, 12 min read
The future is already here: it’s just not very evenly distributed
13 thoughts on “The future is already here: it’s just not very evenly distributed”
, 12 min read
13 thoughts on “The future is already here: it’s just not very evenly distributed”
@Poloni
Simple. I follow several people on Twitter. I carefully picked them. Every day, they share links and newsbites. I read them. That’s all.
I am very careful about who I follow on Twitter… to make sure that there is little noise in my Twitter feed.
99% of Twitter users misuse it by following all their friends, collaborators and so on. That is not how Twitter should be used. I don’t decide whether to follow someone based on whether I know them, whether they are smart and so on. I choose to follow people who post content I enjoy at this time. Whether I like someone has nothing to do with whether I follow them on Twitter. Hell! I might follow someone I dislike if their content is good.
With this system in place, I don’t need news sites, newspapers or any other system. I just check Twitter.
A few minor comments:
* Canada seems (maybe it can afford to be) less advanced than New Zealand in this respect. All grant proposals that I am aware of are dealt with via electronic portals, I don’t get any paper, just go to the HR website, etc. My parenthetical comment is also related to the observed apparent negative correlation between strength of a university research programme and the physical/administrative resources it has. Visiting Berkeley I could hardly believe some of the buildings compared to ours at home. But who cares when you have such good people?
* On page numbers: not only do they not have much point these days, for many journals they don’t even exist (e.g. Electronic Journal of Combinatorics, some physics ones). Since I have never seen a citation in a journal article that needed to point to an exact page, I don’t miss them. But bean-counters will have trouble, not knowing the length of the papers!
* Note: I failed your spam filter by answering in alpha, not numeric. Should have read the example.
@Mark
But bean-counters will have trouble, not knowing the length of the papers!
There are people counting the number of pages? I hope they correct for the font size.
I failed your spam filter by answering in alpha, not numeric.
It is a bit of a pain. But you have to admit that I’m at least a bit original.
Where do you get your hand-picked news from? Seems an interesting website to check.
Amen!
I could add that I have one third of my meetings on-line now. (FlashMeeting is kind of nice…) That I listen to recorded talks while driving to work. That I work at home one day a week. That I almost never read the paper versions of magazines that the ACM or IEEE keep sending me.
At least my university sends the envelope only once a month 😉 Maybe they also pay only half of what you get?
Well aimed post! By the way, there is a paper about an automated system doing exactly the same thing as you do by hand with Twitter – see http://arxiv.org/abs/0910.3490 (argh, I should have asked a friend to write this to avoid self-propaganda).
So true!
All the letters that the university and the government agencies sent to me, I don’t know what to do with it. You cannot simply dump it.
@Duval
That I almost never read the paper versions of magazines that the ACM or IEEE keep sending me.
I left IEEE because I was getting sick of all these magazines. I am still an ACM member, but I don’t even remove Communications of the ACM from its plastic wrapper. I just dump them somewhere in my house. I think that my wife must make them silently disappear.
I am seriously thinking about quitting ACM precisely because they refuse to offer a paperless membership.
Oh! And I will definitively terminate my newspaper subscription this year.
Maybe they also pay only half of what you get?
People typically get paid weekly or every two weeks in North America. Maybe it is more common to be paid monthly in Europe?
@Weiwei
You cannot simply dump it.
I have this large stack of paper in my home office. While it is vaguely categorized, none of it is indexed. The only way to find something is to search through it in linear time.
This system totally ignores decades of research in Computer Science. There is no B-tree, no inverse index. Nothing. Just a stupid, unintelligent stack. No search engine. Nothing. The cost of randomly accessing something in the pile is crazy.
Just something… in and out of context 🙂
Some time ago somebody said that we all live in past 🙂 theoretically it is like that…at least all we perceive have happened at least some seconds ago…all we say/represent we have imagined before… 🙂
In the sense of using modern technologies… it have always been like this…somewhere some used a train to travel and at the same time somebody somewhere still used cartage 🙂
Maybe … for sure i am old fashioned 🙂 because i still love read books (in standard way, not digital), also publications for review for me it is easier to read printed way 🙂
But it is great that many things can be done electronically it ease and speed up so many works in our life’s 🙂
However for some living in the past is the only way they know and they can 🙂
Unless UQAM has much better financial systems than UW, I’d keep getting the paper pay stubs. Here, every time there is a change of some sort (summer salary, partial payment of salary from a grant or different internal budget for whatever reason), there is a reasonable chance of a screw-up.
Maybe it is more common to be paid monthly in Europe?
Yes it is, I believe everywhere in Europe.
Way to go on opting out memberships like IEEE and ACM (on top of newspaper subscriptions) who keep sending paper junk regularly. It not only wastes trees, it wastes time sorting, disposing, etc. I’m personally gutting many professional association membership not only b/c of the lack of value, but also b/c I’m no longer practicing what I’ve learned in college directly.
If you’re looking to reduce your physical junk and paper-work even more, consider checking out Leo Babauta’s e-books (especially the Simple Guide to a Minimalist’s Life) to rid the junk papers one step further.
Stanley