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Readers of this blog who think that I am a bit mad would do well to go read the latest Cringely: (…) reputation still holds in education, though its grip is weakening. (…) MIT threw videos of all its lecture courses – ALL its lecture courses – up on the web for anyone to watch for free.…
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Large groups in science
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Paul Graham wrote an essay that will get people talking: You Weren’t Meant to Have a Boss. The gist of the argument is that large groups like research centers, companies and universities are inefficient artificial constructs limiting people’s freedom. I believe this sentence says it all: It…
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According to an article in the New York Times, drinking beer is correlated negatively with scientific productivity. What is surprising is that even small quantities of beer are correlated with decreases in productivity. But correlation is not causality. They have not shown that drinking beer makes…
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On my blog, the best content is in the comments. Sébastien reminded me of this fact today by offering a link to an article in Physics Today by Lee Smolin. The gist of the paper is that scientists feel a lot of pressure to follow the lead of powerful senior scientists. It is much easier to be…
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There are many reasons for rejecting a paper. The authors might have failed to communicate their results efficiently. There may be a flaw in the science. Or the authors might have cheated. These flaws come from oversights, incompetence, and lack of ethics. But most importantly, they may all be…
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Michael Nielsen posted a link to a paper in Science stating that the lone scientist is outgunned by teams and collaboration. Keith Sawyer supports this claim and gives more details. In Computer Science, there are so few single-author papers — how can you do a sane analysis? I propose the…
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Parand obviously meant to get me to react. He had one eye-opening experience while chatting with a famous professor. He reaches the conclusion that ivy-league schools are necessary to get this kind of learning experience. Mostly, his conclusion seems to depend on two facts. Physical presence…
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Long ago, search engines stopped using the metadata available in the header of HTML pages, because people would lie or enter misleading data by mistake. Many web sites still provide Dublin Core metadata as part of their HTML, but this data is known to be misleading, incomplete and wrong. There is…
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I routinely get emails from unknown graduate students who ask me to help them. Most of these emails are interesting. Unfortunately, some are unacceptably rude. What is ok: Can I get an electronic copy of your paper?- Do you have the source code or the data for this paper? This new paper claims to…
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Wired has an article on Potter, the new Netflix competitor who took everyone by surprise — making it at the top of the list all of a sudden, passing off people who worked much longer in the competition. His insight is to correct for anchoring: a user who has recently given a lot of above-average…
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Anchoring effect in collaborative filtering
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Who needs your lectures?
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You want a cool science lecture? You must register for a conference. Or take a class in a good university… Or find a computer connected to this… Internet… they keep talking about. VideoLectures is a site where you can find thousands of talks — mostly related to Computer Science. Here are…
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A company called Bentham Open has launched a massive number of new journals in just about every field. Open journals are cool and can be of high quality as the Journal of Machine Learning Research has shown. But what about Bentham? They charge you $800 to publish a paper. That is an acceptable fee…
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Information is blood, coverage is intelligence
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We need to learn the lesson of the Web: coverage is more important than accuracy. We only think accuracy and precision are very important, because we fool ourselves into thinking that our brains are accurate and precise tools. Your brain is provably sloppy. It is terrible at remembering objectively…
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Mihai PătraÅŸcu wrote an elaborate post on the benefit of prestigious conferences. His arguments are simple enough: Top conferences are communities created to increase the efficiency of the scientific community. You only have to monitor what happens at prestigious events instead of having to…
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Research productivity versus funding received
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Who should you keep funding? The scientist who receives $10,000 and has an impact factor of 10, or the scientist who receives $1,000,000 and has an impact factor of 15? Source: The idea is from Sébastien Paquet.