I reminded a member of our staff of the following quote yesterday:

Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. (Dijkstra)

But what happens to astronomy when everyone owns a telescope?

If you had millions of people using telescopes for 8 hours a day, what would happen of the astronomers? Can you still continue to do astronomy as if only there were only a few serious astronomers in the world?

See also my post The medium is the message, in Computer Science?

A common problem in information retrieval is that words are ambiguous. That is a fancy way of saying that you cannot tell the meaning of a word when you take it out of context. Some people claim that this problem must be solved by using the Semantic Web. I have long advocated that the Semantic Web is more of a solution in search of a problem.

We already have some good strategies regarding disambiguation, but I have wondered recently why we can’t use wikipedia to disambiguate words. After all, wikipedia knows the difference between Java (the island) and Java (the programming language). It turns out that Google has implemented and patented this very idea!

Bunescu, R. and Pasca, M., Using Encyclopedic Knowledge for Named Entity Disambiguation, EACL-06, 2006.

See? Who needs RDF to disambiguate words?

(Source.)

We just found a major MacOS bug, but there seems to be no trace of it on the Web, so I am posting this here hoping that someone can help. We tested several machines and whenever you have an ethernet connection, trying to do an HTTP POST request with a sizeable load (such as editing a large article on wikipedia) will fail. This does not happen with WiFi, only ethernet (with a cable).

We tested with several browsers. Apparently, some version of Safari would not suffer from this bug, but I could not confirm it.

The problem is not hardware-bound because running Windows XP on the same machine fixes the issue. So, it seems there is a major bug in Apple’s ethernet driver.

Help me!

Erik Duval asks for help. He points out that it is extremely difficult to figure out who cites him, how often, and so on. Using a tool offered by librarians (Web of Science) gives highly accurate, but also highly incomplete results. Meanwhile, Google Scholar fares better, but gives noisy data which overestimate how many people cite your papers. An astute reader comments on his article saying that you still have to take into account the blogosphere and other media.

My take on this? What tool actually matters is the tool other researchers use. If everyone uses Web of Science daily, and you are not there, then too bad.

I have one paper on PubMed, so, at least, I vaguely exist, as far as medical researchers are concerned. I have 5 papers on MathSciNet, so I exist a bit more for mathematicians. And so on.

Myself? I use Google Scholar. If you are not on Google Scholar, you do not exist for me.

How much impact you are having as a researcher is a fundamentally multidimensional problem. No researcher dominates any other researchers in every way. Trying to find one scalar measure that sums it up is futile, though it can be fun.

See also my posts Are we destroying research by evaluating it? and On the upcoming collapse of peer review.

Stephen Downes posted this great video:

If you care about online learning, listen to it. I think Stephen had some trouble initially, but stay with it, it is worth it. I love this quote: It is all about learning, not content.

I didn’t know about Will Richardson.