In Simplicity Peter [Tesugen.com] analyzes Edward de Bono's principles of simplicity in design, from the book Simplicity. Very good material, the kind of thing you want to read while gently sipping a cup of tea.
The more I think about it, the more it seems Tesugen is the weblog I'd take with me on a desert island if I were only allowed one.
Here's Jon, insightful as ever, exposing the ins and outs of project blogging.
Publishing a project weblog. A couple of years ago I predicted that Weblogs would emerge within the enterprise as a great way to manage project communication. I'm even more bullish on the concept today. If you're managing an IT project, you are by definition a communication hub. Running a project Weblog is a great way to collect, organize, and publish the documents and discussions that are the lifeblood of the project and to shape these raw materials into a coherent narrative. [Full story at InfoWorld.com] ... [Jon's Radio]
On the heels of my previous post "Are doctorates worthwhile?" comes Don't Become a Scientist!, another rather dispiriting view of why science today might not be the best spot for bright young people to settle into.
I became a scientist in order to have the freedom to work on problems which interest me. But you probably won't get that freedom. As a postdoc you will work on someone else's ideas, and may be treated as a technician rather than as an independent collaborator. Eventually, you will probably be squeezed out of science entirely. You can get a fine job as a computer programmer, but why not do this at 22, rather than putting up with a decade of misery in the scientific job market first? [...]
Suppose you do eventually obtain a permanent job, perhaps a tenured professorship. The struggle for a job is now replaced by a struggle for grant support, and again there is a glut of scientists. Now you spend your time writing proposals rather than doing research. Worse, because your proposals are judged by your competitors you cannot follow your curiosity, but must spend your effort and talents on anticipating and deflecting criticism rather than on solving the important scientific problems. They're not the same thing: you cannot put your past successes in a proposal, because they are finished work, and your new ideas, however original and clever, are still unproven. It is proverbial that original ideas are the kiss of death for a proposal; because they have not yet been proved to work (after all, that is what you are proposing to do) they can be, and will be, rated poorly. Having achieved the promised land, you find that it is not what you wanted after all.
What can be done? The first thing for any young person (which means anyone who does not have a permanent job in science) to do is to pursue another career.
Now I wouldn't want to appear one-sided on this issue; I think there might be good reasons to become a scientist as well. I'll try to find counterpoints out there and report on what I find.
titled Got Game? and written by Andy Phelps, who teaches at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Definitely worth keeping an eye on. Corante's lineup gets better every month! But, sadly, still shows no trace of RSS anywhere. [via Liz] What do you think? [] links to this post 10:19:31 AM
Sean McGrath: "It's time for the Semantic Web proponents to stop trying to teach us to think at their level of abstraction."
A thought-provoking piece that deals with a very real problem ("every layer of abstraction costs you 50% of your audience"), though I wish the author had spent more space developing his alternative vision of "semantic shadows".
More reactions in and around Don Park's blog. In particular, in these comments Danny Ayers stresses the need for more appropriate representations to make the RDF porridge more enticing to humans: "Everyone agrees that this syntax is ugly. But it is meant for machine- not human consumption. If you wanted to grok it, then you could generate a visual graph or use a domain-specific tool."
