I have written much about intellectual productivity on this blog. If we were machines running mechanical tasks, our productivity would be high. Alas, we are human beings who get depressed or anxious. Even being excited about a new result can deprive you from productivity momentarily.

I am bad about my emotions. I have a bad temper. I can literally scare people during meetings—or so I have been told.

However, I have learned a few things:

• Your own work will rarely generate lasting disturbing emotions. As a researcher, I sometimes waste time on dead-ends and get depressed. More rarely, I get overexcited over a world-changing result—which never ends up changing the world, after all. However, these emotions are relatively easy to deal with. Even having your work being rejected—which happens to all of us—is something you can recover from quickly, given some experience. Science is not an emotional roller-coaster. At least, not for me. Mostly, I just grind through, patiently.
• Most disturbing emotions come from my personal life or the rest of my professional life. Chairing committees, or participating in school politics is particularly difficult.

I have some coping strategies:

• I read good novels.
• I cook.
• I drink red wine.
• I garden, even during the winter.
• I take my week-ends and evenings with my family.
• I focus on research and teaching. They are both more rewarding and emotionally more stable than service or management work.
• It is easier to organize a large conference than it is to chair even a small department. Simply because you are more independent from the results, emotionally. Service work is usually more rewarding and less difficult the further away it is. So, if you must get involved, avoid local committees.

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General Motors, Ford and Chrysler—three of the most powerful companies in the world when I was a kid—are nearly bankrupted. We should learn a lesson from this experience.

Challengers may have weaknesses, but they can work around them:

• If you are inexperienced, work on new topics, where nobody has experience.
• If you have few resources, work in a niche.

Some of the most interesting research results come from challengers. Einstein is the absolute example: without a research job, without a scholarship or a grant, he was able to take the world by storm. Had we parked Einstein in a nice academic job with job security and many assistants, would the world be the same? Maybe. Maybe not. Your limitations colour your work. They give you personality.

That is not to say that you should throw away all of your edges. However, too often, we exaggerate our limitations. I believe that this is partly by design. If I am in power, and you challenge my power, I will do my best to make you feel inadequate. I am too big for you! Hence, if you are an underdog, you should think like an anarchist. Question every preconceived idea. Because some of these ideas are hidden barriers.

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Every few years, the database research community prepares a report listing the most promising research directions. The previous one was called the Lowell report, and I was inspired by it. The latest one is called the Claremont report.

Some bits I found interesting:

• There is a call to exploit remote RAM and Flash as persistent media, rather than relying solely on magnetic disk. Indeed, Solid State Drives are an order of magnitude faster than our spinning disks and large pools of RAM are becoming affordable. External-memory algorithms are no longer a hot topic? (Yes, it is not that simple.)
• Web 2.0-style applications bring new database workloads. I did some work on merging Web 2.0 and OLAP and can testify that the Social Web is a good source of new database problems.
• They recommend integrating compression and query optimization. My work on compression in bitmap indexes that there are still open issues regarding compression in databases. Mostly, whereas information theory has taught us much about how to optimally compress, we have learned relatively little about how to use compression to save CPU cycles.

On December 10^th 2008, Denis G. Rancourt, a full professor in Physics at the University of Ottawa was banned from his campus. Why? Because he refused to grade students:

Problems between university brass and Rancourt began eight months ago when he gave every student in his physics class an A+ after he was denied permission to make the course pass or fail. (University of Ottawa bans controversial professor)

In my courses, you tend to either flunk or pass with flying colors. And I have a reputation for making difficult courses. I never thought of making my courses pass/fail, but I guess it could be a good idea. Students, instead of focusing on the damn grade, might pay more attention to the course content.

My experience in graduate school—for example—has been that an A is the passing grade, and a B is a polite way to fail you. As a Mathematics student at the University of Toronto, I was under the impression that you either got an A or dropped out of the course. I never cared much for grades anyhow. Which is not to say that you should not measure accomplishments! You must! But I never felt that my job was to provide student rankings.

Anyhow, what about academic freedom? I guess we still have to fight for it.

Further reading: Dismissing critical pedagogy: Denis Rancourt vs. University of Ottawa

Source: Stephen Downes

I want to be locked out of Google Mail if I spent more than X hours in a given day on email. Anyhow knows how to do it?

Right now, I spend about two to three hours (as measured by rescuetime) on mail.google.com. Of course, not all of it is random chatting:

• I mark student assignments in mail.google.com. Yes! I actually give feedback to my students by email. No paper involved!
• I receive warnings in mail.google.com about any change a collaborator made to a shared file.
• Many administrative duties translate into email processing. Back when I was chairing the master degree in IT, I would accept or turn down students based on an electronic c.v. sent by email.

Then about three to four hours of my day is spent on actual research work. The rest of my work day (one or two hours) is usually invested in blogging, browsing web sites, surfing on wikipedia, and so on.