Speaking of Twitter stuff… I found an interesting ‘conversation’ [1] between Tim OReilly and Mark Littlewood on a BBC article summarizing a report on how inattentive parents are causing more difficulties for present day children.

While it would be nice to believe that parenting can become the mark of a civilized society, it would be interesting to see some more specifics. From what I see at the ground level it is not that easy to achieve. As a parent you only have a limited control of the overall environment a child grows up in. Some of the suggestions by the report are good though. Having more ‘family-oriented’ spaces is a good thing. I am not sure about other countries but in the U.S. and Japan it can be non-trivial to find family-oriented spaces in urban environments. Finding ways to make these available and more accessible to busy parents is overall a good thing.

Some things I could think of off the top of my head that might be nice:

• More restaurants that are suited to family where parents don’t have to be embarrassed if their children decide to cause a scene
• Try to be more understanding of the parent with the kid that is causing a scene at the you name it area (grocery store, department store, etc). In general kids, cry for a reason (not always the greatest ones). While jamming a pacifier works as a stopgap. Better solutions revolve around trying to understand the root cause. This of course takes time.

Footnotes

[1] I guess these are conversations in Twitter parlance but it seems more like drive-by thought blurb and commenting to me. Either way some of them can be interesting depending on who is talking

References

Read the BBC article

The CNet article jabs at O’Reilly Media itself helped to spawn some of these SuperPoke applications with all of these tech conferences that they have held but overall O’Reilly’s main message in the keynote resonates with me:

And you have to conclude, if you look at the focus of a lot of what you call ‘Web 2.0,’ the relentless focus on advertising-based consumer models, lightweight applications, we may be living in somewhat of a bubble, and I’m not talking about an investment bubble. (It’s) a reality bubble

• Read more at CNET (Courtesy of Hacker News)

The death of a man found Thursday in a stairwell in a Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute building has been ruled a suicide.

Read it yourself

Professor Felton describes a survey of university presidents of the top 10 books that they would make students read. Interesting set of titles however then Dr. Felton asks his fellow readers:

Readers: tell me in the comments which five science and technology books you would have every student read. I’ll summarize and give my own list once your lists are in.

I’m still thinking of my 5. Amusingly I’m not sure I can think of 5 since so much
of my science and technology knowledge had to be amassed from probably hundreds to thousands of sources

Cast your votes in!

Seems Slashdot linked to a story about Computer Schools going out of business. It seems focused on most of the unlicensed schools. I feel bad for the students who went there but there is a reason to go to an accredited school over a non credited school.

Of course the most important aspect to a student is the quality of the instructor. I’ve seen my share of good and bad ones and once in awhile great teachers. However, there are so many variables to consider that it can be bewildering when you start trying to break down it. And these days you can be so bogged down in other things that making decisions like this can be harder. But my suggestion is, try to put as much effort and time into researching your decision of a school if you can. Obviously, you can’t always do so but going completely blindly is even worse.

Link to Story

Gee, that’s a way to put yourself through college. Teach the computer NON-savvy Professors how to use a computer.

Except for one thing… does this cause strife when the student gets graded by that teacher later on?

Paul Dame possessed the knowledge and Willard Morgan the willingness to learn it. It was a classic teacher-student relationship — except for one thing: Dame is an undergraduate at the University of Vermont, and Morgan a lecturer.

Link to Story

Hmm that’s interesting. Forensic Science in High Schools. Definitely interesting.
One thing to note even thought it is getting more popular it seems that the field
itself is not a growth field so people aren’t just going to get in because lots of more
applicants are availalbe. It will just magnify the competition for the available spots.

Link to Story

Looks like my Alma Mater ended up in the press again (the bad side). This link was forwarded to me by a friend of mine.

Obligatory Excerpt:

Postdocs are neither students nor faculty, so their roles, rights and responsibilities in a university are often undefined, governed more by convention than policy. This often leaves postdocs at the whim of domineering advisors, but also can find advisors facing distrustful and frustrated postdocs.

Here’s another passage that was fascinating

Across the country, the difficult working conditions of postdocs have been getting some attention lately. As the number of people getting doctorate degrees outpaces the number of tenure-track faculty positions, the number of postdocs has been rising, and people are spending much longer in these types of positions.

…

The number of postdocs coming from other countries has increased dramatically over the past 15 years. According to a National Science Foundation study, the number of foreign postdocs in science and engineering rose by 8,000 from 1988 to 2000, while the number of U.S.-citizen or permanent-resident postdocs rose by only about 1,500

I don’t have anymore info besides what the article says so it’s hard to know about the specific case mentioned. However, those numbers in the second passage quoted lead to many other questions. Who are rising into the postdoc ranks mainly? Does anyone have an idea of the ratio of native citizens versus influx of non? Also, what happens with many of the foreign postdocs? Are there numbers that show the rate that they decide to settle and stay in the U.S.?
If anyone has an idea about those numbers that’d be great to know.

Link to Story

I saw a thread on ArsTechnica’s bulletin board about What are You
Learning Now.  I thought it was a neat thread and a nice break
from all of the language wars, how do I…, choose a devel. 
environment for me, etc threads that show up on their Programmer
Section.

