, 3 min read
I missed this article by Anya Kamenetz which has a provoking subtitle: “Grad school provides exciting new road to poverty” Here’s the introduction: Here’s an exciting career opportunity you won’t see in the classified ads. For the first six to 10 years, it pays less than $20,000 and…
, 1 min read
Tall, Dark, and Mysterious talks about Vegetables of revolution: Well, I continued, You have a function, like say this one – at this I traced an outline of the squash with my index finger – you rotate it around the x-axis, so it traces out a three-dimensional shape, like this squash. I turned…
, 1 min read
Real knowledge management
, 1 min read
Sean McGrath (the Propylon guy, not the New Brunswick fellow I worked with) has a nice quote about knowledge management: Blogs and WIKIs are real knowledge management at work. Add in a change-control repository with sane URLs (like CVS with ViewCVS or Subversion for the new generation). Then add a…
, 3 min read
Frogs and Ravens writes about an article published in the Chronicle on alternative careers for Ph.D. holders. She cites the following passages from the article: Is there a chance that the alternative-careers movement (which in many ways I laud and admire) has unwittingly sold humanities Ph.D.’s…
, 1 min read
On Grace Murray Hopper
, 1 min read
Suresh cites Hopper: If you want to get something done, do it first. Apologize (if apologies are necessary) later. Don’t let anyone tell you you can’t succeed, especially if you are a woman. Or, put in another way, be pig headed. That’s generally not bad advice, but you should not disregard…
, 1 min read
This article in the Chronicle takes on the debate as to whether women are genetically predisposed to do poorly in mathematics. I like this quote: The researchers found that, in general, mathematically gifted females had broader abilities than did mathematically talented males. If you ask me, this…
, 1 min read
Robert Paterson´s Weblog: Going Home – Our Reformation
, 1 min read
From Downes’, I got to Going Home, an incredible blog post, read this extract: I believe that Blogging, and its wider family of Social Software tools, will not only affect education but will shake our entire society to the core. I believe that our descendants will look back at its arrival the…
, 1 min read
Multi User Weblogging
, 1 min read
I learned about something called the BURROUGHS WELLCOME FUND (BWF) which offers funding for post-doctoral work. You must have a science or engineering Ph.D. and not have more than 2 years of post-doctoral experience. It seems to fund you for 5 years which seems cool. Details: here is a note about…
, 1 min read
From Downes’, I stumbled upon this guide to Multi User Weblogging. I’ve had good luck with Drupal so far, but like the review says, it is not easy to personalized. Also, again as the review says, WordPress MU is definitively not ready for prime time.
, 1 min read
SPIP: a powerful courseware platform?
, 1 min read
Some of my colleagues, including Michel Sénécal et Jean Robillard, have begun using SPIP to develop online courses. I didn’t know the first thing about SPIP and it seems to have a strong “non-anglocentric flavor” (it comes from France) which might explain why I didn’t know about it. It is…
, 2 min read
My wife and I were sick yesterday, and it just a lot of fun to watch a scary movie with my wife. She gets so scared and jumpy that she adds to the movie itself. So, I rented Alien. Not the silly modern-day Aliens with computer animation. No, the real thing. My wife had never seen Alien, not one of…
, 1 min read
Back to 1979: Alien
, 3 min read
My thinking has always been that if you sacrifice everything to your job, then you should not be surprised if you end up at 55 or 65, alone in a house with only a cat and nobody calling you. The first thing I did when I finished my Ph.D. thesis is to go hunt for a wife. I put everything else aside:…
, 1 min read
I’ve been suffering for the last two days from a terrible cold. My brain power is running at 20%. Not only can’t we cure the common cold, but we also cannot efficiently take away the most severe. Yet, we can presumably clone human beings relatively cheaply. It is really troubling. It goes to…
, 1 min read
Cygwin is a marvelous idea: run a Linux-like shell under Windows. It allows me to run Python, CVS, Perl… almost everything I use under Linux, under Windows. Well, it doesn’t quite work as well, but for small things, it does the job. One thing that has annoyed me is their implementation of vim.…