When you edit a document, some software will generate automatically a new version of the document and allow you to see what changed. If the software is sufficiently smart, you might even know when and by whom the change was made. Wikipedia is good at keeping traces of everything. Email and blogs leave traces. Videoconferencing does not usually leave traces: you cannot replay a Skype conference after it has concluded.

However, beyond keeping traces, software can share and index traces. Each email is a trace of a conversation, and it can be retrieved later, but your emails are not shared. Word processors allow you to send a document with recorded changes, but you cannot easily refer to a specific change in the document.

In any case, I made the following table:

Credit: This idea came after a discussion with Sébastien Paquet.

I do not usually link to random research ppaers, but this one is worth a look: Kwyjibo: automatic domain name generation. Here is the abstract:

Automatically generating good domain names that are random yet pronounceable is a problem harder than it first appears. The problem is related to random word generation, and we survey and categorize existing techniques before presenting our own syllable-based algorithm that produces higher-quality results. Our results are also applicable elsewhere, in areas such as password generation, username generation, and even computer-generated poetry.

This is fun research.

I just finished watching the first three seasons of the 4400. It is yet another cheesy, low-budget sci-fi TV series. Or is it?

The premise is interesting. A scientific breakthrough has been made: we are now able to improve substantially human beings at the genetic level. Not all human beings are helped similarly by this technology however. A genetic divide is created. This quickly leads to an us against them mentality. A catastrophe occurs.

At this point, the writers took a shortcut and decided that human beings from the future would modify people in the past to avoid the problem. By carefully choosing who gets genetically improved, they hope that the catastrophe can be averted. The problem with time travel is that it becomes a deus ex machina. Some writers are better at handling time travel than others. Mostly, what writers do is put obstacles in front of the heroes so that changing the past to solve present-day problem is very difficult. To achieve this, the writers of the 4400 imagined that another group of human beings from the future are trying to make sure that the catastrophe still happens. It is vague and sometimes unconvincing.

I think that the idea of a genetic divide is very interesting. It is a metaphor for the fast-paced technological changes happening right now. Some are surfing the changes, but the vast majority is left reacting to the changes. The people who are making the changes happening have to fight the establishment. How do we reach a balance so that a catastrophe does not occur?

Moreover, I believe we are already able to induce significant changes in our bodies. The most obvious superpowers I can see are males with giant genitals and females with very large breasts. Hardly the first superpowers I would have thought about as a kid, but they would appear extraordinary to people a century or two ago. I do not think people will learn telekinesis, but some of us may become immune to cancer. We may not learn to read minds, but some of us may be able to control our hormones better. Body-modification technology is not dividing us yet, but it may happen in the near future. What if I am able to embed Wikipedia in my head? What if there is a whole class of people with Wikipedia embedded in their head? Would not these people form a separate class? If you do not like Wikipedia, just think about having an artificial photographic memory?

The technological singularity is often thought to occur when we can construct machines smarter than man. I believe that making some human being artificially super-intelligent could also cause the same effect — and some would argue that these are equivalent technologically.

I learned that the show was cancelled. I will still order season 4 as soon as it becomes available.

In my previous blog post, I defined research as the need to do great things. What I had in mind was quite broad, ranging from someone who does research to build a prettier garden, to the writer who does research for his next book, and including the artist who tries to come up with a new painting. I defined research as a need, and not an action. That is because research is a state. More precisely, it cannot be defined as a set of actions one willfully takes.

What is your greatest frustration about your work? What is your greatest victory? If they have to do with recognition, you are a marketing drone and not a bona fide researcher. Do no worry, there are many like you.

The title of this post is my best attempt at explaining what research is. And I do not mean just academic research.