Routine Order

GIC Argentina’s program where you can learn Spanish in Argentina sure looks tempting. The deal is - you spend some time in Argentina, either teaching English, or participating in an outreach program, in one of the many volunteer programs in Argentina.


So you volunteer in Argentina, and in exchange, you can learn Spanish, in situ. The program is not entirely limited to Argentina, in fact, you can volunteer in South America, including in Misiones and Iguazu National parks. It sounds like the perfect thing to do between academic programs, or after college. You have to be at least 18 years old to participate in the program. The minimum time commitment required is 2 weeks, though, of course, a longer period of time might be more beneficial. The best of both worlds is if you can make it in winter. You can get away from the cold and immerse yourself in Latin American culture, and learn Spanish the natural way. I wish I had looked up something like this and taken a year off after college.

I know how to parallel park, but to teach that to someone is where I have failed consistently. So how do you break down what happens when you parallel park in a endlessly repeatable fashion? The fearless driver attempts it, and succeeds:


The five steps are all you need to follow. The guide also tells you when to turn in what direction. I suppose a new student could use some practice with the timing and the exact amount to turn the wheel, but all in all, this is an excellent brief tutorial.

I am curious how this online nursing degree program would work. If you read the article in detail, you get the idea that you can even get an MBA for nursing. The reason I am a little puzzled is that I can’t think of how such a person-oriented, physical skill-centric job can be taught using only online methods. The page lists that they use multimedia and interactive technologies, but I’d love to know if it actually works.

It does seem like the programs are for nurses with diplomas seeking to get a higher-level degree to advance their careers:

Registered Nurses with an associate degree or diploma certificate can build on their education and experience to earn a Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN). RNs without a formal nursing degree may also qualify to enter programs leading to a BSN or Master of Science in Nursing (MSN). You’ll also find Master’s programs in specialties such as Integrative Health Care and Health Care Education.

This kind of tags onto the Bachelors in Gaming I wrote about earlier. The universities offering the program include the Phoenix University, which I see ads for almost everywhere, and a few others. a couple of days ago, in Family Guy, I heard this joke where one construction worker tells the other, “My son got into DeVry University,” and the other goes, “Oh yeah? What did you have to do? Hold the door open?”

Collins College offers a Bachelors in Video Game Design. They give some sample courses in the program including Internet Programming for Games, Creative Game Design & Storytelling and - hold on - Creative Level Design! I take it that stands for designing the levels you pass through in a game. So what’s there to learn about levels for a whole semester - I wonder?

The college itself is pretty small - its a school of 2,000 students located in Tempe, Arizona, with an additional campus in northwest Phoenix. As for accredition, I see they are accredited by the “Accrediting Commission of Career Schools and Colleges of Technology (ACCSCT)”. Like what I said about physical trainers with certifications before, it is easy to make mistakes with or without certifications and things. I would have loved to see sample student outcomes for the game design bachelors program. There are some game design and development links at this gaming directory. How does one get to be a game programmer anyway? Sounds like a really cool job.

O’Reilly Radar > Distributed Proofreaders Completes 10,000th Book

Today Distributed Proofreaders (DP) posted a package of texts that takes us over 10,000 completed titles. I’m very proud of our community of volunteers who have accomplished this beautiful number. The 10K package (listed below) showcases the wide range of our volunteers’ interests and talents. For those of you who may not know, DP makes accurate e-text transcriptions of public domain printed material. The results of our efforts are available in html and plain text formats, primarily through Project Gutenberg (PG). Scanning and raw OCR are the first step in digitizing printed material. DP takes the next step to make accurate versions that can be reflowed, re-sized, cut and pasted, accurately searched, analyzed and so on.

For those who like numbers, the 10,000 titles represent around 3 million pages. We have produced books in over 20 languages and just under 15% of our production is in languages other than English. About 700 volunteers login each day, and about 3000 different volunteers login over a 30 day period. We have approximately 5600 projects in some stage of preparation.

