David Shatto wrote: >Do any of you veteran activists have any advice for a newbie >such as I? Is there any particular "starting point"?
My tip is to learn how to find and use high quality references. This adds factual value to postings. A few minutes researching online before posting can make assertions more credible and useful to all of us. As somebody who works in a scientific organisation, you may already value and have this skill. For example, US federal government information often has the suffix .gov and US military information has the suffix .mil If you want to explore more widely, you can find the equivalents in other countries (e.g. the UK government has a lot of easy to read information with the suffix .gov.uk and UK legislation is available at hmso.gov.uk) Google also allows you to use the hyphen as a prefix to mean 'NOT'. For example, '-tons' will eliminate pages that contain the word 'tons'. I have some other personal preferences that are not shared by all here. * I prefer it if postings are plain text and not html. * I prefer to receive a web link rather than a posting of the web page itself. * I prefer not to receive duplicate postings to my personal email address, although I appreciate this can be done by accident (as I myself have done). * I prefer postings that are reasonably well formatted for readability. Welcome.
