Latest Comments on Science and Academia
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One student’s first encounter with academic writing
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What makes a great “grand challenge”?
Ten years ago DARPA, the US defense research agency, first organized the DARPA Grand Challenge. The challenge was to build a car that could drive 150 miles through the Mohave desert autonomously. The key is the car’s autonomy: No human brain was to steer it and make decisions, it was computers and other technology all…
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Non sequitur #DesignPatternsHumor
A colleague earlier today showed me this student answer from one of his exams: The student answer for “name a design pattern” is “hotel” and the answer for “that pattern’s intent” is “book hotel”. Repeat for a second pattern called “flight” and its intent “book flight”.
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Internal vs. external validity of research funding
So far, most of my research funding has been from industry. Sometimes, I have to defend myself against colleagues who argue that their public funding is somehow superior to my industry funding. This is only a sentiment; they have not been able to give any particular reason for their position. I disagree with this assessment,…
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Soundness vs. importance in publishing (PeerJ computer science journal announced)
Today, PeerJ announced the creation of a new open access computer science journal. After a bit of back and forth a while ago I had accepted the invitation to be on the editorial board. (My main concern was that PeerJ is a for-profit organization but co-founder Pete Binfield convinced me that this will only be…
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Fraudulent publishers not missing a beat in 2015
Unbelievable. About everything in this Call for Papers and the website being linked to is screaming fraud. However, it is so badly done that I can only assume that someone is turning the Scigen experiment on its head.