Category: 3. Academia

  • The attack of the Ümlauts

    The attack of the Ümlauts

    Umlauts and other diacritics are on the rise in all the places they don’t belong. How else could you explain these photos I took, all within a short time frame?

  • Industry is where the research data is

    Industry is where the research data is

    Over on Facebook, Lionel Briand commented on how hard it is for an academic research group to compete with industrial organizations on research. This is certainly true for hot topics. Right now, with a burning hot AI summer, the research world is split into the have and have-nots (in terms of GPU resources), and this…

  • Academic publications and what is wrong with them

    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:…

  • Abolishing tenure and academic competitive strategy

    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.

  • Rage against required templates for paper submissions

    Rage against required templates for paper submissions

    Anyone who wants to submit a paper to a computer science conference usually faces two options: Use a TeX template or use a Word template. I haven’t written TeX in thirty years as a first author (I do edit and contribute as a coauthor because it can’t be avoided) and I use Linux and hence…

  • To review or not to review

    To review or not to review

    I previously reported about a bogus review for a journal submission of ours. The submission had been rejected partly or fully based on a review that obviously had nothing to do with our paper but must have been reused from before. I had complained to the editor, but I had not got any answers for…