Four short links: 10 August 2009

Propaganda, Computer Science, Web Science, CS History

  1. The Propaganda Newspapers — London councils increasingly providing their own newspapers, masquerading as mass-market popular appeal newspapers but without anything critical of the council that produces it. This is an evolutionary dead-end for reinventing newspapers, and is why the non-profit/trust structure works so well.
  2. Time for Computer Science to Grow Up — publish in journals so conferences can be community events. I’ve seen academics at Sci Foo look around at the unconference structure, or lightning talks, and say “why can’t my normal conferences be like this?!”, and not just in computer science too. Science conferences need a heart transplant. (via David Pennock)
  3. Science Online 2010 — conference on science and the Web. Our goal is to bring together scientists, physicians, patients, educators, students, publishers, editors, bloggers, journalists, writers, web developers, programmers and others to discuss, demonstrate and debate online strategies and tools for doing science, publishing science, teaching science, and promoting the public understanding of science. (via kubke on Twitter)
  4. E.W. Dijkstra Archive — a collection of over 1,000 manuscripts that EWD sent around during his career. EWD 1036, “On the cruelty of really teaching computing science”. “From a bit to a few hundred megabytes, from a microsecond to a half an hour of computing confronts us with completely baffling ratio of 109” (via S. Lott)
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