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:

1. Most people are out of touch. This is true everywhere. I remember when Java first came out. Years after Java had mostly caught up with C++ in speed, people still complained that it was slow. I still hear people say that Java is slow. Keeping up with the latest facts is hard. People prefer to rehash the same, again and again. The human brain prefers to avoid change.
2. It takes a long time to build new academic material. Older professors have strong incentives to teach and research the same topics again and again. A similar phenomenon occurs in all large organisations, but professors have academic freedom.
3. Finally, leaving people behind is not an option in academia. Even in large companies, you can leave some people aside. In academia, even one individual who is left behind can create a lot of trouble for others. This is also true in large companies, but most employees do not have as much freedom as a professor: they cannot resist change as strongly as a professor can.

(We could test my explanation by determining whether there is a correlation between the level of academic freedom and the level of conservatism.)

I find it very interesting that increased individual freedom brings about more conservatism.

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:

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 to agree with me.) Plagiarism can be surprisingly hard to detect, but it is also amazingly frequent, so I usually search for a few word cooccurrences in Google. Presentation is, on average, quite poor. Figures are often ugly. Poor English is frequent.
• The relevance and strength of the paper is something I usually have an opinion about. Alas, it is easy to be wrong about the importance of a paper, so I usually do not have much to say unless I have directly worked on the same problems for a couple of years.
• Correctness is hard to check especially if I am not a domain expert. I usually pick up on secondary details. Are the results credible? Do the authors mention some special cases that should have arisen in their analysis or experiments? I must unfortunately admit that I usually cannot be sure that the papers I have reviewed are correct. At best, I can voice an opinion about their credibility.

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.

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:

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 after the winter. I learned the hard way that most perennials are better off without any (chemical) fertilizer.

It turns out that in most cases, chemical fertilizers are overrated. As a rule, you should not use them.

• Fertilizers may contain toxic material which stays in your soil and your vegetables.
• Fertilizers may increase the acidity of the soil, which is bad for most plants.
• Fertilizers make your soil poorer, not richer over time.
• Fertilizers tend to kill the microorganisms in your soil, rendering natural composting difficult.
• Fertilizers make your plants less resilient to disease and drought: artificially sustained growth is not always a great idea. Are you really in a hurry or do you want more robust plants?

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 other hybrids. As a professor, all that I care about is to have some tools to post content online, conveniently. The last thing I want to do is live within a monolithic proprietary platform.

Everyone is fighting for his platform. What a tragic mistake! In 2008, only one platform matters. No, it is not facebook, nor Windows Vista, nor Moodle, nor Dot.NET. It is the Web. In some sense, the Web is the platform to rule them all.

Something deeper is going on as well. In Death of the software application, I argued that software as a discrete quantity was finished. How many software applications do you run right now? Nobody cares. Similarly, the term platform is obselete: people hook up the software they need dynamically.

If someone asks you to pick a specific platform for a project, refuse to do so. Pick software the way a taylor will pick fabric: a little bit here, a little bit there. Also, if you are building a Web platform, please stop right there. Turn around and rethink your objectives.