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.

This came to me today: if I didn’t have Internet, I would probably work much less. There is just too much to read, too many people to get in touch with. Generally, there is no excuse not to do great research. I suspect that researchers now spend far more hours working because of the this.

How long before people just stop doing research because they can’t cope?

From Downes’, I read Tuttle SVC objection to Mark Prensky’s interview where he claims that 20 years ago, intellectually, life was boring. Here’s the gist of Tuttle SVC’s message:

I am thirty six, and I AM A DIGITAL NATIVE. I know you baby boomers have a hard time coping with this concept because it is a threat to your authority, and as a result you seem to be constantly reinventing the concept so that it can’t be applied to any actual adults who can compete with you professionally, but I’ve had it, and I’m calling bullshit.

It is quite a punch and I’ve got to agree with Tuttle SVC. It is true that 20 years ago, we didn’t have the web. The world was a big place and unless you were very rich, you were disconnected from it: small town libraries only bring you so far. On the other hand, we were playing video games, and I was learning to program in Basic, Assembler and Fortran.

So, am I a tech native? You bet. I knew how to program a computer when I was thirteen. Hey! I had my very own computer when I was thirteen! A TRS-80 with 32 KB of RAM. No kidding. My friend Eric, living two houses from me, had a VIC-20 with much less memory, but he had much cooler games.

Now, Eric is a software developer and I am a Computer Science professor. Are we tech. natives??? You bet!

Not so many kids these days can put together a video game the way I did. Yet, I programmed several (bad) programs (mostly small games) when I was young.

Am I an Internet/web native? No. I learned about the Internet pretty much when I was in college. And even back then, BBS were much cooler in my mind. However, the web is constantly changing. The web in 2001 was very different from the web in 1998… so, maybe a kid who was 13 in 2001 could qualify as a web native, but the kid is only 16 now. He will enter university soon. I expect him to challenge the classroom and expect a lot of web content. I expect him to look for online courses. So what?

The tech. revolution probably happened with Apple. That’s circa 1971. Any kid who was 10 when the Apple II was released (1977) probably qualify as a tech. native, and that’s any kid born after 1966. Baby boomers were borned before 1960, so we could say that the tech. natives are the kids borned after the baby boomers.

The tech. natives have been around for a long time. They’ve been struggling for jobs for quite some time now. They are not just arriving in your local school.

“Tall, Dark, and Mysterious” the funniest math. geek on the web decided to go ask for job advice. She is obviously extremely smart and can’t find a decent job with a M.Sc. in Mathematics. I think she sums it very well:

Like many members of my demographic – gifted kids of professionals, who were directed to seek scholarship, rather than employment, in their studies, and who were never given much guidance with regards to the latter – I am finding myself suspended between two distinct groups that are, for opposite reasons, ill-suited to help me. On the one hand are the intellectuals who can’t fathom a universe outside the academy, and hence cannot help me find my way in that world; on the other, the folks who never studied a subject as abstract and as technical as mathematics beyond the high school level, and consequently can’t provide the specialized direction I need to apply my own abstract and technical interests and skills outside the academy. Frustrating, because I know that there are math folks employed in statistics and in finance and in the military and elsewhere, and they didn’t hatch ready-made inside their cubicles.

The lesson here is that getting degrees without thinking about job prospects is a dangerous game. Feel free to play the game, but make sure you know what you are risking.