This came to me today: if I didn’t have Internet, I would probably work much less. There is just too much to read, too many people to get in touch with. Generally, there is no excuse not to do great research. I suspect that researchers now spend far more hours working because of the this.

How long before people just stop doing research because they can’t cope?

From Downes’, I read Tuttle SVC objection to Mark Prensky’s interview where he claims that 20 years ago, intellectually, life was boring. Here’s the gist of Tuttle SVC’s message:

I am thirty six, and I AM A DIGITAL NATIVE. I know you baby boomers have a hard time coping with this concept because it is a threat to your authority, and as a result you seem to be constantly reinventing the concept so that it can’t be applied to any actual adults who can compete with you professionally, but I’ve had it, and I’m calling bullshit.

It is quite a punch and I’ve got to agree with Tuttle SVC. It is true that 20 years ago, we didn’t have the web. The world was a big place and unless you were very rich, you were disconnected from it: small town libraries only bring you so far. On the other hand, we were playing video games, and I was learning to program in Basic, Assembler and Fortran.

So, am I a tech native? You bet. I knew how to program a computer when I was thirteen. Hey! I had my very own computer when I was thirteen! A TRS-80 with 32 KB of RAM. No kidding. My friend Eric, living two houses from me, had a VIC-20 with much less memory, but he had much cooler games.

Now, Eric is a software developer and I am a Computer Science professor. Are we tech. natives??? You bet!

Not so many kids these days can put together a video game the way I did. Yet, I programmed several (bad) programs (mostly small games) when I was young.

Am I an Internet/web native? No. I learned about the Internet pretty much when I was in college. And even back then, BBS were much cooler in my mind. However, the web is constantly changing. The web in 2001 was very different from the web in 1998… so, maybe a kid who was 13 in 2001 could qualify as a web native, but the kid is only 16 now. He will enter university soon. I expect him to challenge the classroom and expect a lot of web content. I expect him to look for online courses. So what?

The tech. revolution probably happened with Apple. That’s circa 1971. Any kid who was 10 when the Apple II was released (1977) probably qualify as a tech. native, and that’s any kid born after 1966. Baby boomers were borned before 1960, so we could say that the tech. natives are the kids borned after the baby boomers.

The tech. natives have been around for a long time. They’ve been struggling for jobs for quite some time now. They are not just arriving in your local school.

“Tall, Dark, and Mysterious” the funniest math. geek on the web decided to go ask for job advice. She is obviously extremely smart and can’t find a decent job with a M.Sc. in Mathematics. I think she sums it very well:

Like many members of my demographic - gifted kids of professionals, who were directed to seek scholarship, rather than employment, in their studies, and who were never given much guidance with regards to the latter - I am finding myself suspended between two distinct groups that are, for opposite reasons, ill-suited to help me. On the one hand are the intellectuals who can’t fathom a universe outside the academy, and hence cannot help me find my way in that world; on the other, the folks who never studied a subject as abstract and as technical as mathematics beyond the high school level, and consequently can’t provide the specialized direction I need to apply my own abstract and technical interests and skills outside the academy. Frustrating, because I know that there are math folks employed in statistics and in finance and in the military and elsewhere, and they didn’t hatch ready-made inside their cubicles.

The lesson here is that getting degrees without thinking about job prospects is a dangerous game. Feel free to play the game, but make sure you know what you are risking.

Michael wrote an open letter to Bill Gates. Michael is a smart guy.

(…), unless things have changed drastically in Redmond while I’ve been away this past year, your technical employees (and those of other companies; this is not unique to Microsoft) put in far more than 40 hours per week. It doesn’t matter how interesting that work is; I submit that there is something wrong with an industry that expects its workers, as a permanent state of affairs, to work more than the accepted standard work week. And I think students agree with this and are voting with their feet.

That’s about it. I think that Michael is right that the long hours is probably the main reasons why women won’t go into IT.

How are we going to fix it? It seems that the best way to fix things is to do exactly what students are doing: just don’t enter the profession. As fewer people come into it, there will be more pressure to offer better jobs.

Outsourcing won’t do it. Massive temporary visa programs? We don’t have those in Canada, but the USA should probably do away with them and they probably will, if only for security reasons/paranoia.

I’m really hopeful that in 10 years, IT jobs will be much better. High end jobs will be 40 hours jobs at very good salaries. IT is simply too important to society and the challenges are too great not to have our best people working there.

The IEEE ICDM’2005 Workshop on Computational Intelligence in Data Mining call for paper is out.

Data Mining algorithms present some drawbacks, due to the nature of the problems they try to solve. They are very time consuming, they tend to obtain an excessive number of outputs, unmanageable for any expert (think about association rules, for instance), and they must be able to deal with imprecise, uncertain, and noisy data.

The ICEC’06 call for papers is out.

The International Conference on Electronic Commerce (ICEC) brings together the top of the scientific research community in e-commerce and e-business from all over the world.

I just read a great paper in the Chronical called Evaluation and the Culture of Secrecy:

For years now, I’ve been waging a private battle against the unexamined practice of confidentiality. When I write readers’ reports, I add a postscript requesting that the press or journal attach my name to the evaluation. Then I hope it does so. I add my request for openness to my tenure-evaluation letters too.

What an eye-opener!!! Our current academic system with all its secret evaluations takes a lot from the CIA and Al Quaida, but very little from the justice system.

For years now, I’ve been annoyed that my paper reviews are anonymous. In many cases, I’ve had the feeling that such or such review was motivated politically (I didn’t cite the right people). I’ve also heard many horror stories about promotion cases going sour for unknown pr unexplainable reasons. Like many people, I no longer really trust the system. I used to trust it when I was a graduate student. I believed that people did their best to manage the system, but now, I strongly suspect that many decisions are bias and people get away with it because of the secrecy.

What changed today is that I realized that I can do something about it. I can request that the reviews I write bear my name.