I’ve recently found an app on the Android Market that I think is even better for this purpose.

It’s called Scan2PDF mobile. It’s available for smart phones other than the Android phone. Check out their site.

Scan quality is great. You can scan multiple pages of a journal article, press a button, and all of the pages are combined into a single PDF file. With the click of a button, you can view your PDF or send it to an email address.

This would work very well in combination with the new Kindle DX. I could scan journal articles in the library, immediately email them to my Kindle DX, and I’d have the article with me at all times in the easy-to-read e-ink format.

Now all I need to do is get my hands on a Kindle.

I’ll post some samples soon.

I’ve said it a couple of times before, and I’ll say it again - Twitter makes it suprisingly easy to keep up with what’s going on in philosophy. It’s my favorite thing about Twitter.

One neat thing we’re seeing now is philosophers twittering about what’s going on at a conference they’re attending…live. You don’t get tons of details, but it’s still kind of nice to get an occasional tweet about what’s going on at a conference.

With all these philosophers getting smart phones, I think think the potential to keep up with what’s hot at a conference could be even better.

I’ve been playing around with Qik. It’s a free service that let’s you broadcast live streaming video from your smartphone. The Android app is incredibly simple and straight forward. Open the app. Push the big green button, and you’re streaming live content to your qik page.

After you’re finished you’ve finished streaming, the video is stored in your archive (much like YouTube). With the click of a button you can cross post to YouTube, Facebook, or post a link of your most recent stream to twitter. I tested this one today.

I’m not suggesting philosophers tape entire talks on qik, but the first 3-5 minutes would be great. A good paper should, in that time frame,give me some idea as to whether I want to track down a copy of the paper to read the rest of it.

Of course it would not be cool to do this without the author’s consent. But it seems like it would be very cool, overall, if philosophers put some of that technology they’re carrying around in their pockets to this kind of use (with the consent of the presenters of course).

So, I have a couple of questions:
A. Do you think you’d watch these 3-5 min beginnings of talks if some philosopher recorded them and posted links to the recordings on their twitter feed?

B. What is the most polite/not awkward/not creepy way to secure permission from the author? The reason I ask, is that I thought it might put the author on the spot in awkward way if you approached them just before the start of a talk and asked “Do you mind if I (some stranger you don’t know) video tape a portion of your talk and post it on the internet for the whole world to see?”

(Posted from my Android Phone)

I’m back from the Boundary Waters. While on my trip, I was pleasantly suprised to bwin a little Twitter contest that sponsored by the Android Guys.

The contest was to tweet how you would use TeleNav, a subscription service that turns your G1 into a Garmin/TomTom like navigation device. Winner gets a 1-year subscription.

Here’s the winning tweet.

Thanks guys!

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Android it’s the open-source operating system owned by Google that is designed to run smart phones.

The first Android phone to hit the market was the T-mobile G1 (which is what I have). You should love Android because it’s open source, and the market is loaded with tons of free (or otherwise super cheap) apps. There are tons of great apps on the market that make an Android smart phone a pretty useful tool for academics. I’ve blogged about some of them, I’ll be blogging about more of them soon.

If you get into Android you should read AndroidGuys.Com to stay current on Android news. You can also follow them on Twitter @AndroidGuysCom. Their site is, hands down, my favorite site for Android news.

Thanks again guys!

(Posted from my Android phone)

We’re driving to the Boundary Waters in Minnesota - all the way to the end of the Gunflint Trail.

I doubt I’ll be doing much blogging while I’m there. Even if I wanted to, I’ll have limited internet access and no phone reception. So, I’ll basically be totally unplugged for about 7 days.

We are driving for the next 15 hours (through the night) - I may post some stuff in that time.