“To administer a social organization according to purely technical criteria of rationality is irrational, because it ignores the nonrational aspects of social conduct.”
Peter Blau
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Catenary- Bad surveys November 15, 2009Yesterday, 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, [...]Jorge
- Global warming scepticism and academic intolerance October 28, 2009Someone 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 [...]Jorge
- Workshop on Software Research on Climate Change October 26, 2009Today 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 [...]Jorge
- This is an advertisement October 22, 2009The 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 [...]Jorge
- The Size of a Software Organization September 15, 2009Measuring 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 [...]Jorge
- The Hot Yam! at NOW magazine August 27, 2009More 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. [...]Jorge
- Good Food Box August 27, 2009Val 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 […]Jorge
- Watercolor August 14, 2009Val 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 [...]Jorge
- The cultural cognition of climate change August 7, 2009Would 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 […]Jorge
- How Do Scientists Really Use Computers? August 6, 2009A 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 [...]Jorge
- Bad surveys November 15, 2009
1 response so far ↓
Galax // June 19, 2009 at 7:07 pm |
But of course!
That is the basis of humanism.