February 17, 2012 – 2:05 pm
This is a rant. Here is a 10 years long Apple customer, generally satisfied with the quality of the product, but my stance started to change recently, and radically. Apple is pushing it too far. As I smelled long ago with the introduction of the App marketplace, their plan apparently is to make OSX like [...]
August 11, 2011 – 11:00 pm
Imagine you are a professor in organic chemistry. You received financial support for a project, and you are ready to hire a Ph.D. student to make it happen. The project requires the synthesis of a new compound. Imagine you interview your best candidate. At the whiteboard, you present him with various problems of how to [...]
Since its release, I got access to Google+ and started playing with it, so I feel obliged to join the crowd and state something about it. I want to first state one important point. I am not a fan of social networks, at all, unless when useful (such as LinkedIn). Why? For four reasons, all [...]
Today, an era ends. Today the last Shuttle, Atlantis, is scheduled to land for the last time , closing the era of the Shuttle missions, and basically the Space age. Why I say so? Well I don’t think I should spend low-grade effort explaining something that has already been professionally written at the Economist. Instead, [...]
December 21, 2010 – 8:19 pm
I happened to read this very interesting article from The Economist with title “The disposable academic – Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time“. The article details in accurate terms the current condition of post-MasterDegree formation and professional development in the field of academic research. I invite you to read it, and [...]
October 25, 2010 – 10:30 am
After I came back from TAM 2010, I was waiting for my train to bring me home. I started thinking that there is a potential Public Relations issue with scientific proponents and skeptics around, and it’s never good to have a Public Relations issue. I feel there’s a need to change this, and a need [...]
October 21, 2010 – 10:44 pm
Notable talks Susan Blackmore presented an excerpt of her first years of research on paranormal. She shows intriguing statistics on paranormal evaluation, describes some techniques used for cold reading. A consistent part of her talk was relative to physiological explanations of different phenomena our minds perceive as paranormal or mystic. More specifically, she touches arguments [...]
October 21, 2010 – 12:30 am
This post continues my review on TAMLondon 2010. I will go into details of the audience and the talks, and memorable quotes. I keep the individual talks for the last post, due tomorrow. The audience: with an audience reaching one thousand delegates (more than twice the first edition), question time was in some cases limited, [...]
October 20, 2010 – 1:19 am
TAM London 2010 was highly different from the first European edition in 2009. If I had to describe the 2009 edition in just three words, these would be: showmen/women, music, science. For this year edition, the three words would be very different: interviews, feelings, activism. First, interviews. For the sake of argument, I will consider [...]
October 18, 2010 – 12:08 am
I just arrived home from The Amazing Meeting 2010, and I would really like to report my warm comments on the event, but for practical reasons I am forced to delay a clearly articulate post. Those who followed @forthescience on twitter already had an idea of the event, although reporting with clarity a live situation [...]