Links for 2008-02-23
February 23rd, 2008-
(Inside Higher Ed) – people are asking some good questions about whether to pursue certain collaborations
Links for 2008-02-22
February 22nd, 2008Links for 2008-02-20
February 20th, 2008-
(NYTimes)
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(Nouvel Obs) hymen restoration surgery among French Muslim women
Languages
February 17th, 2008The following in the comments thread of Kieran’s recent post over on Crooked Timber reminds me of an issue I’ve wondered about in the past. The comment exchange:
Do people think it’s worth learning R if you already use STATA*?
Probably in the general sense that it’s worth learning new languages or applications so as not to get too rusty.
I’m not sure whether Kieran meant to refer to computer languages here only or foreign languages as well. I remember reading generals requirements in some graduate program (perhaps my own, I don’t recall) that equated speaking a foreign language with being proficient in a programming language. I’d always found that to be curious. While I believe both are helpful and important skills to have, they seem to be sufficiently different not to equate. Foreign languages (and time spent in other countries) allow us to get to know cultures, histories, peoples in a way that is very difficult to do through translation. Knowing a programming language lends itself to other potential benefits.** The two hardly seem interchangeable. I’m just curious to know what other people think about this.
[*] It’s actually Stata not STATA, I’m not sure why so many people spell it with all caps. Same goes for the Pew Internet & American Life Project. It’s Pew, not PEW.
[**] Yes, yes, I can think of ways in which knowing a programming language might also help one get to expand one’s horizons on those other dimensions as well and feel free to offer entertaining scenarios, but my overall question still stands.:)
Links for 2008-02-12
February 12th, 2008-
How to make money in an age when so many things can be copied for free?
Tom Lantos dies at 80
February 11th, 2008California representative Tom Lantos died earlier today. I’ll take this opportunity to mention the Oscar-winning film The Last Days (I’ve blogged about it before here). It’s a very powerful documentary in which Lantos is one of the five people featured. My one critique of The Last Days movie was that it ignored the plight of people like my grandmother (who died twenty years ago last week, at almost 80) and father who went back to Hungary after their time in a camp instead of emigrating. That doesn’t detract from the value of The Last Days. But I think it’s important to recognize that there is a sufficiently different outcome from very similar circumstances depending on where one went after those horrors. In any case, I learned about many things from watching that film, including details about Tom Lantos that may be lesser known. I thought this was a good occasion to mention the documentary again.
Grab the nearest book
February 11th, 2008As far as I know, no one has tagged me with this blog meme, but I’m still going to participate as it looks fun.
Instructions:
1. Grab the nearest book (that is at least 123 pages long).
2. Open to p. 123.
3. Go down to the 5th sentence.
4. Type in the following 3 sentences.
5. Tag five people.
Nearest book as I sit at my coffee table at home: The Chocolate Connoisseur by Chloé Doutre-Roussel. Page 123 is in the middle of Chapter 6 on The Cream of the Crop under the Reading the Ingredients List subheading. Here we go:
There are several grades of chocolate, and these figures show the European Union and US regulations for standard (S) as well as fine (F) chocolate.
* Dark chocolate (S) must contain at least 35% dry cocoa solids (but 15% for “sweet chocolate” in the US), while dark chocolate (F) must contain at least 43%.
* Milk chocolate (S) must contain at least 25% dry cocoa solids (but 20% in the UK, and 10% in the US), while fine milk chocolate must contain at least 30%.
The fun continues in the 4th sentence so allow me to add that: “Bars such as Cadbury Dairy Milk, Galaxy or Hershey must be labelled ‘family milk chocolate’ in the EU, as they don’t contain enough chocolate to count as chocolate under these rules!”
So yes, it’s worth noting that chocolate is not immune to policy considerations. It may sound silly, but it’s obviously a huge industry and what gets to be labelled chocolate does have regulations attached to it, ones that vary from one country to the next. There are also lobbying efforst involved. I don’t follow this area closely, but when a related news story pops up, I do find it intriguing to check out.
Since I wasn’t tagged for this meme, I guess I don’t have to tag anyone else either although I invite people to grab the nearest book and post the specified three sentences here or on their own blogs.
