, 1 min read
There is an equivalent to SQL for multidimensional databases (OLAP) called MDX. Alas, just like XML has DOM, OLAP would need a standard open API. The closest thing we ever got was JOLAP. However, I reported in 2005 that the Java OLAP Interface (JOLAP) was dead. Julian Hyde then proposed olap4j.…
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Selecting emails per language
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Stephen Downes asked why he can’t tell his computer that all emails in Russian are spam. Here is my answer. Part 1. Selecting emails per language As far as I know, this is not a documented feature, but GMail allows you to select emails per language. Just type in the search…
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Quick! Which type of program had its enrolment grow by 54 percent between 2000 and 2004? Philosophy is the answer according to an article pointed to us by Stephen Downes. This is quite simply a consequence of a phenomenon described by Paul Graham in some of his famous essays: while the best…
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In North America, getting from point A to point B by foot or my bus can be quite difficult. Hence, many people prefer cars because, in some sense, they are easier. With cheap GPS devices, getting around in cars is really easy. Need to be somewhere at 6am? Your car will help you… What to use…
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In a recent post, I told you to stop planning and start prototyping. Cyril—whose web site you should visit just to admire his simple design—objected that efficiency maximization was a very personal matter. I conclude that I must have misrepresented my idea. I seriously doubt that anyone can…
, 2 min read
As a trained mathematician, I like to pull back and ask what are the fundamental limitations I face. A common misconception in our Google-era is that database performance is a technical matter easily fixed by throwing enough hardware at the problem. We apparently face no fundamental limitation. To…
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A no free lunch theorem for database indexes?
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Suzanne Bowness asked me to answer some questions for a paper she is preparing. I reproduce here the content of the interview. It is mildly incoherent. When did you first start your web site? Has your purpose for it evolved over the time that it has been online? How did you decide what sections to…
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When in doubts, prefer unimpressive negative results
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When you first hear about peer review, you are lead to believe that the purpose of peer review is detect mistakes and improve papers. Then, one day, you submit a beautiful paper presenting a correct result.__ Surprise!__ It gets rejected! What happened? Someone decided your work was not impressive…
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I keep reading about how the future will be shaped by new cheaper fuel or amazing new medications. I believe that we are misreading the trends. Yes, we will have better medications and cheaper fuel in the future. However, I believe we are clearly in the mist of an information revolution. The future…
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Yesterday, I listened to some of the BDA’08 talks. One common issue I noticed is that most work is unidimensional. That is, researchers tell us “my technique is 4 times faster”. The trade-off, if any, is not presented. Here is what I would like to hear: “I use twice the RAM, but I am 4…
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Two years ago, I asked whether academic blogging was still relevant. At the time, two famous bloggers had stopped (Sébastien Paquet and Stephen Downes). Evidently, I kept on blogging. I even took up microblogging. Let me revisit some of the benefits. Bloggers are more visible. This blog has over…
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How an individual evaluates his work is a fundamental intrinsic characteristic. If I had to classify researchers, for example, I would look at how they argue for the quality of their research. Let me ask you, how do you know how well you are doing? Doing well can mean several things: What you…
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Here is a simple recipe I have learned for efficient software design: Less planning, more prototyping! Planning is typically a long and expensive process. Some “experts” justify it by claiming that one week of planning saves ten weeks of programming. In practice, this payoff rarely comes.…
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It looks like the government is bailing us out. Wow! $400 millions. To put things in perspective, that is about 2000 times less than the recent bank bail-out in the USA. And I feel better about a university bail-out than a bank bail-out. But that’s just me.
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Peer review is still declining?
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Ellison’s work on the decline of peer review (reported earlier on my blog) is still being discussed: Ellison has painstakingly documented the decline of articles published in top economics journals by authors working in the highest-ranked schools. These authors are continuing to publish, but…
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As some of you noticed, this blog keeps on getting hacked. I need help. I have the latest version of wordpress. I have changed the password and I did my best to find any backdoor. I do not think anyone can modify the PHP files because they are not writeable on the server. In the latest hacks, they…