Preface: Of the parables and other tales that have informed your style of interpersonal dealings, the way that you manage your relationships, which have had a prominent impact? For many, of course, there are the Torah, the Bhagavad Gita, the Dao De Jing and the Analects of Confucius, the Bible or the Qur'an. For interpretation and anecdotal commentary, there are the Talmud, the Mencius, and the Hadith. Better scholars of philosophy than I have produced many ages' worth of analysis, annotation, and metacommentary on these work, though, so rather than attempt another Jesus CEO: Using Ancient Wisdom for Visionary Leadership, I'm going to promote another book that conveys some messages about leadership, but that you may not have thought of very much as a good model: J.R.R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion.

( The Sons of Feanor and the Union of Maedhros )
( Maedhros: humility in strength, coalition leadership, building to last )
( Maglor: mentorship and mercy )
( Celegorm, Caranthir, and Curufin: do-it-yourself, enemies of enemies, and the power of oratory )
( Amrod and Amras: survivor type )
( Final assessment )

This is the first part of a seven-part series.

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Banazir

Seeing as I run a research group devoted to Knowledge Discovery in Databases, I thought I'd mine my IM contact list data. Here are some demographics I found interesting.

( Research students )
( Alumni on contact list )
( Affiliate students on contact list )

Moral of the story: get Trillian or GAIM, everyone! Multi-IM clients keep everyone interconnected and cut down on the overhead for those of us who are otherwise forced to relay messages from one service to another.

Also, which of my contacts have Skype or Google Talk? Please reply to this message (you can do it "anonymously", but please give your name or IM).

--
Banazir

Props to Waleed Al-Jandal, one of the grad students in my group, the Lab for Knowledge Discovery in Databases. He's a second-year Ph.D. student and just passed all of his preliminary exams. Like Jason Li, he's now technically "ABD" (all but dissertation). It will be a year or two yet, but good job, Waleed!

--
Banazir

I was going to call this "An Immodest Proposal" or "A Proper Rant", but as you well know, I'm too much of a pragmatist not to get straight down to brass tacks on this subject.

I've been thinking - not just this morning, nor only this past week, but really this whole semester - about what we need to get some foundations of mathematics and theoretical CS percolating into the heads of our undergrads again. As usual, YMMV, this is only IMNSHO, and expect no mollycoddling.

( What makes a computer scientist? )
( A proposed partial list of essentials )

( General Mathematics )