Mark C. Taylor is quickly becoming famous for his New York Times piece End the University as We Know It. 

The paper makes some good points:

• Universities rely on graduate students as cheap labor. Graduate students accept their fate on the illusion that they will become professors. Unfortunately, most of them will never achieve their goals. They will have to settle for jobs they could have done just as well without a Ph.D. (Yes professor Mitzenmacher, this includes Computer Science Ph.D.s!) We can do better! Either train fewer people for research, or create more government and industry research jobs.
• We should rely more on online learning. We need to dramatically scale up the broadcasting abilities of our teachers. This revolution is coming up. (If you doubt me, watch professor Mitzenmacher teach, online, now.)

Unfortunately, it falls short on other criticisms and proposals:

• Universities are overspecialized? Ever tried to hire a biologist when you are a Computer Scientist? It is not fun! We need clusters of specialists so that they can review each other. Multidisciplinary programs are great, but a multidisciplinary professor is like a greased pig. He may taste great, but you first have to catch it!
• Do away with tenure? Tenure is a great way to save money on salaries. In Computer Science, it would entice the best professors to move off to industry. You cannot do away with tenure in all fields without fundamentally changing the university job market, and it would not all be for the benefit of students and universities.

Further reading: See Vellino’s commentary and Mitzenmacher’s rebuttal.

Hu et al. just posted An efficient quantum search engine on unsorted database. They refer to an older paper by Patel (2001), Quantum database search can do without sorting. Apparently without any data structure or preprocessing, logarithmic-time search queries are possible in quantum databases.

Even if we did have affordable quantum computers, this would not be a big selling point. Building B-trees or sorting tables is hardly prohibitive.

I would be more interested in how quantum databases can handle low selectivity queries. For example, can a quantum computer sum up a large array of numbers in near-constant time? Our current technology solves these problems with a mix of parallelism, compression and brute-force.

All I know about quantum computers is that we do not think they can solve NP-hard problems in polynomial time. Is there any reason to see a bright future in quantum databases?

You have read someone’s work and you have ideas about how to extend their work. You are also interested in working with them on your ideas? Or maybe you just want a copy of their latest work? Or some other favor? How do you go about it?

The old way was to get introduced by a colleague, or to go talk to them during a conference. While the old ways still work, I have found an effective and cheaper short-cut: just email them! (Presumably, Twitter and Facebook might work as well.)

You have to structure your email properly, it must be short, and it must be researched. The object of your email, and the first few sentences should include:

• The title of at least one of their research papers.
• Specific reasons why you are interested in this work.
• A brief description of who you are.
• What you want. Be specific.

My emails get answered at a rate of 70% to 80% when I use this strategy. It does not matter how important or busy the person is. It works because I show interest in the person’s work.

Update. Jo Vermeulen points me to a classic reference on this topic: Networking on the Network.

Social networking tools such as blogs, microblogs (Twitter), and Facebook, extend your communication abilities. The immediate benefits are threefold:

• Increased broadcast capacity: you can now reach 200, 500 or 1000 people daily at a minimal cost. Why give a talk in front of 45 peers, when you can reach 4,500 people with the same amount of effort? Publishing a book or an article, or appearing in a television or magazine are much more difficult tasks. Nobody is suggesting that researchers start posting their results on Facebook instead of publishing them in Nature, but why not doing both? (If posting your research results on Facebook sounds silly to you, consider that the respected arXiv repository recently introduced an arXiv on Facebook feature.)
• Automated relationship management through filters and aggregators. If I subscribe to your blog or microblog or Facebook profile, staying in touch is an automated process. Even sending Christmas cards to everyone in your network is starting to feel like an expensive and ineffective process. I no longer want to ship a copy of my research papers to my friends and collaborators, I want them to subscribe to my arXiv atom feed.
• Inexpensive asynchronicity through infinite databases. I cannot give the same talk every day for the rest of my life, but I can make it available to all at all times for a long time, for almost no cost. Post your talks on YouTube! Post your slides on slideshare! It costs nothing!

Several secondary benefits follow from the use of e-networking:

• Form and join emerging communities
• Receive immediate feedback on your ideas
• Build a digital reputation
• Encourage a diversity of thought
• Share tacit knowledge
• Learn how to write efficiently
• Real time access to information
• Build information repositories

For a prospective Ph.D. student, I prepared a list of the 4 people I follow in e-Learning. (This list is not meant to represent the most important people. It is just my personal list. It is in no particular order.)

• David Wiley
  blog: http://opencontent.org/blog/
  Best e-Learning slides ever
• Erik Duval
  blog: http://erikduval.wordpress.com/
• Harold Jarche
  blog: http://www.jarche.com/
• Stephen Downes
  secret blog: http://halfanhour.blogspot.com/

If you are into e-Learning, what is your list? Who do you follow, and why?