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
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
Book review: Statistical Analysis with R
The programming language R is a standard for statisticians. And it is free software which runs on Windows, Mac and Linux. You can learn much online about R, but...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Innovating without Permission
Is open source software is better than closed-source software? Is wikipedia better than Britannica? Is NoSQL better than Oracle and SQL Server? Are blogs better...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Demarchy and probabilistic algorithms
Demarchy are political systems built using randomness. Demarchy has been used to designate political leaders in Ancient Greece and in France (during the French...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Our Institutions are Limited by the Pre-digital Technology
Much of our institutions are limited by the pre-digital technology: (1) It is difficult to constantly re-edit a paper book; (2) without computers, global trade...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
So, you want to be a mad scientist?
Exceptional scientists are often a bit crazy: Kurt G
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
If human population grew at the pace of computer storage
Between 1990 and 2010, the cost of one megabyte of disk storage went from $9 to $0.00015. Had the human population followed a similar growth, there would be 300...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Five surprising changes in 2010
I was among the first Canadians to own a Kindle. I justified my purchase as “research”. The Kindle was not satisfying for anything but fiction and I predicted it...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Make your own programmable digital thermometer in an hour
I make my own yogourt because I cannot stand commercial yogourt. You can make your own yogourt in less than 30 mintues: heat milk to 112F (34C), mix in a small...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog