Akram's Razor - Reflections on Islam, Muslims & America

Tips for Internet-based scholarship

I write painfully little these days, but I save huge amounts of online references for future reference--I'm an Internet equivalent of a paranoid backwoods survivalist, except that I'm compulsively hoarding stuff for academic articles one day (I keep telling myself) as opposed to preparing for race war or some pulp fiction Armageddon.

Here's how I archive online references:

1. I use the free Evernote and its Firefox plug-in for saving individual quotes from articles I'm reading (along with tags to organize them). It automatically saves the text you've highlighted along with the source link in your local database (which can be synced on other PCs).
   
   
2. I save the URLs of useful pages and resources in Delicious (formerly known by the annoying name and URL del.icio.us), which also integrates into Firefox (and Internet Explorer, if you must subject yourself to its mediocrity).  I tag these by category, as well.
   
   
3. Many of you are probably already doing these 2 things, but are you protecting your records against the scourge of Link Rot (i.e., the phemonenon of pages being deleted or moved, which makes your bookmarks useless)?
   
   Saving a copy locally is a partial solution--and is probably a good idea for key references in any case--but you can also archive it online. Archive the page for free using WebCitation.org. For  example, I archived this Economist column on the Dutch far-right demagogue Geert Wilders at http://www.webcitation.org/5teauEzoh. Then save the citation URL in the comments field of your record in Delicious. (Note: You can add a link to your Bookmarks Toolbar that allows you to archive the page you're on with a click.)
   
   
4. I also use WorldCat and RefWorks a lot, but I won't get into those here. (The latter isn't free, but if you're a student your school may have a license that gives you free access.)

There's no guarantee WebCitation.org won't eventually go out of business, but that's even true of  potentially major corporations (remember the once iconic free host GeoCities). It's an extra layer of protection, and in the event you want to cite it in a publication but discover it's disappeared from the web you'll be very grateful you took a moment to archive it. My guess is that this site (or one like it) will eventually get industry support--as has the WayBack Machine--given what an important need it meets.

And, needless to say, back stuff up. Now. When it comes to free services, one policy change or database failure and the data you've stored could be gone.

Btw, another advantage of WebCitation.org is that it saves a copy of the page that its author can't scrub after the fact. That's very handy when documenting the rants of nutjobs and hate-mongers in the Blogosphere.

Update:

Evernote & Linux. Last I checked, Evernote is only available for PC and Mac. It's one of the few indispensable programs that doesn't have a Linux version or analogue (in fact, I've seen Linux enthusiasts mention it as the only reason one might not ditch Windows entirely).  (As a consolation prize, a Linux user can save links using via a stripped-down web clip feature on the Evernote website, but that's painfully awkward compared to the near-seamless browser integration available for Evernote on PC or Mac.)

Bulk imports in WebCite. I haven't explored it yet, but a trulysublime feature of WebCitation.org is "combing". You can upload a document, extract a list of all its links, and then choose those you wish to archive.  that it contains.  So, you could maintain a list of links on a subject as you do research and then submit them all in one fell swoop (as opposed to archiving each page individually). So, if you have a bibiography that contains some links, all you have to do is upload it and click a few checkboxes. A huge time-saver.

As if that weren't neat enough, you can even comb web pages. Plug in a URL to an article that links to a lot of places and it'll present you an exhausting list of all links with checkboxes for archiving each.

Downloading files in bulk. While we're at it, if you find yourself downloading large volumes of files, the Firefox extension DownloadThemAll is also extremely helpful. And you can fine-tune downloading in all sorts of ways (e.g., only PDFs, or only files containing "2010"). When dealing with large files it's helpful in another way, as you can pause downloads (an unreliable option in the built-in Firefox download feature).

And if you have a huge amount of links to download and are really clever, you could save them all in a big MS Word, save it as HTML, open the file in Firefox (using File-->Open-->etc.), and then download them all with a click or two.

