In news we hope you'll appreciate: Corante now offers RSS for its blogs!

Ad Hominem
Amateur Hour
The Bottom Line
Brain Waves
Connected
Copyfight
Corante on Blogging
Got Game
IdeaFlow
In the Pipeline
Living Code
Many-to-Many
Moore's Lore
Open Mind

We'll be adding links to them from the respective pages over the course of the day - please alert me to any hiccups you encounter. Huge thanks to the WebCrimson crew!

[Corante: Corante on Blogging]

Got an email this morning from Hylton Jolliffe alerting me to this great piece of news. Corante has been publishing some great material; now it's readily available to those of us who prefer aggregators to stay current.

11:01:03 AM •  • comment  

I've had several comments on my post on the risks of knowledge work that I've misattributed the comment:

"Better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt."

I attributed it to Mark Twain, but  my readers believe it belongs to Abraham Lincoln. Certainly wouldn't be the first time I was wrong on an attribution. I did a quick bit of googling to find that the quote is also attributed to Einstein and Groucho Marx among others (according to Ask Yahoo). They suggest that you can even trace this one back to Proverbs 17: 28:

Even a fool, when he holdeth his peace, is counted wise:
and he that shutteth his lips is esteemed a man of understanding

Of course, in a knowledge management context, this kind of problem is interesting beyond the immediate feedback from my readers. Good ideas, like successful projects, are likely to be a product of many parents (another maxim usually associated with Kennedy, although he didn't claim it as his own insight).  Getting the record straight is only one consideration in moving from good idea to successful implementation. The value in tracing lineage isn't so much about parceling out credit as it is about learning from both the successes and failures of others.

10:36:01 AM •  • comment  

Free Science, Engineering and Medical Books Online. I am not lying. The National Academies Press which was created by the National Academies to publish the reports issued by the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Research Council, all operating under a charter granted by the Congress of the United States, has more than 2,500 free, searchable, high quality books online. Some random examples: The Genomic Revolution: Unveiling the Unity of Life Strange Matters: Undiscovered Ideas at the Frontiers of Space and Time Who Goes There?: Authentication Through the Lens of Privacy Microbial Threats to Health: Emergence, Detection, and Response [kuro5hin.org]

A useful resource to have handy BUT see this post from Terry Frazier on limitations of this.

6:41:09 AM •  • comment  

Good news.

Last friday, the département d'informatique et de recherche opérationnelle of Université de Montréal, as represented by a jury composed of profs. Guy Lapalme (president), Esma Aïmeur (advisor), Gilles Brassard (co-advisor), Marc Kaltenbach (jury member), and Tommaso Toffoli (external examiner, from Boston University) granted me a Ph.D. in Computer Science.

The room was chock full with students, professors, friends, and family members (the department director even had to sit on the floor!). I had to give a 45-minute talk summarizing my research contributions and to field questions from the jury and the audience.

I believe it went reasonably well. Several of my friends and family members were pleasantly surprised to find that they actually understood all of my presentation and the question/answer session that followed. I was really happy to see their faces in the room. Thanks to everyone for your support!!

I am extremely grateful to my advisors, who believed in me and had courage enough to let me go way off the beaten path while supporting and advising me every step of the way. THANK YOU!

Oh, and YULbloggers Karl Dubost and Ed Bilodeau showed up and very competently blogged the event. Both wrote that the experience of being there had made them enthusiastic about doing research. That's cool!

[Seb's Open Research]

Congratulations to Sébastien for "piling it higher and deeper".  Although it is a bit unusual, particularly for a new Ph.D., to be comprehensible to such mere mortals as friends and family :), this bodes well for Seb's future work.

6:39:19 AM •  • comment