A friend of mine went to Korea this last summertime, and took an amazing bunch of pictures. It struck me as I was browsing them: these are not just vacation photos to be filed away, they are of high enough quality to appear in most any mainstream publication. I look forward to the day when […]
Monthly Archives: November 2006
Grassroots Journalism
14-Nov-06Spam as Turing Test
08-Nov-06I received an impressive spam a while ago. It was a comment to my SQLObject post a while back, telling me “Have you tried Ruby language? It has quite good database object system.” Not a bad comment, taken by itself. But the poster’s submitted website was clearly some search engine optimization type spam site. I’m […]
Thoughts on Publishing in Academia
08-Nov-06To paraphrase/quote David Klein: publications would be so much better if we were forward-thinking instead of rigorous in our testing. It seems like people judge a paper’s value by “in 10 years, will someone find a hole in the rigor of my testing procedure”. I would rather judge a paper by “does this make me […]
Advice on Writing One’s Dissertation
02-Nov-06All dissertations require four months of uninterrupted work. The last month of work takes 0.5 calendar months. The second to last month takes 1.5 calendar months. The first two months can take years, and they usually do. Prof. Daneil Bewrry, U. Waterloo Sigh… if only this were less true.