When I worked for IBM, I didn’t use Skype. As with many large companies, they don’t allow the use of software on company computers unless the lawyers have approved the terms and conditions — the end-user license agreement, EULA — and the company lawyers didn’t approve the Skype license. It didn’t matter much to me: I had a Cisco IP telephone on my desk, and software on my computer to control the phone. I could make and receive calls from my computer as though I were at my desk.

In the issue dated 10 October, Science News reports on a study that suggests that peer reviewers prefer positive results:

The first (intended to be annual)^[1] Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism was held on Saturday, sponsored by the New England Skeptical Society and the New York City Skeptics. The conference was meant to present the views and opinions of some skeptics — including comments on what it means to be a skeptic — and to give skeptics a venue to get together, meet, and talk. They cutely gave it a name that they could abbreviate as NECSS and pronounce “nexus”.

It’s a rainy morning here in the New York City area — not at all like the bright, cloudless day of eight years ago.

Of those affected, back then, by the events of the day, many were friends and co-workers of people who died. Today I want to tell a story about one of those.

Tony used to work with me at the T.J. Watson Research Center. I was his manager when, one weekend in the late ’90s, I got a message from our purchasing system that he’d ordered a book about web page design. I thought that odd, considering that our research group wasn’t working on anything related to that, and I made a mental note to ask him about it on Monday.