Archive for February, 2005
Monday, February 14th, 2005
One of my apartment-mates back in grad school was an immunologist. She told me once about the first rule of public health: it's only a cure if people will actually do it, or use it. For example, abstinence is not an effective way to prevent HIV/AIDS, or teenage ...
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Saturday, February 12th, 2005
Tuesday, 15 February 2005, 11:10AM -- Bahen Centre, Room 1180
Department of Computer Science
Speaker: Professor Allan Fisher, President and CEO of iCarnegie Inc.
Title: "Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing"
For those who don't know their work, Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher set up a program at CMU to attract more female students ...
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Friday, February 11th, 2005
This C|Net story is depressing reading:
...the female share of bachelor's degrees in computer science dropped from 37 percent in 1985 to 28 percent in 2001. And while women comprised 33 percent of information technology professionals in 1990, that figure was down to 26 percent in 2002... The drop is puzzling ...
Posted in Equity | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, February 9th, 2005
According to Jon Udell, Google Maps is even cooler than you think: if you append "output=xml" to any Google Maps URL, it'll send you raw XML. Check out his most recent blog posting for an example of how you can use this.
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Wednesday, February 9th, 2005
I read this in John Lewis Gaddis's The Landscape of History on the way in this morning:
We are born, each of us, with such self-centeredness that only the fact of being babies, and therefore cute, saves us. Growing up is largely a matter of growing out of that condition: ...
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Tuesday, February 8th, 2005
In his recent blog posting, "Tenets of Transparency", Eric Sink says that if independent software vendors (ISVs) aren't willing to trust their customers, they won't have any. When customers buy software from you, they trust that:
your product will work on their machines;
you will help them if they have problems;
you ...
Posted in Teaching | 1 Comment »
Saturday, February 5th, 2005
Check out this new on-line store. Drag-and-drop with an unmodified browser? Coooolll...
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Saturday, February 5th, 2005
The French mathematician Blaise Pascal once wrote, "I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter." The 'letter' in question was a mathematical proof---Pascal was apologizing for not having taken the time to clean it up and make ...
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Wednesday, February 2nd, 2005
I don't do, or agree with, everything in this post about what it's like to be a consultant in the software industry, but I think it hits a lot of nails on their heads.
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Tuesday, February 1st, 2005
I walked past a desk today, and saw that its occupant had written half a dozen passwords on the whiteboard beside him. That, and the break-in over the weekend, brought to mind this picture (found via Bruce Schneier's blog on security). As Schneier says, "[I]t doesn't matter what ...
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