Latest in Comments on Science and Academia
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An illustration of how chat AIs might disrupt teaching
With the recent general availability of chat AIs like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, teachers have to ask themselves how to deal with student homework potentially created using these tools. In the following ten minute video I provide a short illustration from my own teaching how students might use such chat AIs in creating homework, and I discuss…
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A common single-person research design that does not work (well)
I’ve had some success in grant proposals with research designs for human-centered software engineering that follow the following (common) pattern. It is a three-step of I won a couple of one-person (Ph.D. student, i.e. three years of work) grants with this, but execution has been harder than expected. The skilled observer (e.g. experienced principal investigator)…
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Have you seen this review?
We recently submitted a structured literature review to a well-ranked journal, and got a review back complaining about how badly our controlled experiment had been carried out. We inquired with the editor about this, but got no answer back. The review (by reviewer 2, no less) is so generic, I suspect it has been used…
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Dear ministry, are you serious?
Translated from the (German) instructions on the final step of submitting a project plan for funding: Please specify exactly how many and which publications you will publish over the next three years. Yeah, right.
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Lecturing is getting increasingly bipolar
In this fifth semester of the COVID-19 pandemic, I can’t help but predict that teaching by way of lectures will be getting more bipolar. I foresee two main modes of lecturing: This may hardly sound surprising, but some of the underlying mechanics that are leading me to this prediction may. There are two noteworthy developments:…
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Best practices for page numbers in article submissions
Should you add page numbers to articles you submit for review? Absolutely. Why? Because it will make it easier for reviewers to comment. Should you have page numbers in an article you are preparing for submission? Absolutely. Why? Because your coauthors will find it easier to comment. (Not everyone will always be online; I still…