Sébastien Merkel - Page Personnelle

It comes up every once in a while, in August when they come out: French universities do not do very well in ranking such as the Academic Ranking of World Universities made by the University of Shangai. In the last edition for instance, the first French institution is Paris VI at rank 42 and the université des sciences et technologies de Lille (Lille 1) where I work is at number 402.

Several reasons are often suggested to explain this weakness. Some are true, some aren't:

• French universities are shit anyway: I worked in top universities in the US and Japan and I can testify that this is simply not true. Lille is not Berkeley, but French universities perform top class research in many fields and I have my good share of Science and Nature papers.
• France has a dual system, schools and universities: this is true. Many excellent students never step a foot in a university. They go to a "school", all the way to the masters degrees. Those schools have good students, but they are small and most do not perform world class research. Even the number one elite school in the country, the Ecole Polytechnique, does not have such a great rank. Most famous engeneering schools in France are not event ranked because their research is too weak. Universities do the research, but loose a lot of students to those "schools".
• English speakers are ahead because publications are in English: French politicians love this argument, but it's pure bullshit. International research is written in English and, at the moment, we have to live with it.

On the other hand, the French nobel price winner Albert Fert published a recent article in Le Monde with a point I had missed before: French labs usually have multiple affliations: CNRS and the university of Lille in my case. The Shangai ranking splits the corresponding points to both institutions, 50% for CNRS and 50% for the university. This is totally unfair! As pointed out in the article, most researcher in the US, for instance, cite the address where they do the work as main address and thank their source of financement in the acknowlegdement. In France, we tend to do both!

For instance, when I worked in Berkeley, I was paid by a private fundation, the Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science. But all my papers are signed at the University of California, Berkeley and therefore count 100% for Berkeley. Nowadays, Lille would only get 50% of my points since I also mention the CNRS in my address.

in short, those ranking are useful, but you should be careful when comparing between countries...

This summer, we wanted to go down to Southern France at the end of June, forget about work, and get some sunlight. Lucky we did actually, since we came back six weeks ago, we hardly got any sun up here in Lille! We wanted a five to six days hike, not too difficult, and using an itinerary that is not so busy. At the end, we went for a trail called "la Grande Traversée des Préalpes, GTPA" between Sisteron, Digne les Bains, and Thorame. Here is a rough itinerary plotted on Google Maps.

Actually, the full hike starts in Serres and finishes in Entrevaux, but we did not have enough time, nor strength, to go for such a long one! We started from Sisteron because I knew where it was and because there is easy train access from Marseilles. Afterwards, we had to reach Digne les Bains, at minimum and catch the train des Pignes towards Nice. This train is great for hikers because it stops everywhere, even the most remote towns!

The hike is fun, with nice views, no major difficulties, but some steep climbs. The highest point was at 1700m, nowhere too high. It was very warm, but we wanted it. When you live in Lille, you end up dreaming about a straight week of sunshine!

Big surprise: there was no-one there! A few day-hikers near Digne, two locals, and that's it! In six days.

Here is our itinerary, walking about 6 -7 hours a day

• 1st day: Sisteron - Entrepierre - Saint Geniez, camping in the wild before arriving in Saint Geniez. We left a bit late in the morning and ended up going up the pass in the heart of the afternoon... avoid it! Also, water can be hard to come by and get some when you can. We ended up camping in a spot with no water at all.
• 2nd day: Saint-Geniez - Thoard, through the mountains (Google itinerary isn't right), and a night in a full campground in Thoard. Nice itinerary, nice views, and climbs in the shade.
• 3rd day: Thoard - Digne les bains, through the mountains and the summit called "la Bigue", and a night in a full campground in Digne . It was tough! We left Thoard too late and the climb to the pass of Croix killed me. The climb is only 500m but the trail is steep, and in the sunshine... Be careful on the way down to Digne as well: it's hot, quite steep (although not dangerous at all) and fairly long (1000 altitude difference).
• 4th day: Digne les Bains - Entrages - Les Dourbes, camping in the wild near the Serres forrest house (there is water there). Nice one, quite easy. We could have kept going but the Pas de la Faille seemed long and the storm was coming.
• 5th day: Les Dourbes - Tartonne - Chateau Garnier. Actually, we stopped and camped along a small river, after the pass of Séoune, at least one hour before Château-Garnier itself. It was the longest day on the trip, but we had to move ahead to catch a train the next day.
• 6th day: Château-Garnier - Gare de Thorame Haute and train at 15:00. Be careful, Thorame Haute train station is 10km away from the town itself! The day was not hard, except that the trail between Thorame Haute and its train station is not well marked. It's on the map, but hard too find and the end of it is simply not there. You should do the last 1 or 2 km on the road.

Since you made it so far, here is the reward: a few pictures. Sorry there are not more, but you forget to take pictures when you hike!

We had all the food we needed so I won't be able to tell you much about shops. For books and maps, we had the hiking guide called topo-guide 401 - La Haute-Provence par les Gorges du Verdon and three 1:25 000 scale maps, 3340ET - Sisteron, Digne les Bains, 3440ET - Digne les Bains, La Javie, Vallée de la Bléone, and 3541OT - Annot, Saint André les Alpes, PNR du Verdon.

A nice tripe after all, that ended up with a few relaxing days in Nice while visiting my friend David. Thanks to him for letting us use his shower!

I haven't done anything with this site in months! I've been quite busy since I moved to Lille, setting up my lab, buying a house, and so fourth... Promise, I'll try to be more diligent in the months to come.

Since I did find some time today, I fixed all links and picture galleries that had been broken for months. That's a start!

I had a funny surprise a few weeks ago: my site had been hacked! It was used to send spams and and relay porn website... It took me a while to figure it out completely but I finally understood: those guys were real ones, not your plain script kiddy.

The operation must have started months ago. I had a huge security hole in a PHP script: it was calling for a parameter called $file, and this parameter was the base of a file to be included, something like $file.inc.php. The hacker figured that out, probably by lunching a google search like inurl:$file=. They then managed to upload a shell script called c99madshell, that included calls to various servers in Russia. I know this was done months ago since a new security measure was turned on that disallowed including php scripts from outside servers...

Once this shell is installed, the hacker can see all you files, including php script, configuration files, .htaccess... They can upload scripts, make files, make directories... Basically they had full control. Finally, I went through all my files, one by one, to make sure that I had really created it, and ended up finding the trick... They had an obscure directory far in a structure where I did not go very often with scripts for spams, relay pages for porn websites, and those things,mostly from Brazil by the way.

Lucky enough, my page was partially protected: it is totally impossible to access parts of the site from the other one. I think I have it clean, but I'll have to monitor my logs very carefully for a while. I'll probably rebuild the whole things in a few days, so expect delays and bugs...

Conclusions: if you did not know, you really have to watch your logs to make sure that files you did not create are using your bandwidth, also, log-in frequently and make sure you do not see any files or directories you never created: it's a very bad sign...