Robin ZebrowskiInterview
Assistant professor of cognitive science
Adapted from Robin Zebrowski's interview on Uses This, published 13 November 2012. The kit is drawn from their answers and each reason is an excerpt, lightly edited. Shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the full interview ↗
Is this you? Claim this kit →Hardware
I currently use a Toshiba Portege R705.
To that end, we have a Drobo FS that keeps my constant hardware turnover from being catastrophic.
When I teach Cognitive Robotics, I use LEGO Mindstorms (NXT) to teach embodiment theories.
We've also got a Scribbler Robot that we haven't played with yet, but hopefully I'll give it a spin before the Spring semester.
I use my iPhone 4's basic camera app to take photos of my blackboards at the end of every class I teach, and I later upload the photos to our course management software (see below).
EF 100mm f/2.8 Macro USM+ 1 other
The only lenses we have are a Canon EFS 18-55mm (which comes in the camera kit) and Canon macro EF 100mm.
Communication
I rely pretty heavily on Twitter to keep me in the loop on current research (when some of the best journals tweet their new articles, and lots of other cognitive scientists and philosophers talk shop in 140 characters, it makes it easy for me to stay on top of the most recent work in my fields.) Twitter gets some bad press in academia.
I use twhirl as a desktop client for Twitter.
Surprisingly, I've got to list Facebook here as a valuable piece of academic software.
Productivity
I do my writing in MS Word and, on occasion, Notepad.
Browser
I prefer Firefox in spite of its recent performance problems.
I've tried Chrome but I always end up back with Firefox.
Coding & Development
We're considering switching from the drag and drop NXT software to NXC using Bricx this Spring.
I use comicbookdb for the same reason but to keep track of my small comic book collection.
Media
Other
My college uses Moodle for course management software since it's open source.
I keep all of my books cataloged on Librarything so I can keep track of what I have and where it is.