Okay, “Today” was the 11th of March - I am late in reporting this to you, but I was a distributed proofreader myself for a few days, before that dropped off the edge of my attention span, like everything else. Read some free books at Project Gutenberg. The distributed proofreading effort is a fun way to read a little each day - you basically read the output of a scanner to detect spellos, typos and uh-ohs. Contribute a little of your time, and, more importantly, spread the freedom!

The girls of engineering calendar was produced with current and past engineering students from the University of Illinois posing in ridiculous poses - none of which are really nude, but all of which are supposed to be sexy.

You can buy the calendar for only $12.95 - I am wondering who’d want to. You can also see a slideshow with about 44 pics in it.

How brain dead does one have to be to realize that reinforcing sexual stereotypes does not unmake the stereotype? We all know some girls are engineers, some girls are sexy, and some sexy girls are engineers. Having revealing photos of the small minority displayed in a calendar does not magically convey the image that all sexy girls are engineers, or that all girl engieers are sexy.

Women in Engineering don’t have to be sexy to be good. They only have to be smart. The calendar, if anything, will reduce the few sexy & smart girls in engineering to fancy sexual objects. Quite the achievement for equality of the sexes in engineering education!

I came across simple.wikipedia.org. Just like en.wikipedia.org and de.wikipedia.org, the “simple” wikipedia aims to explain things in a “simple” language. But saying you want to explain something using simple English doesn’t create a new language called “simple”, folks!

Also, maybe due to it’s immaturity, you can now find gems like, “Electricity is the flow of positive electricity in a metal.” D’oh. That is real simple. If I don’t know what electricity means, I sure can understand that electricity is the flow of positive electricity.

There is a point after which simplifying science degenerates into into insulting the reader’s intelligence. Some people have way too much time on their hands.

Fran Allen wins the Turing award, becoming the first ever woman to win the prestigious ACM award worth $100,000. Frances Allen, (not to be confused with the first woman of New England birth to become a nun;) ) was a computer scientist at IBM, an IBM Fellow, who worked on compilers, program optimization work and modern methods for high-speed computing.

I was surprised to learn she was the first woman ever to win the award, but it shouldn’t have been surprising. There is a lot of work to be done to promote women in technology and computer science. The sexist, stereotyped “geek” should give way, it is high time.

Congratulations, Fran, and I hope you blaze the trail for many more female Turing award winners.

Via Lifehacker I learnt of this great article that details how one can live on an income of $12000 a year.

Further, Lifehacker says:

Granted, the $12,000 living income is wholly unrealistic for some cities (she’s only paying $525/month in rent), but the idea remains worthwhile…

Dear Lifehacker, living on $12000 a year has another name - “graduate student life”. I have been with the program for over 5 years. All the wisdom of the MSN moneycentral article can be boiled down to this:
Don’t spend what you don’t have in your savings account.

How to write an awesome scientific paper | COSMOS magazine
Turning even the most dreary scientific paper into a riveting read is not as hard as it may seem…

Through Anil Dash, I ended up on this post at sylloge.com about a John Adams quote, the original version of which seems to be:

The science of government it is my duty to study, more than all other sciences; the arts of legislation and administration and negotiation ought to take the place of, indeed exclude, in a manner, all other arts. I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.

I couldn’t help smiling at the pleasure the author of that blog must have got when he finally discovered the quote he was searching for, after lots and lots of looking for it, asking around, etc. And hey, wikiquote says the quote is from a Letter to Abigail Adams from May 12, 1780.

P.S.: Since I quote so much, and would like to cite my quotations AND have the citations visible, in a sematically correct fashion, I should install the block quotations plugin from Chetan Kunte. Someday, soon.

PopSci contributing editor Theodore Gray has been fascinated with the Periodic Table of Elements. So much so that he has been spending a few years now collecting real-life samples of the elements, or when that is not available, samples of things that include rare elements.

