Tonight, I really feel like the world is changing.

The typical problem scientists and scholars in general have is that we need to be able to predict paradigms changes, or at least study them. But how can you know that things are changing while you are in it? Can humans study humans? Well, I’m not a social scientist, so I don’t have to worry, officially, with such issues… but all scholars are affected to some level by this paradox.

Well, I’ve been using inDiscover.net. Yes, I’m linking to my own project, well, it isn’t my project, but I’m involved from the side. So, it is self-promotion. Fine. Still, using inDiscover.net has made me realized how the world has changed. A bit like when Stephen Downes worked on his MuniMall portal project and, while the project was a failure, he realized that the world was changing and he embarked on a mission (see his value statement on his site).

Look on the right-hand-side of my blog, you should see my current playlist from inDiscover.net. All of this music is free. It is out there. You can download the MP3s and listen to the same music I listen to. No matter where you are in the world. You can then share your playlist with the world. You can have my playlist, live, as XML, that you can incorporate in any application, any web site.

I hope to write later on why I think this is a paradigm shift. We are beyond the world of blogs, beyond the Web… this is deep. I think it will eventually change society all the way.

Ok, I’m making many claims here… I need to write this up, but it is late…

People who are happy with whatever operating system they are offered probably find it much easier to change job. When you are a linux addict, it means that you have to secretly install Linux and then reverse-engineer the network configuration so that you can, well, print.

This time I installed Gentoo in my office. As it turns out, it was rather painless, but as an overworked prof., it was still hurtful to waste a day configuring the machine. The toughest part this time was getting the printing to work. As it turns out, I had to the cups to use smb://mylogin:mypassword@tlmnt4/uer_com instead of smb://tlmnt4/uer_com. Somehow, cups couldn’t just reuse my known username and password. Hmmm… I wonder why I never had this problem before? I really wish cups was easier to configure. But at least, it works now.

There is also a special java applet system called explor@ here. But I think I mostly figured out how to get it running “ok” under linux (in French), though I had to waste another day on it.

I have good reasons to believe I must be the only prof. around using Linux. My addiction to command line interfaces has a thing or two to do with it. You can emulate pretty much the unix environment under Windows, but it is never quite the same in terms of productivity.

I’ve been told that MacOS X would be a good choice too. Except that I couldn’t have done what I just did here: take the “free” PC they put in my office and transform it in a Linux box.

Some facts people often don’t know:

• Networking is mostly painless under Linux. Since most networks use DHCP, the configuration is a joke. With samba, you can access pretty much all of the network services you need even when they are hosted on a Windows server.
• With OpenOffice and latex2rtf, you can pretty live within the MS Word universe and not get noticed. People will complain that the documents don’t look quite as they expect, but I’m a prof. and I can always claim that I’m not very good with word processing. You can consume and produce Word documents. Not very good ones, but unless you do secretarial work, it will be ok.
• Email is not a problem even in a supposedly windows-only world: just use the exchange server as a POP server and you’ll be fine. Microsoft is not yet crazy enough to prevent people from checking their mail using the POP protocol. You might not get all the features from Exchange, but what you are missing won’t hurt you, much.

In the end, you can be very productive with Linux.

Now, if I could find how to turn the system bell off once and for all, I’d be happy.

Update: it turns out that we can turn off the system bell easily under Linux. I never knew this. Just do “xset b off”. You can put this in your .xsession file too.

This time, I found stats for Philosophy Ph.D.s. It would appear that the ratio of candidates to job advertize is shrinking quite a bit. I got this from Leiter Reports. In the same blog, we find evidence that 9 out 10 Philosophy Ph.D.s get a cool middle-class job, assuming they went to Princeton.

Well, there seems to be a lot more evidence than I thought that things are improving for new Ph.D.s

As it turns out, though, my claims are also supported by anedotes: Fang and Nielsen.

Does academic research matter?

I’m not a very good historian, but I seem to recall that rresearch as we know it arose out of the German model. It proved invaluable at least in the Second World War. Or did it?

Of course, Tim Berners-Lee owe to academic research some of the ideas that lead to the Web. Some. But not that much, really. Tim Bray is not exactly from academia, is he? Yet, XML changed the world in a deep way.

It seems like academic research is more and more irrelevant… or is it progressively more underfunded, or mismanaged… or just simply totally irrelevant?

Here’s a theory: we’ve come to define success by the number of publications… yet, amazing folks like Tim Bray don’t necessarily go out of their way to submit papers. They listen, they talk, they write within communities and then they publish proposals. They probably hack some software too. So, maybe academic research is becoming irrelevant because we have success wrongly?

Why would the public respect people whose main achievement is a (smallish) number of 10 pages documents they get in books hardly anyboyd ever read.

According to Owen, or maybe, according to what I understand from his email, overproduction of Ph.D.s is a myth. Schools can’t get decent Ph.D. holders.

True. Maybe.

Owen has evidence: CRA Stats.

More precisely, according to this table, 60% of CS Ph.D. holders go to a Ph.D. granting university (on a tenure-track or not?), 4% to a non-Ph.D. granting school, and 29% go in industry. A meagre 2% join the government, and 1% and self-employed.