Scripting the download of a huge number of sequentially-named  files
Another scenario: Let's you have 500 links you want to download whose filenames are identical except for a number. For example:

• www.domain.com/article11.pdf
• www.domain.com/article12.pdf
• www.domain.com/article100.pdf
• www.domain.com/article501.pdf
• www.domain.com/article999.pdf
• ...

You could, God forbid, do that manually, finding each link and downloading it (hopefully in one step--i.e., rightclicking and choosing "Start saving link with DTA oneclick" instead of opening it in Adobe Reader, waiting for it to load and then choosing File-->Save a copy).

 

You could certainly improve the process by removing all the mousing around using the Word-to-HTML process laid out above, but that would still involve a lot laborious and error-prone typing.

Your life would be much easier if you could just tell DTA to try to save everything between www.domain.com/article1.pdf and www.domain.com/article1000.pdf and let it do the work for you. Well, you can!

The most efficient process would be to create those links using a macro to increment the number in Notepad++--a free program which, if you didn't know, is infinitely superior to the Windows default text editor, Notepad (and which can be easily set up to run in its redneck cousin's place)--and then paste them into Word but that would require explaining how to use its macro feature and  depend on a program that most people don't have installed (it's free, but you need admin rights on your PC to install).

So I'll give a Excel solution instead.

• In Excel, create a 3-column spreadsheet like :
    www.domain.com/article    1    .pdf
    www.domain.com/article    2    .pdf
  
  
• Select all 6 cells and, keeping them selecrted, drag the little box in the lower-right corner down until you reach the desired top range (e.g., 10000).
    www.domain.com/article    1    .pdf
    www.domain.com/article    2    .pdf
    www.domain.com/article    3    .pdf
    ...
    www.domain.com/article    9999    .pdf
    www.domain.com/article    10000 .pdf
  
  
• Now, select those 3 columns and copy them into blank Word file as unformatted text (Edit-->Paste Special-->Unformatted Text).
• Use the enhanced replace function to remove a tab characters from the Word file (Edit-->Replace-->[replace ^t with nothing]). This will combine the  3 segments into a single link on each line.
    www.domain.com/article1.pdf
    www.domain.com/article2.pdf
    www.domain.com/article3.pdf
    ...
    www.domain.com/article9999 .pdf
    www.domain.com/article 10000 .pdf
  
  
• Optionally, press CTRL+A and click the bullet icon to add bullets and the list easier to read (not that DTA will care).
   
  
• Follow the previous instructions to create an HTML file and open it in DTA. Merry Christmas!

Once you get the hang of DTA, you'll wonder how you ever could've wasted so much time, manually clicking on link after link like some unevolved single-celled lifeform.

Hope this helps somebody get organized. (Physician, heal thyself!)

P.S. If anyone is wondering what happened to my blogroll, it's temporarily down while I reorganize it. I was using Bloglines to manage those links, but that fact seemed to be slowing down pageloads ridiculously.

Local activism from abroad

This is quite random (not to mention old, as it's dated Nov 3, 2008), but having a background in ICT4D I found this report on a technology blog intriguing. It goes without saying that the Internet allows people to keep in touch in radically new ways while on the go and Skype is so widespread that its very name has become a handy verb for millions of Internet users, but who would've thought you could use the Internet to volunteer in a political campaign back home while sitting on another continent?

Wendy’s Blog: Skype for Obama, from Cairo to Colorado

I’m spending this election season in Cairo, Egypt, attending an ICANN meeting. Thanks to the Internet, that hasn’t stopped me from some final get-out-the-vote efforts. The time zones mesh up so that after meetings conclude here, I’ve been able to log in to my.barackobama.com, find a list of voters and a calling script, and call via Skype to remind them of polling places and encourage them to vote.

Isn’t the Internet grand? I’m at the ICANN meeting trying to keep ICANN from interfering with the flexibility that allowed that unexpected political outreach.

