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
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
Academia as an ‘anxiety machine’
We learned recently of the suicide of Stefan Grimm, a successful professor at the prestigious Imperial College in London. Professors Grimm regularly published highly...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
When bad ideas will not die: from classical AI to Linked Data
Back in the 1970s, researchers astutely convinced governments that we could build intelligent systems out of reasoning engines. Pure logic would run the day. These...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Perfectionism is not the same as having high standards
A lot of what I do is… quite frankly… not very good. To put it differently, almost everything I do fails to meet my quality standards. So I am constantly fighting...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Why competitive people are often dumb and boring
People who work hard are typically motivated by either their performance (i.e., they want to look good) or their mastery (i.e., they like being good at their craft)...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The hubris of teachers
Today, kids left and right carry the label of some learning disability. Instead of telling kids that they are dumb or lazy, we narrow it down to some problem. It...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Forcefully boring young people is necessary…
In many schools, a fifth of all boys are prescribed Amphetamine-related drugs because they have been diagnosed with an attention deficit. But these pills are not...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Bricolage by smart people
Scientific research is fundamentally about learning, about trial and error. Luck and unplanned interactions are a central part of it. Thus research cannot be planned...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Having your cat declawed means having its fingers amputated
There are many simple facts that totally escape me for years. For example, though I took biology in college and I knew that plants were made of carbon through photosynthesis...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Coffee is probably not killing your productivity
A recent Slate articles warns that coffee makes you less productive. The main claim is that coffee has no cognition enhancement ability but, instead, a range of...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The week-end freedom test
In an earlier post, I compared life in academia with life in industry. One recurring argument to favour an academic job over an industry job is freedom. Of course...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog