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Thursday, September 26, 2002 |
Accept or Reject? What It's About at One University. Jacques Steinberg's book is an account of what he learned during eight months in the admissions office of Wesleyan University. By Patricia M. Mcdonough. [New York Times: Books]
This is a process that could benefit from K-Logs. Also, the hiring of new faculty. You could have a group of people each giving their opinion in a permanent, yet changing conversation. Nice.
7:29:06 PM 
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A friend heard a conversation between two grad students. She is a math professor in the biggest university in Caracas. The students were right in front of her office commenting on a Patilla.com sticker on her door. One of them asked: That's the company that belongs to the mathematician that has a Ferrari, right?, the other answered I think so. My friend understood that they were talking about me!. I don't own a Ferrari, nor Patilla.com belongs to me. She decided not to correct them. Never let the truth interfere with a good story. I guess, that's how legends start...
6:38:39 PM
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By the way, Google touted News Service doesn't contain the two Sci/Tech most important stories of the day in its Sci/Tech section. Despite it being generated 16 minutes ago. Doesn't mention the scientific fraud, prominently mentioned elsewhere, nor the geeky news that Apple new technology Rendezvous has been release as Open Source... The second news is important because the technology can only succeed if it becomes ubiquitous and it will make our life so much easier...
7:58:27 AM
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Flirting With Mac OS X [Slashdot]
Flirting with it? I've been in bed with it for two whole years!
Seriously, the Byte article is very good. Here are some quotes:
I
watched in jealous disgust as the guy next to me fired up a terminal window and ssh'ed to some server and ran a pine mail session. During the conference I saw maybe 20 or 25 people running Mac OS X. They outnumbered the few people usually coming to Linux conferences with FreeBSD, NetBSD, or OpenBSD on their notebooks. That's it, I decided. I am going to get a Mac OS X laptop, too. That was a few weeks ago.
If you have been using Linux for some time and just love its stability and performance, and find it a natural platform for development, you'll feel right at home on the Mac OS X. On the other hand, if you feel at times frustrated by the difficulty with which modern devices (like wireless, DVD, or FireWire devices) work on Linux, then you might find Mac OS X to be what you've been longing for. I for one, am convinced: I am switching my laptop to Mac OS X. And best of all, you don't have to be ashamed to go to a Linux guru meeting with Mac OS X, because it's just a UNIX with a very nice GUI.
But to hear the owners of /. say they are considering moving to Mac OS X really brought a grin to my face. Weren't this the big defenders of Free Software? or was it Open Source? well, it was something... I guess.
7:48:32 AM
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Panel Says Bell Labs Scientist Faked Discoveries. Results from 17 papers that had been promoted as major breakthroughs in physics were dismissed as fiction. By Kenneth Chang. [New York Times: Technology]
Read my brother's report on The Devil's Excrement. I've always felt that science peer review system was prone to abuse by fraudelent researcher. But I thought that at certain level the researchers were better and so was the review. This case proves me wrong. In science fooling one self is easy, so one has to be very aware of it. Fooling others on purpose is trivial and very harmful to the whole edifice of science. The only solution is to give equal emphasis to paper critique as to paper writing. I doubt that will happen.
7:40:27 AM
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© Copyleft 2005 Alfredo Octavio.
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