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I found this excellent survey of Collaborative Filtering which includes a wide range of techniques, problems found and so on. A must if you want to better understand how sites such as Amazon help you find the books you love!
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This morning, I am deeply upset. Some of you who know me will know why. No, I don’t care so much that Buch was elected, though it does puzzle me. Read through, you might find out why I’m upset. I did my Ph.D. with the intent of getting into “industrial research”. Yes, there are different…
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Here’s a report released in 2001 on the state of doctoral education. It looks like a serious study and the conclusion is scary: What we learned may not be entirely surprising because our findings confirm many of the concerns that have been raised in the last 10 years. However, our data provide…
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The Alps
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Found an interesting UK Indie Rock bad on inDiscover: The Alps. They have a number of freely available songs, but I only listened to “The Shining”. There are also some new bands to explore on inDiscover: Steel Poniez (bunch of ladies) and School for the Dead (bunch of dudes). Go! Download now!…
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Interesting post by Sean McGrath (not the inDiscover‘s Sean McGrath, the Propylon’s Sean McGrath) on how Gmail (Google Mail) was designed. For those who don’t know Gmail is a revolutionary Web mail service à la Hotmail, a step beyond anything else I had ever seen. He explains that Gmail is…
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Tim Bray who invented XML among other things, takes a stand against Web Services. Here’s what he says: No matter how hard I try, I still think the WS-* stack is bloated, opaque, and insanely complex. I think it’s going to be hard to understand, hard to implement, hard to interoperate, and hard…
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So, you want to do a Ph.D.?
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Seb sent me this extract of a book. The extract is called So, you want to do a Ph.D.? As usual with this sort of book, it is delightful. Here’s a fun quote: One thing which is seldom mentioned is what happens to you after you finish the PhD. A classic story is as follows. A student focuses…
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Here’s a link to slides from a talk by Roger Magoulas, (O’Reilly Media, Inc.) about building the open warehouse. The talk was presented at O’Reilly Open Source Convention 2004. Commodity hardware, faster disks, and open source software now make building a data warehouse more of a resource…
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Building the Open Warehouse
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Sharleen talks about how evil junior faculty can be in their approach with grad students: (…) in academia, (…), there are limited options, and a poor grad student may have to work with the asshole who has naive, unethical, or objectionable approaches to working with grad students. Now, we…
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I had an off-line discussion with a collaborator about student supervision and how frustrating it can be. As a professor, you have, from time to time, to supervise students. It could be a graduate student you are supervising as part of their studies, it could be an undergraduate project, it could…
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e-Learning or else…
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Important post today by Yuhong, on her experience with e-Learning. She recalls a few facts: a decent videoconference setup for a classroom is less than $5000; MIT is setting itself up to become the major competitor in the future education market through e-Learning: webLab and open sourceware; we…
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How to Misuse SQL´s FROM Clause
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I stumbled on an interesting SQL article on the Misuse of the FROM Clause. The author argues that FROM clauses should refer to only two types of tables: those from which you want values returned those allowing to join two or more tables in the above category In other words, if your select is on…
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Tall, Dark, and Mysterious wrote about this student she has in her class who is actually a fairly typical student: “I memorized how to do the problem you did in class, but then on the test you put a DIFFERENT problem, and you never showed us how to do THAT one, and it’s not fair! My method of…
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I’ve written on this blog about the recent drop in enrollment for Computer Science degrees in North America: I gave an estimate of a drop by 25%. Looks like it is worse: The number of new undergraduate majors in U.S. computer science programs has fallen 28 percent since 2000, reports the…
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Some days ago, I stated on this blog that I had a Ph.D. in mathematics (true fact) and that I didn’t know my own phone number nor did I know multiplication tables (also true). My wife knows it is true. She still claim she has superior brain power because not only does she know our phone number,…