Slashdot reports that there is no geek shortage. One of the comment is interesting:

There is a glut of Ph.D’s in the US creating an over-competitive environment that’s drastically deflating the pay level. What really should be done, is restricting the Ph.D’s that schools push out to help overcompensate for the over inflation. But this won’t happen. Why? Grad students are cheap labor for PI’s. Schools accept grad students not because they are interesting in training and bringing more qualified people into the field, but rather because they need them to work for PI’s. A PI is only as good as his/her grad students. If you add in a post-doc period, you are looking at, in some cases, 10 years (a figure nowadays that has been increasing as many people are having to do multiple post-docs) of getting paid 1/2 of what you would have gotten if you had just gone straight into industry. Mind you, this isn’t a bread and butter time either. This is a period where (in most cases), people are spending ridiculous hours working weekends/nights trying desperately to get data. And for what? An even more competitive academic environment where the positions to applicants ratio is (in some fields) 1:10. We haven’t even gotten to the whole tenure track part. Add in all these factors and it is not surprising that 1 in 3 of these students never even complete their graduate “training”–most fighting for a masters.

I hate to seem pessimistic, but this article is long overdue, and at the same time, disturbing. We are flooding the market with ambitious bright individuals with promises of great prestige and fortune.

I really think they need to make a “Sims:The rise to professor” game depicting the rather long and gruesome journey to professorship. It would have to be realistic, so on average, you should only be winning, say, 5% of the time. Most people don’t realize how different the actual and perceived opinion of prospective graduate students is from the actual reality of academia. I’m actually quite surprised that only 4-5% of Ph.D’s are working outside their field (mind you, this figure doesn’t include people that wanted to be in academia but couldn’t get a position and ended up in industry). Sadly, I know a few that are working in simple jobs as security guards.

VLDB 2006 will be held in Seoul, Korea.

We invite submissions reporting original results on all aspects of data management as well as proposals for panels, tutorials, and demonstrations that will present the most critical issues and views on practical leading-edge database technology, applications, and techniques. We also invite proposals for events and workshops that may take place at the Conference site between September 10th and 11th before the VLDB 2006 conference.

I bought Season One of the new Battlestar Galactica series.

I’m an old man, so I watched the original. The difference between this new version and the old one is that now, the cylons are machines built by man. In other words, Battlestar Galactica tells the story of AI gone wrong. What if we built intelligence machines, and what if these machines turned against us?

In this new series, the humans are in deep trouble as in the first series. They are trying to escape the ennemy. The ennemy is sneaky and furtive. The cylons have outsmarted the humans and they rarely fight in the open.

Of course, in the post-9/11 era, this is just what we expect. Some might describe the cylons as terrorists. What is interesting is that the humans are responsible for the cylon’s very existence to begin with. The humans must live with the result of their actions. They can hate the cylons, but, to some extend, they can only blame themselves, Also, their own defects are what make the cylons so powerful in the first place: greed and hedonism are what the cylons go after.

I like this story at two levels.

Firstly, this matches exactly what the Americans should experience and what they will eventually come to realize. You can keep polluting, you can keep funding the third world military to secure oil reserves or other goods. But all these actions have consequences. The Americans have created Al Quaida to a large extend by training and funding them initially. Also, the Americans are greedy and that’s their main weakness: building empires is a dangerous and expensive game. But this doesn’t really make me like the show: I’m not looking for a Michael Moore commentary on a Friday night.

However, the AI-is-dangerous component is interesting. I’m not advocating we stop funding AI research: mostly because I do not think we can achieve any form of non-trivial intelligence using current computer technology. However, should we ever close down on hard AI, I believe we should back out. The day my computer will “know” it is a computer will be a dangerous day.

I’m serious about this. If in 20 years from now, we start getting close to hard AI, I will do down to the streets and ask that we stop in our tracks.

The DOLAP 2005 (ACM Workshop on Data Warehousing and OLAP) has posted its preliminary program as a pdf file. I see roughly 12 papers. Some of my fellow canadians are there: the famous Panda team has a paper as well as Ken Pu from UofT (part of the Mendelzon team).

Is it just me or the popularity of electronic journals is growing?

• Directory of open access journals;
• Electronic Journals with RSS feeds (University of Sask.);
• Free Electronic Mathematics Journals;
• University of Nevada Reno list of eJournals.

Thanks to Yuhong Yan and Peter Turney, I have more links for you if you care to know what are the prestigious conferences:

• Citeseer list of impact factors;
• Computer Science Conference Rankings (also here);
• Frontier in bioscience list of impact factors (not just about bioscience!);
• Conference Statistics (percentage of accepted papers).

Do we buy this? Sure. Why not.

However, there are also trends. Some hot conferences today might be forgotten conferences tomorrow and vice versa. The results here are presented as somewhat static rankings. That part of the equation, I don’t buy.

Should you aim for the most prestigious conferences? Should aim for the hot research topics? I think a bit of balance is probably the best strategy.

Here’s an old quote that’s worth repeating from time to time:

People like me need to do things in order to understand. That’s why I build systems. That’s why I tinker. That’s why I read so much.
(Jim Gray, IEEE Distributed Systems Online 2004)

Short story: research is not about spending time in the library. And it is not about solving problems either. Research is about building crazy new things.