More Social-Network Mapping Tools. I wrote yesterday a column named “New Social-Network Mapping Tools Are Emerging.” Slashdot mentioned it, and their readers sent me many comments and e-mails about other visualization tools. First, I need to make some corrections about Valdis Krebs, the developer of InFlow, a software tool I talked about in this previous column. […]

Queen of Engines. Last night I had the good fortune to attend a screening of To Dream Tomorrow, a new documentary of Ada Byron Lovelace directed by John Fuegi and Jo Francis. The film is an extraordinary piece of work and a must… [Matthew G. Kirschenbaum] sounds like a great flick….

How to write a book in 10 days. Dedicated to aspiring writers, the author of 12 books and several hundred articles shares his technique for writing an entire book size manuscript in 10 days. [Jinn of Quality and Risk] I'll have to try this. [A Man with a Ph.D. – Richard Gayle's Weblog] this looks […]

Steve Lawrence's paper online or invisible has bee …. Steve Lawrence's paper online or invisible has been referred to before in this blog. But its conclusion is so important that the paper is worth highlighting again: “Articles freely available online are more highly cited. For greater impact and faster scientific progress, authors and publishers should […]

Neil Gaiman. has advice for Americans: I have very mixed feelings about Americans disliking the French. I'm English, after all. We have… [Electrolite] Very funny rebuttal by an Englishman. They've disliked the French a lot longer than we have an know a lot more about dissing them. [A Man with a Ph.D. – Richard Gayle's […]

Secrets of the XML gods. text, code, data It's the season for confession. First Tim Bray reveals a dirty secret: “a lot of input data these days is XML…in most cases, I use the perl regexp engine to read and process it.” Then Sean McGrath fesses up to his Python habit: “I know I should […]

Querying XML in databases. Tom Dyson points out that XPath support for PostgreSQL is in the works. Here's the example he gives: … [Jon's Radio] handy

Ross is on a roll!!. Azeem digs up an essay by Paul Saffo on information overload and new organisational structures, written 14 years ago, to make a case for generalists. We are in a pickle today because we are trying to manage 21st century information overload with 19th century intellectual skills. For example, we still prize […]

Computery grad class. I should be thinking about the summer capstone seminar for the Masters in Informatics program I'll be teaching in May,… [Blog de Halavais] Hmm, i could see teaching a course like this, but I would make it less determinate, probalby a 4/8/2 split in weeks where the first 4 were conceptual and […]

From WorldCom, an Amazing View of a Bloated Industry. We now know in quantifiable, stupefying terms, just how much WorldCom overpaid for the telecommunications network it built. By Gretchen Morgenson. [New York Times: Technology] For me, this brings about the question of how money in these terms makes people feel? I find it to be […]