Latest Comments on Science and Academia
-
Exemplary research papers?
I teach a hands-on lab course on how to do research. Students perform a small research project and write a paper about it, preparing them for the research work of their final thesis. I want to revise the set of example research papers I’m using. We study these research papers as good examples of how…
-
Teaching materials for agile methods course
Update 2018-08-01: The old materials are not available any longer; please watch this space for the new release! I finally put my teaching materials for my agile methods course on this website. The slides are available in “source” form, i.e. Open/LibreOffice format, as well as PDFs. I also added supplementary materials like the videos I…
-
Publishers, e-books, and DRM
2012-02-18: Updated the post with translations from the original letter. I’m an Addison-Wesley author and just received a letter from Pearson, the owner of Addison-Wesley, informing me about their thoughts and steps towards e-books and the digital age. The letter is written as an open letter with no apparent secrets, so I’m making it available…
-
Do engineering researchers care about truth?
So ICSE, the top software engineering conference, rejected our paper, again. The reviewers were actually quite positive: high-quality work, little or no flaws, interesting. One of the reviewers found the paper’s results surprising, asked for more details, and suggested new research directions. The final conclusion of both reviews, however, was the same: The work has…
-
The case for German university outreach to china
On my research group’s blog I make the case for German University Outreach to China. I argue that my employer, the Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, is well-positioned (and well-advised) to tap into the Chinese education market. In a nutshell, German engineering universities provide excellent education almost across the board while being comparatively cheap (no or…
-
Definition of write-only journal
I thought it is a common term by now but apparently it is not. Here is my definition of “write-only (research) journal”: A write-only research journal is a research journal that publishes papers but is never read (hence write/publish-only). Its purpose is twofold: to (a) give a researcher some reputation return on their work by…