Hey City Zen!

So here it is. I'm 50. Looking back, looking now, and looking forward the feeling is most of all of Joy. Of what I had, have and plan to work for. Not that life did not give me some lemmons, but if anything, what I am most proud of in these 50 years is to have turned them into lemonade---Beyonce is not the only one. When we left Angola as refugees, piled up on too few seats for people on the airlift, we had so much Joy when my brother managed (with a little help from me) to sneak in our tortoise. Lemonade never felt so good and it only got better from there. Obrigado.

So, to celebrate this Joy, the lovely wife (who also turned 50 this year) and I threw a big party in Lisbon, by the sea last month. It was so very wonderful to be with family and friends, all special to us at some point and now---despite a few dear friends who could not make it. During the night I DJed for them (in partnership with my cousin, the other rebel, rebel). We wanted to celebrate the Joy of these 50 years, so this is what this DJ set is all about. A Joyous Party. So here it is, Joy. It's live, errors and all. You can access it on E-Trash's site (Username: apollo, Password: feelingfree).

Labels: #Dance, #Music

Sure, I share Popkin's call to Update the Nobel Prizes, but that is just the tip of the iceberg (or the ivory tower). In truth, from universities, to funding bodies and even to the top journals that dictate impact, science has not updated itself to the changing reality. Even Popkin's article fails to discuss the lack of Nobel recognition for Computer Science/Informatics, when this has been the field that most dramatically changed society in the last century. As I like to say, Turing and Von Neumann had much greater impact in the lives of people than Darwin, yet recognition of the field is lacking not only at the Nobel level. You will very rarely see a computer scientist in the top scientific advising bodies in any country (those are typically reserved for Nobel categories). Same is true for editors and thus papers in Nature and Science. But beyond discipline, what is truly lacking is support and recognition for interdisciplinary research, which is needed to actually solve problems---something that both Turing and Von Neumann already excelled at. Nobel's main sin is to actually award prizes per discipline, rather than unconstrained advance. But this is also the sin of most national funding agencies who organize calls within disciplinary walls and prefer to fund the agendas of lead principal investigators from a discipline (props to NIH and somewhat NSF for actually making measurable advances to try to counter this, despite the conservative, disciplinary disposition of universities and scientists alike). Universities too, remain largely organized by traditional disciplines as they were in Mr. Nobel's days. This makes it very hard for teams of scientists to escape the silos of disciplinary training and be collectively rewarded, rather than made to follow the single agenda of a lead investigator---even though we know that no single lab can address the complex challenges of the 21st century.

Labels: #Interdisciplinarity, #Nobel, #Science, #Turing, #VonNeumann