A Scientific American feature article suggests that "an exciting new fundamental discipline of research combines information science and quantum mechanics... Quantum information science is new enough that researchers are still coming to grips with its very nature, and they disagree about which questions lie at its heart. This article presents my personal view that the central goal of quantum information science is to develop general principles, like the laws of entanglement, that will enable us to understand complexity in quantum systems..." [missingmatter: the other 95% of the universe.]
HOWTO Encourage Women in Linux. A recent addition to the Linux Documentation Project's HOWTO collection sets out to tackle a seldom-acknowledged problem in the Linux community: women who use or are interested in Linux are often discouraged from getting involved in the community and/or learning more, by the attitudes they encounter. More generally, the same problem also applies in computing generally, the author argues. [kuro5hin.org]
In today's Chronicle of Higher Education Scott Carlson reports on a PR campaign by scholarly publishers designed "in part, to quash a newfound enthusiasm among some librarians for self-publishing research results online, a practice that lets scholars bypass slow, costly academic journals."
According to Marc Brodsky, CEO of the American Institute of Physics, the campaign will focus on the advantages of publishing in traditional priced journals: "money for marketing, the prestige of a well-known journal, the expertise and mediation of an editor, and the management of peer review." (PS: As if open-access journals are not peer-reviewed, lack editors, need marketing, or cannot be prestigious. Is this the best argument priced journals have? Stay tuned for details on the campaign itself and other signs that the FOS movement is succeeding.) [FOS News]
Many scientists are still unaware that they would benefit from distributing their papers for free and of how easy it has become. Since the main problem in moving towards Free Online Scholarship is raising scientists' awareness of that possibility, the commercial publishers are in all likeliness helping speed up the transition with campaigns such as this. Way to go!
All available research indicates that the ability of a manger to predict how a future employee will perform, based upon a one hour interview, is very low. [read more] [Tony Bowden: Understanding Nothing]
My good friend Philippe Beaudoin has finally succumbed to a growing urge to start a weblog, which I like to think was partially encouraged by my own initiative. Unsurprisingly, I find his blog extremely interesting. Here's the link:
There's a deep connection between some of what Philippe does and my own work. We share a concern with finding ways of exchanging ideas across cultures so that they enrich one another, instead of being oblivious to one another.
Philippe has already written a revealing about page, telling who he is and why he's doing this. Some of his initial posts include:
There were over 20 new titles on the book shelf about information architecture, usability, interface design, web usability, flash usability, and accessibliity. Somebody tell me am I supposed to buy a copy of every one of these books so that I can effectively recommend them to my clients and students?
The Wired article summarizes the main contribution of each book. The general theme is that the role of the connections between objects in emerging networks can account for everything. Remember back to dynamic systems, differential equations and probability, no, well these are the basis along with biology for a new generation of patterns and ideas. [David Crow]
