Library Day

I like TTU's library even though the stacks are very 1950s and there are no bathrooms on two of the floors. Oh well. The downstairs fountain lobby area is cool, and so are parts of the infrastruture. First, I learned today about the KIC system; essentially, it is an overhead camera which takes a picture of a text and turns it into an electronic file--including pdf. This so rocks I can hardly stand it. When this was explained in today's orientation I nearly exploded in joy; I've spent hours photocopying docs and then sending them through a scanner because I had no other resources available to me. Oh, yes! A university that has a budget for good gear!

This is so valuable to me in terms of time and effort because I am used to checking out books I like so that I can take the whole book home and scan it--usually just for a few pages or articles. This way, I can scan the title page and key areas of interest, leave the book in the library, and have digital working copies for home. Once I have a paid for copy of Acrobat--my free use expired--I can then comment and mark them up directly. This saves my back, my backpack, and leaves texts in the library. Tomorrow I am off to learn how to use KIC.

I also learned that TTU has plenty of digital gear that we can check out, too, at the library. Very excited about that.

I spent several hours cruising for information about bioinformatics today. Thus far, I think my real field of interest is in biocomputing, not bioinformatics, and I want to learn more about object oriented data bases. Plus, I found a recent essay in a 2009 text that responds to Haraway's article on Cyborgs. It looks good.

I am also reading about datamining and those related strategies. Part of me is curious if we are coming close to expending the same amount of energy to discovering the hetereneous nature of disability--in part an expression of the genetic code--as we are in attempting to label and delineate genetic code. There are some interesting moral issues involved here. There are also some possible fascinating intersections with Agamben's notions of bare life, zoe, bios, and so on. Is it possible to label the basic code we all share as the zoe and what makes us different as the bios? Is the bios the form of life? My ignorance about genetics and biology makes these kinds of discussions very tenuous, and I'm not sure why I'm even looking here, but the material fascinates me.

I am thinking that I'll look for annotated bibliographies and reports on genetics for the Technical Reports class. I hope to focus on biocomputing or biotechnology for the Technology course. I am unsure of what is coming in the research methods course, and I think the TC course is probably self-supporting.

This weekend I hope to review the course texts so I know what is coming at me for the term.