[This post is written in English but is given from the perspective of someone living in France. The situation in other countries may differ.] I'm writing about an unusual topic: the choice to use cash (rather than payment cards) when paying at businesses. Over the last few years, essentially since COVID, more and more businesses seem surprised when I pay with cash -- I feel a kind of social…
I tend to write a lot about my opinions about academia in my area (theoretical computer science), e.g., about open access , about general problems with academia , etc. If you are interested in this topic, I just contributed an interview to the latest Bulletin of the EATCS , the European scholarly association for theoretical computer science (of which I am now a vice-president). You can read the…
I have read the book Politiser le bien-être by Camille Teste . A possible English translation of the title would be: “Making wellness political”. I found the book interesting, so I wrote this blogpost to summarize it. Maybe this can help make the book's message available to a larger audience: the book is written in French, and not freely available online. Of course, these notes are just my…
This post is about the following hypothetical scenario: Alice is suspected to be a spy from a foreign country, and so to be fluent in the language spoken in that country, called language L. Alice claims to be an innocent citizen with no knowledge whatsoever of language L. Of course, this is just what a spy would say! You are in charge of interrogating Alice, and to figure out whether she is fluent…
More and more conferences in theoretical computer science (TCS) are moving to double-blind peer review . This is the implementation of peer review where the reviewers who evaluate submitted articles do not know the identity of paper authors, at least initially. The two major database theory conferences have adopted double-blind peer review (at least in an "experimental" way): PODS since 2023 and…