O brave new quantum world!
New NSF policies on faculty salaries:
A major revision of NSF’s faculty salary reimbursement policy, to limit compensation for senior personnel to no more than two months of their regular salary in any one year from all NSF-funded grants
This pretty much eliminates any NSF funded research professors, as far as I can tell. Well it was a good run, peoples, but that rule change virtually assures that pseudo-professors like myself don’t exist.
John Baez (via Zoran Škoda) points to the case of M.S. El Naschie. El Naschie is apparently the answer to the question “how do you publish over three hundred papers of craziness in an Elsevier journal?” Simple: just become the editor and chief of the journal!
Tell me again the argument about scientific publishers rendering a valuable service with their stellar editing?
The 11th Annual SQuInT Conference (dude that makes me feel old) will be held in Seattle this year. Seattle is in the southwest because Southwest airline flies here (quick book the direct flights from Albuquerque!) In conjunction with this there will also be a satellite meeting, the Workshop on Integrated Atomic Systems II.
Continue reading “11th Annual SQuInT Conference, February 19-22, 2009”
If you want to have a productive day I suggest avoiding Assembler.
Via: “Phd”ed Man
When sky’s fall, apparently they do not fall equally everywhere (contrary to popular theory.) A partial is of those who’ve held up the sky (and even pushed higher) in this New York Times article:
Bernard V. Drury is a rarity on Wall Street: a hedge fund manager who is making money rather than losing it.
While most hedge funds are sinking into red this year and unsettling the markets in the process, a handful of them are posting spectacular gains. Mr. Drury’s fund, for instance, is up 60 percent since Jan. 1.
How did he do it? Mr. Drury, a former grain trader, is not giving away his secrets. He relies on proprietary computer models to chart tides in the markets and to ride the prevailing currents.
Being a successful trader is often like being a good error correcting code: don’t want to reveal any information from local prying eyes!
Continue reading “Winners and Loser Among Hedge Funds”
Zotero is a Firefox browser plugin for keeping track of citations and is very useful in an academic environment. I’ve played with it from time to time and with each progressive version it is getting better and better. Apparently now its even good enought that, Thomson Reuters, makers of Endnote software, a commercial competitor of Zotero, has sued the Commonwealth of Virginia (George Mason University is where the core team developing Zotero is based) over Zotero being able to read Endnote files into the Zotero system. Yeah, if I were Endnote I’d be scared pantless that a startup which actually promotes and open standard is about to take away your market. And peoples, aren’t you happy that all of the value you’ve created in your citation databases in Endnote is effectively forever trapped inside that program. Makes you almost want to not use the Endnote software, doesn’t it. ENDnote?
Science on blogs? We don’t need no science on blogs! We need more Bacon on blogs:
I wrote a paper with David DiVincenzo once. Now he is in the title of a YouTube video. Some things you can never predict.
Part of me wants to say very loudly OMG. The other part of me watched the full six episodes.
Parts 2-6 below the fold. Hat tip Aggie.
Continue reading “The DiVincenzo Code”
“Local” politics.
Continue reading “And I, For One, Welcome Our New Insect Overlords”