Day 12 of 1000

Our plan for this Labor Day weekend is to apply to colleges, do homework (Lorena, Kelly, and Christian), and work out.  Christian has pretty much decided he wants to go to NCSU.  Kelly is torn.  For now she will apply at NCSU, San Diego State University, and University of Idaho, in that order.  There are lots of criteria, but proximity to friends and family, a good statistics program, acceptance of credits already earned, and the ability to get scholarships are all high on her list.  This is an on-going process in a high state of flux.  It is also a lot of fun, so I am sure we will write about it often.  You can also read about it at Kelly’s blog.

I do not know how my buddy Andrew does it.  He finds relevant, obscure blogs and websites on a regular basis.  He sent me a link to one named Retraction Watch this morning.  It is one of my pet peeves.  One of many, very big problems in academia today is the whole publish or perish, peer review process.  The whole authorship pecking order thing creates an environment where cheating is rampant.  The worst part is that the powerless (read “students”, both graduate and undergraduate here) suffer a lot at the hands of unethical researchers and professors.  Should the person who fills out the grant applications and schmoozes with the government bureaucrats and other toadies that shell out money confiscated from the tax payers be the principle authors or should it be the people who do the heavy intellectual lifting and write the papers–students and industrial partners.  Should the research that gets funded be that which is selected by politically correct government bureaucrats and other toadies that give out the confiscated monies or should it be driven by more altruistic methods (e.g. sickness cures and military needs) or market needs.  The Retraction Watch blog identifies a few of the high profile cases where this abysmal system has failed abysmally.  Thanks for the link Andrew.

There are lots of rumblings in the press recently about the new Amazon Tablet.  It is rumored to run Android and to be very cheap.  I cannot wait to get my hands on one of these.  All the programming work I am doing on the Nook Color to learn about Android should apply to this new tablet.