Die 10 wichtigsten Merkmale eines universitären Fachgebietes:
1. Das Fachgebiet ist die Wahrheit. Die Einsicht, die von der Fachgebietsleitung offenbart wurde, ist heilig und erhaben über jedliche Kritik. Peer-Review sichert die Originalität, Brisanz und den Wert dieser Wahrheit und offenbart die Unzulänglichkeit anderer Meinungen.

2. Das Wissen des Fachgebietes ist hierarchisch und esoterisch. Anfänger erhalten nicht Zugang [...]

Osterloh M. / Wagner, Gert G. (forthcoming) Anreize im Wissenschaftssystem, in: Wirtschaftsdienst, Heft 3.

Nachweislich also so gut wie gar nicht

Peer-Review ist meist kaum zuverlässiger als ein Münzwurf. Ihre prognostische Qualität ist sehr gering. Zusätzlich werden die meisten Gutachten nicht von den Professoren selbst, sondern von ihren Mitarbeitern erstellt was die Qualität zusätzlich [...]

Yes, the research buisness can be a really strange milieu
Good to see that some old colleagues try to change this situation by creating some mixture of a social network for researchers, source/bibtex management and knowledge management. It’s called Scholarz (their blog) and is a spin-off of the project “Scientific Work in the Web 2.0″ [...]

The CERN is rapping the Large Hadron Rap:

(via ZEIT)

“The only real problem is scaling. All others inherent are from that one.
If you can scale, everything else must be working.”
MPLS Conference (Nov. 1998) – Mike O’Dell, Chief Scientist, UUNet

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If you are interessed in background information on high-scalabilty web solutions and you are not a religious IBM-, HP-, $wahteverbigcompany-believer highscalability.com might be worth reading for [...]

Michael Ogawa created a small application visualizing the activity of a software repository over the time… very impressive!

CAIDA, the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis, provides tools and analyses promoting the engineering and maintenance of a robust, scalable global Internet infrastructure. And sometimes they also hire an art student for an internship:

The Internet, an undergrad project by UCSD graphic art student Jennifer Hsu.
(via: blog.caida.org)

If you are interessed in background information on filesystems and how to implement them, there is a really nice e-book: Practical File System Design by Dominic Giampaolo. The target audience may be more technical people, but he writes very straightforward so even if you only have basic computational survival skills it might be worth reading.

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Harald recently blogged about a full-featured DVB-T transmitter using a normal PC and the GNURadio / URSP hard- and software. There is also a paper on this topic “Soft-DVB: A Fully-Software GNURadio-based ETSI DVB-T Modulator” by Vincenzo Pellegrini, Giacomo Bacci and Marco Luise presented at the WSR’08 and a additional paper on wireless protocol [...]