Links for Friday

Bill Gasarch sends in some links on recent activities at Harvard. The Harvard alumni magazine has an "objective" (according to Gasarch) article The End of a Presidency. Also former Harvard College Dean (and Gasarch's Advisor) Harry Lewis has a new book Excellence Without a Soul with an excerpt in the Chronicle, Has Harvard Lost Its Way?

Meanwhile Nature has a online section 2020 – Future of Computing. An editorial about the section talks about an interesting relationship between science and the computer industry.

The computer industry knows that scientists can come up with strange ideas and requirements that may well, in time, have broader commercial application elsewhere. This is one of the reasons why Microsoft is engaging the scientific community with its new Towards 2020 Science report on computers in science. That report inspired this week's focus on computing in Nature. Microsoft is sponsoring free web access to our articles on the subject, although, as always, the content is exclusively Nature's responsibility.

As computing gets ever cheaper, quicker and more powerful, scientists would do well to remember that, by being a demanding and stimulating "user community" that engages the interest of companies such as Microsoft, Google and Intel, they can influence the development of the field, to everybody's benefit.