, 6 min read
Douglas Rushkoff wrote in Life Inc. that our society is nothing more than an operating system upon which we (as software) live: The landscape on which we are living “the operating system on which we are now running our social software” was invented by people, sold to us as a better way of…
, 2 min read
Everyone knows that publicly funded education is good. Right? Wait! Why? “Schools have substantial non-financial benefits.” This argument assumes that people who forgo schooling are uneducated. It is weaker in the Wikipedia era. Kids are naturally curious, and they now have access to…
, 1 min read
A programming language is Turing complete if it equivalent to a Turing machine. In practice, it means that any algorithm can be implemented. Most programming languages are Turing complete, including SQL, ECMAScript, Java, C, and so on. HTML5 + CSS3 is also Turing complete because it can be used to…
, 3 min read
The Luddite fallacy says that innovation destroys jobs. It is believed to be a fallacy because increased productivity causes prices to fall, which then boosts demand which then creates new jobs. While locally or temporarily, there might be economic growth without job creation, economists believe…
, 3 min read
When designing an information system, a piece of software or a law, experts work from a model. This model must have boundaries. When these boundaries are violated, life may become difficult: After over two years in lock-out, the journalists of the largest Montreal newspaper decided to bow to their…
, 3 min read
Back in 2005, Shirky argued that the Social Web offered an alternative to organizations. Working collaboratively has never been easier. And the innovation is ongoing: collaborative real-time editors (e.g., piratepad) are amazing. GitHub has taken collaborative software production to a whole new…
, 2 min read
Scientific publishing is wasteful. We spend much time perfecting irrelevant papers to get them through peer review. Meanwhile, important papers—that thousands of researchers will have to study—remain filled with errors or suffer from a suboptimal presentation. Surely, you have…
, 1 min read
From my experience, the quality and the quantity of the scientific research articles from China has been increasing dramatically in the last five years. To verify this impression, I crunched some numbers. In the general field where I am most active (Information Systems), China dominates in the…
, 1 min read
Not even eventually consistent
, 3 min read
Many databases engines ensure consistency: at any given time, the database state is logically consistent. For example, even if you receive purchase requests by the thousands, you will always have an accurate count of how many products you have sold, and how many remain in stock. Accountants are…
, 2 min read
It has never been easier to self-publish a book: Amazon has CreateSpace which offers a print-on-demand service and an ISBN if you want one. Self-publishing on the Amazon Kindle store could not be easier. Apple allows anyone to self-publish ebooks through its iTunes Connect service. Unfortunately,…
, 4 min read
The case that education pays is often made by comparing the income of people who graduated against the people who did not. The result is compelling. But there are numerous problems with such naive statistical analysis: Kids from wealthy families are much more likely to attend college. Moreover, we…
, 1 min read
The programming language R is a standard for statisticians. And it is free software which runs on Windows, Mac and Linux. You can learn much online about R, but if you prefer a bona fide book, there are also many to choose from. I just finished one of those: Statistical Analysis with R by John M.…
, 3 min read
Is Open Source software better than closed-source software? Is Wikipedia better than Britannica? Is NoSQL better than Oracle and SQL Server? Are blogs better than corporate news services? Do patents favor innovation? Do long and painful funding applications help science? Is learning off Wikipedia…
, 3 min read
Demarchy are political systems built using randomness. Demarchy has been used to designate political leaders in Ancient Greece and in France (during the French revolution). In many countries, jury selection is random. On Slashdot, the comment moderation system relies on randomly selected members:…
, 3 min read
Much of our institutions are limited by the pre-digital technology: (1) It is difficult to constantly re-edit a paper book; (2) without computers, global trade requires perennial currencies ; (3) without information technology, any political system more fluid than representative democracy cannot…
, 1 min read
Exceptional scientists are often a bit crazy: Kurt Gödel starved to death when his wife was hospitalized. He was paranoid. John Nash suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. Paul Erdõs was a homeless itinerant most of his life. Henry Cavendish was so shy that he only communicated with his…
, 1 min read
Between 1990 and 2010, the cost of one megabyte of disk storage went from $9 to $0.00015. Had the human population followed a similar growth, there would be 300 trillion people on Earth. (For simplicity, I am not taking inflation into account. It would make the result even more impressive.) Between…
, 3 min read
I was among the first Canadians to own a Kindle. I justified my purchase as “research”. The Kindle was not satisfying for anything but fiction and I predicted it would be obsolete within a few years. Then I got an iPad and everything changed. My slow Kindle was immediately obsolete. I stopped…
, 3 min read
I make my own yogourt because I cannot stand commercial yogourt. You can make your own yogourt in less than 30 minutes: heat milk to 112F (44C), mix in a small quantity of yogourt, leave the container of warm milk in a blanket overnight. To minimize the labor I wanted a digital thermometer with an…