It seems like Babylon 5 is coming back. New episodes will be released on DVD. I know I’ll be preordering them as soon as possible. Joseph Michael Straczynski (JMS) was the first, as far as I know, to produce real science fiction for adults on television. Here’s what he had to say recently:

Every 6 months, I get together with WB to discuss what to do something with B5. The DVD sales have raised over 500 million in revenue. Now, I produced B5s 110 episodes at about 90 million dollars. Somehow, B5 is still 50 million in the red. Every time I mention that to WB they say We made a good deal, huh? Anyway, they asked if I wanted to do a feature film but I declined mainly because I can’t yet picture structuring a B5 movie as long as [Andreas Katsulas] and [Richard Biggs] insist on staying dead. Maybe in a year or two I’ll be able to but right now I can’t do something big and those two roles will NOT be recast.

So I thought about it, and I suggested a bunch of short films. Little mini-movies or an anthology show set in the Babylon 5 universe. I pick a character and develop an hour-long story around that character. Stories that I wanted to tell during the B5 series but never had the chance to develop. They said, Okay. I said I wanted complete creative control. Do not change my words that I write, and I want that in writing. They said, Okay. And I want to direct. They said, Okay.

This project was green lit less than two weeks ago. Its going to happen. Production starts in September in Vancouver, Canada. Post-production will occur from October to February with a release of the first three anthologies in the second quarter of 2007.

It looks like the title will be Babylon 5: The Lost Tales.

Source: slashdot.

The Theoretical Computer Science community is raging following an article by Wegner and Goldin. Here’s the gist of what the paper says:

The (Theoretical Computer Science) TCS model is inaccurate because (Turing Machines) TMs express only closed-box functional transformation of input to output.

The point is that you can’t model Microsoft Word using a Turing Machine, because, trivially, Microsoft Word interacts with the user.

I’ve read carefully the reactions of the TCS community, at least those who responded on Lance’s blog, and it did not convince me that this paper was wrong or misleading. Some say, “Go read the papers, it proves that yes, you can model everything with a Turing Machine.”, but that’s not an argument I can accept. Others say that Interactive Computational Models have been done before. Fine, but most research is about rehashing what has been done in the past, in slightly different ways.

Here are some reactions from the community:

• “they have a grant: NSF CISE/CCF SGER grant, Persistent Turing Machines: Beyond the Turing Thesis, I give up!” (meaning: “how could people who question the foundation of theoretical computer science ever get a grant?”)
• “I am also very surprised that UConn allows Goldin to teach theory of computation.” (meaning, “clearly, someone who is critical of a field, can’t teach it!”)
• “Forget incorrect- read any of their articles, and you’ll see that they’re literally cranks.”

To be clear, I’m not defending Wegner and Goldin per se. I don’t know enough about this particular problem to really take sides. Nor do I care enough, really. Maybe Wegner and Goldin are spinning a particular shallow idea in the hopes of becoming famous. Maybe, in the process, they are misleading people. But what I can tell you is that calling them cranks, accusing them of not being aware of the related work, being outraged because they have received a research grant, and so on, tells me that the Theoretical Computer Science is a conservative and closed minded community.

Allow me to quote myself:

Next time you review a paper or a funding application which attempts something fresh, don’t dismiss it because “the paper ignores 20 years of research.” We need to ignore fashions more, and encourage novel ideas. Don’t reward people because they follow the trends. We are supposed to give people tenure so that they can take risks, say things others don’t want to hear.

According to Greg Linden, despite their best efforts, Yahoo and MSN keep losing the search war against Google.

What is the problem at Yahoo and MSN? After four years of trying, they just seem to be slipping further and further behind. First, MSN showed a drop in web search market share, down to 12.9% from 15.3% a year ago.

As someone who does not own any stock in any of these companies and who does not have a vested interest in any of these companies, I am actually quite pleased that a company run by engineers wins over “traditionnally managed” companies. Naturally, Microsoft is a large company and places like Microsoft Research are not exactly full of suits seeking the latest acronyms. I am quite certain that Yahoo has also large components mostly run by engineers, but I do get the feeling that Google is unique in that the entire company is ran by engineers and scientists. When Google wins, creative technology people win.

Greg Linden is a good example of what a technology person can do despite the suits running the show. Greg is responsible for making collaborative filtering ubiquitous through the Amazon recommender system.

Suresh points out that Richard Feynman wrote only 37 research papers.

I entirely agree with what Suresh implies. To be fair, the main Canadian science funding agency (NSERC), while it asks for your publication list, actually asks you first what your top 5 contributions are. The concept of a contribution is open ended. Maybe you had an idea and wrote 10 papers on it. Or maybe you wrote a journal paper on a crucial idea. Or maybe you designed one piece of software. Or maybe you wrote a patent. Maybe you lead a research project. Naturally, contributions tend to lead to publications, but the relation is not bijective.

This doesn’t mean that the number of publications is irrelevant. There is a correlation between the number of papers someone wrote and the importance of his contributions. But need I remind you, dear reader, that a correlation is not the same as causality? Having written 255 papers (yes, I met a man who had such a pub. record this very summer) does not imply you did anything significant other than keeping journals and conferences alive.

I suggest that publishing frequently is more important than publishing many papers. If you stop publishing for many years, then release a very thick book (Wolfram’s example comes to mind), you are not doing yourself a favor. Also, it is tremendously difficult to get and keep a job or a grant if you stop publishing for a long time. Other than that, we ought to actually read what people write instead of, I don’t know, counting the number of words/pages/papers/books?

Recently, I added a table with count statistics to my c.v. Maybe I should take it out.

Here is a picture of Louka and Lohan at the (Granby) zoo:

Don’t they look alike?

Later, that same day, Nathalie went swimming with Lohan, I have a pretty good zoom on my digital camera and I was able to catch this picture of them:

While the picture is a bit fuzzy, I really like the look on Nathalie’s face.

The ACM SIGMOD/PODS 2007 Conference will be held in Beijing.

ACM SIGMOD/PODS conference is a leading international forum for database researchers, practitioners, developers, and users to explore cutting-edge ideas and results, and to exchange techniques, tools, and experiences. We invite the submission of original research contributions and industrial papers, as well as proposals for demonstrations, tutorials, and panels. We encourage submissions relating to all aspects of data management defined broadly, and particularly encourage work on topics of emerging interest in the research and development communities.