myResearchSpace Blog : myResearchSpace

UWA Student Missing

admin — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 13:00:00 GMT

Ben Roberts (PhD student in Animal Biology) has been missing since Sunday 22/4/07 (see attached pdf). His car and wallet were left at his parents place and he hasn't contacted any family members, UWA friends or anyone else.

If you have seen him, please contact the police and/or me.

Thanks

Rob

Rob Hurn

School Manager

School of Animal Biology

Phone 08 64882226

Fax 08 64881029

Mobile 0406881655

rhurn@cyllene.uwa.edu.au

Vote on Oral Exams

admin — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 06:29:00 GMT

If you aren't already aware, there is a review of course structures going on at UWA at the moment and this gave us the excuse to try out our new voting gadget to get your opinion on oral exams in both undergraduate and postgraduate courses. There has alread been a discussion of oral exams as part of PhDs and Masters on myResearchSpace in theEzone blog.

So, leave a comment and take part in the vote (you will see the current results when you have voted).

Welcome to myResearchSpace's 200th Member

admin — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 06:21:00 GMT

Melinda Leeder is the 200th member of myResearchSpace and gets a couple of movie tickets to giver her something to blog about.

Video Blogging Comes to myResearchSpace

admin — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 02:04:00 GMT

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtWJU27WjZQ

Here is an appeal for all the budding Spielbergs or Coppolas out there. Make a movie about your research, yourself or your supervisor. This movie was made with a camera phone (we will try a better quality video next time), was entirely spontaneous (we were brainstorming at the time) and posted to YouTube - we will be looking at being able to host videos in the future on myRS.

Blogging from Word 2007

admin — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 10:11:39 GMT

Did you know that you could write your blog post in Microsoft Word? Well, Word 2007 has a feature that allows you to write your blog post and publish it directly from Word. Why would you want to do that you may ask? Well, you get all of the formatting features, spell checking, grammar checking, etc of Word when you write, plus, (once we I have worked out how to do this) you can publish images easily. More importantly however, it allows you to compose your post offline (say like when you are writing from an airport, plane or beach and you don't have access to the internet) and then post it later when you are connected. Convenient?

Word 2007 has some other features that are useful to researchers (more of that later) but it is worth asking your School's technical person for a copy if you don't already have one – if you use a computer provided by the University, you will be entitled to the new version of Office 2007.

So, look at these instructions and the URL you need for the blog account is http://myresearchspace.grs.uwa.edu.au/blogs/metablog.ashx

Pretty simple really.

Pilot trial of Graduate School Email Accounts for UWA HD Research Students

admin — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 11:47:00 GMT

We will be starting a pilot trial of allocating email accounts to UWA research students which will have the form firstname.lastname@grs.uwa.edu.au

This email account is actually hosted by Google and so in essence it is a gmail account but with a UWA address. This allows you storage of 2 GB for your email account.

You will also get access to the GRS email portal http://start.grs.uwa.edu.au

As it is hosted by Google, you should be cautious of relying on it as the only place to store important or sensitive information. We can not guarantee that Google won't discontinue the service at some point in the future (although this is unlikely).

This will not replace your "official" UWA student address.

In order to get a email account, please email admin via myResearchSpace by clicking on admin below and sending a private message. Your email must detail your student number, first name and last name. You must be registered in myResearchSpace to be elligible for this offer.

Winning a Camera

admin — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 11:23:00 GMT

The new postgraduate induction is coming up on the 1st of March and we will be deciding the winner of the camera in the next week. The blogs on the blogs pages have been sorted in order of comments and views (there is an odd algorithm that they use and so it isn't completely perfect). So, over the next week, have a look at the blog postings and if you have anything to say about the posts, leave a comment. It seems though that you can't go wrong with grammar.

