grep2

Vote with your feet: Germany for example has a strong democratic culture, vibrant economy, (nearly) free education system, functioning public healthcare and - best of all - people speak German. To be fair, just with English you'll also get already pretty far.

Drop me a line in case you're interested, I'd be happy to help where I can. Same holds for companies.

Who is interested in building the inverted echo chamber of the internet? Take a standard recommendation algorithm, apply it to news, let's say, and invert the similarity measure for the cluster the article belongs to.

In the best case, the end result would be a page filled with "relevant" (in the sense of read by people with a similar background) articles, but challenging your current position on an individual topic. Think having a "small government" believer receiving an article about the success of nordic social systems.

I, personally, would rather read such news than the "more of the same" you get with a standard similarity measure.

Thanks for contributing to such an awesome project.

A self-contained young lady's illustrated primer (thanks, Neal Stephenson) attempting to judge the current knowledge level of the reader with a set of preliminary questions and delivering progressively more advanced, always relevant content would be awesome.

Has anyone attempted to build it not starting at school level, but from ground up (i.e. colors, words, sentences, basic physics, maths, music), while adding content as the first participants progressed?

What would be required to grab your attention? Curated content? A better discussion platform? Or just plain more signal per noise?

One approach I'd like to see implemented is some monte carlo comment display algorithm. Assign every user a base point level (based on his contributions/selectable?), show every comment/post with score above this level, but comments below with decreasing probability.

This has the advantage of allowing new/initially low-ranked stuff to get picked up faster than a hard threshold, while keeping the noise at a level acceptable for the user.

Or is this nonsense?

Just in case it is not obvious: These rejection letters are fictional[1], created as collage of negative reviews Santini received. But it's hilarious to read, I agree.

Since the original site where Santini commented on it is gone, probably it's only a question of time until this document becomes internet "truth". Brave new world.

[1]http://bertrandmeyer.com/2009/08/14/rejection-letter-classic...

If you want to know why a car running android is a bad idea, take a ride in an 8 year old BMW/Mercedes with (back then) state of the art navigation system. While the car itself is probably still nice, the "smart" part just feels horribly outdated - because it is. The length of these two innovation cycles differs by a factor 3-5. For the same reason, a "smart" fridge running Android isn't, either.

If, on the other hand, you propose introducing a reasonably standardised protocol for interfacing your phone with the in-car audio, video and input systems (plus readouts from the internal sensors), I definitively agree. This allows you to update the "smart" bit every two years on contract, but you can use the controller and screen (with longer innovation cycles, even though they are still below the typical ttl of cars) integrated in the car.

Did one of you check if airplay works in clamshell mode? I.e. when you have a keyboard/touchpad connected and wake up the mac with closed lid, does the screen content show up on the tv wirelessly?

This would be very convenient for a clutterless desk and reduce the number of cables I have to plug/unplug to the power cord when arriving/leaving.

I agree - the main problem is that basically no one has an idea what the day-to-day life of a scientist looks like. The outreach programs of Fermilab et.al. for school children are nice, but I'd be very interested to hear how to get in touch with working professionals to show them that

(a) scientists are not dangerous and (b) there is work done in the ivory towers that might have a positive impact in their field

I would say that's a bad case of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity - but unfortunately not even a well-written one.

Fun fact: the wikipedia article contains a link to Littlewood's law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Littlewood%27s_law), another lesser-known piece of trivia

In fact, one concept with increasing popularity in Germany are Packstations (http://www.dhl.de/en/paket/privatkunden/packstation.html). Basically it's a set of parcel boxes where customers can unlock the one that contains their packet.

Now, instead of hoping that the delivery guy arrives when you are at home, you just give the address of the next Packstation and pick it up at your convenience.

And, from the experiences in Germany, I can tell you: Wind mills suffer badly from "not in my backyard" syndrome, since they destroy the scenery and make noise.

Exactly, the point is that the 20micron-layer of silicon that was shearing off is now the solar cell. Compare that to 200micron sheets, as used currently, and you see where the savings come from (i.e. you can get up to 10x more solar cells from a standard waver).

I hope this helps.

This proposal reminds me of the RFC specifying a security flag in the IPv4 header.

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3514.txt

Actually, it is acceptably straightforward to include a custom header in org-mode. Basically you can create your own latex class in customize-group org-export-latex and then add a

#+LATEX-HEADER: \input{stuff.tex}

to your file to include the appropriate header magick. I'm currently using this approach to prepare my thesis in org-mode.

Actually, there are quite a few points where modern technologies would allow for a significant streamlining of research processes. Off the top of my head (as I work in the field):

1. data acquisition - you won't believe in how many labs devices with a computer interface (gpib or whatever) are running in standalone mode, costing hours in grad student hours where parameters are changed and values are read by hand - in the best case people duct-tape something together with a labview program. No. Just No.

2. collaborative data sharing - if you want to show your boss a graph, you email him a jpg - where is the site to upload a csv and show a graph to other people/edit together?

3. Writing papers: The state of the art is mailing a LaTeX(!) or Doc(!) file to your colleagues with .v1.edited appended... Reviewing the published material is just the last step.

PS: I'm working on a solution for #3 (Etherpad + LaTeX preview + export in the appropriate journal format). Drop me a line if you're interested in details.