Oh Boy Here Comes The New Year!! To Ensure A Good Start To 2021, Take This. He'll Be Your Friend Through

Skip Google for Research

As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse.  It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms 

As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable.  As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.

Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.

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Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free

BE NICE HAVE FUN

i dont consider myself a 'fashion guru' by any means but one thing i will say is guys you dont need to know the specific brand an item you like is - you need to know what the item is called. very rarely does a brand matter, but knowing that pair of pants is called 'cargo' vs 'boot cut' or the names of dress styles is going to help you find clothes you like WAAAYYYY faster than brand shopping

fun studying tip: if you’re a procrastinator, play tom jones’s “what’s new pussycat” on repeat while writing your papers and do not turn it off until you are finished, it will motivate you to finish that essay as quickly as possible

going to start researching sheep breeds that are like endangered or need conservation and then seek out their wool to use, preferably buying directly from the herders, so i can support them

YALL. Holly Black has a list of resources she's used for writing her books on the fair folk. I'm OBSESSED. I love her work and world building. it's so true to the heart of faeries

Dracula and Jonathan’s Tango - from The Polish National Opera production of ‘Dracula’.

With Choreography by Krzysztof Pastor and Music by Wojciech Kilar.

don’t forget your pills! [rbs&follows>likes]

If you're feeling anxious or depressed about the climate and want to do something to help right now, from your bed, for free...

Start helping with citizen science projects

The Conversation

Explainer: what is citizen science?

Public participation in science is increasing, and citizen science has a central part in this. It is a contribution by the public to researc

What's a citizen science project? Basically, it's crowdsourced science. In this case, crowdsourced climate science, that you can help with!

You don't need qualifications or any training besides the slideshow at the start of a project. There are a lot of things that humans can do way better than machines can, even with only minimal training, that are vital to science - especially digitizing records and building searchable databases

Like labeling trees in aerial photos so that scientists have better datasets to use for restoration.

Or counting cells in fossilized plants to track the impacts of climate change.

Or digitizing old atmospheric data to help scientists track the warming effects of El Niño.

Or counting penguins to help scientists better protect them.

Those are all on one of the most prominent citizen science platforms, called Zooniverse, but there are a ton of others, too.

Oh, and btw, you don't have to worry about messing up, because several people see each image. Studies show that if you pool the opinions of however many regular people (different by field), it matches the accuracy rate of a trained scientist in the field.

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I spent a lot of time doing this when I was really badly injured and housebound, and it was so good for me to be able to HELP and DO SOMETHING, even when I was in too much pain to leave my bed. So if you are chronically ill/disabled/for whatever reason can't participate or volunteer for things in person, I highly highly recommend.

Next time you wish you could do something - anything - to help

Remember that actually, you can. And help with some science.