Ruchira S. Datta

Happy New Year! - Afonso Xavier

My surgical kit contains: Blade - Highest quality by X-Acto. For opening the patient up. Duct Tape - For surgical repairs. WD-40 - For clearing up adhesions, gastrointestinal obstructions, and whatnot. Pliers - For performing extraction. Binder Clip - For clamping, e.g., bleeders. Drinking Straw - For suction. Stapler - For closing the patient up. Pencil - For planning out my operative course. Eraser - Staedtler Mars Plastic erases everything completely! For fixing mistakes. Calculator - If the patient is bleeding out 20ml/min, how long do I have before she bleeds to death? Dice - Random number generator. When making decisions, I need to game out possible scenarios. With my calculator, pencil, and dice, I have everything I need to run Monte Carlo simulations! A writing surface, you ask? Did you know an adult human has 16 square feet of skin? In case the pencil lead doesn't adhere, you may notice my blade has a nice pen-like form factor. - Ruchira S. Datta

Hahaha! - Anne Bouey

"[Glaxo-Smith-Kline] is making its trial database available to researchers in an attempt to steer the use toward scientific purposes. It is not merely providing summary data, but is sharing patient-level data, which will support a broader array of research and is a higher level of transparency...this step alone is remarkable...I think we will look back on today as a watershed moment." Hope this pans out. - Ruchira S. Datta

""Under the hood we built a new engine for computing on streams, called the StreamOS, and we wrote it completely in javascript and HTML5. The StreamOS does a lot of things, like real-time natural language processing and semantic classification, topic detection, analytics, sentiment analysis, trend detection, personalization, visualization, profiling, computation, storage, networking, messaging, and much more… ... But what’s most interesting about the StreamOS is that, after years of optimization, we have gotten the StreamOS engine down to the size of a photo. And it runs in a distributed fashion, in your browser, when you are at Bottlenose." - Ruchira S. Datta

From http://www.tnr.com/article... - Ruchira S. Datta

Great word. See also _The Metaphysical Club_ http://amzn.to/MYCc9K - Ruchira S. Datta

I don't know, but I voted for it! - Laura Norvig from iPhone

Thanks Walt. - Ruchira S. Datta

This particular feature is useful during collaborative liveblogging so we can see each other's comments and reduce redundancy while composing our own. - Ruchira S. Datta

On the plus side for Google+, conference liveblogging bangs on the commenting system really hard, and I've seen nary a glitch so far. - Ruchira S. Datta

A few special interests, namely certain commercial publishers, have spearheaded this act by making claims about open access publishing that fly in the face of reality, e.g., the success of the Public Library of Science (PLoS), and the fact that the peer review process is alive and well in math and physics despite the extensive use of the arXiv.org preprint server ahead of publication. - Ruchira S. Datta

See more about the Research Works Act here: http://scienceblogs.com/confess... - Ruchira S. Datta

Maybe they were typing with a Boston accent? - Kristin

I was thinking the same thing, Kristin; but I suspect there should be an "h" where the "r" is missing if that was the case. - DAMMIT, MR. NOODLE

kind of cute aren't you chickmunk? - NoahDavidSimon

Congratulations! - imabonehead

thank you for sharing this great news with us, :) - chaz2b

Because the guys didn't approve the new delicious TOS. - Napolux

Napoulx, thanks. - Ruchira S. Datta

I'm not sure how I'll feel about it once it's fixed -- sometimes it's nice to have transient chats. - Ruchira S. Datta

Facebook chat and messaging were always broken, even separately and not for technical reasons... - Jean-Marc Liotier

"Ross and his collaborators told half the players in their experiments that they were playing the Community Game and the other half that they were playing the Wall Street Game. The two groups were identical in all other respects. Yet, in the Community Game group, 70% started out playing cooperatively and continued to do so throughout the experiment. In the Wall Street Game group, the proportions were reversed: 70% of the players didn’t cooperate with one another. Thirty percent started out playing cooperatively but stopped when the others didn’t respond." ! - Ruchira S. Datta