(Source: sosuperawesome, via earthwaker-deactivated20171217)

Anonymous asked: Is there a good, inexpensive (not even free, just affordable) way a non-academic can access scholarly articles? I'm never going to cite an article in anything and I'm not affiliated with a university, I just enjoy reading & checking primary sources.

elodieunderglass:

That’s such a good question!! Oh my goodness!

The short answer is yes, definitely! I’m going to tell you The Big Dirty Secret at the end of this post. But first you have to read how to do it properly, okay?

If you’re browsing, and you don’t know exactly what article you want, probably the best place for you to start is Google Scholar. Type the research topic (I used a clear, modular search string - “socioeconomic status and pet ownership”) into the search bars and see what comes up.

See how some of them offer PDFs/HTML on the right there? They are open-access, or the authors have uploaded PDFs to researchgate, or something. At any rate, you can get that material. Click on that, and you’ve got the article.

What about the ones that don’t have that option? Well, you can still click on the link. It’ll take you to the Abstract, and ask you to pay $30 or whatever to read the rest. But pro tip: the Abstract will probably have enough information for a light research skim, and could be good enough for you. (Also try copy-pasting the whole title of the article, and normal-Googling it. Sometimes authors have uploaded the full text somewhere random, like on their personal websites.) 

What if you ONLY want to look at articles you can have RIGHT NOW? My go-to recommendation for you is PubMedCentral. It’s a full-text archive of curated open-source biological/medical research articles, and officially a Good Place To Start. Everything you find on PMC, you can have for free. Even though it’s broadly biology/medical, you can find over 400 articles on the topic of “ethnicity and dog ownership” :

Look at that! All of those are free, and you can have them. 

But what if you already know exactly what article you want, and a mean ol’ paywall has gotten in your way? Like, everyone is talking about that cool new article in Nature, and you want to read it too, but you’re not at a university and you don’t wanna pay. How can a non-academic get their little paws on all of that sweet research locked away in the ivory tower?

Well, you can download the Open Access Button to your browser, and then when you hit a paywall, you can press it, and it will try to get the article for you by politely and legally sneaking behind the paywall. If it can’t, it can email the author on your behalf and ask for a copy. You can also do this by mining the author email from the Author Information sections of the paper.

But…

here is the big one.

hopefully the long post has scared everybody off.

BECAUSE THIS IS A BIG FUCK-OFF SECRET .

COVER YOUR EARS, CHILDREN.

If you’re absolutely leg-crossingly hopping-up-and-down desperate for a specific article that is maddeningly out of your reach… and you have an academic interest…

*swigs from flask and stares off into distance*

let me tell you about Sci-Hub.

If you were to be the sort of person who clicks on links, you could click on that link, which would take you to a strange-looking, Russian website with a search bar. Don’t worry if you don’t read Russian - we know what you do with search bars, don’t we? 

If you were the sort of person who WANTED to do that sort of thing, you could put the name of the article in there, and it would just nip behind the paywall and get it for you. Unlike the OA Button, which is polite and friendly and helpful and asks first, Sci-Hub uses hacked proxies to steal papers, and that’s very rude. Elsevier is losing its shit trying to kill it.

Using it is stealing, and I cannot condone that sort of behavior in my followers.

It was built by Alexandra Elbakyan, a female scientist from Kazakhstan, who is quite an interesting lady.

But I didn’t tell you any of this.

Edmonton Gothic

jeyradan:

(Inspired by copperbadge and flatlanddan, I gave in and wrote this.)

The town sprawls farther and farther out, eating away at the edges of the prairie. Or is the prairie eating away at the town? You aren’t sure. You try not to go out there. You’re never quite sure where the hungry edges of the tallgrass start.

The streets make sense, you explain. It’s a grid system. Neat rows of numbers marching north and south, east and west. You don’t mention the streets that have names, but no numbers. You don’t mention the streets that have neither.

You walk home from the rink late at night, skates slung over your shoulder and knocking together at your hip. The streetlights cast their yellow-pink glow over the sidewalk; you hurry from one dimly lit outpost to the next and try not to see what’s in between the lights.

They say there are fish in the North Saskatchewan, huge sturgeons that live in the rusted-out carcasses of sunken trains where the sunlight doesn’t reach. No one has ever caught one, the grizzled fisherman on the bank tells you, relief in his eyes, and fear. His float bobs on the surface of the water.

There’s an unshaven man lying against the brick wall of the old library downtown. He’s always there, though every day he wears a different face. You pretend not to see a half-empty bottle, a lighter, blood. You want no part of his arcane rituals.

When the LRT leaves Grandin Station, you look at the person sitting across from you, or down at your feet. You hold your breath from Grandin to University, then take in great gulps of air as the train pulls into the station. Everyone knows you don’t look at the river while you cross.

You’ve heard that Telus Field is built on an ancient First Nations burial ground. Maybe that’s why baseball teams never stay there for long. The city says there’s nothing there, and you assume the trucks that leave are carrying only earth.

