Flu shot causes cold?

It doesn't make sense, but it's the second time that it happens to me.
So sitting in the couch, feeling really poorly. and downloading software, so I can do some proper work next week.

But I don't know what will happen to the weekend work...

Very late Ada Lovelace Day 2012 picture...

"Computing is too important to be left to men"
Karen Sparck-Jones, 2007.

Shieber post

When Margaret Tatcher resigned in 1990, Karen came to my office in the Computer Lab, shared with several other postdocs, excited by the news. Since I was alone in the office in the early morning, she exclaimed, `oh there is no one here' presumably  for her to tell the good news, turn around and left. I started laughing, the news were really cause for jubilation.

Later on we became good friends and I remember fondly a walk in Nancy, after the conference dinner in 2004, talking about computing, linguistics, marriage and children.

Wayback Machine, I love you! IMLA 1999

I was looking for the data on previous IMLA workshops, as we need to organize the new one, the 6th IMLA, which is happening in Rio de Janeiro, in April 2013, as part of 4th Unilog.

Now the web is vast and things never disappear from it. Unless you want them, that is.

For instance the whole Hypatia archive of pdf papers (kudos to M. Dawson -- I believe-- for creating it in the early nineties) has disappeared without a trace... But I am not going down the rabbit hole of trying to find it. Had enough of rooting around the wayback machine today to find the program of IMLA 1999.

Luckily I did find the IMLA 1999 program and at least one associated page that tells me the program committee and invited speaker. This is enough for one Saturday...

But while I'm at it I must repeat that the Wayback Machine is wonderful. The guys who conceived the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine and that keep it going are my heroes!

Reproducing the program of IMLA  1999 here to have it easily.

Patent win?...

Two great things happened two Mondays ago:

I started working at Nuance Communications in Sunnyvale, yay!

And my patent with Ji Fang, Jessica Staddon and other colleagues in PARC on detecting sensitive content in documents was granted. (Funny, only got to know about it because the guys who sell you wooden plaques told me...)

Now, I do not like the idea of patents at all.
Probably would prefer if we lived in a world where they didn't exist.

But I feel that during  my years at PARC I contributed to several projects where others got  patents and I didn't, which wasn't fair. So this is very sweet!