Ellison’s work on the decline of peer review (reported earlier on my blog) is still being discussed:

Ellison has painstakingly documented the decline of articles published in top  economics journals by authors working in the highest-ranked schools.  These authors are continuing to publish, but are seeking other outlets, including unrefereed preprint and working paper servers.

The analysis is simple:

• If you are good and well known, people will read you even if you publish on toilet paper.
• Peer review is becoming less and less fun. Myself, I have had numerous problems with papers stuck in a journal peer review for several years. Conference peer review is often crude.
• Hence, if you are well known, peer review might not be beneficial to you. As you stop publishing in the top venues, the prestige of these venues diminish which leads more people to drop them, and so on. Until one day, nobody thinks that peer review is prestigious

Of course, peer review is not really declining, but rather slowly evolving. It has become far more acceptable to take some of your work and simply post it online. If it is good and useful, people will make use of it, with or without formal peer review. Not unlike open source software.

Source: Michael Nielsen.

As some of you noticed, this blog keeps on getting hacked. I need help.

• I have the latest version of wordpress. I have changed the password and I did my best to find any backdoor.
• I do not think anyone can modify the PHP files because they are not writeable on the server.
• In the latest hacks, they update the content of my post with hidden spam. That is, the spam appears directly my relational database. It appears that, indeed, the PHP files are not modified. It also appears that they are only able to update the latests posts. Indeed, only 3 posts had spam in them. Surely, if they could have done more, my entire database would be filled with spam right now.

So, what should I be looking for?

I think there must be at least one backdoor left. I have checked that when I write a new post, the spam is not automatically inserted. So, the post must be updated a bit later.

This is very scary and annoying.

Update: My current best guess is that only few blog posts were modified because I changed my password and removed the default admin user just in time. If so, I am very lucky because the spammers could have infected all of my content. Indeed, it appears that none of my recent posts have been spammed. Of course, it could be just a matter of time…

• There is no such thing as an unbiased expert outside the Mathematics department. When your banker told you to borrow money and to invest it in the stock market, you did not really think he had your best interest in mind, did you? I am always amazed by how definitive the financial advice bankers give out. Ask to see their mathematical models and question their assumptions! Most often, you will find out that they have no model and they are just repeating corporate lines.
• Reproducibility is a lot harder than it sounds. Times and times again, I have been surprised by how difficult it is to reproduce the results of a given research paper. Financial experts often base their advice on case studies and they assume that these are reproducible. If people twenty years ago managed to get rich by buying cheap houses and reselling them for a profit, can we reproduce this scenario in 2008? Maybe. Maybe not.
• Long-term plans are much less useful than you think. As a researcher, I often make up plans. I am forced, every 5 years, to plan for the next 5 years so that my funding agency will give me some money. However, these plans always fall flat. The truth is that I am terrible at predicting the future reliably. Feel free to set goals for yourself however. Just do not be surprised if you have to reinvent your plans and your goals every 3 months.

My blog has been penalized in Google’s index for a few weeks now. While I would prefer that my content be easier to find, it does not worry me and my readership is not declining. Daniel Tunkelang explains exactly why: while Google brings a lot of traffic to my blog, almost none of it is relevant.

For example, my post on Simpson’s paradox is the most popular page from Google’s search engine. By far. Yet, it is not very exciting nor very representative. It gets a lot of traffic because many people want to compute the “average of averages”.

There is a practical conclusion: forget about most search-engine optimization tricks if you are a blogger. Making some of your pages show up first in Google will generally not increase your readership.

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.

My blog was hacked again by spammers. While I tried to be careful last time, I left evil scripts behind. That is how they were able to hack my blog again. This time I took three hours to verify manually everything before and after upgrading.

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.