Here’s an article giving interesting figures:

College Board figures show the number of students older than 25 has increased from 29.9 percent in fall 1999 to 31.1 percent in fall 2003. However, roughly 40 percent of regional and U.S. students are older than age 24, according to the board.

In short, a large fraction (about a third) of university students in the USA are adult students (older than 25 years old). Of course, this includes some graduate students, but I bet it includes a large number of students working to get a degree.

Once in a while, you find something on the Web that makes you go “Wow!”. Ever since MathML came along, I’ve been fairly disappointed because it looked like it was designed to work only inside expensive commercial tools. ASCIIMathML proves I was wrong. You can write standard HTML files with some convenient mathematical notation in it, and a piece of JavaScript will dynamically convert it to MathML which displays fairly nicely in Firefox. However, I always seem to be missing some key fonts.

XML and JavaScript are a potent mix.

I have been consulting for several years. I think my first consultant job was around 1999 or even 1998. I think I told the story on this blog before: I had planned to finish my Ph.D. and then move into industry. At that point, I faced a wall: very few companies in Montreal were looking for fresh Ph.D.s. I cannot blame them, but back then, it was a big disappointment for me. So, I went into R&D consulting with companies outside Montreal (Paris, Ottawa, Marseille…). It seems there is a fairly good supply of companies lacking a solid R&D department, but needing the R&D. At least, that’s true during some economic cycles. So, I provide ideas, software, documentation, against fair compensation over a couple of months or slightly more. I usually get to keep ownership of some of my work though some of it remain secret.

I stopped consulting for a few years while I was at the National Research Council of Canada (NRC). But now that I’m back as a university professor, I’m back into consulting.

Why do consulting? Firstly, it is fun: you get to work on mostly exciting (read:new) projects that have some importance. Secondly, it pays well enough. If you contribute significantly to a project, you might even be able to negotiate some profit sharing: I was once offered 5% of a company or some cash (I took the cash). Consulting is also a special kind of business: it is focused on your expertise and not on business expertise. You are may have to write bills and do some accounting, but you don’t have to deal with bankers and venture capital, with hiring 30 people and finding offices. Consulting also keep you on your toes: you have to keep learning about the new trends. It also gives you valuable insights into what is really important in the industry and what isn’t.

Why not do consulting? Uncertain times: you might make $30k in a few short weeks, and then make absolutely nothing for a month or more. If you can live with it, it is not so bad because you can use the free time to do other work like research or learning a new computer language. If times get tough, you might have to do some jobs you don’t particularly care for. Also, consulting is not like building a company or a product: your clients do this, not you. Hence, your growth is limited: you can only sell the time you have and this has some pretty dire consequences on how you manage your “business”.

As a consultant, you sell mostly one thing: your time. And you have a finite supply of it. This means you must be extremely picky about the projects you do and clients you work with. You must make absolutely sure that it leads you somewhere because agreeing to one project means you can’t do some other project someone else will offer you down the line.

This is somewhat counterintuitive at first. You’d think that you’d want to agree to do as many projects as you possibly can, and be nice to all clients. That might be true if you sell T-shirts, but not if you are a consultant.

So, how do you recognize a good project and a good client? Bad projects are not so bad as bad client since most consulting jobs are over short periods.However, sticking with a bad client can have terrible consequences. Fortunately, a good client is somewhat easy to recognize. A good client is someone who wants to work with you specifically and has good reasons to do so.

How to recognize a bad client:

• He will try to bully you in accepting terms that are not acceptable to you. For example, I’ve had a client try on several occasions to intimidate me into lowering my hourly fee to about a third of my usual hourly fee.
• He will have a selective memory. As a consultant, you don’t carry along a lawyer, so you need to trust the client to remember the terms you’ve agreed to. This is usually not a problem with real business people as they can’t stay in business with selective memories unless they are called Bill Gates. I suggest that the minute you find out the client as a defective memory, you run away.
• You don’t see how the client has any need for your skills or the client doesn’t/can’t understand what you can offer. This has happened to me quite often due to the highly specialized nature of my work.

Through Jarche, I found out this nice article in Startup Journal which points out the very same thing. Knowing when to drop a client or a project is one of the most important skill you can learn as a consultant:

(…) I’d just been advised to seek a portfolio of engagements that will spawn new experiences and opportunities, listen to my heart and assess the tradeoffs of each opportunity. So I thought to myself, I don’t love what I do for this CEO and working for him isn’t expanding my network, making me rich or helping me to achieve my long-term goals. Should I allow him to chip away at me every time I see him?

No questions there. I resigned, confident that I can replace the revenue with more fulfilling and remunerative work. More importantly, I began to feel for perhaps the first time that I’m on the right road.

Here’s an interesting initiative: Science Commons.

Science Commons is a new project of Creative Commons and will launch on January 1, 2005.

The mission of Science Commons is to encourage scientific innovation by making it easier for scientists, universities, and industries to use literature, data, and other scientific intellectual property and to share their knowledge with others. Science Commons works within current copyright and patent law to promote legal and technical mechanisms that remove barriers to sharing.

