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
You probably shouldn’t use a spreadsheet for important work
Following the Reinhart-Rogoff case, where famous scientists go formulas wrong in the Excel spreadsheet that supported their research, a lot of people commented...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Share your software early: the Reinhart-Rogoff case
I like stories where prestigious professors screw up spectacularly. It reminds us that everybody gets it wrong some of the time. The Reinhart-Rogoff story is one...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The irony of “we are the 99 percent”
David Graeber is credited (by himself) as the true organizer of the Occupy Wall Street movement, a widely reported month-long demonstration against capitalism....
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Do we lose intelligence and creativity as we grow older?
It was popular during the XXth century to say that most scientific discovery are done by young scientists (under 30). The implicit assumption was that the brain...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The 2013 Data 2.0 Summit
The Data 2.0 Summit will be held in San Francisco at the end of the month (April 30th 2013). Some of the speakers might interest the readers of this blog. For example...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
We are sentenced to permanent cognitive stretching
If you want to get better at something, should remain in your comfort zone? Or should you, rather, be exposed to ideas or techniques slightly beyond your reach?...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
We need to get a lot better at imagining the future
We live in an era of fast changes. Ten years ago, YouTube was unthinkable, social media did not exist (Facebook was founded in 2004), we got our movies on tapes...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Advanced tips for dealing with your email inbox
I probably receive 50 emails a day, not counting spam. Give it a week, and I could easily end up with 200 unread emails in my inbox. When that happens, it feels...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
We are getting smarter as a matter of survival
A journalism student got very depressed after reading my post on genetically engineered intelligence. His feeling can be summarized by this question: if at some...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Is genetically engineering intelligence worth it?
We have been hearing reports that China is planning to use genetic engineering to make its population smarter. In fact, there are claims that China has been practicing...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Current Daylight saving time policies are insane
Daylight saving time (DST) is this insane practice whereas twice a year, clocks are moved forward or backward by an hour. It is still widespread throughout North...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Do NULL markers in SQL cause any harm?
The relational model, and by extension, the language SQL supports the notion of NULL marker. It is commonly used to indicate that some attribute is unknown or non...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Where are the “big problem” jobs?
Several authors, scientists and entrepreneurs have lamented our poor ability to innovate. It seems that industry is recruiting few people to work on hard problems...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Does academic research cause economic growth?
In most developed countries, government massively funds through academic grants, government laboratories, tax credits and research contracts. In Canada, the government...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Peer review without journals or conferences
Almost all scientists ask their peers to review their work outside of the formal process offered by journals and conferences. Young scientists are routinely told...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
What kind of researcher are you?
The politician. He will get people to collaborate on joint projects. How to recognize: He knows everyone! Pro: He makes things happen irrespective of the available...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
We are publishing a lot more! How will we cope?
The number of research articles published each year grows exponentially. We often estimate the rate of growth to between 4% to 6% a year. We are publishing a lot...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The big-O notation is a teaching tool
One of my clients once got upset. Indeed, the running time of our image processing algorithm grew by a factor of four when he doubled the resolution of an image...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
How fast should your dynamic arrays grow?
When programming in Java or C++, your arrays have fixed sizes. So if you have an array of 32 integers and you need an array with 33 integers, you may need to create...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog