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I have not used Microsoft Office in over 5 years. I use Mac OS and Linux. I never use my employer’s email service. Prior to Google Mail, I used a private provider and forwarded my work email there. I have never driven to work, in the last 4 years. As a researcher, I do not belong to any one…
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The Purity Scale in Science
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Sufficient focus is necessary to be smart. The corollary is that distractions may turn your brain into mulch. There several conditions to sufficient focus: a sense of urgency: without a strong need to get the task done, long term focus is difficult; the dismissal of external stimuli: either you…
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This is how most people understand purity in Science: As for myself, I measure purity on a bandwidth scale: the more feedback the researchers get, the less pure they are. I should maybe use another term. (Thanks to Steven for pointing this comic to me.)
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Tag clouds are an interesting visualization technique because, unlike bar charts, you can easily display 30 or 50 weights in a compact figure. Moreover, because they are a 2D structure, you can more easily cluster similar tags together. The Tag-Cloud Drawing problem is the optimization of the…
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My previous blog post generated quite a number of comments and much criticism. Let me summarize the main objections: What I describe is not pure theory but bad research. Pure theory is useful: consider the n log n lower bound on sorting. My replies: Our brains are bandwidth-driven machines, not…
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Pure theory is like exploring the universe by staying on Earth. Sure, it seems expensive at first to build space ships, but our brains are at their best when facing reality up close. Too many scientists work exclusively over models in their mind. Then they are surprised that nobody outside their…
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I was recently asked by the publisher to review Collective Intelligence in Action. The author is Satnam Alag, a Bay area engineer with a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Alag is VP of NextBio, a specialized search engine. The first chapter is free and so is the source code…
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A short review of Collective Intelligence in Action
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Mike gives us 3 rules to improve our presentations. Two of the rules I knew: you have to practice and you should present pictures, not text, on your slides. The other rule is the 10-minute rule: you have to insert a break in your presentation every 10 minutes to refresh the audience. I must admit…
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Running a research project has more to do with a marathon than a sprint. Most good runners can nearly run forever if they avoid injuries and they stay hydrated and motivated. Similarly, a creative worker can work nearly forever on a topic. A novelist can write 10 books in a saga. A researcher can…
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Pictures from paradise
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Kamel is back from Madeira (Portugual) where he presented our paper Collaborative OLAP with Tag Clouds: Web 2.0 OLAP Formalism and Experimental Evaluation. Madeira is too far from Montreal when you are old and decrepit like me. But he took some great pictures of the place. I was there last year…
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As Peter points out nobody really knows what science is. Generally speaking, however, I like to distinguish two forms of science. Predictive science aims to predict future events based on past observations. It relies on induction. Machine Learning is the embodiment of predictive…
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I have had no end of trouble connecting by ssh to my main Mac Pro. Whenever I would type “ls -1” in a directory containing many files, the connection would time out. This problem came and went away periodically. Owen pointed me to a sane explanation which has to do with evil firewalls. It looks…
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I am deeply dissatisfied with Google Mail spam filter. I get 4 or 5 false positives per week, at least 2 of them are critical. It might be the best spam filter in the world, but it does not listen to me. It keeps on marking off as spam perfectly legitimate emails, written in French, from uqam.ca. I…
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In gardening—as in research—there are 3 fundamental values one must cultivate. Patience. Quick results are possible without much effort. However, it takes a minimum of 3 years for a new garden to reach its maturity. The first year you set the ground, the second year you build-up, and the last…
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To anyone who worked in industry, academia feels like it is standing still. For example, many Computer Science programs still teach programming as it was done 10 years ago, if you are lucky. Most programs undergo only cosmetic changes over time. I have the following explanation: Most people are…
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We have a nice mix of white and black tulips. They really stand out: I also have a nice rhododendron. I never water it or care for it in any way, and here is how it rewards me:
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Black tulips