Daniel Lemire is a software performance expert. He ranks among the top 2% of scientists globally (Stanford/Elsevier 2025) and is one of GitHub's top 1000 most followed developers.
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The number of researchers and peer-review publications is growing exponentially. It has been estimated that the number of researchers in the world doubles every 16 years and the number of research outputs is increasing even faster. If you accept that published research papers are an accurate measure of our scientific…
As a kid, my parents would open the television set, and we would get to watch whatever the state television decided we would watch. It was a push model. Some experts pick the content you need and they deliver it to you. You have little say in the matter. There was one newspaper in my … Continue reading Stop spending…
“We see something that works, and then we understand it.” (Thomas Dullien) It is a deeper insight than it seems. Young people spend years in school learning the reverse: understanding happens before progress. That is the linear theory of innovation. So Isaac Newton comes up with his three laws of mechanics, and we get…
Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts said Richard Feynman. Feynman had a Nobel prize in physics. He was a remarquable educator: his lecture notes are still popular. He foresaw nanotechnology and quantum computing. He is credited with identifying the cause of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. There is…
In the first half of the XXth century, there were relatively few scientists, and these scientists were generally not lavishly funded. Yet it has been convincingly argued that these scientists were massively more productive. We face a major replication crisis where important results in fields such as psychology and…
The concept of property is a social construction. Animals, such as cats, can own a piece of food, or a territory, but only as long as they are able to personally maintain a credible threat of violence. And animals can only defend concrete, physical properties, such as an area, a dead bird or a tree. … Continue reading…
I have previously reported that there has been a silent revolution in science where countries like China, India, South Korea... that previously contributed few research articles... have started to catch up and even exceed the productivity of the western world. The National Science Foundation (NSF) in the US has…
At my university, one of our internal software systems allows a professor to submit a revision to a course. The professor might change the content or the objectives of the course. In a university, professors have extensive freedom regarding course content. As long as you reasonably meet the course objectives, you can…
It would take too long to expose all of the flaws of peer review, here are some: some work is just flat wrong because the reviewers cannot analyze all of the mathematical results, and because they cannot redo the experiments; numerous researchers cheat, sometimes in small ways ("2 out of 3 experiments agree with by ……
We learned recently of the suicide of Stefan Grimm, a successful professor at the prestigious Imperial College in London. Professors Grimm regularly published highly cited articles in the best journals. He was highly productive. Unfortunately, some of his colleagues felt that he did not secure sufficiently large…
There is a widely reported threat to our economy: robots are going to replace human workers. It is nothing new... In 1930, Keynes, the famous economist introduced the term "technological unemployment"... We are being afflicted with a new disease of which some readers may not yet have heard the name, but of which they…
Many of us rely on a Qwerty keyboard, at least when we are typing at a laptop. It is often said that the Qwerty keyboard is inferior to clearly better alternatives like the Dvorak keyboard. However, this appears to be largely a myth backed by dubious science. There is the similarly often repeated story of … Continue…