New York Times on Google PhDs

Randall Stross of The New York Times takes a look at the hiring practices of Microsoft and Google, specifically focusing on their approach to PhDs.

Working in Google’s favor is its practice of putting new Ph.D.’s to work immediately in the exact areas where they have been trained – in systems, architecture and artificial intelligence. Google, the company, may falter, but Google, the human resources experiment, is unlikely to be the cause.

Microsoft has yet to disavow old templates for hiring. Its chief college recruiter, Ms. Roby, says that among computer science Ph.D.’s, “it’s less likely to find someone with the desire to work on projects that will ship every 24 or 36 months.

A boy raised as a girl with his identical twin brother

John Colapinto wrote a really interesting article in Slate about the life of David Reimer. David Reimer was born a male, had a bothced circumcision, and Dr. John Money of Johns Hopkins performed a surgical sex change. David was raised as a girl. He had an identical twin, perfect for nature versus nurture research. He later had his female parts removed and male parts and hormones added. Mind bending stuff! David Reimer committed suicide on May 5.

So you’d like to…grab an expert OPML file

Amazon has the “So you’d like to…” guides to share product lists spanning a unique category. iTunes Music Store has iMix. What are the data structures for the online publishing world’s self published guide lists? Users of news aggregators in search of new feeds might browse a directory such as Syndic8. While viewing a channel, they see a few guides containing this feed. So you would like to… be a Web standards guru, learn photography, keep up on world news, etc. Guides could be published using OPML. It is Share Your OPML, at a very targeted level. The user would consume a CSS, SQL, San Francisco Giants bundle similar to an iMix listing in iTunes. Grab a feed at a time or load the full OPML.