Biweekly links for 03/06/2009
- Ban the Laptop! | Kevin Drum
- “At the beginning of his Criminal Law class last semester, Eugene Volokh decided to ban laptops as an experiment. So how did it go? As the post-class survey summarized below shows, pretty well. Unsurprisingly, the ban was a net negative for note taking, but it turned out to be a pretty strong net positive on every other scale. This is mostly of interest to students and professors, but even outside academia it’s an intriguing data point for anyone who thinks that the increasing device-driven ADD in modern America might deserve a little more pushback than it usually gets and would like some evidence to back up their instinct.”
- Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP
- Excellent blog about theoretical computer science from Richard Lipton.
- All we want are the facts, ma’am
- Peter Norvig on Chris Anderson’s article “The End of Theory”.
- How to Present While People are Twittering | Pistachio
- What single book is the best introduction to your field (or specialization within your field) for laypeople? | Ask Metafilter
- This thread is a goldmine of great reading.
- [0902.3439] wikiFactor: a measure of the importance of a wiki site
- “A new metric is introduced, inspired by the Hirsch {\it h-index}, to measure the impact of a wiki site. A table of wikiFactors is presented for a number of wikis, in particular those oriented towards scientific topics. The wikiFactor is defined as the number of web pages, wF, that have had $\ge 1000$wF visits. “
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Michael, thanks for another outstanding round-up! I especially enjoyed Peter Norvig’s remarks on the (non-existent) “End of Theory.”
If we construe “theory” broadly, as encompassing all forms of informatic model order reduction (and is there any other good way to construe it?), then we are indeed in the midst of a Golden Era of Theory.
However, I have found it is remarkably challenging to find good quotes that make this point. At present my database has only a link to an extended praise of Fermi Rules that begins on page 112 of Ed Magrab’s Integrated Product and Process Design and Development, which can be read on Google Books.
Can provide a better quotation? C’mon … we’re in the middle of a Golden Age of Theory!
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@book{Author = {Edward B. Magrab},Publisher = {CRC Press},Title = {Integrated Product and Process Design and Development},Year = {1997}}
Thanks for kind words…
dick lipton