Latest Comments on Science and Academia
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German universities to take university rankings serious
Germany is the best place I know to be a professor if you value your independence. Your rights have been codified in the German Basic Law (Constitution) and no dean can tell you what to do. You are your own person. On the downside, German professors and universities have been (for the most part) blissfully…
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Talk slides: Teaching agile methods with industry partners
I’m at ECSEE 2014, the European Conference on Software Engineering Education, and I just held a talk on how we teach agile methods at Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nürnberg. Key to our projects is the involvement of industry partners, who provide high-level project requirements to the different student teams. Here are the slides to my talk…
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Once again natural vs. engineering sciences struggling over definitions #FSE2014
I’m in Hong Kong, attending FSE 2014. I had signed up for the Next-Generation Mining-Software-Repositories workshop at HKUST but missed it for (undisclosed) reasons. Apparently there were two main topics of dicussion: Calls by colleagues to make mining work “useful” rather than “just” interesting Calls by colleagues to build tools rather than “just” generate insight…
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Springer Verlag adding insult to injury
Springer Verlag by way of its incompetence to properly edit manuscripts has been a royal pain in my butt for a long-time. In the most egregious example, one of their editors changed the title of what was a crowning paper of many years of research work. He turned “open source” into “open course”, completely altering…
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Response to Moshe @Vardi’s CACM editorial on open access
In the most recent CACM editor’s letter, Moshe Vardi, the CACM’s editor-in-chief, addresses the question of open access from the perspective of the ACM [1]. The ACM is a non-profit organization for (mostly) computer scientists, and a publisher of conference proceedings and journals. I find the editorial rather disconcerting. Vardi views “the open access movement”…
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The economics of financing Ph.D. students as company contractors
Occasionally companies approach me with the following proposal: If I’m willing to supervise one of their employees for an external Ph.D. thesis, they’ll pay into my University budget an annual lump sum, typically something like EUR 10000. I almost always reject such proposals, unless I can change some of the critical terms, because these proposals…