Chris Aldrich

"Like everyone, I'm a big fan of Pocket, but also use Instapaper frequently as well, though both of these are primarily for personal articles I plan on reading.  Though for academic related papers, I generally tend to stick to a Mendeley bookmarklet for sorting and tagging the journal articles and books that I'd like to put into my reading/research queue.  Additionally I've found that the LibX (http://libx.org) extension is stupendous for very quickly tracking down and being able to download research materials from a variety of research libraries/institutions." - Chris Aldrich

"As an electrical engineer (in the subfields of information theory and molecular biology), I have to say that I'm very intrigued by the trio of articles that Parry has written for the Chronicle in the past few weeks on the subjects of quantitative history, cliometrics/cliodynamics, or what I might term Big History (following the tradition of David Christian; I was initially turned onto it by a Chronicle article: http://chronicle.com/blogs/wir.... I have lately coincidentally been reading Steven Pinker's book "The Better Angels of Our Nature" as well as Daniel Kanheman's "Thinking, Fast and Slow". (I'll also mention that I'm a general fan of the work of Jared Diamond and Matt Ridley who impinge on these topics as well.) I'm sure that all of these researchers are onto something in terms of trying to better quantify our historical perspectives in using science and applying it to history. I think the process might be likened to the ways in which methods of computed tomography, P.E.T.,..." - Chris Aldrich

"Great to see other Hopkins folks in the food community! When is the toaster commercially available? Or will they post their solution as open source with hardware options? Do they have notes on the optimal amounts of internal bread moisture levels and exterior humidity? For other budding (or recovering?) mechanical and biomedical engineers and biophysicists I'd recommend reading Harold McGee's "On Food and Cooking" (http://amzn.to/12rBJqx) as well as Myhrvold, Young, & Bilet's "Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking" (http://amzn.to/Z7B0GN) as great sources for thinking about applying your professional skills to edibles." - Chris Aldrich

"For taking the next step into the digital space, I highly recommend using the free (and very actively developed) Calibre e-book management program. (http://calibre-ebook.com/) To help significantly with data management, one can use the GoodReads.com plug in and their phone app which will let you add your books to your online library using a built in bar code scanner. Then sync the two together to give yourself a great computer (even server-based) management system for not only your electronic media, but as well for your physical books. These pieces of software will let you tag/shelve your books in any number of ways you choose so that even though you are forced into a physical shelving method for your physical books, you can search them and your e-books in almost any manner you choose. As for digital journal article management, Calibre can work somewhat well too, but I prefer Mendeley.com which has lots of additional perks like browser bookmarklets which usually import all the..." - Chris Aldrich