Wednesday linkfest
November 12th, 2008
- Author William Gibson finds one of his books in a sad place. Happens to everyone.
- Secrets of the writing of the Daily Show. Amusing, but there are some interesting nuggets on process in there. Also note the size of the staff.
- The Nature journal has a special issue on innovation. Haven’t read these yet, but they look deliciously non-fluffy.
- The sketch that gave birth to twitter. Some archival photos from one of the inventors of twitter. Btw: I love legal pads.
- The Story of the Office 2007 Ribbon UI. Lots of backstory, photos, prototypes, etc. straight from Jensen Harris, one of the main people on the project.
- A simple plan for fixing the ridiculous H1B Visa policy in the USA. I’d like to understand a) how it got so messed up to begin with, and b) what possible arguments there are to not changing the policy in this direction.
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The “simple policy” for HiB visas has bit of ethnocentrism: the “four year university degree” part. The campus in the province next to me, in Saskatoon, has some three year degrees, Oxford and Cambridge in Britain have three years, and my own campus used to be three years. In a talk by our vice president of academics, she explained that a fourth year was added not to the top but to the bottom, as a high school make up year.
Of course some degrees, such as law and engineering, are not enough by themselves, but the solution is to require real world post graduate training, not to lengthen the on-campus degree.
It seems to me that a man from Mars, knowing everything about our society except for our schooling, would expect campus life to be three years, not four.
A year seems a lousy measure of an education, given how wide the variance is in how rigorous a program is, or in even how many courses are taught in two semesters.
But I confess ignorance on the whole mess - I’m ignorant of many of the details and much of my knowledge comes from people who have either struggled with, or have been screwed by (in their estimation), the current system.