An interesting lecture on IT conversations by Microsoft Research sociologist Marc Smith.

Sociology provides insights into web communities, essentially collective action through computing. Keywords: "collective action dilemma theory", "interactive sociology", "social network theory", "social software".

What's the opposite of socializing? Getting work done? Well, a lot of getting work done is socializing, so, perhaps they aren't antonyms.

May 13th is the combined graduation for Tulane University. Presidents Bush (dad) and Clinton will both speak.

From the Washington Post: Displaced Students Return To La. for 2nd College Try

Terry Hartle of the American Council on Education said university administrators don't want to be seen as poaching students from the hobbled Gulf Coast schools.

I knew this was the position of the medical schools, I didn't realize it applied to universities generally.

"Not too many operations in the city have as much economic clout as the university," said Professor Richard Teichgraeber,

Tulane was the largest private employer in the city before the storm, now they're the largest employer period. By far.

In the style of a Fermi problem 'never' can be defined by comparing something's half-life to the life of the universe. Examples (somebody check my math: in the spirit of a Fermi problem I rounded a lot):

If a protein of 100 amino acid residues had to assume every possible conformation at the theoretically fastest rate (the period of a molecular vibration is about 10^-13 seconds) then it would take 10^85 seconds or 10^77 years to have a 50% chance of finding it's native, biologically active conformation. (paraphrased from Lehninger's Principles of Biochemistry, 3rd Ed.)

How long would a 1000 monkeys have to type to have a 50% chance of punching out Hamlet? There are about 167,000 characters in unique sequence, 96 characters on the keyboard, and a good typist can type 100 words a minute, or about 8 characters per second. The monkeys will be there (96^167)/8 or about 10^320 seconds.

This is huge! Copyright-safe searching through Google. It's available on the advanced search page.

A short article on being married to a radiologist. Courtesy of Sumer's Radiology and Grand Rounds at Random Acts of Reality.

I'm in a meeting with the President of Tulane, Dr Cowen, who is also the commissioner of the Bring Back New Orleans Taskforce, responsible for the public education committee. Seven reports from the seven committees are due out to the larger task force and the public next week.

The big issue is the levies, and I addressed that in a previous post. The second issue is housing. The two main options are

• Level select neighborhoods, like the lower ninth ward

• Offer a one-year right of return where people have one year to go back. If a neighborhood can consolidate and demonstrate a plan, it can stay, otherwise, option one is executed.

• The third option is on the front page of the New York Times: A Big Government Fix-It Plan for New Orleans. Basically, the government will buy back property at no less than 60% of the pre-Katrina value and then sell the titles back to developers in the future.

TerraPass: for-profit, expensive, and well designed and marketed. Wharton School in Philadelphia.

DriveNeutral: not-for-profit, inexpensive, and poorly designed and marketed. Presidio School of Management in San Francisco.

Is up at Random Acts of Reality, which more usually hosts the posts of an emergency med tech on some island west of France. I hear they have a nice clock tower. Seriously, an excellent blog I can only hope to emulate.

From the New England Journal of Medicine's Image Challenge. It's not actually hairy, but it looks that way, because it's actually disordered overgrowth of filiform tastebuds, which normally look like this under a microscope.