In CyberSpace, nobody can hear you blog.

admin — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 12:32:00 GMT

So, you have been blogging away thinking that this is a totally private activity that nobody else pays any attention to other than a few other fellow grad students? Well, you would be wrong. We track the activity on myResearchSpace using a free web tracking service provided by Google called Google Analytics. This provides quite detailed metrics on (amongst many other things) how many visits the site gets and how many pages each visitor views, whether the visitors are new or returning, and where the visitors are from:

The interesting things to note about this are that most of the visitors come to myResearchSpace via google and that the most popular search terms in the last week have been McNaught Comet and Frangipani (there is a photo of a frangipani that I uploaded to illustrate a point). Finally, the data shows that people from around the world are reading myResearchSpace (in fact, I was reading it at Singapore airport on Sunday!)

Periodically, I will be reporting on how the myResearchSpace usage is going and maybe we should have a prize for the item that gets the most google hits (without putting in something really obvious like "Paris Hilton enrols in a PhD").

Grad School Email Accounts

admin — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 07:05:00 GMT

Google are offering a service in which they will host email for educational users. The email address would be <student>@grs.uwa.edu.au but underlying it would be the standard gmail account with 2GB of storage space.

Do you think this is something that UWA Graduate Students (i.e. you) would be interested in if this was offered? The benefit to you as a student is that it would be identifying you as a graduate student at uwa. The possible negative (depending on your point-of-view) is that the email is hosted by Google.

Your comments on this would be appreciated.

"Downtime"

admin — Sat, 16 Dec 2006 23:40:00 GMT

Some may have noticed that myResearchSpace was down yesterday. This was because the machines had to be moved and there was a small problem after the move which was fixed this morning - apologies for that. They had to be moved because the heat from the machines was causing the thermostat in the room to keep the air-conditioning running full blast - this didn't help the machines much but was cauing the PhD students in the connected room to have to wear jumpers etc - curiously, they were getting grumpy about it.

phdcomics

admin — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 12:53:00 GMT

We discovered this site and decided that we would feature the comic strips from it. The site features comics from ""Piled Higher and Deeper", the ongoing chronicle of life (or the lack thereof) in grad school." where new comics are posted "approximately 2.718 times a week".

Hope you enjoy them

Prize for 100th member of myResearch Space

admin — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 06:43:00 GMT

Congratulations to Matthew Legge who has become the 100th member of myResearchSpace and has won 2 tickets to a movie at one of Luna Cinemas. We will be having other prizes over the coming year - but keep blogging for that camera!

myResearchSpace Upgrade (Cont...)

admin — Sun, 12 Nov 2006 14:13:00 GMT

Most of the glitches have been ironed out (so much for all of the other things I was going to do this weekend - like resume a life that has been long-abandoned to a masochistic urge to mess with software). There are some cosmetic things still to do but at least everything seems to work). Looking at this version, there have been lots of improvements and the whole environment is much more usable.

One thing we have done is buy a commercial license of the software. This has given us unlimited file uploads and another cool feature which is access to the RSS feed reader for each registered user. So now you can configure the reader with all of your favourite RSS feeds. All you need to do is go to My Reader (on the top menu) and then right-click on My Feeds and add the url to the feed. For example, if you go to the Australian Newspaper front page and find the RSS Feeds box on the page - click on one of the feeds and copy the url (e.g. http://feeds.news.com.au/public/rss/2.0/aus_higher_education_56.xml).

Actually, you can watch the video to see how this is done:

http://communityserver.org/blogs/videos/archive/2006/02/08/513967.aspx

myResearchSpace upgrade

admin — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 23:21:00 GMT

myResearchSpace has been upgraded to version 2.1. You will notice some new features (and a few glitches that I am working through at the moment). The main new feature is being able to add Tags to posts and then to be able to browse by Popular Tags. When doing this, you will get an idea of how popular a tag is because the font size is proportional to the number of times the tag has been used. So when you are writing a blog don't forget to add some meaningful tags.

Inserting photos in blog entries

admin — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 02:37:00 GMT

There are 2 ways in which a photo can be added to a blog entry. The first is to add the image as an attachment to the blog entry and then in the text of the blog entry put "["ImageAttachment"]" - without the quotes:

The other way is to use a photo that has been uploaded to your Gallery. In the blog entry, click the content selector button () and pick the photo to insert. Remember that the URL that you use needs to be of the image and not the page that the image is on - right click on the image and select properties and then get the URL from that.

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