links for 2009-06-27

"One unusual but very useful style was to set a goal like reading 15 papers in 3 hours. I use the term "reading" here in an unusual way. Of course, I don't mean understanding everything in the papers. Instead, I'd do something like this: for each paper, I had 12 minutes to read it. The goal was to produce a 3-point written LaTeX summary of the most important material I could extract: usually questions, open problems, results, new techniques, or connections I hadn't seen previously. When time was up, it was onto the next paper. A week later, I'd make a revision pass over the material, typically it would take an hour or so.

I found this a great way of rapidly getting an overview of a field, understanding what was important, what was not, what the interesting questions were, and so on. In particular, it really helped identify the most important papers, for a deeper read."

"A proper quote from me would probably have been something like: âThe search string âMichael Jacksonâ is getting intense interest on Twitter at the moment, showing up in between 13-20% of tweets. Itâs unlikely this level of intensity will continue through the night, but at the moment, it exceeds the intensity Iâve seen on Twitter during slower-breaking stories like #swineflu, #pman and #IranElection.â That, unfortunately, is 337 characters - far too long for anyone to read anymore. And a clarification in the form of a blogpost? Thatâs so 2006."m