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Eszter
I really enjoy seeing friends take up blogging because I find it helps us keep connected and it usually means more interesting reading. (I guess one could see that as a bad thing, but I’m working on honing my time-management skills.) The latest arrival is Liliputian Lilith who is a friend from graduate school. She, like me, grew up in Hungary interspersed with years in the U.S. thanks to our academic parents who rarely stayed put for more than a few years. Related to other Timberites’ experience (and I suspect many readers’) are her thoughts about the choice some of us make to live in a country other than the one in which we grew up. She has only been blogging for a few days but already has interesting posts about “mother-books” and air travel, cities, Barbie and beauty queens, and the origin of the Hungarians (related to this post on CT earlier). Today she took on John Holbo’s recent comments about Academic blogging and literary studies. Welcome to blog writing, LL! (I know you’ve been a reader for a while.;)
Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day so I wanted to take a few moments to remember. Although numerous members of my family were killed during World War II, my father survived and a few years ago decided to write his story. He did this in a fairly unconventional way. Each chapter in his book begins with a snippet from a Nobel Laureate’s life (with whom he had conducted conversations). Later in the chapter he then relates this biographical story to something in his own life. Reading the book takes us on a journey through the lesser-known moments of many famous scientists’ lives and the details of one Hungarian Jew’s life affected by the events of over 60 years ago.
Here I share with you some snippets from my father’s book. I start with a section told by my uncle about his experiences when he was 11 in a concentration camp. Then I quote the section about my father’s visit in 2002 to the camp he had been in and how poor the remembrance is there.
Excerpts from “Our Lives: Encounters of a Scientist” by István Hargittai, Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, 2004
[this quote in the book is from my uncle who was 11 at the time — EH]
The first day after our arrival [in the camp] the people got their work assignments. Mother was directed to be helper to a roofing master who turned out to be a humane Viennese man. He often shared his sandwich with Mother who pretended to eat it and brought it back for us. Children younger than 10 years old stayed behind in the camp during the day. Children above the age of 15 were considered adults and went to work with the rest. Children between 10 and 15 years old formed a special labor unit. I was in this unit, which had about 20 children. We were taken to bombed-out buildings, immediately following the bombing. We had to reach places that adults could not have reached. We had to bring out cadavers and wounded people and all the valuables. If we found just limbs or other body parts we had to bring them out as well. It was a cruel and frightening job and dangerous too.
It’s that time of year again, time for 18-26-year-old Jews who have never been on an educational trip to Israel to sign up for a free trip. I went four years ago and it was truly an experience of a lifetime. I realize I went when things were calmer, but people have been going for the past four years without problems. Although at some level there is an underlying agenda – the organizers would like visitors to enjoy their time and develop an interest in Israel – there is nothing forced about the program. Many students who go are secular or have little connection to their Jewish heritage and keep questioning many things while there. We had very interesting discussions both amongst ourselves (you travel with a group of students and a few organizers) and with people we met there.
I used to have a sign up in my office that said “I read your email”. It was just a joke, a geek’s bumper sticker to shock people. But as with so many things, what may seem like a joke or far-fetched idea one day suddenly becomes mainstream reality.
By now I’m sure many people have read about the controversy surrounding Google’s proposed new free email service, GMail. Soon after the company announced the forthcoming new service, privacy advocates started criticizing Google for potential privacy violations. The basic idea is this: the service may scan the contents of people’s email to figure out the most relevant targeted advertisement. One response to the reactions has been to say that people have a choice to use this service. If they are bothered by the practice, they do not have to use GMail. But is it really as simple as that?
With all the comments I make about search engines, I can’t help but link to this article about a new Yahoo feature.;-)
Hoping it will push them to the top of an increasingly competitive market, Internet portal Yahoo has added soul-search capabilities to its expanding line of search tools, company executives announced Monday.
For Ph.D. students, it’s not too late to apply to Webshop ’04
where graduate students interested in the intersection of technology and human behavior meet with leading experts for [a week] of seminars, discussion, and social activities that promote the production of high quality research.
