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I do not claim to be an expert at reviewing academic papers, but I have done my share of work. Here is my recipe: Reproducibility, (self-)plagiarism and presentation are easy to evaluate and I usually spend quite a bit of time on these issues. Science should be reproducible. (Panos Ipeirotis seems…
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If you are running MacOS and use the Safari browser, I suggest you have a look at Shiira. It uses the same underlying engine (WebKit), but provides a superior skin.
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Better than Safari: Shiira
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Stephen Downes prepared a Montreal photo set. The photo set is worth a visit if you want to know what Montreal feels like. I am the nerdiest of the two:
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Colorful professors
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The one thing I learned about gardening this year
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Since I moved to the Montreal suburbs, I have become an active gardener. I used to apply generous amounts of fertilizers. I also got into serious trouble. My lawn died. Not because I burned it, but because I got a bad case of grubs. Several of my perennials died also or fail to come back healthy…
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Since I have had amazing luck in the past with questions to the readers of this blog, I have another question. The diameter of a graph is the longest distance between any two nodes. The degree of a node is the number of edges or links from and to this node. Intuitively, the higher the node degrees,…
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In academic circles, there are intense platform wars. We have a talk next week from the head librarian about offering Google-like services, but on an academic platform. I won’t go to the talk because I no longer care about library portals. Regarding courseware, there are wars between Moodle and…
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In the past, I have had luck with my requests for help, so here is another one. Suppose you have a large array made of a large number of distinct values ({A,B,A,B,A,C,C}) and you want to group the identical values like so {A,A,A,B,B,C,C} or like so {C,C, A,A,A,B,B}. That is, you do not care about…
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I am not a neat guy. I tend to drop coffee cups on my desk and I never look back. What I learned this year is that if you leave a cup of cappucino for a week on your desk, then drink a shot of it by mistake while staring at your computer screen, you are left with a terrible taste in your mouth for…
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As a young Ph.D. student, I thought that my thesis supervisors were annoying. Looking back, ten years later, I think they were not nearly harsh enough. I used to think that keeping detailed logs of what I have done was pedantic. As a young researcher or developer, I would just quickly jot down my…
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Scientists often cheat. Bad and famous scientists cheat. The cheating can be small or large: putting your name as an author on a paper that you barely read, omitting part of the an experiment, making up experimental results, claiming that you have a proof of a given result, making something look…
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Job offer: education specialist
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We are looking for someone to fill a permanent position as an education specialist (spécialiste en sciences de l’éducation). The job includes some research time. You must have a degree in education, or the equivalent. Some of our specialists have Ph.D.s. Some training in Computer Science would…
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Back when I was a Mathematics undergraduate student at the University of Toronto, I was told by some of my peers that I was not a Mathematician but a problem solver. This was meant as a derogatory remark, but I thought it was a correct assessment. In short, I cared only about a given theorem if it…
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Writing alone: benefits and pitfalls
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This year, I am the course coordinator for a Java course. One of our tutors went missing. Human resources tried to negotiate with him but he told them he did not care anymore. I googled him. I got his resume, and then noticed that the top line says “2008: now with Google.” I guess that must be…
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Yesterday, I wrote about the types of collaboration we commonly observe in science. Today, I want to spend 5 minutes thinking about what happens when you write a science paper alone. Benefits: New projects can emerge and die quickly. You set your own standards. You increase your range of skills by…
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Scientists collaborate frequently. Most science articles have at least two authors. Some collaborations work well, others fail. The first step to understanding what went wrong is to categorize the collaboration. I distinguish three types: Hierarchical collaboration: the student collaborates with…