Here’s the link:
 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2003/12/18/being-rich-and-how-you-show-it/

The New York Times has a story about the interesting paradoxes of the wealthy and how they try to show their public figure to people. It brings up some interesting topics such as:

If you’re rich and everyone pretty much knows you’re rich. Why keep going about trying to show you grew up poor to appeal to the ‘everyman’?

My main thought on being rich is the Spiderman Mantra. “With great power comes great responsibility.” Perhaps that’s a trite way of looking at it but if you have the power and the resources to affect change to many people for what you hope is for the better, wouldn’t you try?

Link to Story

Continuing my random observations of RPI grads doing other things after graduation. The new CEO (Edward Zander) of Motorola graduated from RPI.

I’m not sure of the state of Motorola but they’ve not been doing well. So Mr Zander comes into an organization needing lots of reworking. All I can say is…

If you mess up you’ll only make the Alma Mater look lamer so I hope you don’t.

Link to Story

Now this is a really good idea. How about giving libraries CDs full of free software for them to loan out? This article goes into more and also some of the difficulties involved.

Obligatory excerpt:

The first reaction from the open source community is usually “Great, I’ll burn a whole set of CDs and donate them to my local library.” This is completely and utterly the wrong thing to do. It is wrong because you will not be taking into account the responsibilities libraries have for their patrons

…

How did I do it, then? I asked librarians, “Why can’t you accept them?” Then I listened to what they said.

Their first reason is, “They can’t trust the public.” I was insulted at first, but when someone at my local Linux User Group came up to me and said, “Wouldn’t it be funny if I made a CD with a virus on it and donated it to the library?” I realized the libraries were absolutely correct. This idiot in my local group proved the case for them.

Very interesting idea but lots of things to keep in mind. The most important is listening to what the libraries need and want not to what you think is cool. Good luck to all of you out there who try it.

Link to Story

I love how there is this impression that going to an Ivy League school is an automatic guarantee for getting a good job, good life, etc etc. While I won’t dump on that Ivy League schools tend to give an undergrad a very good education that’s not a free ticket to doing well. Now if you qualified going to an Ivy League school AND come from a family that has money then I’ll admit that tends to weigh the scales you’ll do ‘well’ in life.

Here is a story on what one Princeton grad is doing now. I really like her writing style. If you get the chance definitely get a look see. Sorry no quotes since I’m not sure what her standpoing is on excerpts.

Link to Story

The Harvard Business School requires that its students use an IBM ThinkPad if they wish to be enrolled at the business school. That’s REQUIREMENT not RECOMMENDATION. Seems one of the business school students decided a little differently and setup a weblog documenting his experiences walking in a Windoze universe with a Mac. So far it seems he’s been doing well and continuously questions the need for a Windoze laptop rather than a very strong recommendation. I wish you luck in turning the tide, sir!

Link to Weblog

Now this idea is really cool. Books being developed Wiki Style. We’ll see how far this one goes. Another useful resource is
WikiPedia which is an Open Content style effort to create an encyclopedia via a Wiki. Now that’s really sharing information.

The title is Do Yourself a Favor and Stop Learning but it rings true about a topic I’d like to relabel as ‘Learn the Right Things’.

I still spend quite a bit of time learning ‘garbage knowledge’. I classify that as knowledge that won’t have a useful impact on my immediate career nor is it solving any of humanity’s problems (although it tends to satisfy my thirst for knowledge). However, one thing I’ve been working on is trying to focus what I spend my very finite amount of time to learn things that are relevant to activities I need to get done (ex. learn enough JavaScript to be able to debug why some web page busted) and also try to keep some time for activities that can span over a longer period of time but have some decent payback. (Really sit down and understand the intrinsics of Network Security and break some stuff on the way to see why X, Y, Z is important)

Needless to say, it’s a hard process and I think it is part of the territory for a knowledge worker. There’s far more knowledge than you can ever absorb in one human lifetime. The best you can do is figure out how to use what is out there that is best for your situation. And pray that something you picked up pans out sometime in the future.

It’s the beginning of the school year again. I caught a pic in Harvard Yard of some students moving in and about to begin (or continue) their journey onwards towards higher education and finding their way in this world.

The Press Herald has a story on New Hampshire following Maine’s lead on a laptop program for school. Interesting perhaps but also sad in some ways that they need to give away basically expensive toys to get students interested in education. I agree that the public school systems in the U.S. need work. Yes, I do agree that technology can help.

I’m warily skeptical of the laptop program being a gigantic resounding success. I think it does bring many good things to the table. I’m just wary of many of the bad things it brings to the table.

]]> http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2003/09/09/new-hampster-following-maines-laptop-lead/feed/ 0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2003/09/01/just-because-i-have-a-piece-of-paper/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2003/09/01/just-because-i-have-a-piece-of-paper/#comments Tue, 02 Sep 2003 03:54:05 +0000 hoanga http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2003/09/01/just-because-i-have-a-piece-of-paper/

Here I am banging my head on trying to get my own piece of paper (not the one with the magic 3 letters though) and I come across something like this:

Maybe I should just give up … naaaa