Links for 2008-02-11
February 11th, 2008Links for 2008-02-10
February 10th, 2008-
image resizer tools (some are free, some are not)
Links for 2008-02-08
February 8th, 2008Links for 2008-02-07
February 7th, 2008-
fun game, not easy, but not impossible
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(NYTimes)
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great little video about why one might want to use online photo-sharing sites
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pdf repository
A day in the life…
February 5th, 2008Whoa, I guess I won’t be reading any blogs (or emails for that matter) today.
Here is my schedule:
8:30am – Breakfast with job candidate
10am-noon – 4 one-on-one meetings with students one after the other
noon-1pm – Attending job candidate’s talk
1:30-7pm – 11 one-on-one meetings with students (straight through, obviously)
7pm-? – Dinner with colleagues and job candidate
So yeah, this many meetings is not usual, but I thought the students from my undergraduate writing seminar would benefit from some one-on-one discussions of their research statements.
Just another 12+ hour day. Wish me luck.
Links for 2008-02-05
February 5th, 2008-
(Salon) interesting take on the Salesgenie Super Bowl ads
How to print a large map from Google Maps
February 4th, 2008Neat idea, very helpful video.
Google Maps Hack: How To Save Large Maps – Click here for this week’s top video clips
Thanks to Blog on the Side for the pointer.
Links for 2008-02-04
February 4th, 2008-
(NYTimes)
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another Obama video
Going viral
February 3rd, 2008This video was posted on YouTube just yesterday and has already been watched over 150,000 times.* There’s also a site for a ringtone.
It’s impossible to know at this point how such viral campaigns might influence outcomes, but it’s certainly interesting to watch how people are taking advantage of new tools to disseminate material of this sort. It would be a stretch to suggest anyone can do this easily since this video is filled with celebrities, which likely helped it get coverage on ABC yesterday [source]. Nonetheless, having it available online certainly helps in spreading it widely. I’d be curious to know how most people linking to it found it, but many don’t seem to be pointing to sources, which makes this difficult to decipher.
[*] Note that YouTube’s numbers are confusing as depending on when I click on the link I either get around 153,000 or 84,000 views.
[thanks to Discourse.net]
Photos as notes
February 3rd, 2008While I realize not everyone is as obsessed with photography as I am, many phones now have cameras and I wonder if people remember to use them for the logistics of everyday life. So this post is just a reminder that all those things you often forget (I certainly forget all sorts of details that would be helpful to remember later) can be captured easily with your pocket-sized camera.
A recurring theme when I go shopping is trying to remember the name of that wonderful cheese I purchased earlier. Good cheese can be expensive so it’s a pity to buy the type that doesn’t work out. Last week after buying some cheese that turned out to be very tasty, I decided to take a picture of its label. Yesterday when I returned to the store I started looking for it. I couldn’t find it, but then I showed the image to the person behind the counter and immediately she had an answer. Although they were out of that particular item, she pointed me to another one that, upon sampling it, reminded me sufficiently of the earlier one that I was happy to find it. The woman mentioned that she wished more people would think to take photos as it’s usually difficult to guess what they want from their descriptions.
This method can work with all sorts of details that are easy to forget: book titles and authors, wines, where you parked your car, what you ordered off of a restaurant menu, bus & train schedules, maps (yup, I’ll just take a quick snapshot of a map instead of printing it out), and lots more. For some of these (like maps) a higher resolution photo where you can zoom in is helpful, but for others a simple camera phone should work just as well.
Links for 2008-02-03
February 3rd, 2008-
people do print email and some probably do it in situations where it’s not necessary, but I agree with the general sentiments expressed in this post
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(NYTimes) the science behind online matchmaking
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(CNN)
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Russian Facebook?
Links for 2008-02-02
February 2nd, 2008-
(Canadian Press) concerns behavior on Facebook, not much detail in article, but interesting to note
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finally something that people in NYC notice (although those may have been out-of-towners)
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(blog post) – use of text messages in Kenya with negative intentions
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(NYTimes) – creating a sculptural home in Arizona over decades (Michael Kahn featured in the article was a cousin of a friend of mine)
Links for 2008-02-01
February 1st, 2008-
(Time) nice little article on Dopplr, a service everyone should be using