u’ve had it, uTorrent

25 Tuesday Apr 2017

Posted by in JURN tips and tricks

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If you use torrents and your torrent software uTorrent has suddenly been overrun with slow-loading banner adverts and nags, I can recommend the free open source qBittorrent. Almost the same as uTorrent in terms of the interface, and it takes about half an hour to swop over if you’ve been seeding a half-dozen or so torrents. Note qBittorrent’s ability to set time-of-day on upload/download speeds, so as to automatically increase them across all torrents at times when you will be away from your PC.

Keep in mind that, after uninstalling uTorrent, it leaves behind a big backup cache of all your downloaded .torrent files in C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\uTorrent

Added to JURN

25 Tuesday Apr 2017

Posted by in New titles added to JURN

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Alambique (“scholarly research and criticism in the fields of science fiction and fantasy originally composed in Spanish or Portuguese”)

Genocide Studies and Prevention : An International Journal

Military Cyber Affairs (journal of the Military Cyber Professionals Association)

Journal of Strategic Security

International Journal of Speleology (caves)

All of the above are at scholarcommons.usf.edu — which has long been indexed by JURN — but these appear to be relatively new or newly-hosted titles. Note that their ABO : Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830 was formerly on the JURN Directory under the title Aphra Behn Online, and is now listed under the new title.

Not so cosmic

25 Tuesday Apr 2017

Posted by in JURN metrics, Spotted in the news

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Another screenshot that gives an up-to-date glimpse of the universities-only oaFindr service, in action. In this case it’s from ETH Zurich, which has a trial running with its students…

In JURN, for same search, slightly more results. Plus Google’s leading relevancy-ranking…

Of course, it’s going to help if you at least try to do a search using basic quote marks: solar “cosmic rays” gets 290,000 results. solar “cosmic rays” troposphere whittles it down to a mere 24,500.

Update, Nov 2017: OAFindr is now called 1Findr.

Oxford University: no Asperger’s students required

25 Tuesday Apr 2017

Posted by in Spotted in the news

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If you have a degree of Asperger’s — as many of the brightest in academia do — then Oxford University now automatically suspects you of being ‘a racist’ on campus…

Students who avoid making eye contact with their peers could be guilty of racism, according to Oxford University’s latest guidance.

And it’s not some irrelevant extreme-left Students Union officers saying this, either. It’s in the University’s printed ‘guidance’ from their own Equality and Diversity Unit.

I hear that Durham is an excellent no-nonsense alternative to Oxford, these days.

HMML

20 Thursday Apr 2017

Posted by in Spotted in the news

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A fine feature article and photo-story in The Atlantic: “The Monk Who Saves Manuscripts From ISIS”…

“… the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML) … is dedicated to preserving endangered manuscripts on microfilm and in digital format. So far, it has managed to photograph more than 140,000 complete manuscripts, for a total of more than 50,000,000 handwritten pages … 2,000 out of the 6,000 manuscripts digitize[d] in Iraq between 2009 and 2014 have been lost or destroyed. Other manuscripts digitized in Syria may have suffered the same fate.”

The Hill Museum and Manuscript Library has a Virtual Reading Room in which one can browse images of treasured books and pages, such as this 6th-10th gospel from a monastery in Tigray in Ethiopia…

Also note their large Lexicon of Manuscript Studies, among the many other features of the website. The Lexicon can also be searched across via Google Search: site:https://www.vhmml.org/lexicon/definition/ keyword