I read in Oliver Sacks’s Uncle Tungsten that Sacks liked to visit a periodic table at the Kensington Science Museum in London, and I actually thought it was a real table with samples sitting on it for people to look at. Disappointed to learn that it was just a wall display, I resolved that I was going to build a proper periodic-table table.

And so began his journey that ended in it’s current form as an interactive flash periodic table!

How I wish I had this when I was still learning Chemistry…

At Harvard’s business school, it’s forbidden to use Google to “solve” a case study by figuring out how the business actually turned out(Source: Peter Suber, Open Access News).

Now is it just me, or are these guys counter-intuitive? I guess the policy-makers at universities world wide need to grow younger and think lik students do, and I am not suggesting anything subversive, or radical or that they should start thinking like punks. The decision makers probably did not grow with the knowledge-awareness that the young have - where you have a better idea of what is possible, where to look for the solution (or data) and how to best get the information you need. The old have to learn, the young know, intuitively. Stopping the young from using the tools they know best will shackle their growth.

∃xistential Type » Research versus engineering

You know you’re doing research when you spend today undoing nearly everything you did yesterday.

Right said!

Heartening news from Yahoo: Google book-scanning efforts spark debate - Yahoo! News

A splinter group called the Open Content Alliance favors a less restrictive approach to prevent mankind’s accumulated knowledge from being controlled by a commercial entity, even if it’s a company like Google that has embraced “Don’t Be Evil” as its creed.

The organization will be doling out millions to an Open Archiving group - the Internet Archive. Works to be scanned include those from a Boston Public Library and the Museum of Modern Art.

So what’s wrong with Google’s scanning initiative, you ask? Well, for one they intend to scan copyrighted material without explicit permission, and then show excerpts from the scans that don’t violate the copyright. And then there is the fact that they don’t want the content to appear on any other search engine besides theirs - A monopoly over knowledge, anyone?

It’s like having this huge, bad-ass “public” library, and then putting a gate upfront, and then charging to include books in the library, and to read the books, and no, the books can’t leave the library. There is nothing altruistic about google’s efforts - think about it - if you have original content that was not available in digital form earlier, that is now available only through you - who profits? I guess “humanity” is not the answer as much as “The Google Corporation” is.

I hope the Open Content Alliance survives, and thrives.

Highest-Paying Jobs in the US : Career Advice Article at CareerBuilder.com
Top Paying Jobs Overall

The message is clear, don’t waste time blogging - go get working at the flight simulator game instead

# Physicians and surgeons — $147,000
# Aircraft pilots — $133,500
# Chief executives — $116,000
# Electrical and electronic engineers — $112,000
# Lawyers and judges — $99,800
# Dentists — $90,000
# Pharmacists — $85,500
# Management analysts — $84,700
# Computer and information system managers — $83,000
# Financial analysts, managers and advisors — $84,000
# Marketing and sales managers — $80,000
# Education administrators — $80,000

I am in love with LaTeX, the intelligent text formatter. Someday I will write a book with LaTeX. For that day, then, I save the following resource:

Getting to Grips with Latex - Latex Tutorials by Andrew Roberts @ School of Computing, University of Leeds

I wouldn’t consider myself an expert, but I’m learning all the time. I recall finding it quite taxing when I start to learn Latex, which is why I have started these tutorials. However, I hope that my experiences plays to your advantage, since I hope I can let you into the sort of questions and problems I had when I first learning Latex.

The guide seems quite comprehensive, and should be useful for graduate students who use LaTeX a lot, or better still, want a better alternative to the braindead-ness of MS Word.

PLoS Computational Biology - Ten Simple Rules for Selecting a Postdoctoral Position

You are a PhD candidate and your thesis defense is already in sight. You have decided you would like to continue with a postdoctoral position rather than moving into industry as the next step in your career (that decision should be the subject of another “Ten Simple Rules”). Further, you already have ideas for the type of research you wish to pursue and perhaps some ideas for specific projects. Here are ten simple rules to help you make the best decisions on a research project and the laboratory in which to carry it out.