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With the recent increase in the price of oil, Harold nails a very important idea: An interesting dichotomy is appearing in our world. The price of communication is decreasing while the price of transportation is increasing. Most of our transportation systems rely on oil and it is becoming more…
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Massachusetts Thursday unveiled plans to phase out Microsoft’s Office in favor of office productivity suites that support an open-document format from the OASIS standards body, according to a statement on the commonwealth’s Web site. It expects its agencies to develop phased migration plans…
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I run Linux with Firefox exclusively. Hence, I don’t need a product which supposedly fixes Windows. Such a product, called Winfixer, has managed to install a popup in my Firefox. Every time I start Firefox, a Winfixer popup tells me they found several problems on my machine (yeah! right!), I…
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Want help choosing your Linux distribution? I use both gentoo and Mandrake… Let’s see if gentoo is right for you. About gentoo… Short story: great for a machine you really care about and plan to keep a long time. Bad for a machine you rarely use and just want to work now. Pros: Installation…
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Most scientific papers are probably wrong
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According to this New Scientist article, most scientific papers are probably wrong: John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at the University of Ioannina School of Medicine in Greece, says that small sample sizes, poor study design, researcher bias, and selective reporting and other problems combine to…
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There is exactly one Java application I use routinely, jedit. It is an excellent text editor. As it turns out, the author doesn’t think too highly of Java itself: I wonder how an extensively hyped piece of software like Java 1.5 — Sun told us it was “the most stable Java release ever” —…
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I believe that what I’m trying to achieve with some of my more critical posts about the Ph.D. track is to provide “a candid acknowledgement of the sacrifices and conflicts that came with the field.” An older article in Salon has interesting quotes on this theme… Academia is a world that is…
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Antioxidant Values in Fruits And Vegetables (ORAC units per 100 grams): Fruits: Prunes — 5570 Raisins — 2830 Blueberries — 2400 Blackberries — 2036 Strawberries — 1540 Raspberries — 1220 Plums — 949 Oranges — 750 Red grapes — 739 Cherries — 670 Kiwi fruit — 602 Grapefruit,…
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Update: a much simpler approach is described in Embedding fonts for IEEE. My friend Yuhong reminded me to make sure I embed all fonts in the pdf file for our ICDM-05 paper. This seems to be an IEEE requirement. Turns out to be a non trivial task, but not difficult. Here’s what I did (applies to a…
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Paul Graham says that transparency (and thus data recording) is the way out of corruption: How do you break the connection between wealth and power? Demand transparency. Watch closely how power is exercised, and demand an account of how decisions are made. Why aren’t all police interrogations…
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In relation to a previous post of mine about open source Business Intelligence where I wrote “So, maybe someone out there should start a support company for Open Source Business Intelligence?”, Krishnaswamy Ram pointed out to Pentaho which seems to be exactly what I had imagined a smart…
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For researchers who actually want to be read, there are several good eprints servers including arxiv.org (which I don’t use, but many physicists seem to like it) and cogprints (great for AI-related stuff). Of course, you can simply post your papers on your web site and let Google find them (my…
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Should you encourage your M.Sc. students to go for a Ph.D.? If you want to get more grant money, publish more papers and be generally viewed as a more “important” researcher, than you should definitively push all your talented M.Sc. students to go for a Ph.D. Yet, Yuhong does differently: I…
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PODS 2006 (December 1st, 2005 / June 26-28, 2006)
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SIGMOD 2006 (November 17, 2005 / June 27-29, 2006)
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The PODS 2006 call for papers is out. It will be held in Chicago along with SIGMOD. The PODS symposium series, held in conjunction with the SIGMOD conference series, provides a premier annual forum for the communication of new advances in the theoretical foundation of database systems. For the…
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The SIGMOD call for papers is out. It will be held in Chicago (cool!). The annual ACM SIGMOD conference is a leading international forum for database researchers, developers, and users to explore cutting-edge ideas and results, and to exchange techniques, tools, and experiences. We invite the…
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You know TeX, you know HTML and you don’t like PDF or PowerPoint slides? Leverage the fact that Firefox supports MathML and your troubles are over! Following one of my earlier posts, Peter Jipsen was nice enough to email me to let me know that ASCIIMathML officially works with both HTML Slidy and…
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Hitflip DVD recommender is using Slope One collaborative filtering algorithm