"Essentially, Jeff installed a printing press to close the inventory gap with Amazon.  The Espresso Book Machine sits in the middle of Harvard Book Store like a hi-tech visitor to an earlier era. A compact digital press, it can print nearly five million titles including Google Books that are in the public domain, as well as out of print titles. We’re talking beautiful, perfect bound paperbacks indistinguishable from books produced by major publishing houses. The Espresso Book Machine can be also used for custom publishing, a growing source of revenue, and customers can order books in the store and on-line.

You can walk into the store, request an out-of-print, or hard-to-find title, and a bookseller can print that book for you in approximately four minutes."

"Because, if you did, someone is going to check your work. A group of researchers have already begun what they’ve dubbed the Reproducibility Project, which aims to replicate every study from those three journals for that one year. The project is part of Open Science Framework, a group interested in scientific values, and its stated mission is to “estimate the reproducibility of a sample of studies from the scientific literature.” This is a more polite way of saying “We want to see how much of what gets published turns out to be bunk.”"

"During a recent talk David Weinberger asked me (paraphrasing) whether and how the nature of scientific knowledge will change when it’s produced by large networked collaborations?

It’s a great question. Suppose it’s announced in the next few years that the LHC has discovered the Higgs boson. There will, no doubt, be a peer-reviewed scientific paper describing the result.

How should we regard such an announcement?"

Good resources in the first comment.

Google Closure++

Genius and Biographers: The Fictionalization of Evariste Galois

Another essay on teachings of mathematics.

"Puzzles and tricks from Martin Gardner inspire math and science."

"A reading protocol is a set of strategies that a reader must use in order to benefit fully from reading the text. Poetry calls for a different set of strategies than fiction, and fiction a different set than non-fiction. It would be ridiculous to read fiction and ask oneself what is the author's source for the assertion that the hero is blond and tanned; it would be wrong to read non-fiction and not ask such a question. This reading protocol extends to a viewing or listening protocol in art and music. Indeed, much of the introductory course material in literature, music and art is spent teaching these protocols."

"From 1999, the late great Douglas Adams on How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet. You might worry that Adams' piece is out of date, but it's one those evergreen bits of wisdom that will apply right up until human consciousness is absorbed into the digital cloud." via http://kottke.org/10/05/how-to-stop-worrying-and-learn-to-love-the-internet

"Alexander Szalay's career in astronomy took an unexpected turn when the Johns Hopkins U., where he is a professor, joined the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and he volunteered to help with data storage."

"Content from Sternberg, R. (1994). In search of the human mind. New York: Harcourt Brace."

"Thankfully, the W3C created media queries as part of the CSS3 specification, improving upon the promise of media types. A media query allows us to target not only certain device classes, but to actually inspect the physical characteristics of the device rendering our work. "

"The linked document is the first public release of a document discussing the value of programming languages principles for undergraduate CS majors. The intended audience is computer scientists who are not specialists in programming languages. Please leave comments on how well you believe it meets its goals and with suggestions for improvements." // Abstract: "Undergraduate students obtain important knowledge and skills by studying the pragmatics of programming in multiple languages and the principles underlying programming language design and implementation. These topics strengthen students' grasp of the power of computation, help students choose the most appropriate programming model and language for a given problem, and improve their design skills. Understanding programming languages thus helps students in ways vital to many career paths and interests." (via http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3990 )

"When you want to gain a historical perspective on personal computing and programming languages, why not turn to one of the industry’s preeminent pioneers? That would be Alan Kay, winner of last year’s Turing Award for leading the team that invented Smalltalk, as well as for his fundamental contributions to personal computing."

"Fifty years ago Gardner launched the modern skeptical movement. Unfortunately, much of what he wrote about is still current today." ... "In 1950 Martin Gardner published an article in the Antioch Review entitled "The Hermit Scientist," about what we would today call pseudoscientists." via http://blog.computationalcomplexity.org/2010/05/life-of-martin-gardner-1914-2010.html

"Uz ovakvu državnu maturu vezuje se niz problema koji se mogu sažeti u više kategorija: (a) nedostatak razvojne vizije, (b) promašena svrha, (c) diskriminacija strukovnog i umjetničkog obrazovanja, (d) kršenja standarda i načela edukacijskih mjerenja, (e) upitno korištenje rezultata državne mature za upise u visoko obrazovanje, (f) negativan povratni utjecaj na učenje i poučavanje, (g) provedbeni problemi."

"Bad application programming interfaces plague software engineering. How do we get things right?"

A legendary problem and the battle over who solved it. by Sylvia Nasar and David Gruber

"Having a good mentor early in your career can mean the difference between success and failure in any field. Adrian Lee, Carina Dennis and Philip Campbell look at what makes a good mentor."

"May 2003 (This essay is derived from a guest lecture at Harvard, which incorporated an earlier talk at Northeastern.)"