Technology predictions are always worthless, but they can be fun. Plus, predictions on a blog tend to stay around and so people can check back on them.

• The home PC market will keeping declining and by the end of 2005, a new architecture will seriously threaten the PC for home web surfing, email and instant messaging. There will be serious talk of replacing the PC-on-every-desk model in many companies. Maybe Microsoft will be pushing an XBox2-Pro for business use.
• Videoconference-type broadband will still be out-of-reach for most home users and most small and medium businesses.
• Whatever the big thing in IT is, it will have to do with storage. Job prospects in large cities will improve significantly for IT workers in 2005 and the growth will be driven by the new possibilities offered by infinite permanent storage. They will be significantly more data warehousing at the end of 2005 especially in smaller companies.
• Google will still be the most interesting Web company at the end of 2005. They will still be seen as a potent competitor for Microsoft.
• The Semantic Web will still be mostly at the same point it is now, at the end of 2005. That is, some nice ideas, including RDF and XML will stick around and find some uses, but OWL won’t take off.
• The Web will keep evolving. Personalisation will be a big thing: while the Web is now seen as a static graph on which people navigate, we will start seeing the Web as a graph around people. Social software will keep growing and growing in importance and won’t be based on ontologies or any such rigid model. New forms and models of recommender systems will emerge.
• Security will be a big thing in 2005 as it was in 2004, but we won’t make significant progress. People will install critically insecure software and they won’t care; or else, they will keep locking everything down.
• eLearning in universities will keep on growing and we’ll have significantly more online courses offered by the end of 2005, though the push will come from students and deans, and not so much from Faculty members.
• eLearning outside universities may grow out of the PowerPoint or Flash models, but if so, only because some cool new technology, maybe based on XML, makes it possible.
• Year 2005 will be the year where the parallelization of systems and algorithms will become ubiquitous because of changes in CPUs.

Ok, most of those predictions may sound obvious. Well, what are your predictions?

In my quest to determine whether Montreal is a creative class city, I learned through Martin Brooks about a Montreal institution called SAT:

The Society for Arts and Technology [SAT] Founded in 1996, The Society for Arts and Technology [SAT] is a transdisciplinary centre dedicated to the creation, dissemination and conservation of digital culture. It brings together creators who work with digital technologies, fostering collaboration among diverse artistic and scientific disciplines, establishing partnerships with industry and educational institutions and promoting its members at home and abroad.

Nicolas and Richard write about the start of our project about Blogs for Computer Science Tutors. We are still at the very beginning. In the first phase, Nicolas will be investigating which blog engine is best for this particular use. In the second phase, we’ll need to setup tools for information analysis and aggregation to support the community.

While this is a small, local initiative, we are doing something to push eLearning forward! If we can help tutors with blogging, then this will be a good step toward giving UQAM students blogs… (warning: this is blue sky thinking)

On a related topic, Nicolas (in French) talks about how he intends to learn about RSS even though he is not a computer scientist.

This tells me something: RSS is to Semantic Web (for lack of a better term) what HTML is to the Web. HTML was a technical format never meant for non-technical people, yet, designers all over the world have learned HTML and learned it well. HTML was simple and limited, but it was enough. RSS is the same: it was meant for a few Netscape engineers and now, everyone from the average lawyer to the sociologist is studying the RSS formats. RSS is simple and limited, but it is powerful enough for separating content from presentation on the Web.

I noticed a few weeks ago a feature in Word that allows you to request that important sentences be outlined. As it turns out, there is a free tool to do this called the Open Text Summarizer. My ex-colleague Peter Turney did related work and has a patent on such a technique.

I really like Yuhong Yan. She’s one of my favorite collaborator of all times. It is quite strange too because we were colleagues for a long time and never collaborated much at all. Then, I left my NRC job, I went to live something like 700 km away and since then, we’ve never been closer. Maybe this says something about how efficient technology has become.

In any case, if you are a graduate student or are thinking about becoming one, you should read Yuhong Yan’s Tips to Graduate Students. The mere fact that she put this page together is enough to make me like her! I find that very few schools care enough about their student to put together similar advice. It seems to be enough for many professors to just throw students into research and see who swims and who sinks. My advice to graduate students would be to seek supervisors who will give you such advice. I think Yuhong is probably a good supervisor.

She also posted a copy of an unpublished paper we wrote together. Myself, I tend to keep unpublished papers private, but at the same time, I keep arguing that researchers should promote their papers more agressively, so I’m not going to complain about what Yuhong did.

Those who have been reading this blog know about inDiscover. This is a collaborative filtering/recommender system project I did with Sean McGrath. This is a projet part of a larger initiative with Harold Boley and his Semantic Web Lab.

In any case, this was a little project out in a corner of the web. Then Bell Canada contacted us and now, there is a prominent link to inDiscover on msn.ca (sympatico high speed) front-page.

Just in case it ever goes away, here’s a snapshot:

(Usual disclaimers apply: I didn’t ask permission before taking the snapshot… blablabla…)