This is old news, but here’s Sun’s explanation for their confusing Java version numbers, I think it is really funny:

Both version numbers “1.5.0″ and “5.0″ are used to identify this release of the Java 2 Platform Standard Edition. Version “5.0″ is the product version, while “1.5.0″ is the developer version. The number “5.0″ is used to better reflect the level of maturity, stability, scalability and security of the J2SE.

The number “5.0″ was arrived at by dropping the leading “1.” from “1.5.0″. Where you might have expected to see 1.5.0, it is now 5.0 (and where it was 1.5, it is now 5).

I’m sure some poor guy was told “here’s our incomprehensible decision, now document it”.

According to this New Scientist article, most scientific papers are probably wrong:

John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at the University of Ioannina School of Medicine in Greece, says that small sample sizes, poor study design, researcher bias, and selective reporting and other problems combine to make most research findings false.

In my opinion, there is no question that the weak review process most conferences enjoy and the pressure to publish lots of new results, as opposed to verifying what others have done, contribute to this. In my experience, very few people will ever try to reproduce your results, very few people will check your proofs, very few people will reimplement your algorithms.

A few years ago, I tried to publish an errata to one of my paper. It took some doing since the editors had never received such a request. Quite clearly, our tolerance for unaccurate or wrong results is quite high.

Is it a problem? If you are an engineer trying to implement a new system, and you are naïve enough to trust a few scientific papers, then you can get in big trouble. It usually isn’t much of a problem because the average engineer doesn’t read cutting edge scientific papers. It seems obvious that the problem can get more serious if medical doctors read cutting edge articles… do they?

There is exactly one Java application I use routinely, jedit. It is an excellent text editor. As it turns out, the author doesn’t think too highly of Java itself:

I wonder how an extensively hyped piece of software like Java 1.5 — Sun told us it was “the most stable Java release ever” — could be shipped out the door with such critical bugs. Anybody who is still attempting to do client-side development in Java is either retarded, a clueless summer intern working at Sun, or both. This must be why after 8 years of (broken) promises regarding Swing and client-side Java, there are exactly zero Java applications in wide use.

I agree with Slava. Java is a terrible platform for client-side work. Applets died quite some time ago, but now, the remaining client-side applications will live a slow, painful death.

Disclaimer: I still use Java extensively, but not for developing anything that looks like client-side applications. Yet, I seriously worry about Java’s future on the server as well… but this will be for another post…

Paul Graham says that transparency (and thus data recording) is the way out of corruption:

How do you break the connection between wealth and power? Demand transparency. Watch closely how power is exercised, and demand an account of how decisions are made. Why aren’t all police interrogations videotaped? Why did 36% of Princeton’s class of 2007 come from prep schools, when only 1.7% of American kids attend them? Why did the US really invade Iraq? Why don’t government officials disclose more about their finances, and why only during their term of office?

This is very important. Being rich brings you security, but not a lot of power if you have to go through the same process as everyone else. A just society is an open society where we record everything.

Big Brother might actually be the ticket to a just society.

Update: a much simpler approach is described in Embedding fonts for IEEE.

My friend Yuhong reminded me to make sure I embed all fonts in the pdf file for our ICDM-05 paper. This seems to be an IEEE requirement.

Turns out to be a non trivial task, but not difficult. Here’s what I did (applies to a Linux TeTeX 3.0 distribution):

1. As root, type “updmap –edit”, edit the config file so that it has the following content:
   
# Should pdftex download the base 14 pdf fonts? Since some configurations
# (ps / pdf tools / printers) use bad default fonts, it is safer to download
# the fonts. The pdf files will get bigger, though.
# Valid settings are true (download the fonts) or false (don't download
# the fonts).
#pdftexDownloadBase14 false
pdftexDownloadBase14 true
2. Run pdflatex over your document.
3. Run pdffonts over the produced pdf file, all fonts should have true in the columns “emb” and “sub”.

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I believe that what I’m trying to achieve with some of my more critical posts about the Ph.D. track is to provide “a candid acknowledgement of the sacrifices and conflicts that came with the field.”

An older article in Salon has interesting quotes on this theme…

Academia is a world that is not set up to nurture a marriage or a personal life in general.

or

Male professors are expected to be married to their scholarship but not to their wives in the same full-on, participatory way. Women academics are asked to be polygamous and then are punished as a result.

