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30 hours after the earthquake, I confirmed my parents, siblings and son are all well. Also Fabiola's family in Chile are OK; we have been able to contact most of our friends and they are also fine.

More information in Manzana Mecánica (in Spanish).

The Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA) is one of the top venues in computer science. In this year's edition SODA'10, there is a paper by Flavio Chierichetti, Silvio Lattanzi and Alessandro Panconesi: "Rumour Spreading and Graph Conductance".

In the paper, there is a very interesting footnote in the front page:

For the role of the Italian Ministry of University and Research please see the Unacknowledgements.

This is what you find at the end of the paper (emphasis added):

Unacknowledgements: This work is ostensibly supported by the the Italian Ministry of University and Research under the FIRB program, project RBIN047MH9-000. The Ministry however has not paid its dues and it is not known whether it will ever do.

I hope the Ministry will pay now!

El ex-obispo de ciudad de México y cardenal Javier Lozano, indicó que los homosexuales "nunca entrarán al reino de los cielos" y que la homosexualidad es "un insulto a Dios".

Un vocero del vaticano, Federico Lombardi, se apresuró a declarar en un e-mail que esto no representa la posición oficial de la Iglesia Católica, que es que "la práctica de actos homosexuales es pecaminosa, pero la homosexualidad no lo es".

Aurelio Mancuso, el presidente de la asociación de derechos homosexuales Arcigay le contestó al cardenal lo siguiente:

«Si è vero, le donne, gli e le omosessuali, le/gli trans consapevoli e liberi non entreranno mai nel vostro Regno dei Cieli, che è un luogo oscuro e ingiusto, cui può accedere solamente chi condivide le vostre farneticazioni e volontà di dominio sui corpi e sulle idee di milioni di persone libere e determinate a sconfiggere tutti i pregiudizi di cui siete millenari portatori.»

«Sí, es verdad, las mujeres, ellas y los homosexuales, a sabiendas y libremente no entraran jamás en vuestro Reino de los Cielos, que es un lugar oscuro e injusto, al cual puede acceder solamente el que comparte vuestros delirios y voluntad de dominio sobre los cuerpos y las ideas de millones de personas libres y determinadas a derrotar todos los prejuicios de los cuales sois milenarios portadores.»

Correlator is a new way of searching information. It is currently built on top of the English Wikipedia, but can use any source of information as its data collection.

Given a query, it first assembles an "overview" page synthesized from sentences in Wikipedia articles. It also analyzes matching phrases to find names of persons, locations, and dates related to the query. Then, these results are presented in a way that is dependent on the type of entity: persons are shown in a sociograph, locations on a map, and dates on a timeline.

Correlator was launched a few days ago. TRY IT!: Dinosaurs in Argentina, transistor or Picasso and Peace.