2002/03/07: A lots of writing ahead

Strange case of mathematical plagiarism

New York Times: "Mr. Casti's rampant plagiarism is still more peculiar because mathematically it is so insignificant. It is not an attempt to steal credit for original discovery, but to steal prose that explains original discovery. But far from clarifying this knotty material with crystalline elucidation, much of that prose will be unintelligible without college-level mathematics. So this case is strange indeed: credit is generously given and scandalously denied; the stakes are, in mathematical terms, unusually small; and the plagiarism is both unnecessary and unsuccessful."

Outage

At around 5pm yesterday afternoon, the power went out in my office. A second later, the lights came back on in the basement of 44 Barrows -- but the computers did not. My first thought was that something terrible happened with the earthquake retrofit effort to kill the power. But when I got to the parking lot (after noticing an unusual amount of traffic south of campus), I was told that there was a campus wide blackout.

About a day later we're back online. Power was restored last night -- but the network connection betwee interactiveu and the rest of the world was not restored until our hard-working network people in CNS fixed it. Bravo.

Needless to say, I felt so isolated without our server being up. Last night, I wrote email to Lloyd after reading his post about the power outage: "Am thus unable to read weblogs hosted at ATDP, and those at the Interactive University. As I read them regularly and often—indeed they're a regular part of my daily routine—it feels like a psychological disconnect at the moment. Or a physical one, like missing dinner. Sure, there are a thousand and one other weblogs I can be reading elsewhere, but I want to read those of my friends. Grr. Oh well, I'm hoping for the best and that the network on campus will be back up again soon, after an evening's absence."

Apparently, there are still buildings without power. The cause of the outage was "a major failure in one of five campus electrical switching stations".

Other UC Berkeley bloggers

I had been wondering whether there were other bloggers on or associated with the campus others than those in our immediate circle. I've discovered a few recently. One is Kevin Deenihan's Calstuff. (Kevin Deenihan, from what I can tell, is a student who is active in student politics on the campus.) I turned to his blog last night for news about the blackout. It seems that he might not know about our blogging community: "CALSTUFF PAYS FOR ITS HUBRIS. Following my smug assertion that Calstuff owned the Berkeley blogging market, the Lord has shown me humility. No less than TWO new Berkeley-based bloggers have set up shop."

Another is Boing Boing: A directory of wonderful things, one of whose editors/writers is David Pescovitz who is "Writer-in-Residence for UC Berkeley's College of Engineering" (according to his bio) and author of Lab Notes (research from the College of Engineering at UC Berkeley).

The third is the Radio blog of Eric Baumgartner. Eric Baumgartner is "currently the Director of the Synergy Communities: Aggregating Learning about Education (SCALE) project, a NSF-funded effort based on the University of California at Berkeley that studies the related processes of designing innovative, technology-rich science curricula and adapting innovative curricula to meet local needs and constraints." (I cam across Eric's blog when reading the Radio newsgroup.)

Feb Apr

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