Free Thought
drorzel | February 10, 2010We had a meeting yesterday with the chair of the CS department, who wanted to know about our computing needs. Sadly, she just meant that she wanted to know what computing things we would like our students to be taught, because my real computing need, as I said to Kate last night, is "I need the entire computer industry to operate on a different paradigm than it does now, because the current system is making everyone miserable."
I was half joking, but not entirely. I genuinely am annoyed at the whole way the industry operates, because planned obsolescence means that I am constantly being…
revere | February 10, 2010I'm a scientist and my research is supported by NIH, i.e., by American taxpayers. More importantly, the science I do is for anyone to use. I claim no proprietary rights. That's what science is all about. We make our computer code publicly available, not just by request, but posted on the internet, and it is usable code: commented and documented. We ask the scientists in our program to do the same with the reagents they develop. Reagents are things like genetic probes or antibodies directed against specific targets mentioned in the articles they publish. There is an list of the reagents on the…
drorzel | February 9, 2010
BBC News - More cat owners 'have degrees' than dog-lovers
My favorite bit is the note that "Cat and dog numbers were last estimated in a scientific peer-reviewed journal in 1989," because, of course, peer review is critical to the process...
(tags: pets dog society education social-science)
Bright Idea: The First Lasers -- A history of discoveries leading to the 1960 invention.
An excellent step-by-step history of the development of the laser, including interviews with laser pioneers.
(tags: lasers science history physics optics atoms molecules)
The highs and lows of this year's Super…
pontiff | February 1, 2010Shameless self-promotion: an article I wrote with Wim van Dam, "Recent Progress on Quantum Algorithms" has appeared in the Communications of the ACM. Indeed if you have a copy of the magazine you can check out an artists rendition of a quantum computer/quantum algorithm on the cover. Clearly quantum computing is the new string theory: so abstract that it must be represented by beautiful, yet incomprehensible, figures. Not sure if that's a good or bad thing. (The article was actually written quite a bit back, so "recent" is a bit off. If we had to write it today I'm guessing we would…
mikethemadbiologist | February 1, 2010I keep reading stories about how the iPad will revolutionize everything--or not (here's one example). There are also lots of complaints about how the iPad is betwixt and between an iPhone (or similar device) and a laptop. But these posts are missing the point: the iPad is an attempt to sell computers to the approximately forty percent of households that don't own one. Not only is this an opportunity to sell something to a consumer sector that otherwise wouldn't buy any computers, but it also might ultimately, by serving as an introduction to the web, email, and basic computer operation,…
gregladen | January 31, 2010I told you so, but most of you would not listen. Amazon has tossed an entire publishing company off its site (hat tip: H.G.) because that company would not comply with Amazon's universally imposed Kindle edition pricing strategy. That places Amazon at the decision making table where the publishers and the market (the buyers of books) usually sits, and not just as a stakeholder but as the holder of everyone else's nuts. (And when I say nuts, I'm talking chestnuts, so don't get any ideas.) Amazon is not a book store. It is a public utility that delivers a wide range of products (including…
jdupuis | January 29, 2010I couldn't agree more with Bonnie Swoger's sentiment that academic librarians need to stop going to library conferences, although I perhaps might not go that far.
In any case, the last couple of weeks have been pretty fallow blogging weeks for me and I just can't seem to come up with any original commentary on the topic. Fortunately, I have an post from way back in June 2008 expressing many of the same sentiments, though probably neither as well nor as succinctly as Bonnie has.
I'll also not that the post was excerpted in The Library Leadership Network.
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I saw…
pontiff | January 29, 2010The University of Waterloo is adding a quantum information graduate program, one step closer to being able to get a Ph.D. purely in quantum information. Application details here. Description of the program below the fold.
About the Program
The University of Waterloo, in collaboration with the Institute for Quantum Computing, offers graduate students unique opportunities to learn about and engage in world-leading research in quantum information through a wide range of advanced research projects and advanced courses on the foundations, applications and implementations of quantum information…
drorzel | January 29, 2010
Physics Games - online physics-based games
Just in case you were planning to get something done today.
(tags: games physics science education internet computing)
J.D. Salinger Dead « Whatever
"Somewhere Holden Caulfield is pretending he doesn't care."
(tags: books literature news blogs)
Best Science Books 2009: The top books of the year! : Confessions of a Science Librarian
"For the last little while I've been compiling lists from various media sources giving their choices for the best books of 2009. Some of the lists have been from general media sources, in which case I've just…
ddobbs | January 26, 2010
Above: Kasparov after his first meeting with Deep Blue, in 1997, when he crushed DP. Later it wouldn't go so well.
