Latest in Comments on Science and Academia
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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…
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Upcoming talks in April and May 2023
I’ll be holding the following public (free) and commercial (closed) talks and seminars in the upcoming weeks. 2023-04-20: User-led open source projects and country-level competitiveness at Fraunhofer FOKUS. 2023-04-21: Streamlining open source license compliance (our commercial seminar, through Bayave GmbH). 2023-04-24: Open-source software and sustainability (in German most likely) at the TUM Digital Sustainability lecture…
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How to acknowledge the use of copyediting services
I looked around research papers and did not find any acknowledgments of copyediting services used. Even before Grammarly and ChatGPT, authors have used human editors, and apparently this was not worth mentioning? This seems unfair to me and may have to change in the age of chat AIs. How about this template for the acknowledgments…
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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…
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What to make of the high-tech layoffs
To my disconcerted students: Sadly, the massive layoffs in Silicon Valley and around the world that we are currently observing are a low-frequency yet business-as-usual event. Let me tease apart the different components and draw some conclusions for your career. First of all, you may have observed how they are all happening at once. This…
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Demonstration that Chat GPT is human
Or stupid. Probably both. Enough anthropomorphizing already.