Podcast: "How Biotech and Robotics are Transforming Today's Military -- and How That Will Change the Rest of Us"

The New America Foundation is podcasting a conference today on how biotech and robotics are transforming warfare. It's got a great list of speakers and topics. You can watch the live today podcast here. Hopefully they will record this and throw it up on the web in the near future.

Geeky Stuff: Searching Within Google Scholar Results

Google Scholar is great--I use it more often than JSTOR or almost any other database of academic research. I came across this clever tip for searching within the results of a Scholar search. It's a bit complicated, but seems to work and can be pretty handy:

Google Scholar is an extremely useful academic tool. One great thing about it is, after running a search, you can click on "Cited by" beneath a result and it will then return a list of all sources that cite that article or book. The new result is itself sorted by citation count, which is usually a useful metric for determining relevance. However there's a problem—you can't search through these results using additional terms! If you enter new terms into the search box and hit enter, it forgets what you were doing and starts over.

Here's how to get around this oversight. First, click on the "Cited by" link beneath the article you're interested in. Then, on the resulting page, look at the URL. It should be something like "http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=15426054345747611141&hl=en&as_sdt=800000"—which is all articles that cite Pinker's "Blank Slate." Select and copy this portion of the portion of the URL, "cites=15426054345747611141". Now do a new search, let's say just for "Dennett." In the URL for this results page, add "&" to the end and paste the portion of the previous URL you copied. The URL should now read, "http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=dennett&hl=en&btnG=Search&as_sdt=800001&as_sdtp=on&cites=15426054345747611141". Finally, hit enter (from the address bar, not the search box), and the new search should come up—this will be all articles/books that cite Pinker's "Blank Slate" *and* contain the word "Dennett" somewhere in them.