Blogs Rule on Lawrence.com (Go Jayhawks!).

Blogs Are No. 1! Blogs Are No. 1!

“The most-read content at Lawrence.com? Believe it or not, it's currently the city site's weblogs, according to general manager Rob Curley. Curley & Co. have crafted Lawrence.com into an edgy site with wide appeal to a younger audience (Lawrence is home to the University of Kansas), and the site's blogs are promoted heavily and displayed prominently on the home page. See, weblogs do hold some serious potential for media companies.  (Lawrence.com is one of several sites produced by Curley's Web team. LJWorld.com is the main news site.)” [ E-Media Tidbits, via  MediaSavvy]

Lawrence.com is a great a way to keep up with the rockin' town that is home to my alma mater (and the soon to be NCAA basketball champions!), and the LJWorld's endeavors are consistently awarded high praise on the national level. Now all they need is a few RSS feeds to maintain their “head of the pack” status!

Actually, it would be pretty cool if they'd let you register and customize the local feeds you want to read online, including ones that will eventually come directly from the University, KJHK, the Bottleneck, etc. This type of aggregation service is a bountiful opportunity just waiting for some enterprising BigPub to notice it! Just think of the dedicated, daily eyeballs Lawrence.com/LJWorld would get!

P.S. Carolina – you can't have him!

[The Shifted Librarian]

i'm not much of a basketball fan, but lawrence is a great town.

More spooky .gov stuff. Derek Murphy is one of 2 other bloggers who have also seen a hit from another weird .gov:

http://sseop101.eop.gov/

“eop”? Anyone?

[www.gulker.com - words and pictures from Silicon Valley]

wierd, is it time to do a foi request. or perhaps ask your representative, the best bet is that it is executive office of the president (eop) which is where ollie north worked during contragate, it has a wide variety of functions in support of the president's office.

Next trick: doing this on the highway at 100km/h..

Gary Turner has put together something I want.

The Geek Gene explains it.

[The Doc Searls Weblog]

cool toy!

Reasons not to become a scientist.

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.

Think this sounds bleak and gloomy? Then you can cheer yourself up with Philip Greenspun's illustrated Career Guide for Engineers and Computer Scientists.

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.

[Seb's Open Research]

Any job I know of requires compromises. You take a chance in any of them. What this little story says is absolutely true. Yet many scientists DO pursue their own questions. They find a way to make grant requests work. They find a way to turn the system to THEIR advantage. I did not want to spent my time writing grants, trying to wring the last penny out of every grant. So I went to work for a biotech compnay where I spent 16 years doing what I wanted. I figured out ways to make what I wanted overlap with what the company wanted. I found a path that let me explore the questions in Nature that I found interesting. It is possible but it is not something you can follow a checklist for. It requires creativity, adaptability and driven curiousity. If you have those, you have a good chance to do what you find interesting. [A Man with a Ph.D. - Richard Gayle's
Weblog]

ahh, the joy of a ph.d. i think i just posted my reasons for pursuing this type of degree. but it is really the same way everywhere, the real problem is that the professionalization of higher education.

The Language of Imperialism.

The Language of Imperialism

I am finding it fascinating to learn the Dutch language. Especially fascinating is how perfectly bi-lingual so many Dutch people are. And amazingly, there are so many Americans who seem to think than's just fine and why shouldn't they be? And these same folks would figure, why should we learn any other languages anyway? And why should we bother funding language programs in our schools? What's the point? Everyone learns English anyway. Let them do the hard work of learning another language. And I cringe when I run into this attitude. When we speak English with this attitude we are speaking a language of imperialism. We could learn a lot from the Dutch — they were once imperialistic like us and and now have a much less brutish and overbearing attitude. Their history and all the lessons learned there are in that beautiful language of theirs.

I am in awe of the mastery of languages most Europeans have. I took a helluva long, grueling time to learn French. Learning a language is just sheer uphill work unless you're three years old. And so next time you speak with someone bi-lingual, I invite you to KISS THEIR ASS, because they are handing you a gift that took as much as 10 to 20 years to make. They had the courage to fall on their faces repeatedly learning your language — that's the only way anyone ever DOES learn a language. They had the perseverance to keep enlarging their vocabulary, their accuracy, their present, past and future verb tenses, the whole ball of wax. They had the gigantic respect and humility to study YOUR WAY OF THINKING, because nothing helps you understand someone else's thinking like learning their language. I learned that in French and I happen to love the French language and in an unpopular time, also love the French.

And now, as I learn Dutch, I am enthralled to hear the echos in the language of the way the Dutch think — it's so interesting — and the way the Dutch language still holds so many French and German words in it — like a delicious haute cuisine six-course meal with delicacies from the other languages that once lived within their now modern borders, but the remnants of old visitors marching through those lowlands and leaving some of their tasty words behind. < [Halley's Comment]

about 6 months ago,i was at a confernece held in the room where the dutch west indies trading company did its business. it was a good conference, if a bit overwhelmed at times by the venue.

