Author Archives: manish

Assignment 14 – Research Paper

Posted on November 10, 2011 | Leave a comment

Last week, when I went through advanced internet searching, it helped me a lot in preparing bibliography for my research paper. I was looking all over the place, without being focused and I was unable to find relevant information for my research topic, which was pretty frustrating. Now, I am relieved and I have adequate information for my project. Searching CUNY library database is also very helpful and I have scholarly journals for my project also. I have learned how to search deeply, precisely, and without spending so much time wandering on the web. I shall definitely utilize the skills that I have learned in this class, especially, in my coming writing intensive courses where I have to write research papers.

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Assignment 13 – Research Journal

Posted on November 8, 2011 | Leave a comment

Writing first draft is going to be fun. The last time, I wrote a research paper was spring 2007. I have not written a research paper since then and that’s why it’s going to be fun. The reading assignments given to us, about the evaluation of information from web, will help me a lot in putting the research paper together. The readings are very informative and definitely I shall use them in my research paper. The strategy is to use focused information and detailed analysis of the data from reliable sources. I have some questions related to the research paper and I shall be in need of some guidance. But, that’s for later; right now, I am just focusing on the outline of the research paper and some internet sources for my research paper. The hardest thing is to find detailed information and internet sources.

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Assignment 12 – Research Journal

Posted on November 2, 2011 | Leave a comment

I tried CUNY+ catalog and it didn’t help me with the topic that I am working on. When I tried to use only keywords, then it gave me bunch of books which are not even at City Tech. After going through the indexes and contents of the books, I found out that these are not the ones I am looking for. A regular search engine at least gives me information which is related to my topic to some extent but CUNY+ is no where near my topic. So, I am going to stick to a regular search engine like Google for the information related to my research project. Most of the time, my searches are taking me to search engine optimization, which I don’t need at all. The search is still on.

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Assignment 11 – Advanced Reasearch

Posted on October 31, 2011 | Leave a comment

I use Google for all my day to day searches but I am unable to find relevant information about my topic on it. So, I tried Yahoo search engine and found that the results are almost similar, whether you try Google search or Yahoo search. Then, I switched to the advanced searching mode and tried to search information. It was somewhat helpful. Google scholars worked a little better than normal search and so as Quintura. The information I found on them was too much scattered and I am going through the articles to decide which one will fulfill my purpose and which one won’t. So far, I am out of luck but the battle is still on. I haven’t tried searching our college’s library database yet. Also, I am trying to use specific keywords related to my topic to search for information, which is helpful to some extent.

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Assignment 10 – Research topic proposal

Posted on October 23, 2011 | Leave a comment

Looking for a research topic is a challenging job and narrowing it down is more challenging than searching itself. I was fascinated by the topic on search engines and how they work just because I want to know more about them. My knowledge is very limited about this topic. It is a broad topic and I am trying to narrow it down but it is getting tougher for me. Finding information about it is very easy thing but it is hard for me to decide which information I need to keep and which one to discard. It is mixed feeling. Also, it’s hard to talk about the authenticity of the information. For this, I am trying my hands on different sites for the same information; not to mention that it is too much of reading and extra work. My main concern is, “How can I narrow it down..?” so that I can focus more precisely on it.

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Assignment 9 – Search engines

Posted on October 17, 2011 | 2 comments

I enjoyed all the three readings, especially from Badke. Everybody does searching every now and then and gets more than necessary information (both relevant and irrelevant). Sometimes, even I searched by typing long sentences and got too much of data. But, now after reading chapter 3, I can say that, I can search more efficiently and narrow down my search by just using “OR”, “AND” and “NOT”. The search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo, invest plenty of money to make their searching worthy. Websites also pay these search engines so that when people search for information, their site will show up in the top ten searches. This is one way, these search engines make money. Popularity of a site is also an important factor; like how many people are logging on or surfing the site as daily routine. Search engines really work hard to make searching easy.

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Assignment 8 – Metadata and Folksonomy

Posted on October 11, 2011 | 1 comment

The reading from chapter 4, Badke apprises about metadata and how it simplifies our search. I agree that when I use Google search engine, I get information that is vast and is spread all over the place. Instead of losing in too much of the information, he showed how easy it is to focus while searching, to get only that information which is necessary, by using metadata (much more organized and simple arrangement of information). To convey his point, he used the example of the database of Library of Congress and its use by most of the libraries in the north. As far as the other readings are concerned, I enjoyed the article on “Flickr” and “Folksonomy”. Both articles talked about tagging and searching using keywords. I agree with the fact that, now a day, tagging is very common concept in social media and people with common interests (like photographing in case of flickr and picasaweb) come together and make these sites worth surfing. Flickr has its own advantages where you can find high resolution photodata, when you search using keyword tags and photos can be accessed by public but public access comes with its disadvantage that anybody can use the photos anyhow s/he wants.

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Assignment 7 – Copyrights and Fair use

Posted on October 4, 2011 | 3 comments

The reading were striking, especially the one on plagiarism by “Maurice Isserman.” It was very persuasive in a way that it’s difficult to distinguish between what is plagiarism and what is not because there is not too much gray space in between to draw a line. It’s hard to evade plagiarism as in one way or another; most of us are plagiarizing, even if it is unintentional most of the time. But, quoting somebody’s work too much in your work is plagiarism clearly because you didn’t convey your thoughts in your own words. I understood that point very clearly. The videos kept my attention to the last. The second video was clear and to the point but the first one was all over the place through out the 20th century and I couldn’t seize what exactly he was trying to say. The copyright laws are more flexible for us (students) and teachers because they are using it from learning and teaching aspects only, which is a fair use. From my point of view I can say that the creator showed some creativity and nothing wrong in copywriting his/her work and if you want to use it then ask for permission. Otherwise, use your own intellectuals and create something new.

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Assignment # 6 – Online Privacy

Posted on October 2, 2011 | Leave a comment

The readings were enlightening ones. No doubt that they were long and thorough. Let’s start with facebook first; I can say that the advertisers use our personal information. In fact, if your status says that you are single, you will get advertisements on “meet singles in your area”. I figured out that they use your personal information and they use your location through the location services. We all know that this is all around us but some of us pay attention to it and most of us don’t pay attention. I paid attention to it after reading the articles on facebook and privacy. I used internet to pay bills and to buy products online but one time I got a bill for a product that I never ordered. Somebody used my credit card information and purchased. How would you feel if this happens to you…? I cancelled all my online transactions including online banking services. I also had to go through process of changing my account number to inhibit further problems. The way technology is changing by leaps and bounds, the problems regarding online privacy are also increasing in severity. The laws are changing, the privacy statements are changing, but people hardly find time to go through all that pages of reading. To save time, they agree to terms and conditions, without even realizing that they just gave consent to be used by service providers.

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Assignment 5 – Politics of research

Posted on September 23, 2011 | Leave a comment

The reading, “The Politics of Research” by “Brian Martin” is very compact, covers vast variety of knowledge and its use in research. But the word, “research” is never alone; it comes with money, power, competition, status and politics too. Large organizations contribute large amount of money towards research but on biased basis because they want the research to be beneficiary to themselves only. They want to make more money than they invested in the research or sometimes they want to be in competition. One good and simple example could be a software developing company like Apple or Microsoft, which have their own software developers working for them. Since, I already mentioned the word, “politics” before; I can also say that when it comes to selecting a team of researchers, politics also exist. Sometimes they want to hire people from different competitive companies by paying more money. Organizations who are funding a research want king of one specific field or in other words, they want people who are professionals with vast knowledge in the field of research because most of the researches are narrow and highly distinguished.

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