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
Are you a techno-optimist? (A review of Tomorrowland)
Walt Disney released Tomorrowland. I brought my little family to see it and we had a blast. (Warning: mild spoilers ahead.) The movie has one message: let us be...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Putting the evil academic publishers in perspective
Academic publishing is a bit of a perverted business. Let us recap what should be well known: professors write papers for free while publishers take the papers...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Old people are not very sharp, are they?
Depression, obesity, stress, sleep deprivation and age affect negatively your brain. However, as I have previously argued, the commonly reported decline in intellectual...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Do better written papers get more citations?
Everything else being equal, you would expect short and simple papers to get a wider readership. Long sentences, complicated terms, should all discourage readers...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Basic email skills
If there is one skill that is needed in a modern office is email. By email, I do not refer to the specific Internet protocol. I refer to the general process of...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
To be creative, work alone
In his excellent book How to Fly a Horse, Ashton makes a case for working alone. He quotes Apple’s co-founder and technical genius Steven Wozniak: Work alone. You...
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