Small is beautiful

I agree with the Economist on this: http://www.economist.com/science/tq/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12673233

Text summarizer

This looks interesting: http://libots.sourceforge.net/

MiKTeX for Linux

Will be interesting to check out when it matures a little: http://blog.miktex.org/post/2008/09/MiKTeX-28-Beta-1-for-GNULinux.aspx

Writing journal article using LaTeX

I have been intimated by the fact that many journals, especially in the filed of social science, accept only Word format submission. Writing in Word has been a terrible experience for me: error-prone, hard to automate, etc. But I have not been brave enough to go out and explore the possibility to mainly work on LaTeX and figure out ways to get the final draft into Word.

After some research, I think now I have all the tools that can handle all the important aspects of this process, and I am going to write my next paper - smoking in China - in LaTeX and see how it eventually turns out.

As a teacher, I will definitely teach students how to combine Linux, Emacs, LaTeX, Stata, estout, R, and sweave to automate the process of data analysis and results reporting. Maybe that will make a difference in the future.

Linux laptop

• http://system76.com/index.php
• http://laclinux.com/en/Laptop
• http://www.zareason.com/shop/home.php
• http://www.shoprcubed.com/

I especially like the System 76 (for its Ubuntu-specific feature) and Los Alamos (for its Thinkpad hardware, they even offer the new ultraportable X300!), and really wish that they could combine strength.

ESS (Emacs speaks statistics) has a new version out today

http://ess.r-project.org/

This is unbelivable

http://austinist.com/2008/12/10/aisd_teacher_throws_fit_over_studen.php

Open source and acedemia

Interesting materials:
http://www.bgsu.edu/cconline/tayloriley/intro.html

Bash vs. Python

• http://ztatlock.blogspot.com/2008/11/bash-vs-python.html
• http://www.redhatmagazine.com/2008/02/07/python-for-bash-scripters-a-well-kept-secret/