Less planning, prototyping!

Planning is typically a long and expensive process. Some “experts” justify it by claiming that one week of planning saves ten weeks of programming. In practice, this payoff rarely comes. Why? Because as you make progress, the project itself changes and the planning becomes obsolete.

I am not saying you should not manage and plan your projects. However, all planning should be short-term. The only question you must answer is:

What is the most efficient use of my time today?

In short, I advocate you follow a greedy algorithm to manage your time and your projects. Given that your problems are ill-defined and constantly changing, maximizing your short-time efficiency is the only sane thing to do.

Stop investing your time today in the hope that you will be efficiency tomorrow. Be efficient now!

Of course, if you live in some huge slow-moving corporation and work on problems that will remain the same for decades, then please do plan ahead!

Ellison has painstakingly documented the decline of articles published in top  economics journals by authors working in the highest-ranked schools.  These authors are continuing to publish, but are seeking other outlets, including unrefereed preprint and working paper servers.

The analysis is simple:

• If you are good and well known, people will read you even if you publish on toilet paper.
• Peer review is becoming less and less fun. Myself, I have had numerous problems with papers stuck in a journal peer review for several years. Conference peer review is often crude.
• Hence, if you are well known, peer review might not be beneficial to you. As you stop publishing in the top venues, the prestige of these venues diminish which leads more people to drop them, and so on. Until one day, nobody thinks that peer review is prestigious

Of course, peer review is not really declining, but rather slowly evolving. It has become far more acceptable to take some of your work and simply post it online. If it is good and useful, people will make use of it, with or without formal peer review. Not unlike open source software.

Source: Michael Nielsen.

• I have the latest version of wordpress. I have changed the password and I did my best to find any backdoor.
• I do not think anyone can modify the PHP files because they are not writeable on the server.
• In the latest hacks, they update the content of my post with hidden spam. That is, the spam appears directly my relational database. It appears that, indeed, the PHP files are not modified. It also appears that they are only able to update the latests posts. Indeed, only 3 posts had spam in them. Surely, if they could have done more, my entire database would be filled with spam right now.

So, what should I be looking for?

I think there must be at least one backdoor left. I have checked that when I write a new post, the spam is not automatically inserted. So, the post must be updated a bit later.

This is very scary and annoying.

Update: My current best guess is that only few blog posts were modified because I changed my password and removed the default admin user just in time. If so, I am very lucky because the spammers could have infected all of my content. Indeed, it appears that none of my recent posts have been spammed. Of course, it could be just a matter of time…

For example, my post on Simpson’s paradox is the most popular page from Google’s search engine. By far. Yet, it is not very exciting nor very representative. It gets a lot of traffic because many people want to compute the “average of averages”.

There is a practical conclusion: forget about most search-engine optimization tricks if you are a blogger. Making some of your pages show up first in Google will generally not increase your readership.

I like the approach described by Jeff’s post:

Design an experiment to learn regardless of the outcome.

Of course, we all want to improve computations. However, you do not have to prove that your way is better than their way (the macho approach). This sort of contest gets boring rather quickly.

Considering how much students pay for overpriced textbooks, it is maybe not so surprising that they are willing to pay extra for online content.

Source: Downes.

In any case, two locals are waiting for you.

First Bypolarian: You are most welcome on our planet. You are safe here.

Second Bypolarian: You must leave at once. You are in danger.

First Bypolarian: Do not mind my friend, he always lie.

Second Bypolarian: Ah… we always disagree.

Should you be worried or relaxed?

Source: Owen Kaser.

To explain why freedom leads to better result, we had Adam Smith—yes, I took economics once—who used a crude model to justify the use of free markets (an innovation at the time). But it takes time and patience to convince us that thriving for more freedom is necessary. Certainly, intelligence is fuzzier than we tend to believe.

Fear is freedom’s worst enemy. Fear destroys freedom and ultimately, intelligence. In turn, this is why leaderless organizations are thriving. The leaders are not the trouble, the loss of freedom is.


TEMP=`getopt -o a: -- "$@"`
if [ $? != 0 ] ; then exit 1 ; fi
eval set — “$TEMP”
while true ; do
case “$1″ in
-a) COMMAND=$2 ; shift 2;;
–) shift ; break ;;
*)echo “should not happen” ; exit 1 ;;
esac
done
if [ $COMMAND ]; then
nohup $COMMAND $@ > ~/.s1 2> ~/.s2 &
else
/usr/bin/xdg-open $@
fi


Dear prof. X,

I see that you are chair of the certificate program in Computer Science. I want to apply to the certificate program at [insert competing university here]. Can you have a look at my application? I really need to get in!

Thank you.

Some confused student.

• Programming Methodology — CS106A
• Programming Abstractions — CS106B
• Programming Paradigms — CS107
• Introduction to Robotics — CS223A
• Natural Language Processing — CS224N
• Machine Learning — CS229
• The Fourier Transform and its Applications — EE261
• Introduction to Linear Dynamical Systems — EE263
• Convex Optimization I — EE364A
• Convex Optimization II — EE364B

My only beef is that online videos are awfully boring, irrespective of the lecturer. If only I could convince more people to stop lecturing! Otherwise, the content is well organized and generally beautiful.

It is easy to dismiss these things as marketing gimmicks. But doing so would be like dismissing company Web sites in 1996 as gimmicks. These are the latest seeds of a long stream of seeds that will change higher education forever.

Disclaimer: I teach 3 online-only Computer Science university-level courses, including a graduate course.

The Canadian Association of University Teachers found the dismissal grossly abusive. They call for a censure of Acadia University unless Wightman is rehired.

Disclaimer: I was once a professor at Acadia University.