I received a rather annoying email today informing me that my office computer had been compromised by a virus and has been sending out elicit packets. Damn.

I’m not sure how I got the virus, but clearly it is a security threat to me and my school. I appreciate that removing it is not an option, but is re-imaging my machine really the best way to go? That’s right, the default response to this type of situation for our IT department is to re-image the infected machine.

Of course they will help back-up my data, but what about all my settings and all the programs that I have personally (legally) installed? I’m pretty anal when it comes to how my computer is configured and it will take me several hours to get things back to the way I like them. So I ask again, is this the right move? I’m not a security expert but it seems like there are several other steps that can be taken first: virus scan, firewall, etc… Why must they wipe everything as a first move?

Anyone have any experience with this and know how I can convince my IT folks that there is a better way? I really don’t have the time/energy to deal with re-installing my entire machine.

Help!?

All too often the popular press will jump on a scientific result and shout its praises. On the surface, this is great. The scientists get exposure. The people get knowledge. What could be wrong with that?

Well, it turns out that 99% of the time journalists seem to avoid the dirty work of reading the paper that describes the research in question and simply go for the abstract. Then, they often take one choice sentence from the abstract and extrapolate from there. This, of course, leads to conclusions which are not supported by the data.

Although the most recent example I came across isn’t necessarily an example of this type of journalism, it has the same flavor. This is an interview in Time magazine of Daniel Kripke, co-director of research at the Scripps Clinic Sleep Center in La Jolla, Calif.

The article suggests that those people who sleep between 6.5 and 7.5 hours live the longest and those who sleep less than 6.5 or more than 7.5 have a higher likelihood of dieing early. On the surface, this is terrible for me. I routinely sleep 8 - 8.5 hours per night. I guess I’m already a corpse? Of course, those of you that read the entire article will notice that Dr. Kripke acknoledges that this relationship is NOT CAUSAL. Did you get that? It’s not that sleeping more leads to early death. It’s that, for whatever reason, people who sleep longer also die younger. It does not mean that if I sleep 1 fewer hour I will live longer!

Now, the good news is that this was at least mentioned in the article…but not till pretty far into it. Most people just read the headline and the first paragraph, a dangerous practice. If I took this seriously (as I’m sure many people will), I might uproot my life based on the belief that I’m sleeping too much.

Journalists needs to get some stronger ethical standards when it comes to presenting scientific research and acknowledge things like correlation <> causation early on. Defusing these types of misconceptions will surely lead to a more informed citizenry.

Clearly any time you have to travel you fall behind in a slew a different arenas: work, friends, family, etc… One area that particularly gets to me is my blog reading.

I read something like 40 different blogs on a regular basis. Most of them only post something 2-3 times / week so it’s easy to keep up. But some, like Digg, Engadget, and Gizmodo have hundreds of posts per day. This means that when I get back home (as I just did), my RSS reader ( google reader) has more than 1,000 posts to go through.

The decision I am presented with is: do I a) read them all, b) read some of them, or c) mark them all as read and move on with my life. Option (a) is clearly out of the question. (B) seems appealing, but then I always feel like I’m missing something. (C) is what I usually wind up doing, but then I worry that I will be left out of the loop.

What do you guys do? Is there a strategy for catching up on 100s or 1,000s of posts? Help!?!