Update: Buddhamouse think I’m too critical. Her comment can be summarized as follow: getting a Ph.D. can be fun work, and then, you can go search for work outside academia. (Oh! And “just say no to postdocs”.)

Antioxidant Values in Fruits And Vegetables (ORAC units per 100 grams):

Fruits:

Prunes — 5570
Raisins — 2830
Blueberries — 2400
Blackberries — 2036
Strawberries — 1540
Raspberries — 1220
Plums — 949
Oranges — 750
Red grapes — 739
Cherries — 670
Kiwi fruit — 602
Grapefruit, pink — 483

Vegetables:

Kale — 11770
Spinach — 11260
Brussels sprout — 1980
Alfalfa sprouts — 1930
Broccoli Flowers — 1890
Beets — 1840
Red bell pepper — 1710
Onion — 1450
Corn — 1400
Eggplant — 1390

In relation to a previous post of mine about open source Business Intelligence where I wrote “So, maybe someone out there should start a support company for Open Source Business Intelligence?”, Krishnaswamy Ram pointed out to Pentaho which seems to be exactly what I had imagined a smart businessman could do.

The Pentaho BI Project provides enterprise-class reporting, analysis, dashboard, data mining and workflow capabilities that help organizations operate more efficiently and effectively. The software offers flexible deployment options that enable use as embeddable components, customized BI application solutions, and as a complete out-of-the-box, integrated BI platform.

For researchers who actually want to be read, there are several good eprints servers including arxiv.org (which I don’t use, but many physicists seem to like it) and cogprints (great for AI-related stuff). Of course, you can simply post your papers on your web site and let Google find them (my favorite solution).

On this topic, Suresh cites Cosmic Variance:

Most people these days post to the arxiv before they even send their paper to a journal, and some have stopped submitting to journals altogether. (I wish they all would, it would cut down on that annoying refereeing we all have to do.) And nobody actually reads the journals they serve exclusively as ways to verify that your work has passed peer review.

I think we are slowly getting at the point paper-based publications are going to be completly unecessary. Right now, people still ask me for page numbers when I say I published a given paper. I was even asked for photocopies of the journal issue. These people will soon die and we will be finally free to let the trees in the forest.

Should you encourage your M.Sc. students to go for a Ph.D.? If you want to get more grant money, publish more papers and be generally viewed as a more “important” researcher, than you should definitively push all your talented M.Sc. students to go for a Ph.D.

Yet, Yuhong does differently:

I never encourage my master students to get Ph.D., though some have the talent. I know that a Ph.D. does not gain a lot more happiness in one’s life. I even find that normal people enjoy better life than researchers. So why impose research to my students?

Myself? I remember the first time a student came in my office to inquire about an academic career. She was a bright first-year student. The type that went to the best high school, got the best grades, had probably been involved in several extracurricular activities, in short, the perfect student. She was the best student in my class. Maybe she is reading this and will recognize herself. She also wanted to have a family. My answer to her? Make a choice: either a family or an academic career. She left my office pretty disappointed. I could never figure out whether she was disappointed at me or at life.

Is it true you can’t be a great scientist and also a family person? Of course not. Some people become astronauts, get a Ph.D., and get a gold medal at the Olympics. Such people exists. However, is it a reasonable plan? For a young lady, I don’t think so. I don’t think you can have 2-3 kids, raise them well, feed them well, spend quality time with them, and at the same time, pursue a solid academic career. There are counterexamples, but…

What we need to do is to:

• Stop sending more and more people to the Ph.D. track. Make sure those who get on the Ph.D. track have fair expectations; make sure they are not betting their lifes on what this Ph.D. can bring to them.
• When reviewing a colleague, clearly separate work done with students from work done by the researcher. It is easy: just check the names on the papers.
• We should value academic simplicity: fewer papers, fewer students, less money, more quality of life, and happier professors.

Further reading: The 2003-2004 Taulbee survey shows that the number of new Ph.D. in Computer Science is sharply on the rise (17% from the year before) whereas the number of undergraduates is about to take a significant drop since the number of new students has significantly gone down (60%).