Month: May 2003

Online texts from National Academies Press

Free Science, Engineering and Medical Books Online. I am not lying. The National Academies Press which was created by the National Academies to publish the reports issued by the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Research Council, all operating under a charter granted by the Congress of the United States, has more than 2,500 free, searchable, high quality books online. Some random examples: The Genomic Revolution: Unveiling the Unity of Life Strange Matters: Undiscovered Ideas at the Frontiers of Space and Time Who Goes There?: Authentication Through the Lens of Privacy Microbial Threats to Health: Emergence, Detection, and Response [kuro5hin.org]

A useful resource to have handy BUT see this post from Terry Frazier on limitations of this.

Congratuations to Sebastien Paquet

Good news.

Last friday, the d partement d’informatique et de recherche op rationnelle of Universit de Montr al, as represented by a jury composed of profs. Guy Lapalme (president), Esma A meur (advisor), Gilles Brassard (co-advisor), Marc Kaltenbach (jury member), and Tommaso Toffoli (external examiner, from Boston University) granted me a Ph.D. in Computer Science.

The room was chock full with students, professors, friends, and family members (the department director even had to sit on the floor!). I had to give a 45-minute talk summarizing my research contributions and to field questions from the jury and the audience.

I believe it went reasonably well. Several of my friends and family members were pleasantly surprised to find that they actually understood all of my presentation and the question/answer session that followed. I was really happy to see their faces in the room. Thanks to everyone for your support!!

I am extremely grateful to my advisors, who believed in me and had courage enough to let me go way off the beaten path while supporting and advising me every step of the way. THANK YOU!

Oh, and YULbloggers Karl Dubost and Ed Bilodeau showed up and very competently blogged the event. Both wrote that the experience of being there had made them enthusiastic about doing research. That’s cool!

[Seb’s Open Research]

Congratulations to S bastien for “piling it higher and deeper”. Although it is a bit unusual, particularly for a new Ph.D., to be comprehensible to such mere mortals as friends and family :), this bodes well for Seb’s future work.

Rube Goldberg Honda Commercial

Rube Goldburgh + Honda ==> an amazing commercial.


My mom was a “gifted and talented” teacher in an elementary and middle school.  Each year her kids had to design and build a Rube Goldburgh devices to compete in the Olympics of the Mind. 

I'm sure they'd appreciate this an amazing commercial. (Flash 6 required)

[Micah's Weblog]

 

Brilliant commercial. Of course, most of the systems we live with day to day have the complexity without the payoff.

The real risks of knowledge sharing

Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas!. I just love this quote from Howard Aiken:

Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.

So true! [Gurteen Knowledge-Log]

I have a new hypothesis about why it’s difficult to get people to contribute to knowledge management systems in organizations.

Conventional wisdow says it’s because people are worried that someone will steal their ideas. I think that’s a rationalization. I think the real fear is the fear of being ignored. The fear that the knowledge I share is so obvious or trivial that no one will care. What’s the old maxim from Mark Twain? “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.” (some input from my readers about the correct attribution of this quote. See my comments here for some more)

The issue may still be fear, but it’s a fear that we need to address in a very different way.