Jeff Dalton reports on a presentation by Dave Jensen and David Smith on the Myths of Research in Computer Science. A key insight is that Computer Science Research is not about systems. Designing a better spam filter is a great idea, and might make you wealthy, but it is not what Computer Science is about.

I like the approach described by Jeff’s post:

Design an experiment to learn regardless of the outcome.

Of course, we all want to improve computations. However, you do not have to prove that your way is better than their way (the macho approach). This sort of contest gets boring rather quickly.

Unsurprisingly, almost all students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison say they prefer courses with webcasted lectures as opposed to campus-only lectures. What is more interesting is that 60 percent said they were willing to pay more for them.

Considering how much students pay for overpriced textbooks, it is maybe not so surprising that they are willing to pay extra for online content.

Source: Downes.

You are an explorer who arrived on planet Bypolar. The Bypolarians come in two species: the Falsians and the Truans. The Falsians always lie whereas the Truans always tell the truth. Alas, you do not know how to distinguish them.

In any case, two locals are waiting for you.

First Bypolarian: You are most welcome on our planet. You are safe here.

Second Bypolarian: You must leave at once. You are in danger.

First Bypolarian: Do not mind my friend, he always lie.

Second Bypolarian: Ah… we always disagree.

Should you be worried or relaxed?

Industry has always advertised to scientists. However, this ad targeting biologists is… peculiar:

Source: Owen Kaser.

If you want to be smart, you must first learn to be free. Build low energy systems. Lean and mean machines.

To explain why freedom leads to better result, we had Adam Smith—yes, I took economics once—who used a crude model to justify the use of free markets (an innovation at the time). But it takes time and patience to convince us that thriving for more freedom is necessary. Certainly, intelligence is fuzzier than we tend to believe.

Fear is freedom’s worst enemy. Fear destroys freedom and ultimately, intelligence. In turn, this is why leaderless organizations are thriving. The leaders are not the trouble, the loss of freedom is.

MacOS has a nice “open” command that will open any document with any application from the command line. I hacked my own for Linux for a bash shell:


TEMP=`getopt -o a: -- "$@"`
if [ $? != 0 ] ; then exit 1 ; fi
eval set — “$TEMP”
while true ; do
case “$1″ in
-a) COMMAND=$2 ; shift 2;;
–) shift ; break ;;
*)echo “should not happen” ; exit 1 ;;
esac
done
if [ $COMMAND ]; then
nohup $COMMAND $@ > ~/.s1 2> ~/.s2 &
else
/usr/bin/xdg-open $@
fi


Got an email a week ago. True story:

Dear prof. X,

I see that you are chair of the certificate program in Computer Science. I want to apply to the certificate program at [insert competing university here]. Can you have a look at my application? I really need to get in!

Thank you.

Some confused student.