Studying has lately been sucking out all my creativity; hence my ability to come up with new materials for a post is not very high, to say the least. After thinking about that, I came to realize that it might be a good idea to help my fellow students with some tools and tips that can save them at times of distress and misery- when they write a paper or when they attend a really boring class.
Don't you just hate it when you write a paper and the article you are citing from is in a PDF format, which means that you can't just copy & paste it to your document? Well, the solution is converting the PDF file to a WORD or EXCEL file, it can be done easily just by uploading the file to the following website which will simply do it for you:
pdf to excel - http://www.cogniview.com/pdf-to-excel/pdf2xl-basic
pdf to word http://www.convertii.com/
צילום: (visualphotos.com)
Zotero- As you write a paper and just about to be finished you suddenly realize that you have forgotten to write the bibliography and that really ruins your plans for that day. Well, thanks to Zotero you can see that problem as solved. This amazing software (which can also be downloaded as a plug-in to your browser) will organize all the details that you have provided (best solution will be providing it with the ISBN of the article) it with, then it will export it into an organized document sorted by the bibliographical method you selected.
Google Trends- sometimes you have these boring moments during class when you really want to see pretty much anything else but the lecturer. For that, there is no better way to keep yourself updated then to take a look at the hottest search words on Google. You can check popular search words by country, region, dates, in comparison. This may also indicate the current interest of people from different places, for example, today the most popular search word in the US was "Dallas Cowboys".
צילום: (visualphotos.com)
Recorded future- Probably one of the most interesting websites I have seen lately. This website, who works on algorithms that collect data from the web and from social networks, gathers all the data to one place and sorts it automatically. It offers a wide range of visualization options that include a timeline, location, person etc. with these options you can take a look at past events, current events and even future events. The algorithms calculate the chances that certain events from around the world will occur based on what people write on the web.
Twitter psychology- To those who always wanted to psychologically analyze celebrities, apparently it's possible. An easy to use website took a few simple psychological method and by using a software which works on something called "sentiment analysis" it performs a shallow, yet interesting analysis of a twitter account which you provide it with by analyzing the text written by this user. You can find out for example that Obama writes about things that are work related 338% more than the average user and that Chuck Norris writes about positive related issues 93% more than the average user.
http://tweetpsych.com/?q=%40chucknorris
We feel fine-An interesting website that also works on the method of sentiment analysis. Describes the feelings of people from all over the web at a given time period. You can view the date by age, area, weather, gender and more. The website is built in a very simple and attractive way which makes it a great time-spending tool for students.
Michael Rabi //