If you’ve been annoyed about the fact that a kilobyte has 1024 bytes and not 1000 bytes, well, you were right all along! What people call a kilobyte is really a kibibyte. (Thanks to Owen for pointing it out to me!)

Source: Definitions of the SI units: The binary prefixes

Michael just finished his essay: Principles of Effective Research. I think it is a must read for all Ph.D. students, young researchers, and even idiots like me who always get it wrong. Michael takes a very refreshing view to what research is all about. He is not cynical yet he is true to what research really is. You may never win the Nobel prize if you follow his guidelines, you may never be a guru researcher, but I think you’ll be a good or even excellent researcher. As he explains, being an influent researcher is not a subset of being a good researcher, and that’s a very important statement. In any case, Michael did all of us a favor and I hope that he essay is read by a lot of people. (Power of the network?) I implore you all: link to his essay!!!

Through Downes’, I found an interesting paper on the application of collaborative filtering to e-Learning in ITDL (by Jinan A. W. Fiaidhi).

It makes the point quite well that we must differentiate heterogeneous settings from sane laboratory conditions:

Searching for LOs within heterogeneous repositories as well as within collaborative repositories is far more complicated problem. In searching for such LOs we must first decide on appropriate metadata schema, but which one!

Through Didier and Nielsen, I found a list of Golden Rules for Successful Scientific Research attributed to Dijkstra.

• “Raise your quality standards as high as you can live with, avoid wasting your time on routine problems, and always try to work as closely as possible at the boundary of your abilities. Do this, because it is the only way of discovering how that boundary should be moved forward.”
• “We all like our work to be socially relevant and scientifically sound. If we can find a topic satisfying both desires, we are lucky; if the two targets are in conflict with each other, let the requirement of scientific soundness prevail.”
• “Never tackle a problem of which you can be pretty sure that (now or in the near future) it will be tackled by others who are, in relation to that problem, at least as competent and well-equipped as you.”

Of the three rules, only the last one seems important. The second one appears self-evident: you want to be socially relevant, but not to the point of producing low quality work. This being said, most researchers go to the other extreme and ignore social relevance and their work loses out its motivation. If you tackle a problem that only you care about, don’t expect much recognition. I actually disagree with the first rule: small problems, technical issues actually often hide interesting problems. Always focusing on the management and top level issue is a bad idea I think. Michelangelo was painting a church! In research, do not be so quick to think that there are noble and not-so-noble problems. All problems can be interesting and knowledge of technical issues can bring much insight.

Blogging is a fascinating past-time. Who would have thought? I just read bits and pieces of an essay on Extreme Thinking.

Here’s a fascinating quote:

The key to keeping this independence of solitude is to develop a long-term vision so compelling and well-internalized, that it can override behaviours for which the short-term rewards are significant, but which may be damaging in the long run.

Update: Independence of solitude: I didn’t know this expression. Found 600 or so hits on Google. Seems that maybe the expression comes from Ralph Waldo Emerson.

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great person is one who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.