Author: Dirk Riehle
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Academic publications and what is wrong with them
The most basic academic currency are your publications. While you can’t (or shouldn’t) trade them, they are the way of how other researchers keep track of you and keep score. The higher your score, the higher you are in the pecking order, of course. A publication has two aspects to it that determine its value:…
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When requirements come last
Peter Naur was probably the first to realize that “computing is a human activity” and that as we program, we are not only solving problems, we are also only just beginning to understand them. This even affects small projects like student theses. For engineering theses, i.e. theses in which some artifact is to be built,…
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I hope the authors ignored the bogus review
Dear editor: We previously had submitted an article to your journal, and it got rejected. One of the two reviews we received was bland and the other one apparently had been copied over from another review and had nothing to do with our submission:
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The role and responsibility of an editor or PC chair
I just saw a tweet arguing that a program committee (PC) chair was being disrespectful of the reviewers, if they (the editor) overruled their (the reviewers) recommendations to accept a paper. I beg to differ. It is the PC chairs job to make the final decision on what gets into the research program and they…
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Abolishing tenure and academic competitive strategy
The U.S. state of Texas is trying to abolish tenure for public university professors. If this comes to pass, it would be a highly interesting natural field experiment on academic competitive strategy. From an academic perspective, I’m quite curious about this. Tenure means job security: Tenured professors can’t (easily) be fired, ensuring freedom of research…
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Upcoming talks in April and May 2023
I’ll be holding the following public (free) and commercial (closed) talks and seminars in the upcoming weeks. 2023-04-20: User-led open source projects and country-level competitiveness at Fraunhofer FOKUS. 2023-04-21: Streamlining open source license compliance (our commercial seminar, through Bayave GmbH). 2023-04-24: Open-source software and sustainability (in German most likely) at the TUM Digital Sustainability lecture…