Small world

[maradydd]

There's a post up on BoingBoing today (ok, yesterday for me) about open vs. closed search algorithms, suggesting that the search algorithms used by Google, Yahoo et al are bad because of their lack of transparency. It invokes a comparison to an important concept in computer security: "security through obscurity" is dangerous because an effective encryption scheme should be equally hard to break whether you know the internals of the algorithm that generated the ciphertext or whether you don't.

I think comparing this to search is a bad (or at best misleading) idea, and expounded on this in the comments. But I'm far more entertained by the fact that the two best comments on the post so far come from two sources with whom I am tangentially familiar, albeit from totally different directions: jrtom and radtea. Small damn world!

Comments

[enochsmiles.livejournal.com]

I do know other academics that are strongly concerned with practical considerations, however.

They won't last as academics. ;)

I suspect you're right about civil engineering and engineering having a higher percentage of people interested in practice -- that said, handwaving-away a problem for the sake of publishing a paper isn't beneath any academic in any field, and the problem continues to exist because the program committees for conferences put up with it.

As for experiments and metrics, sure, emphasis is placed on them for certain fields and certain conferences. That said, "meaningful" is up for debate. What's meaningful to an academic is not necessarily meaningful to an implementor.

[And as a side note -- you've never driven in Brussels, I assume, or you wouldn't have been so certain about civil engineers and practice. ;) ]

He changed his mind once the reviews started coming back.

Oh, definitely -- if "practicality = more grant money" then they change their minds in a heart-beat. Sometimes they even try to take credit for the whole idea in the first place. But I ask this: what percentage of students listen to their advisors, vs. the percentage that stick with the practical work? I'd like to think most of them stick to their convictions and plow ahead, and if I sample my friends in academia, that seems to be the case. But that could also tell me that the academics I am friends with are stubborn people who care more about practicality than finishing their PhDs.

I wonder if a sociologist has done any studies on this.

Nah, too practical.