As a former student of the ILLC, I am very happy to see that the ILLC has launched a blog-based webportal for the research community of logic and rational interactions, called loriweb.org. Here is a snapshot:
The ILLC has finally made an attempt going from web1.0 to web2.0, which means more dynamics and interactions!
However, I noticed that there is an important element missing on loriweb’s front page. It is a link to the RSS feed. What is RSS?
RSS (Rich Site Summary) is a format for delivering regularly changing web content. Many news-related sites, weblogs and other online publishers syndicate their content as an RSS Feed to whoever wants it.
More details of RSS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_(file_format)
Why RSS is important?
RSS solves a problem for people who regularly use the web. It allows you to easily stay informed by retrieving the latest content from the sites you are interested in. You save time by not needing to visit each site individually. You ensure your privacy, by not needing to join each site’s email newsletter. The number of sites offering RSS feeds is growing rapidly and includes big names like Yahoo News.
Actually, since the loriweb is using the popular wordpress software (good choice!), it has an RSS feed by default: http://loriweb.org/?feed=rss2. So I subscribed to it using my Google RSS Reader. But then I found this problem. The loriweb RSS feed only outputs an abstract of the content. For example, here is a snapshot of the loriweb in my Google Reader:
You have to click on the article in order to read it fully.
And this is what you see from the blog of Terence Tao, a well-regarded mathematician:
In this case I can read all his articles without leaving the my reader. The difference is small if you only subscribe to a few blogs, but very noticeable when you
subscribe to dozens of blogs, which may have 1000+ new articles every week.
So my suggestions to the webmaster of loriweb.org are as follows:
- add a link to the RSS feed in the front page
- output the full text in the RSS feed.
It is very easy to set in wordpress: login as admin, and find the Settings section, and choose the Reading subsection, then you can see the following: just make sure Full text is chosen (this view is based on version 2.7.1)
Cheers, Ji
The USA White House launched its strategy to reform the government in the Web 2.0 age. In this post:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/09/05/01/WhiteHouse/, it gives the information channels through which white house is reaching its citizens. These channels include:
- Whitehouse.gov
- Facebook.com/WhiteHouse
- MySpace.com/WhiteHouse
- Twitter.com/WhiteHouse
- Flickr.com/WhiteHouse
- Vimeo.com/WhiteHouse
- YouTube.com/WhiteHouse
- iTunes (videos & podcasts)
I would say this government is leading toward the right way. Well, my government, the Chinese government, is still using a communist version of web 1.0 tools. You see, my blog is still blocked from China Mainland. What a shame.
Once I tried to motivate a well-established scholar to set up a blog to make his website more interactive. He said, “Blog is really the thing for your generation.”
I tend to disagree with him. But it is indeed the case that the new generation would not wait long to set up their blogs. See an example:
AMS Graduate Student Blog by and for math grad students.
I am excited about this.
This BBC news article says it is about a video, and I find it here:
http://media.phayul.com/?av_id=147&av_links_id=323
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiZL9zvQ3Sc
Speechless. 
When you are blocking information sources without a good reason, we tend to think you are hiding the truth.
I became interested in the issues related to the global economic crisis because the impact to people’s lives is tremendous. Yesterday, the USA Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner unveiled the public-private plan, which is to buy up to $2 trillion in toxic assets that are weighing down the USA banks.It is very intersting to see that the New York Times called four economists — Paul Krugman, Simon Johnson, Brad DeLong and Mark Thoma — to tackle this question: Will the Geithner Plan Save USA? Click each name for their opinions:
- Paul Krugman, Op-Ed columnist, Princeton University
- Simon Johnson, M.I.T.
- Brad DeLong, U.C. Berkeley
- Mark Thoma, University of Oregon
My general impression, after reading these experts’ opinions, is that this plan is very risky and will not be likely work; the eventual step might be the bank nationallization, which will see a lot of resistance from the Senate.
It also seems to me that China has certain advantage in the banking system as most of the banks were already nationalized 60 years ago. But because of the corrupted the political system, I think China is suffering from another set of problems in this crisis.
What can we do as a person to help to recover from this crisis?