The WebShop is committed to promoting scientific research and collegiality between young scholars to understand the transformative effect—both positive and negative—that the Internet has on human behavior and how the emerging persistent behaviors enable and constrain activities, understanding, knowledge, and culture.
Students get help with travel expenses and room & board is covered by the program. It’s a great opportunity!
Here are some random sites I thought people may find interesting. I maintain a mailing list (from my pre-blog days) and just sent these out in an issue.
Last weekend when I realized the NCAA Final Four championships were being played on the first night of Passover, I couldn’t help but wonder whether Elijah would be interested in watching basketball.
I see now that others are pondering similarly important questions with respect to this week’s holidays. The Head Heeb wonders what would be a good Jewish substitute for the Easter Bunny. I think my vote would be to let it be so we don’t add to the ways in which these holidays can be commercialized. But if I want to play along, I’ll say I think we should have little personified matzah. They could have facial features and arms and legs. It would resemble SpongeBob SquarePants. I think it could be cute.
I had a piece on the BBC News site yesterday. A few people have kindly sent me notes letting me know about this so I thought I should blog it so people know that I am aware of my article on the BBC site. ;-)
I should clarify that my motivation for writing this piece – or any other that mentions Google for that matter – is not a reflection of any personal love or hate relationship I may have with Google.. or any other search engine for that matter. My thoughts on the topic are a result of studying how average Internet users (as in not just me, or just some of my friends and colleagues) find information online. I have tried to make this increasingly explicit in my writing in order to avoid people sending me emotionally charged notes about how I am misunderstanding that one particular company. This part seems to be getting better as no one this time sent me messages explaining to me how to use Google to make the most of it. (Believe me, I know how to use search engines, learning those skills was the least I could do while writing a dissertation on how people find content online.:)
Brought to you by right-wing eye.
After noting yesterday that “Diebold electronic voting machines are a danger to our democracy”, it makes all the sense in the world that Avi Rubin would announce today that he is joining Diebold to become its Chief Security Officer. Well, it makes all the sense in the world as long as that announcement came today of all days.;-)
More news of interest thanks to Freedom To Tinker.
Since we’re on the topic of peeps, bunnies and bilbies, let’s not forget the seasonal reason for oranges. Is that confusing? Then you should take a look at a humanist feminist modern-version Haggadah for Passover. My referral logs from last year tell me that there are definitely others out there who seek such a text so I was happy to make one available. To elaborate, humanist means that there is no mention of a higher power and feminist refers to the inclusion of the orange on the Seder plate. It’s a modern version Haggadah because it does not only refer to events from thousands of years ago but also makes reference to the Holocaust and hardships of today. The plagues are not frogs and wild beasts but hunger and war. In general, it’s a more inclusive text. To spice things up a bit, you can also plan to have a chocolate seder plate for dessert. The first night of Passover this year falls on Monday, April 5th.
For the data geeks in the audience, here’s an updated version of the graph I created last year (see disclaimers there) tracking the coverage of the word “weblog” and “blog” in 47 US and international (English-language) dailies. Of course, this doesn’t mean too much except that the term and the artifact of blogging is diffusing in mainstream media coverage (notice the change in the ratio of the two words). It is unclear, for example, how often journalists in such newspapers acknowledge blogs as sources of information when they get a story or an idea from them. That would be something interesting to look at, but would require much more work than running some queries on Lexis-Nexis and may also involve collecting some qualitative data. Since this is not part of my research, I’m going to leave detailed investigations to others.
Seth Finkelstein comments on Ed Felten’s blog that perhaps one reason why we don’t see much mixing of people from legal and technical backgrounds at conferences is that neither lawyers nor technologists get points within their own communities for attending conferences with experts from other fields. I can’t tell if Seth agrees with this point or is merely raising it, but it’s worth considering either way. My reaction to the above approach is that it seems short-sighted to assume that you cannot gain something valuable – something that could eventually score you points in your own community – from attending a conference that isn’t solely made up of people from your own field.