After detailing the main features, pros, and cons of 20+ brands of academic research software, Hellekson recommends running Zotero off of a large (~32 Gb) thumb drive for maximum portability. This works well if you would rather carry your files and apps between computers rather than lugging around a laptop. See Hellekson's article for links to the research applications mentioned above and more.

What is your favorite reference manager and citation system?

Apple's iTunes has hundreds if not thousands of university lectures available for download from such top schools as MIT, Harvard, UC Berkeley, and Stanford. Last Spring, I came across a wonderful survey course called Quantitative Aspects of Global Environmental Problems taught by Professor John Harte at UC Berkeley in the Spring 2009 semester. The videos are available through the Berkeley Webcasts website as well as iTunes.

In his last lecture of the course (#32), Dr. Harte presented his Eight-Fold Path to Personal, Professional, and Environmental Happiness. One of the 'folds' is what Dr. Harte calls The Tyranny of the Most Important Problem. I transcribed a part of his discussion here, which occurs 43 minutes into the video.

“Back in the 1980s—late ‘70s, ‘80s--I and a number of graduate students were working up in the alpine of the Rocky Mountains studying salamanders and acidification of lakes and the consequences of coal fired power plants that didn’t have their emissions controlled in any way because the original Clean Air Act didn’t apply to the western power plants. We were looking at what the pollution from these plants were (sic) doing to life in alpine and sub-alpine ponds up in the Rockies. I had colleagues at Princeton and here and other places who were working on arms control and were trying to prevent nuclear war. I would sometimes go home at the end of the day, I’ll be very honest with you, [and think] Am I wasting my time studying salamanders when we could all be blown up tomorrow in a nuclear holocaust? That’s the tyranny of the concept that there is a most important problem and if you're not working on that most important problem, you are not doing the thing you should be doing. You’re wasting your time, and you’re not helping the world.

“Don’t be numbed by the idea that there’s a bigger problem to work on. Work on the one that you enjoy, that feels right to you, where your expertise matches the needs of the problem, and where you get your satisfaction. And in the long run, you may be doing as much to prevent nuclear war by leaving the world worth saving from nuclear war than you would be by working on it directly.“

Over the decades scientists in quantitative research fields have often experienced a tug-of-war between the desire for large (and expensive) shared computing environments and smaller but powerful workstations that a single scientist could procure for their own lab. The trade-off typically is between the cost of managing one's own system versus the control that one gives up with a large shared resource. Sometimes you need a lot of computing power to answer a research question, but you don't need it every day nor for very long. This is where cloud computing steps in. Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), for example, is a commercial web service commonly used by technology startups who want to be able to scale quickly without committing to large upfront costs. Last month, Argonne National Laboratory announced that they have been awarded $32 million in ARRA (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) funds from the Department of Energy (DOE) to study cloud computing "as a cost-effective and energy-efficient computing paradigm for scientists to accelerate discoveries in a variety of disciplines." The idea is to eventually make cloud computing resources available to scientists to study problems in climate, biology, chemistry, and more.

Wikispaces: Wikispaces is an easy to use collaboration system that can be used privately for a fee or open to the public for free (as long as you don't mind seeing Google text ads on the side). All it takes is a simple username, password, email address and wikiname to get started with a free account. Universities can enjoy unlimited users for a flat rate. Columbia University created Wikischolars on the Wikispaces platform for its university faculty and research scientists.

PBworks: PBworks (formerly known as PBwiki) offers a free wiki with the option of creating a private collaboration space, which isn't available in the Wikispaces free edition. New wikis come with sample pages that you can use as best practice samples for setting up pages such as a document repository, a meeting minutes page, a project tracker, and more. Cal Newport at Study Hacks has a helpful and detailed post on How to Build a Paper Research Wiki using PBworks.

TikiWiki: TikiWiki is an open source wiki engine and overall content management system. Added features include forums, chat rooms, polls, blogs, image galleries, and more. While TikiWiki has the advantage of being free and open source, it may require more development time than you would prefer. If that is the case, you might be better off with a hosted solution like Wikispaces or PBworks.

TiddlyWiki: TiddlyWiki is a rather odd micro wiki engine written in javascript that creates a single HTML file that you can store on your harddisk or even a pendrive. This gives you the advantage of being able to update it offline, but also limits the design and functionality. Since all of the content exists on a single page, clicking a headline in the navigation makes the page scroll to show you the specific content. TiddlyWikis can be combined to create collaborative wikis at TiddlySpot.

Are you finding that Google Earth is not filling your needs while professional geographic software packages are out of reach? Below are a few free open source GIS packages just added to the Element List database. For an exhaustive listing of free GIS software products, see also FreeGIS.org.