Why Teach What When?

Why don’t we practice what we teach

The development process used by academic researchers often seems unsystematic. A Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) is seldom considered, commenting is scarce, and external documentation consists of erasure marks left on whiteboards. Configuration management is paid lip-service, but is not standard practice. This paper examines reasons behind the apparent large-scale non-adoption of softwar...

Supersymmetry: what? why? when?

This article is a colloquium-level review of the idea of supersymmetry and why so many physicists expect it to soon be a major discovery in particle physics. Supersymmetry is the hypothesis, for which there is indirect evidence, that the underlying laws of nature are symmetric between matter particles (fermions) such as electrons and quarks, and force particles (bosons) such as photons and gluons.

What shutdowns , why and when ?

Vitamin K--what, why, and when.

Policies for giving babies vitamin K prophylactically at birth have been dictated, over the last 60 years, more by what manufacturers decided on commercial grounds to put on the market, than by any informed understanding of what babies actually need, or how it can most easily be given. By a pure fluke a 1 mg IM dose, designed to prevent early vitamin deficiency bleeding ("haemorrhagic disease o...

Collaborative clustering: Why, when, what and how

Clustering is one type of unsupervised learning where the goal is to partition the set of objects into groups called clusters. Faced to the difficulty to design a general purpose clustering algorithm and to choose a good, let alone perfect, set of criteria for clustering a data set, one solution is to resort to a variety of clustering procedures based on different techniques, parameters and/or ...