Lucky McCain's campaign didn't get wind of this. I can hear Palin's inevitable slogan now: "Obama campaign gets support from Al-Qaeda member."*

*  Swiftboat-ese for a person residing in the Middle East.

Report on the Arabic Blogosphere

Dustin over at His Peace Upon Us, a thoughtful and recommended new Christian blog dedicated to dialogue between Christians and Muslims, reports on  a very interesting study of the Arabic-language Blogosphere.  Its title is "Mapping the Arabic Blogosphere: Politics, Culture, and Dissent" and its authors are Bruce Etling, John Kelly, Robert Faris, and John Palfrey.

Dustin writes:

The Berkman Center for Internet Study and Security did a massive study on the Arabic blogosphere. Who blogs? What do they blog about? You can read the summary of the report at the Berkman Center site.

I found it interesting that they blog more about human rights than they criticize Western culture and values. That’s probably not what most would expect.

Very interesting indeed.

Haven't read all of the report, but 3 interesting details jump out at me:

• I'm not suprised that Saudi bloggers hold a decent sized chunk of the Arabic Blogosphere--They've got money, a strong sense of national idenity, and fewer distractions during their leisure time (e.g., cinemas are still verboten in ABBR title="Kingdom of Saudia Arabia">)--but judging by this report Kuwaitis seem markedly more active online than their fellow GCCers in Qatar, UAE and Bahrain. Forget the populations and populations' citizenship/foreigner breakdowns, but it surely this is disproportionate. (A prediction, given the Khaleeji Consumption Disorder epidemic: Soon we will hear of Gulf states rushing to  buy cutting-edge bloggers from Africa to write under their flags, like they do Olympic athletes.)

• Arabic Bahais. Not the first thing you think of, but they're out there, and very legitimately speaking out against the discrimination they face. (Speaking of which, there is something pathetic about the need some feel to harass these peaceful people. If you're offended by their rejection of Islam or concerned about the message its sends, try focusing your energies on giving them less reason for doubt instead of seeming to prove them right.)

• I might've overlooked something in the complete report, but I don't see any discussion of Arab Christian bloggers. I wonder what the explanation is for this apparent disparity. Are they not as active online? Did the researchers perhaps give inadequate attention to their networks?

What I'd really like to see is a study of the contemporary contours and groupings of the Salafi/Wahhabi corner of the Blogosphere, which has gone through a lot of changes (not to mention a huge amount of in-fighting) since their heyday online in the early days of the Internet, when it claimed or influenced some of the best known Islamic websites and fora.

I'm sure there are oodles of somewhat relevant "threat assessment" reports in the intel/security arena, but doing this right would be a very difficult undertaking even experienced researchers who master Arabic fully, as the ideological and doctrinal nuances are so fine (and, to many outsiders' eyes, trivial). The background required to really understand the changes isn't likely to be picked up just by lurking in their forums. (Perhaps Berkman needs to hire Umar Lee as a consultant.)

Update (2009-07-21): Had a typo in my excerpt from His Peace Upon Us. Wrote "KSA" instead of "Berkman Center site" at the end of the 1st paragraph.

Latest pseudo-science inspired by this blog's title

I see it more of a quirk of the unexpected workings of Internet media than anything else, but as I've mentioned before, despite my blog's quite modest traffic every now and again a contributor to an online forum will refer in all seriousness to the famous philosophical principle of, ahem, "Akram's Razor." The actual precept is called, of course, Occam's Razor. (I explained the reasoning behind my pretentious neologism when I set up the blog in 2005.)

Here are the two latest examples I've come across.

