Category: Uncategorized

Today was a landmark day, a little sad; I said goodbye to my research unit and my position as a postdoc. The place and people prised their way into my heart and, unlike many of their patients, I will never forget them.

But every event has its echo, and this one carries backward – to an interview and offer last month – and forward, to a new job in the new year. More details as I get them, loyal readers.

Tomorrow is also a landmark day; we move into a house that we own.

The day after is Christmas Eve (you might know that one), with all the busyment that follows.

All in all, 2006 is making a big exit.

Speak in… 07?

Not mine, but a quote I mined:

It might be right to say that the “true” cause of poverty and lack of life chances is ignorance, malnutrition, antisocial behaviour etc, but as Chris Dillow often says, you don’t cure a pedestrian with a broken leg by sending the bus backwards over him.

From the comments to this provoking post.

Something to do with the combination of dark nights, fairy lights, jingly sleigh-bell music and heavy-rotation advertising going on in the background means there’s a palpable whiff of greasy hysteria in the air. A feeling that everything’s about to shut down and hibernate, so you’ve got to get your oar in now while there’s still time. It’s all bells and tinsel and unhinged grinning urgency. No wonder Die Hard was set at Christmas. Watching Bruce Willis crashing through windows and machine-gunning terrorists would have seemed downright boring if he’d been doing it on pancake day.

Charlie Brooker at Comment is Free

Part One. Disa passed her PhD viva with flying colours. She’s the top squirrel in the park!

More to come.

Speaker: Luis von Ahn is an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University.
Snippet of Abstract: “Tasks like image recognition are trivial for humans, but continue to challenge even the most sophisticated computer programs. This talk introduces a paradigm for utilizing human processing power to solve problems that computers cannot yet solve. Traditional approaches to solving such problems focus on improving software. I advocate a novel approach: constructively channel human brainpower using computer games.”
Awesomeness: Pretty awesome.

On whether university economics skews you politically rightwards:

I never was taught basic economics (Latin and Greek were thought to be much more useful), but the logic of a rightward shift seems pretty straightforward to me.

First, you are taught how to conjugate a verb. That would be Latin 101.

Metella est mater. Quintis est filius et ambulat in hortum. Hic, haec, hoc. (This is all I can remember)

Then you spend the next 5 years learning all the 20,000 exceptions to the rule. That would be real Latin.

Similarly, Econ 101 is for libertarians, while economy is for, huh, real economists. The libertarians never get past the Esperanto-like first grade version of Latin.

They only learn the first bit: how markets work. They never get round to the second, far more frustrating bit: markets don’t work all the time, and can indeed fail disastrously. The invisible hand often needs guidance.

Jasper Emmering at Crooked Timber.

…now I can drive – in theory.

Since I’m updating a little more than usual, I thought my world-worn and harried readers may benefit from the benefits of a web reader*. This is an “inbox for the web”, meaning that sites you are interested in have their new information plonked into one location for you to check out, much like emails all pour into one location for you to read them (instead of having to check different locations for each person who might send you something). This technology has been around for donkey’s years, or at least blog years; Bloglines is a well-known and established provider. I’ve never quite got my head around it, but recently with Google reloading their version, I thought I’d give it a go. And really, it’s dead easy.

Step 1. Go to Google Reader, or a preferred alternative, if you know better. I’ll just talk about the Google one, as it’s what I know.

Step 2. Get a google account. If you have a gmail email account then I think you already have one; if not, you just give an email and password and you’re away.

Step 3. Add subscriptions; that is, the sites you want updates from. You do it by putting information in the text box opened by the add subscription button (genius!). Obvious candidates are news sites – BBC news has a list of their news feeds here, for example – or blogs. I did have a lengthy thing about how to find the right address for the feeds (all blogger blogs are the webaddress plus /atom.xml) but it’s even easier than I thought. Just put the basic web address in and in most cases, it’ll just find the feed for you.

Step 4. View at leisure. When you come back to your Google Reader page, you can see all the new content that’s been added to your favorite sites (not always new comments on posts though, depending on the feed), and as you scroll through to find something enticing, the nice front-end automatically marks everything you pass over as old. You don’t get a big inbox to manage, just a quick scroll-through and next time it’s all gone.

Step 5. Sharing? Too early a stage to say how useful this is, but one feature is a no-bones proto-blogging feature, in that things you see and find interesting enough to share can be sent to a shared page just by clicking on the share button. Then others can see it and marvel at your powers of discovery and superior (or gloriously bad) taste. I threw a few things on today, and you can peek it. Blogging for people who don’t see the point in putting “as the incomparable William T. puts it” before an excerpt, and “indeed.” after it.

That’s it. Do it and put me on top, and keep on top of the quality.
EDIT: I wanted to say – and make clear that it’s not all about me – that thanks to having this in place I know immediately when something internet-worthy has happened to any of my pals. I just got a nudge that Tom has had a bad day, for example. I also have everyone from my friends list on the right in, so when Akin has more baby news, I know it. This is especially handy for keeping up with people who update only occasionally; I have great respect for people who’ve kept up with my blog given that there have been months where I haven’t said a peep, and they’ve presumably been fruitlessly checking back over that whole time. No more, people, no more!

*that is, RSS. But ignore the acronyms if you, like me, find them full of dangerous magic.