Category Archives: Uncategorized

•The New York Times reviews companies that sell term papers. EDIT: Sorry, this turned pay-to-read between the time I read it and the time I posted it. A quick summary – most papers aren’t worth the money. • Via sartorias, … Continue reading →

For some reason, when I edit posts imported from LiveJournal, WordPress kills all the paragraphing and I can’t put it back in.

It’s so nice to see a good plan work out.

Members of rec.arts.sf.composition have dedicated an auditorium chair at the Minneapolis Central Library to Patricia C. Wrede, who’s provided us with an incredible amount of advice over the years.

Pat’s post is here. Beth Friedman managed to surprise her with the news, and tells the story here. With photos. Thanks to mjlayman for coming up with and organizing the whole project.

This seems like a good place to mention that I’ve syndicated rasfc as rasfc_feed. It’s a pretty useless thing to have done, except for the odd night when you get home and open your friends page and see that Pat got her chair. Continue reading →

In Wired, Daniel H. Pink’s “What Kind of Genius Are You?” discusses an economist’s study of artists and the ages at which they created their best-known works. David Galenson found that some did their best work when young, and then faded away, while others plodded onward and only met with great success later in life.

What he has found is that genius – whether in art or architecture or even business – is not the sole province of 17-year-old Picassos and 22-year-old Andreessens. Instead, it comes in two very different forms, embodied by two very different types of people. “Conceptual innovators,” as Galenson calls them, make bold, dramatic leaps in their disciplines. They do their breakthrough work when they are young. Think Edvard Munch, Herman Melville, and Orson Welles. They make the rest of us feel like also-rans. Then there’s a second character type, someone who’s just as significant but trudging by comparison. Galenson calls this group “experimental innovators.” Geniuses like Auguste Rodin, Mark Twain, and Alfred Hitchcock proceed by a lifetime of trial and error and thus do their important work much later in their careers. Galenson maintains that this duality – conceptualists are from Mars, experimentalists are from Venus – is the core of the creative process. And it applies to virtually every field of intellectual endeavor, from painters and poets to economists.

There are some problems with his dichotomy, of course (some of the early-bloomers died early being one of the biggest), but the article does a good job of pointing them out. I would have liked to see a clearer link between the *type* of innovaters – conceptual vs experimental – and the age at which they innovate. Most of the examples are from art history, which I’m unfamiliar with, so I can’t judge the accuracy of breakthroughs in concept versus more gradual ideas.

Nature lists the top-ranked science blogs. None of them are about materials science, but I’ll post the link anyway.

Anyone know of any materials science blogs?

From PhysicsWeb, a report on the study of the decay of news on the web.

The average half-life of a news item is just 36 hours, or one and a half days after it is released. While this is short, it is longer than predicted by simple exponential models, which assume that web page browsing is less random than it actually is.

The short life of a news item — combined with random visiting patterns of readers — implies that people could miss a significant fraction of news by not visiting the portal when a new document is first displayed, which is why publishers like to provide e-mail news alerts.

One could argue that if users aren’t hunting for the news they’re missing, they didn’t really need to know about it in the first place.

And finally, it is International Blog Against Racism Week. rilina has a roundup of people’s posts on the subject. Continue reading →

Please post any questions, comments, or complaints about the web site, including broken links and errors in the research notes.

Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post gave the University of Maryland J-school commencement address: I want to congratulate you all upon your graduation from the University of Maryland College of Journalism, and wish you luck as you prepare to embark … Continue reading →

Can’t stop watching the Kaavya Viswanathan mess. Chip Scanlan’s column on Poynter uses it in a discussion of what to teach students about plagiarism. (Although he says he’s “not interested in piling on”, he does.) I’ve got another book packaging … Continue reading →

I really, really want to like OpenOffice, which I downloaded and installed today. But. It doesn't wrap text the way I want it to. MSWord has three options: print layout (obvious), web layout (wraps text to the window size) and … Continue reading →

Riddle 1: How is fettucine alfredo better than buttered toast? It lands facing up. Riddle 2: How is fettucine alfredo worse than buttered toast? It sprays fettucine around the room on the way down. Mnemonic: Since I cannot ever, ever … Continue reading →