The Imperialism of Language.

The Imperialism of Language

I got some interesting email responses to my post yesterday, “The Language of Imperialism” that got me thinking. I have no problem with people disagreeing with me, or making me look at any issue from a different point of view — Tom from Denver wrote:

> [After kindly mentioning he likes reading my blog and often agrees with my views, he begins:]
> “I have to comment though on your latest entry “The
> Language of Imperialism”. I grew up in England
> (I've been in Denver now for 22 years), and have
> many relatives there and in France. There are some
> extremely practical reasons for many other countries
> to teach English as a second language, which is
> exactly WHY they do. Being an Engineer, one of the
> most obvious reasons is technical communication.
> The majority of technical publications and
> proceedings are published around the world in
> English because re-creating the complex terms and
> ideas in such things in some other languages is a
> complicated waste of time as many technical people
> use English terminology anyway. Also, communicating
> these ideas via computer and other electronic media
> requires the use of a keyboard. If you are
> Japanese, for instance, this rapidly becomes and
> impossibility since you would need a keyboard with
> thousands of characters just to be able to generate
> the average document. They get around this by using
> either a Japanese shorthand, which in itself is a
> separate skill to learn, or English, which make
> communicating to your target audience (i.e. Western
> Consumers) much easier anyway.
>
> Don't get me wrong though, I agree with you that
> everyone should be open to learning a new language
> and making the effort to “do as the Romans do” as it
> were. I break out my rusty French when I go to
> France, but inevitably, the people I speak to take
> pity on me (and themselves) and speak English. With
> the world getting smaller all the time, English may
> become more dominant, but the mindset needed to
> grasp the ideas of a foreign land will always be a
> valuable asset. It is in fact the kind of thing
> that could prevent wars. Given that our current
> leader in this country can barely speak English, it
> isn't surprising that diplomacy failed when you
> think about it in these terms.
>
> If you haven't already read it, you might find Bill
> Bryson's book “The Mother Tongue” a fascinating and
> funny read about the history of the English
> language. Recently I have been very interested in
> language history along with word etymology, so this
> book was well worth the read for me. Considering
> where English comes from (Celtic, Latin, German,
> French, and others) it really doesn't surprise me
> that it has become such an international language.”

Thanks Tom, food for thought. I'll check out the book too.
[Halley's Comment]

neener neener neener I'm citing this in my dissertation, neener neener neenr

A bit of irony. My grad school advice must have picked up some serious Googlejuice lately, because I am getting a ton of email about it. Much&#8212;all right, all&#8212;of this email asks my advice. Er, this is, to put it mildly, slightly strange. Guys? Gals? I&#8217;m the one who crapped out, remember? Failed? Crawled… [Caveat Lector]

if you have or are considering grad school read this article. i will say that i am opinion that there is only 1 reason to get a ph.d. and that this. 'you cannot imagine yourself without it' when i was 8 i said i'd get a ph.d., it is what i've always wanted, but i fully realize that my entire justification is just that, 'my imagination' if you think yours is otherwise, i suggest a very close examination of what you want and are.

I've been lucky of course, I've had a great graduate school experience, all of the people that I've dealt with have been supportive and interested in my work in some manner, sure some have been critical, but then I've been critical of some people too, but the end of a ph.d. especially in the humanities and the social science is more about your own personal pursuit of knowledge and how you can relate that to the rest of the world.

Keeping in mind that my imagination of the ph.d. is one of many possible solutions to the question, you could of course be the girl or guy as above who finally solves question z, whatever that may be, but let me be clear, even if you think you've solved it. this is always a contentious world, you probably have solved nothing, and in that regard i suggest reading some of the finer writings on academia, like white noise, or homo academicus.

to each is own, don't try to make it more, cause then yer just being pretentious;)

Just Build It. Wise words from Duncan Mackenzie:Stop debating this issue; pick a language and build something… you'll feel better…. [Incessant Ramblings]

this is frequently my approach. Today i was talking with Len Hatfield about the CATH's watermark project and i told him, you know it doesn't matter who has done what before, if you get the dtd for the IPH standard done, and give it to everyone else, then you become the leader. Likewise, if you make the bit of software that you think that you need, you can just by doing it, become the person in the field. Now for Paper Historians, we might be talking a smaller field, but overall the concept is the same.

the glue factory. From today&#8217;s dive into mark: In the future, there will be so much open source software available, programmers will be… [mamamusings]

teaching this isn't teaching programming, it is teaching philosophy and understanding. more or less it is 'all i learned about data i learned from wittgenstein'

The Blake Archive's Archive. The Blake Archive's internal project records, now on file at the amazing Charles Babbage Institute: The bulk of the collection is comprised of the blake-proj messages (entire contents of Boxes 1-3, and Box 4, folders 1-17, Box 5, folders 7-12,… [Matthew G. Kirschenbaum]

if i understand this correctly, this is moving electronic history to paper history, and I'm not sure that is a good thing….