"What quantum algorithms outperform classical computation and how do they do it? "Dave Bacon, Wim van Dam

by Margaret Talbot

Autor: Boris Lenhard <3

"Excellent article by Garry Kasparov. It's ostensibly a book review, but I'd be surprised if the review isn't a great deal more interesting than the book. " --- nielsen

"Still fearful of sounding presumptuous, I labeled the note a “Request for Comments.” R.F.C. 1, written 40 years ago today, left many questions unanswered, and soon became obsolete. But the R.F.C.’s themselves took root and flourished. They became the formal method of publishing Internet protocol standards, and today there are more than 5,000, all readily available online."

"Still fearful of sounding presumptuous, I labeled the note a “Request for Comments.” R.F.C. 1, written 40 years ago today, left many questions unanswered, and soon became obsolete. But the R.F.C.’s themselves took root and flourished. They became the formal method of publishing Internet protocol standards, and today there are more than 5,000, all readily available online."

truly great read

"Hundreds of projects in fields ranging from genomics to computational linguistics to astronomy demonstrate a major shift in the scale at which scientific data are taken, and in how they are processed, shared and communicated to the world. Most significantly, there is a shift in how researchers find meaning in data, with sophisticated algorithms and statistical techniques becoming part of the standard scientific toolkit. The Fourth Paradigm is about this shift, how scientists are dealing with it, and some of the consequences. Its 30 chapters, written by some 70 authors, cover a wide range of aspects of data-intensive science." Nielsen

"Inventive and intensely-detailed book covers, prints and postage stamps, not to mention a sleeve for the Rolling Stones, make up just a small part of illustrator Tony Meeuwissen's creative work since the 1960s. Next month, an exhibition in Stroud displays a selection of highlights from his career..." Great work! :-O

"On the 40th anniversary of the first internet connection, a look back on how a flash of insight and a 20-minute meeting got it all started."

For literary critics.

"Lunsford is a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, where she has organized a mammoth project called the Stanford Study of Writing to scrutinize college students' prose. From 2001 to 2006, she collected 14,672 student writing samples—everything from in-class assignments, formal essays, and journal entries to emails, blog posts, and chat sessions. Her conclusions are stirring."

by Timothy Gowers & Michael Nielsen. "The 'Polymath Project' proved that many minds can work together to solve difficult mathematical problems. Timothy Gowers and Michael Nielsen reflect on the lessons learned for open-source science." ... "The working record of the Polymath Project is a remarkable resource for students of mathematics and for historians and philosophers of science. For the first time one can see on full display a complete account of how a serious mathematical result was discovered. It shows vividly how ideas grow, change, improve and are discarded, and how advances in understanding may come not in a single giant leap, but through the aggregation and refinement of many smaller insights."

"Google Wave is the kind of open-source online collaboration tool that should drive scientists to wire their research and publications into an interactive data web, says Cameron Neylon."

"U Googleu sam direktor jednog zajedničkog projekta Googlea, NASA-e i Mars Societyja, gdje istražujemo mogućnosti interakcije robota s astronautima, radimo simulacije budućih misija koje će ići na Mars, objašnjava Debić."

"Primila sam tekst moje prijateljice i kolegice, gospođe Doroteje Kirhmajer - Vujčić, dugogodišnje radnice u PLIVI, koja je uspješno rukovodila s nekoliko proizvodnih programa, prolazila FDA inspekcije i koja nakon prisilnog umirovljenja radi kao savjetnik za uvođenje dobre proizvodne prakse. U tom svojstvu radila je i u Imunološkom zavodu gdje sam je imala priliku upoznati kao vrhunskog stručnjaka i predivnu osobu. Tekst koji je poslala jest njeno viđenje nastanka i nestanka PLIVE. Tekst je potresan, i vrijedi ga podijeliti s ljudima koji razmišljaju, ako ni zbog čega, a ono da se slično pokuša spriječiti u poduzećima koja još postoje."

by Richard Feynman

Really great article about PhD and scientific research.

Članak o Supeku, datum objave 10.03.2007 12:09

"The biggest lesson learned, according to members of the two top teams, was the power of collaboration. It was not a single insight, algorithm or concept that allowed both teams to surpass the goal Netflix, the movie rental company, set nearly three years ago: to improve the movie recommendations made by its internal software by at least 10 percent, as measured by predicted versus actual one-through-five-star ratings by customers."

Boris Pavković (1931 – 2006) Portrait of a distinguished teaching expert and popularizer of mathematics

I’m taking a Media Theory course at Concordia in their Media Studies MA program, which involves a fair bit of reading. I’ve come to the conclusion that all academics should blog. Here’s why:

Article about Git

Adolf Merckle, one of the world’s richest men, committed suicide yesterday by throwing himself under a train, Bloomberg reports. [...] For those of us who don’t live and breathe finance, this is that story.

I get many email inquiries about what artificial intelligence is all about. This is a first attempt at answering them on a layman's level or beginning student's level.

"In this column we investigate the other half of the tenets, the elements of design, in an effort to bring together a solid foundation on which we can base all future investigations." Solidan article

History of color

Alex Roetter introduces the Java Thread API, outlines issues involved in multithreading, and offers solutions to common problems.

Does this style look at all familiar? It should! This is, to put it as impolitely as possible, n00b-style. (Incidentally, if u dont no wat a n00b iz, u r 1.)

Marvin Minsky

We get better design when we understand our medium. Yet even at this late cultural hour, many people don’t understand web design.