2005_12_01_archive

2006_10_01_archive

To praise or not to praise?

An interesting management issue arose this week. Part of our strategic

planning involves getting input from our users, so I am spending a lot

of time attending various faculty (and I hope soon, student) meetings.

I want to make sure everyone in the library hears what our users are

saying so I send the notes to the whole library. I am also thinking

about ways to keep these available, may be a website. Obviously some

of what we hear is positive and some is negative, but the point is to

get outside our box and listen.

I think this is new for the Olin Library, and it is a little

challenging for some. It is made more challenging by a very different

style on my part. As you may have noticed if you read this blog, I

believe in open communication and sharing lots of information and

multiple perspectives. I think you generally end up with stronger

decisions even if it can be a bit messy getting there. Traditionally

the Olin Library seems to be a low-conflict, high-consensus

organization. To avoid conflict and achieve at least the appearance of

consensus information and communication has been carefully managed by

everyone in the library. Kinda the Thumper's mother school of

communication -- if you can't say nice, don't say anything at all.

I disturbed this culture by giving everyone the unedited notes from

the meeting I attended, but -- and this was worse -- by specifically

singling out certain individuals who had been mentioned positively by

those at the meeting and thanking them for their contribution.

Naturally, those who were mentioned are those that the faculty

interact with. There are many people working in the library who do

excellent work without which the library would not function, but that

work is not seen by our users. This is a persistent problem in

libraries. Public services get thanks, technical services do not,

reference librarians generally get to help users find stuff and so

users think they are great, while circulation folks have to fine users

for overdue books etc. and are often seen as the bad guys. As a

director I have to find ways to overcome this and make sure that

everyone's contribution is recognized.

However, the way to do that is not to praise no one. If individuals do

good work that is noticed, I intend to let them know and let everyone

else in the library know as well. But I also need to find ways to

reward excellent work that is hidden from our users but makes a real

contribution to our operations.

I also need to get people used to the idea that "a full and frank

2007_01_01_archive

George Bush and OCR

Fred is a darn good writer. I liked him just fine when he was writing

a column in the Navy Times* and I like him just fine now as an ex-pat

living the good life in Mexico. His latest is pretty good and the nit

I'm about to pick does not detract from the main point which is

It doesn't matter whether an investment banker has seen a barracks

or a pair of work gloves. It bothers me to have policy made, and

wars started, by those who have never seen the country they rule,

or the world they play with, who have never had to make a living,

to carry a rifle or worry about snipers, who have never run the

back alleys of Taipei or anywhere else and, god help us, can't

serve their own potatoes.

However he launched his column thusly

Two incidents come to mind, of no shattering import but serving as

windsocks. First, a politician I barely know, but of import in the

making of national policy, told me recently that he had never been

in Washington's subway, though he lives in Washington. Second,

there was the astonishment of the senior Bush on observing the

technology of a checkout line in a supermarket, into none of which

had he apparently been. He didn't know how to buy groceries.

That last didn't happen the way it was reported. It really bugs me

when people just accept urban legends and report them as fact, when

fact checking is so damned easy.

In 1992 President George Bush went to a Florida trade show. A

gentleman showed him the latest development in scanner technology

for supermarket checkout lines; it could read and reconstruct the

information on torn labels -- a pretty big deal for

optical-recognition technology and for people like me who get stuck

behind customers who like to buy 35 cans of potted meat from the

marked-down bin.

How big a deal it really was is irrelevant, President Bush was

polite and made a big deal out of it nonetheless. Still, Gregg

McDonald, of the Houston Chronicle, the print reporter in the pool

covering Bush that day, didn't even mention the event in his own

coverage. But that didn't stop Andrew Rosenthal of the New York

Times from writing up the story. He used two paragraphs from

McDonald's pool report and a misleading photo of Bush looking

surprised at what seemed to be a normal check-out scanner. They ran

the article on page one as a sign that George Bush was not a man of

the people. The event quickly became shorthand for Bush's

aloofness.

Soon, the story was completely debunked by -- among others -- Brit

Hume, then with ABC. Writing in The American Spectator , Hume wrote

that even though the story was "almost wholly untrue....[it] became

part of the legend of a President who just didn't know how things

were out there in the real world."

space for rest of us in few years

2008_01_01_archive

Paper on join

There is a new paper giving the details on the join operator which

allows high scalability in shape analysis. We have submitted this to

CAV 2008.

phenol and sulfur some notes on pka

Phenol and Sulfur - Some notes on pKa values and Wikipedia

As posted on the ChemBark blog depends the higher acidity of Phenol

mainly on an inductive and not a mesomeric effect, which was till this

post wrong on Wikipedia.

I must comment on this

God knows that we in the chemical blogosphere love the Wikipedia,

but read it with skepticism. ChemBark

Wikipedia depends on 'be bold in updating pages!'. If you see errors,

please discuss them on the talk pages and/or change them by citing

correct references. Never forget that we talk about science and that

it would be extremely boring without Serendipity! Do you know that an

impressive amount of chemical, pharmaceutical, and biological

inventions were rather found than really designed?

Anyway, as highlighted by this article about sulfur acidity involves

drug design sometimes parts of rational ignorance, or was bounded

rationality *big grin* ? Well, especially in this case might this

question not be easy to answer.

Structures (in SMILES line notation). Please use Egon's Greasmonkey

scripts for a link-out.

* Phenol c1ccccc1O

* Cyclohexanol C1CCCCC1O

* Propen-2-olC=C(O)C

at 4/12/2007 05:53:00 PM

Technorati tags: acid dissociation constant, acidity, bounded

2006_01_01_archive

The New Space Race - 1/1/2006

'60 Minutes' - The New Space Race, Sunday, January 1, 2006.

The private sector's race to space is being led by maverick

aeronautical engineer Burt Rutan, who foresees thousands of people

enjoying the view from space in the very near future. Ed Bradley