Latest in Comments on Science and Academia
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Using open source to align academic client-supplier relationships
Open source is a boon for academic project collaboration. As long as the collaboration is not only voluntary, but also on equal footing, everyone can contribute and benefit under the guidance of an open source license and processes. However, as soon as money flows between the partners, the lawyers will want to have their say,…
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What does customer success mean for a professor?
A professor raises funds, manages projects, and publishes about it. Next to teaching, university committees, self-administration, recruiting and hiring, people management, peer reviews, community leadership, etc. Fundraising is called sales, if done by a company. Now, companies have something called customer success. What does this imply for a professor? Customer success means making sure that…
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Top three career advice for students
These are the three top pieces of career advice I give to my students: In more detail: If you don’t feel comfortable with the people you are going to work with, your job will be miserable. Chances are that even after moving within the organization, it won’t get much better. If you help generate revenues…
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Why we shouldn’t grade dissertations
tl;dr — A quality mark of a dissertation is that its reviewers don’t all come from the same university. However, different universities have different grading systems, making average grades meaningless at best and hurtful to the careers of young researchers at worst. So we should move to a pass/fail system of grading. A dissertation (a.k.a.…
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There’s more to research than testing hypotheses
In a recent grant proposal, we proposed to develop a new method and to evaluate it using case study research. By definition, case studies are a good way of evaluating theories where you can’t control all parameters, as is the case with new methods in an open and complex world setting like software engineering. Interestingly,…
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Good use of ancient SD cards
I finally was able to find a good for of those old (ancient!) SD cards I have flying around. The ministry of education in Bavaria requires that I send exam questions to them before use, by mail (the one without an e-). I can burn the questions to a CD, or put them onto a…