1. A comment (posted only a month or so ago, fetched from Google's cache since the link's now broken) in a discussion on an engineering magazine's online forum on, I kid you not, the feasibility of Cold Fusion:

Regardless of PERSONAL OPINIONS, there remains the fact that Neutrons just dont get up and move because they don't like their neighbours and that Helium just doesn't appear out of nowhere! Highly regarded laboratories around the world are providing some evidence that there is excess heat.
(please see Thermodynamics for the morons that are to silly to realise that they can be wrong ) I believe that Galileo was wrong and so were some very great scientist in history that funnily enough we now revere and quite happily tout as the greats. No matter how we want to put it there is evidence pointing straight towards Cold fusion being somewhat of a reality. ( please see Akram's Razor and  once again for the morons, if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it probably is a DUCK!
The truth is that no one understands the process and it will take some time for physics to meld the process into their thought processes but no matter how you want to take it something is happening that is reported to give us Helium, Stray Neutrons and Gamma Rays and all of this from good old water..... HMMMMMMMM!!!

2. Then there's this contribution from last year to the Heroes forum on Tv.com (emphasis also added). TV.com Forums - I think I know where Sylars Power of Freezing comes from. Possible Spoilers.

On wikipedia and a bunch of other sites it says that Sylars power of Freezing is unkown where he gets it from. I think it is quite obvious where he got his power from Molly Walkers father. When we first see him he is frozen with his head cut-off eating cereal. Whenever Sylar gets a new power he always tests it out as soon as he gets it. When he got his Telekinesis he showed Mr. Suresh, Precognitive Painting from Issac he paints himself as the President, Liquification from Zane Taylor he melts everthing in th Apartment, Enhanced hearing from Dale everything is super loud and Radiation Manipulation from Ted Sprague he is on the roodtop making explosions in the palm of his hand. So why wouldnt he freez Molly Walkers dad after he cut of his head and stole his power because he killed her Mom by stabing her with household objects. Also we know Powers run in the Family, Hiro's Dad had a power, Parkman's Dad. Peter/ Nathans Dad/Mom, and Claires Dad and Mom. So what do you think is my theory correct or am I way off??? Akrams razor states the most obvious answer is usually the right one.

Thanks, dudes, but with all due respect I think you need to get your head out of your twitter and read some, like, books. Especially that first guy. Sure wouldn't want to use any technological device designed by an engineer so careless as to cite my blog in a scientific discussion!

As online typos go, this case seems unique in that, so far as I can tell, there is no other possible source for this mistake. An interesting and ironic index of  influence in the New Media.

I wonder how many other instances there of this weird slip.

The case of the purloined curly quotes.

I'm making final revisions to a masters thesis that's had stuff pasted in from many sources.

What I generally do is choose to Paste Special and choose Unformatted Unicode to avoid importing any formatting that will clash with my doc and require cleanup later.

 For example, if you find a great reference on somebody's personal website:

Ephrat, Daphna. “In Quest of an Ideal Type of Saint: Some Observations on the First Generation of Moroccan Awliya' Allah in ‘Kitab Al-Tashawwuf’.” Studia Islamica. 94 (2002): 67-84.

but find red Comic Sans MS a bit much, you could paste it in as unformatted text and get

Ephrat, Daphna. "In Quest of an Ideal Type of Saint: Some Observations on the First Generation of Moroccan Awliya' Allah in 'Kitab Al-Tashawwuf' ." Studia Islamica. 94 (2002): 67-84.

When you do that, you lose italics, which I don't find much problem generally. The real nuisance is the replacement of curly quotes (i.e., “ ” or ‘ ’ ) with soulless straight quotes (i.e., " " or ' '), which then have to be fixed manually (or handled at the end with several needlessly complex search & replace operations).Or so I thought.

Just came across this on the M$ site. Turns out all you have to do is enable the replace-as-you-type feature for quotation marks and then you can replace all instances of " with " and Word handles the rest. D'oh!

I've been writing macros in VBA, mapping keyboard shortcuts to all sorts of stuff, and using Autocorrect to finish words for me for more than a decade and I didn't realize I could do this simple thing. Sad.

