If I had to guess, I'd say Slashdot and I conspired to add six months to my grad. school career, minimum. But I managed to get through anyway, so I don't care. Good luck and thank you.

This is a really common problem in the academy. So common in fact, that one particular academician has come up with a special license, the Community Research Academic Programming License (aka, the CRAPL). It's worth a look and good for a chuckle:

http://matt.might.net/articles/crapl/

A search of the Auburn Montgomery website, produces several "News & Events" hits which show Dr. Aaij giving public lectures and supporting student scholars. A Google Scholar Search on Michel Aaij shows a regular publication record in peer reviewed journals dating back to the late 1990s, at least. This guy is a good scholar and, from the article, strikes me as a good colleague, even without the Wiki contributions. He deserves tenure. The fact that he found the time for this other form of service/scholarship on top of his other work is very commendable and I'm glad to see it included in his portfolio. The fact that this did make it into his portfolio is better for Wikipedia than it is for Dr. Aaij, who I think wouldn't have gotten tenure no matter what. In any case, I say "Congratulations, Dr. Aaij!"

The journal article on which TFA is based is embargoed behind Kluwer's academic firewall's and my school doesn't have a subscription to this one. So, I can't see the actual article. However, the comments from some of the people who *can* see the article are telling, to wit:

"Only by a stretch of imagination do you see a linear correlation in there. Look at figure 3 ... http://journals.lww.com/jcrani...
OMG!!..."

and......

"This is only a pilot-study, and should NOT be brought into the media before a larger and more rigorous study has been done. This study has very small sample groups, and they should have had a group with the cellphones at their waste, but turned off. It could be other things than the electromagnetic radiowaves, i.e. the weight of the phones, if there is an effect at all, which a larger study will clarify."

not to mention.....

"This is only a pilot-study, and should NOT be brought into the media before a larger and more rigorous study has been done. This study has very small sample groups, and they should have had a group with the cellphones at their waste, but turned off. It could be other things than the electromagnetic radiowaves, i.e. the weight of the phones, if there is an effect at all, which a larger study will clarify. "

and.....

"Also, the study doesn't say if the measurement and calculations were unblinded, and the sample groups were not randomized, and recruited by word of mouth locally. This is just the flaws without looking at the results. Again, please stop writing about pilot studies, unless you are giving it a critical evaluation."

as well as....

"Something is wrong with the user cited charts where the bone density declines on a range from zero to 80,000 hours.

Now at maybe 2000 hours exposure per year, that means 40 years exposure. How could they get that much data?

Chart labels must be wrong. "

followed up by....

"From the method section of the study:

'Men of the first group provided information about the
number of years they had used a mobile cell phone and the number
of hours per day that they carried the phone in the belt pouch. The
number of years of use and the product of years of use and hours per
day each year carrying the phones were used as rough estimates of
cumulative exposure.'

*****In other words*****

A small pilot study with questionable (or at least very simplistic) methods for estimating for cumulative exposure was conducted on a small and apparently undifferentiated sample and a statistically significant result was obtained.

As one of that "strange breed," I was initially concerned. Now, not so much...

Timothy's other hobbies include feeding mice to snakes, setting up barrels loaded with fish then handing out guns, and throwing blood in the water at shark-infested beaches. Wow. I really do kinda feel bad for the guy who wrote this original post. Kinda, but not really.

Basic relational database design is about logic and structure. When compared with other areas of computing, I would argue that the the original materials worked out by Codd and Date have not changed nearly as dramatically. There are certainly exceptional sub-areas where there have been major changes (e.g. the introduction of the object model and development of XML and RDF, to name but two prominent examples), but if I were you, I would suggest doing two things:

1. Do some research into existing relational database platforms (e.g. SQL Server, Oracle, PostGRES), figure out which model will ultimately work best for you, and get a book on that implementation of SQL and RDMS. Every intro to databases book has a chapter on relational database design. That will get you started. You can also skip the platform selection process if you are already stuck with a database.

2. Read this: Date on Database: Writings 2000-2006 by C. J. Date

Codd (now deceased) and Date are still the authorities, IMHO, and this latter book will give you a good overview of major conceptual issues in relational database design.

There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California.

-Edward Abbey

He reminds me of Marc Andreesen, back when Marc was that age.

Funny you should mention him....

...is 25 years old. One of the sentences in TFA begins "When I was in my dorm room at Harvard."

So, a rich, successful, right-place-at-place-at-the-right-time twentysomething makes a self-serving comment born out of the hubris and inexperience of youth. This is like Paris Hilton saying "It doesn't matter what you do, as long as its *hot*" and it is only newsworthy because Paris Hilton isn't in a position to take a great deal of the intellectual capital I've invested in Facebook and simply passing it to whomever suits her fancy. Perhaps some of Zuckerberg's older business partners could recommend that he shut up.