New magazine and …..

October 10, 2007 at 1:53 pm | Posted in Misc. | Leave a comment
Tags: teacher

The new issue of Modes & Travaux is available now. I just got it yesterday in the train station on my way home. 🙂 There are many inspiring stuffs in this issue again. It seems I am going to be a big fan of this magazine.

I haven’t talked about the new teacher and the new classes so far. I like most of the lecturers here in France, except one. I tried to overcome my prejudices against that type of people in the last few years. After the class yesterday, I won’t consider that as prejudice any more.

Here’s what happened. I found a formula on the slides like

which is wrong as the argmax function should return the argument W, so I asked the lecturer about this and he said that’s how things work. Of course, I could not agree. I managed to find some proof of my point in a textbook (Manning and Schuetze), however he refused to even look at the book. He also claimed in an uncompromising way that he wrote books too, implying he is the authority in this class and we should follow no one else but him. He was sort of irritated by me. At this moment, no more discussion is necessary. As a matter of fact, the formulas in the other slides were correct in terms of the use of argmax. I guess he must tried hard to ignore the other formulas, while many colleagues have noticed the difference.

Everyone makes mistakes. Regardless how ridiculous the mistake is (especially for people claiming themselves doing research on statistics), I cannot understand why he cannot admit his mistake and what makes him so arrogant. If I had a choice, I would not take this course for sure. Unfortunately, it’s compulsory. 😦