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There is no such thing as an unbiased expert outside the Mathematics department. When your banker told you to borrow money and to invest it in the stock market, you did not really think he had your best interest in mind, did you? I am always amazed by how definitive the financial advice bankers…
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My blog has been penalized in Google’s index for a few weeks now. While I would prefer that my content be easier to find, it does not worry me and my readership is not declining. Daniel Tunkelang explains exactly why: while Google brings a lot of traffic to my blog, almost none of it is…
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Computer Science Research does not care about your System
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Jeff Dalton reports on a presentation by Dave Jensen and David Smith on the Myths of Research in Computer Science. A key insight is that Computer Science Research is not about systems. Designing a better spam filter is a great idea, and might make you wealthy, but it is not what Computer Science is…
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Students want online learning
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Unsurprisingly, almost all students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison say they prefer courses with webcasted lectures as opposed to campus-only lectures. What is more interesting is that 60 percent said they were willing to pay more for them. Considering how much students pay for overpriced…
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You are an explorer who arrived on planet Bypolar. The Bypolarians come in two species: the Falsians and the Truans. The Falsians always lie whereas the Truans always tell the truth. Alas, you do not know how to distinguish them. In any case, two locals are waiting for you. First Bypolarian: You…
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Industry has always advertised to scientists. However, this ad targeting biologists is… peculiar: Source: Owen Kaser.
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If you want to be smart, you must first learn to be free. Build low energy systems. Lean and mean machines. To explain why freedom leads to better result, we had Adam Smith—yes, I took economics once—who used a crude model to justify the use of free markets (an innovation at the time). But it…
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Why I am sometimes rude
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MacOS has a nice “open” command that will open any document with any application from the command line. I hacked my own for Linux for a bash shell: TEMP=getopt -o a: -- "$@" if [ $? != 0 ] ; then exit 1 ; fi eval set -- "$TEMP" while true ; do case "$1" in -a)…
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Got an email a week ago. True story: Dear prof. X, I see that you are chair of the certificate program in Computer Science. I want to apply to the certificate program at [insert competing university here]. Can you have a look at my application? I really need to get in! Thank you. Some confused…
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Colin Wightman was recently fired from Acadia University. What wrong did he do? Mostly he had a one-time consensual bondage experience with a lady. They also accused him of using the university computers for some cybersex purposes. The Canadian Association of University Teachers found the dismissal…
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Canadian Computer Science professor fired for being into bondage
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Universities worldwide are starting to offer online courses. Personnally, I just launched my first Computer Science graduate course (INF 6104, in French). Because students can take the course on their own time at home, without having to show up at designated time, accessibility is unbeatable.…
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There is, I believe, a tension between management and innovation. Innovation is fundamentally disruptive. There is plenty of evidence that too much order is a bad idea: If your heart becomes too regular, you may be about to die. American backyards made of only good-looking grass are high-energy,…
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Imagine if you came to my blog and it would load all unread articles. New readers would get a list of 1000+ posts. You would then need to hide each post, one by one. It would be annoying, wouldn’t it? Likewise, I am seriously getting annoyed at email and RSS clients. I need a very simple…
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We just enrolled our oldest son in some karate lessons. I am not sure how useful this will be, but given that I got regularly in trouble with bad guys in school, I am hoping it will help him a bit. Would you gang up on this kid?
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OO helps us hide away the routine problems and the makes the code easier to use. Among the first things you learn with class-based object-oriented (OO) languages like Java and C++ is how to use inheritance. Inheritance is a form of taxonomy for programmers. It makes great-looking diagrams.…
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Here are two ways to count the numbers from 1 to 1000000 in Python. First, the classical way: sum([i for i in xrange(1000000)]) Runs 0.8s on an old Linux box. It uses quite a bit of memory. Second, the better way: sum((i for i in xrange(1000000))) Runs 0.2s on the same box. It uses a tiny amount of…