My current employer, a state university, may technically go out of business in July. Naturally, management blames the lack of funding. There are two issues at stake.

Firstly, the University has been chronically in the red. This means that tuitions and government grants are not sufficient to cover cost. Meanwhile, the number of faculty members has gone up 5% in the last few years. So, surely, someone expected the University to have increased revenues. But from where?

Secondly, the University has invested massively in real estate. I mean millions and millions of dollars in buildings. What for? To accommodate the increasing number of students? Actually, the number of students attending classrooms has been pretty stable in recent years. Whereas the business students keep on coming, the sciences are not attracting more students as time passes. Distance education is another matter: the number of students taking online courses is growing by more than 10% a year. But as anyone knows, distance education does not require large buildings.

I find this interesting. Isn’t it the job of managers to do the best they can with whatever budget they have? If you are a highly paid university manager and you spend and spend without counting, then where is the challenge in this?

It seems that spending the money then turning around and say “oops! we spent money we didn’t have” is irresponsible. You’d think people would get fired over this, but they won’t.

What is going to happen? Clearly, less popular courses and programs will have to go. There is no other way to reliably save money when you are a university. The only recipe for profit is to focus on the profitable programs (Business!!! more Business!!!) and to slash less profitables one (Physics?). Except for distance education, of course, which will continue to slowly grow, unnoticed, and without any expensive building to support it.

(No, I do not expect to lose my job. Not for now anyhow.)

Though blogpulse seems to be going nowhere, as far as I can see, it is still one of the most fascinating tool out there. What it does is plot word occurrences versus time on the blogosphere. The recall is rather poor compared to Technorati but the time series plot are very nice.

Here’s one comparative plot that a student in my Information Retrieval course (Mahmoud El-Bachir) has submitted:

You can see clearly when Christmas is (Noël in French) and when the new year is… I think you also have the Chinese New Year too! (Seek the smaller bump).

My only beef is that I do not have access to the raw data: it would be really cool to build applications on top of blogpulse, but I guess it goes against their business model.

Technorati is one of the few long standing Internet companies to be in the search business and to stand tall in front of Google and Yahoo. And there are only 45 of them. That is not exactly a basement operation, but given how well established the company is, that is a very small number.

What does it say about the future of Information Technology? Are all the mail servers in the world be run by 30 people one day?

Here’s a recent quote from ACM TechNews:

The ACM’s Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computing Theory honored Rudich and Razborov for their contributions to addressing the P vs. NP problem, which involves the computational complexity behind the security of ATM cards, computer passwords, and electronic commerce.

The implication here is that the P vs. NP problem is important for computer security. This seems like saying that General Relativity is important to establish a mining operation on the Moon.

This may be a naïve question, but would proving that P=NP (or disproving it) change anything in computer security?

Yes, I can appreciate the fundamental nature of the P vs. NP problem. But does it have any practical consequences?

Note that whether a problem requires 2ⁿ or n¹⁵⁰ time will not make much difference: both are intractable.

As a database researcher, anything requiring n⁴ time is already intractable. Don’t believe me? If n is 1 million and a computer can do 10¹² operations per second, it takes 30 thousand years to solve a n⁴ time problem. I am not even going to get in the constants: what if your complexity is 10¹²⁰ n?

Oh yes! Please, give prizes to anyone who makes progress toward the P vs. NP problem, but I am still waiting for the practical implications.

(If I am making a crucial mistake here, please tell me! I want to know.)

Update. André pointed me to a web site that pretty much says that P vs. NP is not so important for cryptography.

I just found out about SLIMTIME. If you need to keep track of your time, this is the perfect application.