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
Improve your impact with abundance-based design
People design all the time: new cars, new software, new houses. All design is guided by constraints (cost, time, materials, space) and by objectives (elegance,...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Is science more art or industry?
In my previous post, I argued that people who pursue double-blind peer review have an idealized “LEGO block” view of scientific research. Research papers are “pure”...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The Case Against Double-blind Peer Review
Many scientific journals use double-blind peer review. That is, the authors submit their work in a way that cannot be traced back to them. Meanwhile, the authors...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Ten things Computer Science Tells us About Bureaucrats
Originally, the term computer applied to human beings. These days, it is increasingly difficult to distinguish reliably machines from human beings: we require ever...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The Open Java API for OLAP is growing up!
Software is typically built using two types of programming languages. On the one hand, we have query languages (e.g., XQuery, SQL or MDX). On the other, we have...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
How information technology is really built
One of my favorite stories is how Greg Linden invented the famous Amazon recommender system, after after being forbidden to do so. The story is fantastic because...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
You can assess trends by the status of the participants
I conjecture that, everything else being equal, the level of your education is inversely correlated with innovation. At first, a new idea appears interesting, but...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Social Web or Tempo Web?
Back in 2004, Tim O’Reilly observed that the Web had changed, and coined the term Web 2.0. This new Web is made of several layers which enable the Social Web. Wikipedia...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Know the biases of your operating system
Douglas Rushkoff wrote in Life Inc. that our society is nothing more than an operating system upon which we (as software) live: The landscape on which we are living...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Governments Should Stop Funding Higher Education
Everyone knows that publicly funded education is good. Right? Wait! Why? “Education has substantial non-financial benefits.” This argument assumes that people who...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Breaking news: HTML+CSS is Turing complete
A programming language is Turing complete if it equivalent to a Turing machine. In practice, it means that any algorithm can be implemented. Most programming languages...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Jobless recovery, the luddite fallacy and the 4-hour workweek
The luddite fallacy says that as innovation destroys jobs, just as many new jobs are created. The logic is that increased productivity causes prices to fall, which...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Innovation and model boundaries
When designing an information system, a piece of software or a law, experts work from a model. This model must have boundaries. When these boundaries are violated...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Social Media is subversive, but maybe not how you think
Back in 2005, Shirky argued that the Social Web offered an alternative to organizations. Working collaboratively has never been easier. And the innovation is ongoing...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Taking Scientific Publishing to the Next Level
Scientific publishing is wasteful. We spend much time perfecting irrelevant papers to get them through peer review. Meanwhile, important papers—that thousands of...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
China: the new Scientific Superpower?
From my experience, the quality and the quantity of the scientific research articles from China has been increasing dramatically in the last five years. To verify...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Not Even Eventually Consistent
Many databases engines ensure consistency: at any given time, the database state is logically consistent. For example, even if you receive purchase requests by...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Turning vanity publishing on its head
It has never been easier to self-publish a book: Amazon has CreateSpace which offers a print-on-demand service and an ISBN if you want one. Self-publishing on the...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
On the monetary value of an education, and bad statistics
The case that education pays is often made by compare the income of people who graduated against the people who did not. The result is compelling: (Source: U.S....
From Daniel Lemire's Blog