Communications of the ACM
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How the “Frontier” Became the Slogan of Uncontrolled AI
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been billed as the next frontier of humanity: the newly available expanse whose exploration …
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Was life better in the 1970s?
People from my generation often complain that their parents were better off. They are often quick to dismiss the Internet and smart phones as irrelevant to their...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Evil abbreviations in programming languages
Programming language designers often abbreviate common function names. The benefits are sometimes dubious in an era where most programmers commonly use meaningful...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Accelerating intersections with SIMD instructions
Most people have a mental model of computation based on the Turing machine. The computer does one operation at a time. For example, maybe it adds two numbers and...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Good ideas are overrated
As a college student, I was convinced that the most important part of science and engineering was to have good and original ideas. If you contemplate Einstein,...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Other useless school trivia: the quadratic formula
I have two young boys and I have decided to pay attention to what they are learning in school. Beside basic writing and reading skills, mathematics feels like the...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
On rote memorization and antiquated skills
When I write that we should focus on teaching useful skills, and avoid rote memorization… I get far more opposition than I expect. To my surprise, there is an abundant...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The mathematics we teach our kids…
Math education has made progress compared to my school days in specific areas. For example, I am really happy that statistics and probabilities are fully integrated...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The hopeless ones become college professors.
Many people justify their choice of pursuing graduate school by a desire to explore new ideas and satisfy their intellectual curiosity, an euphemism for goofing...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Large well-funded laboratories…
Your intuition is probably that large well-funded research laboratories produce more research… One part of this intuition is flat out wrong. Small teams are consistently...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Lectures are the lazy person’s approach to education
Roger Schank is a famous computer science professor. His take on lectures is just brilliant: We still have lectures for one main reason. They are the lazy person...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Your brain and its software patches
Scott Alexander wrote a series of great posts on genetic determinism. He recounts how he believes he learned English without any effort but could not learn Calculus...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
How do you become an expert?
I was asked by one of my students how to become an expert programmer. Peter Norvig has already given an excellent answer: work hard for ten years. Let me revisit...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Knauff and Nejasmic recommend banning LaTeX
Two German psychology professors, Knauff and Nejasmic, recently published a paper on the benefits of Microsoft Word over LaTeX. The paper was reported in Nature...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Fast unary decoding
Computers store numbers in binary form using a fixed number of bits. For example, Java will store integers using 32 bits (when using the int type). This can be...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Theory lags practice
Schools teach us theory so that we can be more productive workers. You learn grammar so that you can be a better writer. You learn about computer science, so that...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
How to learn efficiently
I am convinced that much of the gap between the best college students and the worst is explained by study habits. Frankly, most students study poorly. To make matters...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
MOOCs are closed platforms… and probably doomed
Colleges and universities, left and right, are launching Massive open online courses (MOOC). Colleges failing to follow are “behind the times”. Do not be fooled...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Optimizing polymorphic code in Java
Oracle’s Java is a fast language… sometimes just as fast as C++. In Java, we commonly use polymorphism through interfaces, inheritance or wrapper classes to make...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The Smartest Kids in the World: stories from Finland, Poland and South Korea
I have always been interested in what makes us smart. So I read Amanda Ripley’s The Smartest Kids in the World in almost a single sitting. She is a good writer....
From Daniel Lemire's Blog