Is it just me or the popularity of electronic journals is growing?

• Directory of open access journals;
• Electronic Journals with RSS feeds (University of Sask.);
• Free Electronic Mathematics Journals;
• University of Nevada Reno list of eJournals.

Thanks to Yuhong Yan and Peter Turney, I have more links for you if you care to know what are the prestigious conferences:

• Citeseer list of impact factors;
• Computer Science Conference Rankings (also here);
• Frontier in bioscience list of impact factors (not just about bioscience!);
• Conference Statistics (percentage of accepted papers).

Do we buy this? Sure. Why not.

However, there are also trends. Some hot conferences today might be forgotten conferences tomorrow and vice versa. The results here are presented as somewhat static rankings. That part of the equation, I don’t buy.

Should you aim for the most prestigious conferences? Should aim for the hot research topics? I think a bit of balance is probably the best strategy.

Here’s an old quote that’s worth repeating from time to time:

People like me need to do things in order to understand. That’s why I build systems. That’s why I tinker. That’s why I read so much.
(Jim Gray, IEEE Distributed Systems Online 2004)

Short story: research is not about spending time in the library. And it is not about solving problems either. Research is about building crazy new things.

Read in the latest Communications of the ACM (Sept. 2005, Vol. 48, No. 9, page 10):

Research firm Gartner Inc. predicts up to 15% of todays’ tech workers will drop out of the profession in five years, not including those who retire or die. (…) demand for technology developpers is forecast to shrink by 30%.

Repeat after me: long term predictions about the job market are worthless. Basically, they often take first order trends and extrapolate. Why? Because they are written by people with only a very basic understanding of numerical analysis and time series.

If the system is stationary, then the prediction might hold true. However, technology is hardly a stationary system. Right now, there isn’t much happening in technology and the oil industry looks like a safe bet if you need to invest. In two years, there might be a new disruptive technology like the web has been, requiring companies to massively reinvest in their IT architecture or factories. Like a new way to manage massive data sources or ultraefficient solar panels.

Hint to students: if you are interested in technology, don’t go to a business, medical or law school. Get a CS, Math or Engineering degree. You may not earn as much initially, but you might very well have the last laugh. Don’t base your life on useless predictions. Back when I was a High School student, I was told that 75% of new jobs would be tech. jobs when I’d graduate. I was then told that there would be a severe shortage of science Ph.D.s. Both of these predictions were overwhelmingly wrong. The truth is not that science and technology is a bad choice, the truth is that job market predictions are terribly inaccurate.

Myself, I cannot believe that in 2015, we’ll all be lawyers, business managers, salesman, and medical doctors. I cannot believe that technology will stand still and mathematics beyond basic algebra will be a lost art. I cannot believe my two sons will have business degrees and make three times my salary by managing a bunch of underpaid Indian programmers.

Call me a fool, if you want, but I’m slightly more optimistic. If I’m proven wrong, then I’ll retire early and write science fiction novels describing the world as I think it should have been.

What do you do when a student asks you a valid question and you think your answer ought to be wrong but that’s the only answer you have? You turn it into a blog post!

How do you convert an integer to a string in C++? I mean, it is a pretty basic operation, right?

Here’s what I wish it was…

string s = "some text = ";
s.append(2);


Well no. The basic string object in C++ is just a container. The following code is the C++ way to to convert numbers to strings.

#include <sstream>
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
int main() {
stringstream sstr;
int integer = 2;
float floater = 2.2f;
sstr < < "La vie est belle" << integer << floater << endl;
string result = sstr.str();
const char * cresult = result.c_str();
cout << result << endl;
return 0;
}


Ok, I cheated a bit, but you get my point.