Posts from — August 2003

Campus Cutbacks Hit the Classroom. Many public universities have reluctantly begun chopping away at academics, making it harder for students to graduate on time. By Greg Winter. [New York Times: Education]

i will say that i think that there may be much more politics involved in some of these occurances than perhaps should be.

nonetheless my position is: raise taxes and guarantee the success of the future by investing in education. the booms of the 80's-90's are probably much more an effect of the huge investment in education int the 60's-70's than anything else. of course, comparative funding levels now point toward a much less optimistic future, but you see this is a choice voters can make, they can tell their state governments to pay for education.

Former Dot-Commers Are Adjusting, Painfully. Chapter 2 of the Great Dot-Com Bust has begun, the part in which former employees of start-ups try to re-acclimate to the corporate world. By Claudia H. Deutsch. [New York Times: Technology]

this article has several levels to consider, but most dishearteningly the core seems to be “don't encourage a culture of taking big chances”.

–+–
i like quizzes that seem to have good characters….

College Rankings!. College Rankings! Seems like everyone's talking about 'em. There's the good ole controversial US News & World Report rankings, but thanks to the the librarians at UIUC, this wonderful site has links to many, many, many different rankings, including ones that let you make your own rankings. There's also rankings of some of the more important non-academic features of colleges, too.

Does college rank really matter? [MetaFilter]

all rankings except the ones you personally construct and refuse to distribute are junk, once you make it for an audience other than yourself, and accept evidence and opinion from others without a proper critical eye based on your own personal perspective and desires, the enumeration of the value becomes worthless and uninterpretatable.

Study: Open source produces best results. I found the following link/article buried in my e-mail. It is a bit old, nevertheless the argument still stands. Study: Open source produces best results “A consulting group that scrutinizes the source code underlying several operating systems has found that a key networking component of Linux is of higher quality in several ways than that of competing closed-source software.”… [infosophy: socio-technological rendering of information]

Interesting study, i might be able to put it to some use….

Globalisation and Falling Inequality.

The Economist discusses a lecture by Stanley Fischer (ex-MIT,IMF and now with Citigroup) and summarises that “if you consider people, not countries, global inequality is falling rapidly.” One of the reasons: “Two of the poorest countries in the world÷China and India÷have both (a) enormous populations and (b) rapid growth in incomes per head in the years in question.”

[E M E R G I C . o r g]

but maybe we should account for inflation and money transfer and illicit economies to see where that equality arises.

Nachi, the 'benevolent' worm has so far been responsible for shutting down a railroad and a hospital among other institutions. Please tell me no one is running a nuclear power plant on Windows… What? They are? [www.gulker.com - words and pictures from Silicon Valley]

yes, well, a few nuclear plants, an aircraft carrier or two; in a risk society occasional calamitous disasters are often traded amongst rich and poor, for various other values and uses. Windows is easy and common, who cares if we have a meltdown…. or don't.

August 22, 2003.

Raymond Chen has been running a series of interesting articles about the history of Windows and its API. Ever wonder why the time zone map no longer highlights the zone you're in? Or what the BEAR35, BUNNY73, and PIGLET12 functions are named after? Or why you turn off your computer by clicking “start”? I've bookmarked his site.

In particular, “The secret life of GetWindowText” should be required reading for anyone trying to understand API lockin. Describing one aspect of this simple and fundamental part of the Windows API takes a couple of pages. And then notice the kicker:

The documentation simplifies this as “GetWindowText() cannot retrieve text from a window from another application.”

As Raymond says, “the documentation tries to explain its complexity with small words, which is great if you don't understand long words, but it also means that you're not getting the full story.” (Actually, Raymond, the documentation does tell the whole story, look closer.)

[Joel on Software]

Mr. Chen's articles are well written and informative. I'm not sure why people would actually want to use windows, but if you are going to do that, then you should at least ally your thoughts with bright people like this.

Random Proposals for Communications Courses. Theory.org.uk has an interesting course description generator. Keep clicking “Next” for more. This might come in handy now that it's syllabus time! [CultureCat: Rhetoric and Feminism -]

this is funny, but somehow seemingly almost and surely on occasion true, take any set of things jam them together and voila.

On 13.-15. Octobre 2004 the project C2 Between Online-Religion and
Religion-Online: constellations of the transfer of rituals in the medium
internet of the collaborative research centre Dynamics of Rituals at the
University of Heidelberg (http://www.ritualdynamik.uni-hd.de/) arranges the
international research meeting Online-Religions and Rituals-Online?

The research meeting will deal with the topic of religion on the internet
with special regards on the ritual discourse on the internet from the
electronic publication of traditional ritual scripts to presentations of
innovative design of rituals. Several aspects of the dynamic change of
rituals by the use of the internet will be discussed.

The research meeting is dedicated to the exchange and discussion of
methodological questions of the analysis of religious websites. Hence,
methodological contributions as well as reports from current research,
which deal with the topic of religion on the internet, are highly appreciated.

The conference will take place at the university of Heidelberg (Germany).
The conference language is English. We do not plan to take a conference fee.

Propositions for contributions are requested to be send to Oliver Krueger
(oliver.krueger@urz.uni-heidelberg.de) till 12. Octobre 2003.