WD2000: How to Replace Smart Quotes with Straight Quotes

Replacing Existing Straight Quotes with Smart Quotes
Use the following method to replace existing straight quotes with smart quotes in a document.
1. To turn on smart quotes, follow these steps:
a. On the Tools menu, click AutoCorrect, and then select the AutoFormat As You Type tab.
b. Under Replace as you type, click to select the "Straight quotes" with "smart quotes" check box, and then click OK.
2. On the Edit menu, click Replace.
3. In the Find what box, type a quotation mark.
4. In the Replace with box, type a quotation mark.
5. Click Replace All.

Ignore messages from FanBox

Judging by my inbox over the last few days, a lot of people I know seem to have been taken in by the spammongers at FanBox, one of the more disreputable sites out there that masquerade as legitimate social networking services.

If you get an email involving FanBox, just delete it. Don't click on any of its links (least of all, one for unsubscribing, which merely lets them know your email works and will ensure yet more emails coming your way). It's most likely not an attempt by a real human being to communicate with you, but rather an attempt to suck you into its network (in fact, this applies to most messages from websites you've never heard or signed up for). If you sign up for this "service" will spam everybody in your address book with similarly useless and annoying messages, the purpose of which is to harvest functioning emails for various slimy marketing schemes.

The company appears to be really exploitative of its employees, too, so yet another reason not get suckered by these guys.

If you've already signed up, add a filter to delete all messages from them. Here are instructions for doing it with Yahoo Mail.

Sometimes you DON'T get the best deal online

I've found this rather counterintuitive, so I thought I'd share for bargain hunting posterity.

Since I spilled a cup of coffee on my laptop (a Lenovo 3000 N100) recently, a few of my keys either stopped working completely or began to stick something fierce. As a result, I've been living without easy access to the '-' key in most programs (exception: MS Word, where I was able to map an autoreplace shortcut to get it; for others I've either gone without or pasted in the dang thing from a text file that I keep at hand), which has been quite irksome at times (you don't realize how many words are hyphenated until your hyphen stops working) and has resulted in a lot of unsightly tildas (i.e., '~') clogging my file names and Del.icio.us account.

Anywho, I googled this quite a bit in search of a bargain for the replacement keyboard. A few places offered it for $40~60 (note the tilda~~my replacement has yet to arrive), and others demanded an absurd amount (highest: $225). None of the former outfits turned out to have it in stock (contrary to their website's claims) and I'll be damned before I pay the other prices.

Someone on a Lenovo forum agreed that this price was ridiculous and suggested I call them and inquire. I was sceptical of the use of that, but I did.

I tend to assume that you're always better off cutting big companies out of the process and scouring the Internet for bargains, but to my shock Lenovo not only had it in stock, but was charging less than them all.

The moral: Check traditional sellers when bargain hunting, too. I tend to use the big box shops and major websites for scouting and then order from places like NewEgg.com, but that didn't work here. Don't automatically assume the big guys will charge more and leave them out of your search. In this case, the big guy can charge a lot less become it keeps a lot of these in stock for repair shops. Had I followed my gut instinct that the part was just rare now, I'd have ended up paying 400% of its normal price ($200 instead of $50).

P.S. NewEgg.com is a place you can still order Windows XP to escape the bloated and buggy Windows Vista malfunctioning system ...sorry... "operating system".  We just, to use Micro$oft's parlance, "downgraded" Shabana's new but sluggish Dell XPS laptop to XP Home.  Runs much better faster and smoother now. (Note: Some customers who got had the misfortune of getting Vista preinstalled can even make this switch for free, though not us. Check with your seller.)

The power of HTML: The Synoptic Gospels Primer

It's rare that I see web page that so perfectly captures the power of HTML to make complex ideas accessible as this wonderful website exploring the Two Documents Hypothesis in New Testament studies.

Take a look at the Synoptic Gospels Primer's color-coded analysis the Synoptic Gospels' various renderings of the Parable of the Mustard Seed in the Gospels to see what I mean.

The power of strategic use of color and smart hyper links.

Past writings & the dangers of Internet procrastination

Having grown weary of the chore of googling myself every time I want to find past writings, I've added to each page a list of links to past writings available online. It's called "My writings elsewhere".

