Talmai Oliveira

So I’ve been extensively using MATLAB recently and while writing a paper had to cite it. Simple thing, no? The whole problem is that MATLAB is a software (@electronic, right?), but it is a corporate publisher, with specified version. So one would expect an output like

[1] MATLAB version 7.10.0. Natick, Massachusetts: The MathWorks Inc., 2010.

Where

• Title of software: MATLAB
• Version of software: version 7.10.0
• Place of publication: Natick, Massachusetts:
• Publisher: The MathWorks Inc.,
• Year of publication: 2010.

But however hard I tried, this wouldn’t get compiled into my pdf file. Final solution?


@book{MATLAB:2010,
year = {2010},
author = {MATLAB},
title = {version 7.10.0 (R2010a)},
publisher = {The MathWorks Inc.},
address = {Natick, Massachusetts}
}

Done. In a very similar manner, I also learned how to cite NS-2

What is up with Arizona governor Jan Brewer’s? She recently signed the US’ most restrictive illegal alien law, SB 1070.

As a PhD student, sometimes you get so involved with your research, that you get disconnected from world events. However, when recent studies have shown that it is either “difficult to draw any strong conclusions” about the relationship between immigration and crime, or that illegal immigrants are actually less likely to commit crimes and serve time in prison than citizens, while the cities where most of them live have seen a reduction in crime in recent years, one has to look deeper into the hypocrisy of the new Arizona law. Does anyone know how the law affects people who hire illegals? That’s a simple way deal with it IMHO.

The US was born out of immigrants, has become what it is because of immigrants and should be ashamed of such kind of ultra-nationalist radicalism. When people are fearful (anyone remember black Americans before the civil rights era?) they do not vote, nor do they participate in the public sphere. They do not raise their voices and use their talents to build a broader and more pluralistic culture….

I’m just happy to be in Cincinnati and not Arizona.

UPDATE:  So it seems that the US  government filed a lawsuit against Arizona on Tuesday (6th of July) where the Justice Department stated that it undermines Barack Obama’s ability to enforce national immigration policy. US officials said they took the action after consulting with various law enforcement departments, chiefs of police, civil rights groups and other local officials.  Yay!

This is yet another one of those posts ‘for me’, as I frequently find myself having to look this up. As everyone knows, URL encoding replaces unsafe ASCII characters with “%” followed by two hexadecimal digits corresponding to the character values in the ISO-8859-1 character-set. URLs cannot contain spaces. URL encoding normally replaces a space with a + sign.

Continue reading ‘HTML URL Encoding Reference’ »