The hard life of the researcher

I am a researcher at a major university in Sydney. Because student numbers are going down year after year, my research budget is going down as well. Something is wrong here.

Universities supposedly have two responsibilities: to teach students and to do research. Both of these activities need money to work. But only teaching generates a significant amount of money. This is true, at least, in Spain and Australia, the countries in which I have this kind of experience. The money that universities generate from their students, either directly (course fees) or indirectly (government subsidies), must be enough to pay teaching and research activities. And here starts the problem.

If student numbers go down 15% this year, for example, it would make sense (although it would be very harsh) to sack 15% of the lecturers. Or, less bluntly, to pay 15% less teaching hours. Since the demand is lower, the offer needs to be lower. Less money is coming in, less money is being spent. Logical. But things do not work this way. When student numbers drop 15%, teaching staff are not fired but keep being paid. The only way that universities have to save the money that they are not making is to cut research budgets. Less travel to conferences, fewer and lower seed grants, etc.

The real difference between objects and agents

Paolo Giorgini is visiting us at UTS. I spent some time talking to him today and he explained his views on the difference between objects and agents, or OOSE and AOSE.

The main differences are two. The first one concerns delegation. You delegate goals to agents. Agents then find their way to achieve those goals. The second difference is related to the communication style. With objects, you tell them what to do each time you invoke a method. With agents, you let them know about things.

Simple as this is, it is the best explanation that I’ve ever heard or read so far. Don’t worry about autonomy, situatedness or intelligence. Just delegation and communication style.

Tricks people do

Isabel and I spent some time chatting over junk-food dinner. The topic was the tricks that computer users do in order to go around little problems and nuisances with their computers.

It seems that many people devote more brain cycles to think of a hack to solve an immediate problem than to try to find a permanent solution. I know this is common human behaviour, but as a software engineer I am especially interested in this phenomenon.

I remember a funny case of computer trick. I used to work for the Galician government as an IT support person. One day my boss told me “Hey, Cesar, just drop by Angelina’s office and check out a database problem they’ve got. It’s weird. They have five thousand rows in a table with data they don’t know what it means.”

I love Visio but…

I love Microsoft Visio 2003. Since my work involves drawing a lot of diagrams, I use it a lot, and I think it’s far superior (in usability and functionality) to its competitors.

However, there is something very wrong with it. Create a UML diagram. Create a couple of classes and draw an association between them. Edit the association properties and give it a meaningful name and a “name reading direction”. The association should appear as a line labelled with its name and a little black arrow pointing in the right direction. If you can’t see this, you need to right click the association, click Shape Display Options and check the Name checkbox. You’ll see the name and the little arrow now.

Well, Visio calls this little arrow a “reading direction”. This name suggests that Visio applies this property to the appearance on the diagram on the page rather than the semantics of the diagram. Look at this: click on one of the classes you’ve created and drag it to the other side of the second class. The arrow keeps pointing in the same direction! Which is nonsense, because the layout of the classes on the page has changed.

Welcome to my new blog

I have moved this blog from its former home, MSN Spaces. I didn’t like the idea of you needing to obtain a Passport in order to post comments, so I implemented my own blog engine and here you are.

I will not post further messages to MSN Spaces. Please use this blog’s URL from now on.

If you have suggestions or any idea of how to improve this blog, please let me know. Thanks.

And welcome to my new blog!

USA kids don’t know about free speech

[Giagnocavo]Michael reports on a CNN story about how kids in USA high schools are blatantly ignorant of some of the basic rights of their society, such as freedom of speech. It is sad and chilling indeed. But it comes to no surprise. When I read it, I couldn’t stop thinking “of course, everybody knows that USA kids are dumb”. I didn’t voice it because it is not politically correct, though.

The USA have brilliant scientists and extremely interesting people. But they also have one of the poorest primary and secondary education systems in the developed world according, for example, to the PISA report 2003. For example, if you look at the ratio between student performance and educational expenditure, the USA is the second worst after Italy, and is also the one that spends the most. In most measures included in the report, the USA appears well to the right, that is, below average. And the PISA report 2003 is not only including OECD (i.e. “developed”) countries but developing countries as well. Even in this context, USA scores well below average.

Can you identify this bird?

Again I need help.

Can you please identify this bird for me? I took the picture in St. Albans, NSW on 8 August 2004. I cannot find any bird on my field guide (Simpson & Day, 6th edition) that combines a black throat with blue above the eye.

Another Odd Bird

 Thanks!