USENIX Keynotes and other Multimedia

Few Intesting keynotes and other sessions at @USENIX - Publications - Multimedia

Inaugural Address

Today President Obama, the 44th president of US sworn in, and lot of people are looking froward for him for change. We hear it discussed, sometime even in lectures, spelled out by professors themselves. Here is his Inaugural Address (transcript) , I like his addresses, even though he is not a powerful speaker, he uses pause to a great effect, and is able to rise emotions.

Also this is the Lincoln's second inaugural address, which is considered one of the best, and it includes the famous quote, "With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right ....--Abraham Lincoln", and John F. Kennedy: Inaugural Address.

King Xerxes of Persia and beholders eyes

I watched the movie, One Night With The King couple of days ago, apart from being a nice movie one thing that stuck me was how different the King Xerxes is portrayed in this movie compared to the movie 300. My guess is former is much closer than 300, however it is ironic the how different things are depend on the point of view.

Google Knol & Fallacies of Distributed Computing Explained

This is interesting,Fallacies of Distributed Computing Explained.I found it in Google Knol, which according to Google is a place to share knowledge. It is a collection of authoritative articles on specific topics, and as usual they depend on crowd sourcing.

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Interesting article, Is Google Making Us Stupid? by Nicholas Carr, written by the author of the book Big Switch which I blogged about few months back (It is a reading in one of classes, could not help writing a blog after I read it). He observes that with the internet we are more and more used to skim through and jump from link to link, a habit he suspects that may have a negative effect on our brain, alienating us from serious and focus reading.
But, his evidence does not run very deep, mostly they are personal observations, however, when I think about my own net browsing habits and what I seen others do, I feel may be there is a ring of truth in it. (However, at Grad school, there is no shortage of serious reading!! I am safe :)). Nevertheless, as he himself pointed out, when "writing was invented", and "printing was invented" people complained lot, so on and so forth, and at each case our brained proved to up to the task. Humans are good at adapting, and with luck our brain will continue to do so.