It looks like Coffee May Raise Heart Disease Risk.

Before you pour that next cup of coffee or head to the corner cafe, you may want to get up to speed on the latest coffee research.

Drinking even moderate amounts of coffee may raise your risk of heart disease, according to a Greek study.

I’m one of those people who get through their days with coffee. I just love coffee and couldn’t really easily limit myself to a cup or so. I plan to do so though and increase my consumption of red wine.

Here’s my thinking: given that I’m stressed out so often, I stand to win if I switch from coffee to wine.

Nicolas points to this new Google tool called mygooglepagerank allowing you to figure out what you PageRank is.

This is of limited use but can be funny for a time. I would want a richer tool allowing me to understanding the rankings.

I wrote earlier that IBM announced it would no longer sell its DB2 OLAP Server. It looks like the move by IBM might mean that they plan to focus on their own OLAP product:

in fact it’s more to do with their current focus on their Cube Views product, which in his opinion is more likely to be IBM’s future OLAP direction.

So DB2 Cube Views will be the main IBM OLAP product?

According to COMPUTERWOCHE ONLINE, IBM is killing its DB/2 Olap Server by breaking its deal with Hyperion. This somewhat surprising move brings questions as to what IBM will do in the Business Intelligence arena… partner with Oracle or Microsoft, or do do something else? Maybe get out of the OLAP business altogether?

Through Downes’, I got to this list of journals having a RSS feed. This is just amazing! It could be tremendously useful!

Through the Geomblog, I got to a post in “Lowerbounds, Upperbounds” which reproduces a speech given by Hamming. Here’s what Hamming had to say about great researchers:

I claim that some of the reasons why so many people who have greatness within their grasp don’t succeed are: they don’t work on important problems, they don’t become emotionally involved, they don’t try and change what is difficult to some other situation which is easily done but is still important, and they keep giving themselves alibis why they don’t.

What is also interesting is that Hamming was probably not a very happy man:

I had incipient ulcers most of the years that I was at Bell Labs. I have since gone off to the Naval Postgraduate School and laid back somewhat, and now my health is much better. But if you want to be a great scientist you’re going to have to put up with stress. You can lead a nice life; you can be a nice guy or you can be a great scientist. But nice guys end last, is what Leo Durocher said. If you want to lead a nice happy life with a lot of recreation and everything else, you’ll lead a nice life.

Nice guys end last. Right. Are we to understand that bad guys end first? Right. Fun.

ACM IT Curriculum Committee is seeking feedback regarding its preliminary report. Basically, they describe what a 4-year degree in IT should look like.

In the report, IT is defined as an academic discipline that encompasses all aspects of computing technology. As a discipline, IT focuses on “meeting the needs of users within an organizational and societal context through the selection, creation, application, integration and administration of computing technologies.”

The report is very long (over a 100 pages) and the stupid “draft” image on each page makes it harder to browse.

This makes me hopeful that IT will grow to become a respectable discipline.

In the report, IT is defined as an academic discipline that encompasses all aspects of computing technology. As a discipline, IT focuses on “meeting the needs of users within an organizational and societal context through the selection, creation, application, integration and administration of computing technologies.”

To me, this is one half of Computer Science jobs, the other half being Software Engineering-related. However, IT is hard to outsource, is needed by almost all companies and can be a key component of a smart company.

Reading the report, it looks like programs following this guideline will be both fun and challenging.