Parents worry over whether to send their children to public school or Catholic school. Which one has better resources, they ask? Which one has smaller class sizes? No one gives voice to the real questions. This land has old gods of its own. Which one will anger them less?

The city is surrounded. RV dealerships, farmhouses, grain silos, the airport, and beyond it, grass that reaches past your knees and ripples in the wind. You wonder what’s out there. You wonder if the city is a fortress or a prison. You wonder if it’s dangerous to question it. You wonder if anyone who leaves ever comes back.

The sky is white. The ground is white. The snow piles up as far as the eye can see. The sun will be back in the spring, you tell each other. It sounds like an invocation. You say it every day, just in case. You don’t know what would happen if you ever missed a day.

Gravel crusts over the snow at the side of the road. More snow falls. More gravel. More snow. More gravel. It’s May, and the snow is still there, under the gravel. If it ever melted, you might see what was trapped underneath. You add more gravel.

You lie in the grass, listening to the summer hum of lawnmowers and mosquitoes and the shouts of children in the wading pool at the park. At this distance, it’s hard to tell the difference between shouting and screaming. Six children went missing in Parkallen last year, but the green shack opened up again this year, like it always does. Like it always will, as long as there are children.

The oil rigs bob their heads slowly up and down, casting long, looming shadows in the golden afternoon sun. You glance away, then back. You wonder if they’re in the same place they were a moment ago. The prairie stretches endlessly, and there’s no way to be sure.

(via darlinggirlpicklock)

linguisticsblr:

polyglottalstop:

glossikos:

spanishskulduggery:

So, guys, probably more reliable than Google Translate is in many cases there’s Linguee.

Linguee is a sort of dictionary filled with examples and sentences from all over the internet so you can look up individual phrases or words and see how they’re used and in what contexts.

So if you want to type in an actual phrase or something in English or Spanish (or a different language if you pick it) you can see your words used in sentences and see how actual sentences look… rather than relying on Google Translate to mess up the grammar or false cognates.

And more than that, you can also check the sources they take the example sentences from.

I highly recommend Linguee for people who are trying to figure out specific phrases rather than particular words (which I would use WordReference for).

Linguee is a god send!

Linguee is bomb!

My French teacher introduced me to Linguee and it really is spectacular!

(via earthwaker-deactivated20171217)

fscottie:

chapel hill right now 2/11/15

(Source: molotovgirls, via earthwaker-deactivated20171217)

Thoughts on noticing disability experiences →

realsocialskills:

saturniidaenightfever replied to your post“Anonymous asked realsocialskills: I’m physically disabled, and it…”

As an able bodied person, I am never certain when/if it’s appropriate to bring it up. I don’t want to belittle disabled persons, but I…

geromanly:

superziggy:

In attempts to get Teka to stop chewing at my books, I put on some dance music.

Poor buddy’s confused because it wants to eat book, but HAS to dance

(via kenyatta)

blackrosekz13whovian:

apsarcasm:

sherlocksmyth:

Deflate when writing prose; inflate when writing essays for school.

Procrastinating on finding ways to add one page to my essay to get the page requirement! Thank you so much.

(Source: amandaonwriting, via starfieldcanvas)

liars:

careydraws:

Written in the Bones. New comic, written by Christopher M. Jones & illustrated by Carey Pietsch.

I’m hoping to have printed copies of this at MOCCA, ABPCC, and TCAF this spring, and SPX in the fall! More info to come.

CJ, this is incredible.

(via opioneers)

typostrate:

Snow calligraphy

This is the snow calligraphy by Mr Gren. Mr Gren is some kind of misterious, there is nothing what you can find about him, but his awesome works. This urban calligraphy, another form of street art, but with less vandalism background and more artistic is very impressive. So please Mr Gren, if you read this article, tell us a little bit about your work!

Typostrate on: Facebook | Pinterest | Instagram | Tumblr

(Source: Flickr / _misterg_, via courageous)

unknowneditors:

ZUPAGRAFIKAis a creative design studio (team - David Navarro & Martyna Sobecka), based in Poznań, Poland.

Blokografia is a collection of paper cut-out typographies representing modernist buildings and Polish blocks. We started with Poznań and now we keep on completing the series by gradually adding new letters with buildings from other cities. The collection is part of a bigger cut-out selection available at our design store Zupamarket.

(Source: behance.net, via crossconnectmag)

her-perishable-breath:

whenever possible we must shatter the illusion of white superiority and white innocence because america loves to forget their history. love it.

WHADDA FUQQQ DIZ MY JAYUM DIZ MY ANTHEM HALLELUJAH 

(Source: cagedlions, via karensofiacolon)

"What is disaster pornography? Africans define it as the Western media’s habit of blacking out Africa’s stock markets, cell phones, heart surgeries, soaring literacy and increasing democratization, while gleefully parading its genocides, armed conflicts, child soldiers, foreign debts, hunger, disease and backwardness."

Gbemisola Olujobi, Nigerian journalist (Via the December 2007 issue of Ebony magazine)  (via sexgenderbody)

(via kenyatta)

View high resolution

nnmprv:

Nesterovskyi Aleksandr

(via dulcisdomus)