Here's the current list, for those interested:

• 2008-01-23: "MLK's 'Dream' Unrealized and Undigested"
  Religion Dispatches
• 2007-12-31: "UK Muslims & the 'War on Christmas'"
  Religion Dispatches
• 2007-11-01: "Jyllands-Posten and the Otherization of Europe's Muslims"
  THE CARTOON DEBATE AND THE FREEDOM OF THE PRESS (book chapter)
• 2006-07-06: "Theme Park Segregation: The Problem with 'Muslim-only' days"
  alt.muslim
• 2006-05-29: "Muslim Stereotypes: Understanding Muslim Language"
  alt.muslim
• 2006-02-01: "Comprehending Catastrophe"
  Islamica Magazine
• 2005-12-06: "Progressive Islam: Lessons learned from the PMU Experiment"
  alt.muslim
• 2005-06-02: "Politics of Hijab: Should Muslim women be on Mt. Everest?"
  alt.muslim
• 2005-06-01: "There ain’t no mountain high enough"
  Q-News
• 2005-04-01: "Voting is not enough"
  Q-News
• 2005-01-01: "That's right, he's back"
  Q-News
• 2004-08-30: "How Not to Fight Muslim Anti-Semitism: The Revocation of Tariq Ramadan's Visa Fuels Bigotry"
  MuslimWakeup!
• 2004-03-31: "Hijab hysteria: France and its Muslims"
  openDemocracy
• 2003-11-01: "Promise & Peril: Prospects for Democracy in the Muslim World Today"
  Muslim Democrat

I've left out a few things, but it's thought provoking and even a bit depressing to survey such a short list when you've contributed a gazillion posts to all sorts of mailing lists as much as I have over the last decade and a half.  (Unlike most of you whippersnapper new jacks  out in the Blogosphere, I was scrappin' with people over Islam, politics,  and all sorts of other things, way back in the early 1990s when the World Wide Web was text-based and had yet to catch on outside techie circles. I still remember the excitement of downloading my first file--the Bhagavad Gita in plain text--via not the Web but rather the now extinct Gopher network. )

Sure, for many years my goal was simply to participate in an exciting new medium, a new "town hall meeting".  I often found the exchanges enjoyable and stimulating--and I even made a good number of friends and useful contacts that I otherwise probably would never have known--but I can't help but groan, Man, I had a penny for every long, carefully thought-out post that was painstakingly constructed and then hurled into the ether of the Internet debate, never to be seen again....  It was a life style or hobby of sorts, and this was participation in the dawn of an exciting new dimension of modern life, but the uncomfortable question remains:  But what do I (or most other early Internet users) have to show for all those endless discussions and debates? 

Oh well. As someone once wrote, God loves the lazy rainbow no less than the laboring sea.

The scary thing to me is that Internet today is far more addictive.  It's far easier (and tempting) today to fritter away one's intellectual energy and spare time online.  Facebookers take note!

I've taken a second wife

She's a svelte, multi-lingual beauty from Sweden. Now, if she just spoke Arabic, too, she'd be perfect.

Here's a recent photo:

C-Pen 20 Handheld Scanner

C-Pen 20 Pen Scanner scans text, numbers, barcodes and small images from forms, invoices and other printed or hand-printed documents/books/magazines. C-Pen recognizes text in over 167 languages. The scanned data is transferred immediately into your PC, laptop or Win XP based handheld device. C-Pen 20 free integration software creates possibilities for high speed scanning solutions in virtually any field of data entry.

Seeing my eyes light up with lust as I feverishly unwrapped my new toy, Shabana spontaneously quipped that the 'C' on the box must stand for "concubine". 

Well, it is a handheld scanner...  (Get it?.)

So far, I'm quite impressed, even if it doesn't handle diacritics and macrons (which abound in academic books on Islam due to the transliterated Arabic words) so well.

More later.