I bit the bullet and upgraded my Ubuntu machine from Breezy Badger 5.10 to Fiesty Fawn 7.04. That’s jumping three versions in one upgrade. All I had to do was:
gksu "update-manager -c -d"
Everything went well and I definitely like what I’m seeing.
I found this gem from an interview with Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google:
Q: Talking before, you’ve spoken glowingly about Larry and Sergey, and also Chad and Steve from YouTube. What are the characteristics of very successful entrepreneurs?
Eric: I think the most important characteristic of an entrepreneur is that they’re going to do it whether you give them permission or not. They are motivated by something inside of them. It’s not something that can be taught… they feel it, they want it, they’re driven to it. And when you find such a person, they’re usually a pretty good person to hang out with. They’re gonna do some interesting things. In Larry and Sergey’s case, and more recently with YouTube with Steve and Chad, they were going to be successful, and you can tell when you talk to them. Everything else is a tactic compared to that passion and vision that an entrepreneur has. It’s relatively rare, and it’s important to identify and respect it. (…)
(read the rest of the transcript)
I came across a very cool project to rank academic journals: EigenFactor.org. Quoting the about page:
Eigenfactor.org is a non-commercial academic research project sponsored by the Bergstrom lab in the Department of Biology at the University of Washington. We aim to develop novel methods for evaluating the influence of scholarly periodicals and for mapping the structure of academic research. We are committed to sharing our findings with interested members of the public, including librarians, journal editors, publishers, and authors of scholarly articles.
The ranking is done using an algorithm similar to Google’s PageRank. Read about the other features on their “Why EigenRank?” page.
Here for example is a listing of the highest ranking (by eigenfactor) journals in Mathematical Physics:
I’m yet to figure out a way to make use of this service effectively. My day job deals with Medical Imaging, which is a form of Computer Vision, which in turn falls under Artificial Intelligence. Computational Anatomy, one of the emerging subfields of medical imaging is fairly mathematical, using ideas from group theory and functional analysis. To add more to the mix, one of the most used algorithms for image/volume segmentation is the Level Set Method, first published in the Journal of Computational Physics. I can’t judge a paper just by looking at where it’s published, can I?