An update to my previous posting regarding Harvard adopting a open access requirement to all it faculty. It seems that the proposal has been approved. See this news story on the Chronicle.com website. Stuart M. Shieber, a professor of computer science at Harvard who...
Posts related to: Politics
Breaking free of academic publishers
It appears that the arts and sciences faculty at Harvard are considering publishing all their scholarship freely online. Here is a NYTimes story titled At Harvard, a Proposal to Publish Free on Web. This is truly wonderful news and long overdue. I have been doing...
Psychoanalyzing Bush
I picked up Jacob Weisberg's The Bush Tragedy from the library and finished reading it over the past day and a half. I have never been a fan of Bush, mainly because I was troubled, from the very beginning, by his lack of curiosity, and his unwillingness to learn....
Of ballots and names…
Jon Krosnick, a professor at Stanford, argues that Hillary Clinton's surprise victory in the New Hampshire primary (contrary to what was being predicted in the pre-election surveys) could be simply due to the design of the ballot! Here is is the key quote: Our...
The Reluctant Fundamentalist
An essay by Mohsin Hamid (titled My reluctant fundamentalist) about the process of writing his novel "The reluctant fundamentalist." What stands out in this piece is an excellent description of the extended and often painful act of creation - in this case a novel. I...
Election 2.0
An op-ed in today's NYTimes by William Poundstone about how the web can be used during an election to prevent election fraud. As the article describes a computer scientist and a mathematician "have proposed an ingenious method that would combine paper ballots and a...
A defining moment?
Is this a defining moment of our time? One can just hope... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqoFwZUp5vc