Yesterday, a grad student asked me whether I could answer a survey he was doing for his research. I’ve struggled getting participants in the past, and seeing that the survey would only take a couple of minutes, I accepted. It was a survey about the urban design of a particular place at the University of Toronto, [...]
Someone very dear to me told me, a few weeks ago, that he had noticed I was becoming more and more intolerant with several positions and people —among them, climate change deniers. He felt it wasn’t fitting for a scientist, a person supposed to examine the facts objectively and to be a professional doubter, to [...]
Today was (still is, at the time of writing) the 1st Workshop on Software Research on Climate Change, down in Florida. Jon Pipitone and I planned to attend remotely, skype-ing in, but never got around to make it work satisfactorily: our connection kept getting dropped, perhaps due to bad connectivity at the conference centre. In any [...]
The company my brother works for has just released a website called This is an Advertisement: This is an Advertisement is a site where the ads are the content. It’s as simple (and counterintuitive) as that. We believe ads are useful and even entertaining — valuable information that should be available when we want and need [...]
Measuring something as simple as the size of a software organization turns out to be a tricky problem. It’s clear to see that while IBM, Microsoft, and Google are “large”, the company my friends and I started when we finished our undergrads was “small”. But as I will show, beyond these basic comparisons it’s hard [...]
More on good food: NOW magazine has just reviewed the Hot Yam!, an amazing one-day-a-week eatery at the University of Toronto that’s very close to my heart. It’s an extremely positive and well deserved review. Congratulations everyone, and if you haven’t tried it yet you must! Thursdays, noon to 2pm. [...]
Val and I are now volunteering to distribute Good Food Boxes in our neighbourhood (we’re at Charles and Balmuto St). We got our first order today, and the veggies are fantastic—I thought I’d share the contents of a large box in case you’re interested: (cat not included!) Contents: 4 corn (peaches & cream) 1 cucumber 1 pint of blue […]
Val and I recently celebrated our sixth year in Canada. We felt nostalgic, so we went to walk around our old neighbourhood, the Annex, along with my sister, who was visiting from Mexico. While there we decided to get some drinks at Future Bakery —it was a nice evening but the patio was full, so [...]
Would you agree that discussing climate change with a denialist is one of the most exhausting and frustrating debating experiences there are? Then you’ll enjoy reading Steve Easterbrook’s informative summary of a series of studies by Kahan and Braman on cultural cognition (and you might enjoy the studies themselves!). Kahan and Braman write: Indi […]
A very accessible short article by Greg Wilson in American Scientist provides a nice summary of the results of the survey he and his colleagues conducted recently. He concludes that the survey shows two things are clear: The first is that if funding agencies, vendors and computer science researchers really want to help working scientists do [...]
1 response so far ↓
mcyclops // October 30, 2007 at 3:22 pm |
So geeky my head hurts!!!