In a splendid article in the NY Review of books, former world chess champion Gary Kasparov ponders the limitations of technology as a means of playing chess truly well. When I hit this paragraph late in the article, it struck me that you could write much the same thing about pharma. From The Chess Master and the Computer - The New York Review of Books:
Like so much else in our technology-rich and innovation-poor modern world, chess computing has fallen prey to incrementalism…
agelman | January 26, 2010You've all heard about how you can predict all sorts of things, from movie grosses to flu trends, using search results. I earlier blogged about the research of Yahoo's Sharad Goel, Jake Hofman, Sebastien Lahaie, David Pennock, and Duncan Watts in this area. Since then, they've written a research article.
Here's a picture:
And here's their story:
We [Goel et al.] investigate the degree to which search behavior predicts the commercial success of cultural products, namely movies, video games, and songs. In contrast with previous work that has focused on realtime reporting of current trends,…
gregladen | January 25, 2010Robert Gentleman and Donald Nickelson have joined the board of REvolution Computing. Gentleman is co-creator of this OpenSource statistical package which is widely used by researchers. The news was released moments ago, and here is a press release from the company:
REvolution Computing, the leading commercial provider of software and support for the open source "R" statistical computing language, announced the appointment of R co-creator Robert Gentleman and investment-banking veteran Donald Nickelson to its board of directors. Gentleman and Nickelson join directors Norman Nie and Basil…
drorzel | January 23, 2010
Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Blog posts / Neglected Books: the list
"So, I asked for recommendations for neglected books and authors and had an overwhelming response. I'm going to make the results into a useful reading list, in alphabetical order, with links, and usefully divided. The world is a very big place with a lot of stuff in it, and a lot of books are published and pretty much vanish. They say word-of-mouth is the best way to find books, and these are all books with someone to advocate for them. "
(tags: books sf literature blogs tor)
slacktivist: Bullies
"This is what…
razib | January 20, 2010If Your Password Is 123456, Just Make It HackMe:
Back at the dawn of the Web, the most popular account password was "12345."
Today, it's one digit longer but hardly safer: "123456."
Despite all the reports of Internet security breaches over the years, including the recent attacks on Google's e-mail service, many people have reacted to the break-ins with a shrug.
According to a new analysis, one out of five Web users still decides to leave the digital equivalent of a key under the doormat: they choose a simple, easily guessed password like "abc123," "iloveyou" or even "password" to protect…
drorzel | January 19, 2010
Cocktail Party Physics: a bevy of bloggers (#scio10)
"I especially liked Carl's (I think it was Carl) description of this emergent media enterprise as a delicately balanced ecosystem, each segment interdependent on the others for survival. Several weeks ago, Bora! posted one of his occasional rants relishing the collapse of traditional media, in which he baldly stated that he really didn't care if the cost of the revolution was journalists losing their jobs. (I can't find the link, sorry. He's just so damned prolific.) I adore Bora!, but he's wrong about this. He should care that…
cpikas | January 16, 2010John Hogenesch, Assistant Professor of Pharmacology - Penn School of Med
gene-at-a-time is giving way to genome wide - larger datasets, collaborative research
last year more added to genebank than all previous years combined (wow!) - exceeds Moore's law.
Academia responds by buying storage and clusters - but you need great IT staff - and it's really hard to get and keep them (they go to industry), heating & cooling, depreciation, usage/provisioning (under/over utilized). Larger inter-institutional grids - access is tightly regulated, they are very complex to program in/for
Cloud computing…
dgmacarthur | January 15, 2010Continuing my new tradition, here are some of the genomics-related links and information I posted on Twitter this week:
RT @decodegenetics: The opportunity to migrate to deCODEme ends on February 1st 2010. http://bit.ly/86Xtsh
Gah, it burns! RT @jcbarret: Science publishes behavioral genetic association, N=72 humans and 68 mice http://bit.ly/68rC7E
The Motley Fool discusses flow-on benefits to personal genomics companies as sequencing costs drop: http://bit.ly/5BtgjR
RT @Duncande: Complete Genomics announced 1 hour ago the $1500 genome, 1 day after Illumina announced $10,000 genome, at the…
drorzel | January 12, 2010
Official Google Blog: A new approach to China
"These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered--combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web--have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to…
sb admin | January 12, 2010
Of course, this conference would not be itself if it was not full of Open Access evangelists and a lot of sessions about the world of publishing, the data, repositories, building a semantic web, networking and other things that scientists can now do in the age of WWW. This year, apart from journalists/writers, the largest cohort appear to be librarians and information scientists. So it is not surprising to see a number of sessions (and several demos) on these topics, for example:
Repositories for Fun and Profit - Dorothea Salo
Description: Why are my librarians bothering me with all this…
clock | January 12, 2010
Of course, this conference would not be itself if it was not full of Open Access evangelists and a lot of sessions about the world of publishing, the data, repositories, building a semantic web, networking and other things that scientists can now do in the age of WWW. This year, apart from journalists/writers, the largest cohort appear to be librarians and information scientists. So it is not surprising to see a number of sessions (and several demos) on these topics, for example:
Repositories for Fun and Profit - Dorothea Salo
Description: Why are my librarians bothering me with all this…