Link

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!

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.

A recent Gallup poll showed that only 4 in 10 believe in Darwin's evolution in the US. I am saddened, but not surprised, to hear this. Religion is a dangerous system of control that wants to keep society in a permanent state of childhood. I can not agree more with Émile Zola: "Civilization will not attain perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest."

"As Darwin is being lauded as one of the most important scientists in history on the 200th anniversary of his birth (on Feb. 12, 1809), it is perhaps dismaying to scientists who study and respect his work to see that well less than half of Americans today say they believe in the theory of evolution [...], the evidence is clear that even to this day, Americans' religious beliefs are a significant predictor of their attitudes toward Darwin's theory. Those who attend church most often are the least likely to believe in evolution, and most likely to say they do not believe in it."

Source: Gallup, Feb. 11, 2009.