Critical thinking

Just received the student feedback for some lectures I gave in Term 1 - this was the first half of a new Year 1 course in critical thinking, so I was particularly interested to see it. About 10% of those who responded to the survey felt the delivery and/or sequencing of material could be better.  I have some plans to address that. It was nice to see a similar number actively praising the course - not something I necessarily expected given the topic.

Show all files in OS X Finder

There are various guides to this around, but most do not result in the hidden folders in the root directory (Macintosh HD) being shown. This works, though: sudo chflags -R nohidden /*

LaTeX to Microsoft Word

I've been using LaTeX for over a year now, and definitely prefer it to Word - I find it much easier to concentrate on content with its WYSIWYM rather than WYSISYG approach. Of course, most of the rest of psychology (and the world) continues to use Word, so it's harder to share content with co-authors than if I were still using Word.

Fortunately, latex2rtf provides a great solution. It auto-converts latex to an RTF file, which can then turned into a variety of formats (including DOC or DOCX) by your word processor of choice.

Now I have latex2rtf working, it's very easy to use, but getting it working was a bit of a pain. Some notes below that others may find helpful (these notes have been updated):

1. There is no installation package for Mac OS X on latex2rtf's webpage. However, it is available on https://www.macports.org/. Install MacPorts, and then install latex2rtf with the command: sudo port install latex2rtf.
2. Recently, I've been using the excellent elsarticle document class in LaTeX. latex2rtf does not seem to recognise this. So, to get referencing to work properly in latex2rtf when using elsarticle, you need to explicitly put the line: \usepackage{natbib} into your .tex file. This single addition fixes referencing.
3. In OS X, open a Terminal window, use cmd-drag to change the Terminal's directory to where your .tex file is, and simply type latex2rtf <filename>
4. latex2rtf assumes you have already processed your tex file (e.g. to PDF) and the relevant support files this creates. still exist in the directory.