Category: 3. Academia
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Writing recommendation letters using a chat AI
It is the first week of the new year, and I already got three student requests for recommendation letters. Writing recommendation letters is an important duty of a professor, but writing letters for students who took exactly one course with with me ten years ago is stretching this duty. Thankfully, chat AIs can help–or can…
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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?
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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…
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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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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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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…