How do you compute the real
H? One of the ways is the most straighforward, the one I use when I
post about it and what
programs like Publish or Perish return. But there are several problems here: first one is that Google overshoots a bit the number of publications by including published Master Thesis, technical reports and even the popular press. No big deal, because a reference is a reference, but the second is a bit harder: excluding self-cites.
Citeseer does it, as does
Scopus, but Google does not.
The problem is that it's quite laborious to exclude self-cites, since the paper title is unique, but the author might not (A. Pérez, anyone?). In any case, if I try to exclude these self-cites, what would my real H be? I would have to painstakingly go reference by reference, and exclude a few. And while I'm at it, there are a few papers called "Indexed bibliography of this and that" which are also included and would have to be taken off. And all that is not worth the while any more. But
I should try and modify this, to take that into account... gone to the TO DO list. Any other suggestion, you're welcome.
Etiquetas: musing, todo, PoP, academic world
Right now the
tally of blogs supporting the "Spanish science needs no cuts" goes up to the thousands, and it's basically a slap in the face of the government, that has released all its mediatic power to try and convince somebody that it's the other way round, that we live in the best of all possible worlds.
In fact, the money devoted to fund basic research and competitive grants has gone down sharply, and that's on the top of an even sharper drop the previous year, and an not-so-well-publicized drop the year before. It's already three years in a row with even prestigious groups known internationally having trouble to make ends meet, so we have finally said enough is enough and jumped to our blogs to make our voices heard.
It's going to be useless, probably, but don't underestimate the power of under/post/and ultra grads with an open Internet connection.
Etiquetas: science, budget cuts, crisis, what crisis?
In my latest step to achieve an
H-number in the triple digits, and after almost a year of writing and revision, our paper on
the Algorithm::Evolutionary Perl module and its applications has finally
been published (online first) in the
Soft Computing. Those that follow this blog will remember
these posts I usually write about it, but here's the abstract anyways:
This paper describes Algorithm::Evolutionary (A::E), a Perl module released under an open source license and designed for the exploration and exploitation of evolutionary algorithms. We describe the design decisions taken to enhance flexibility, how performance was improved by using several implementation tweaks, and what kind of design patterns were applied for its development. This work also tries to dispel the myth of low performance of scripting languages by comparing it with a state-of-the-art library (ECJ) written in Java. Besides, we are interested in assessing its efficiency in several possible evolutionary settings, finding out what kind of behavior we can expect, and what can be done to improve it. Applications already written using A::E are also described, along with how it can be used to create new operators. Finally, some conclusions are drawn from the design experience.
The baseline is that
Perl is a language as good as any to do Evolutionary Computation, and probably better than many others. And it's fast enough to be able to
solver Mastermind in a little while.
Etiquetas: papers, publish and/or perish, just in time for the full professorship tribunal
With respect to the
incident referred to as the goth daughters photo-op, the debate around it seems to miss a few points, mainly related to the understanding our president has of world affairs.
First one is protocol. Of all the
the 135 pictures taken in the same session, there's a
single one with somebody else than the mandatary with spouse (curiously enough, with Kosovo's president, wife and
translator). You simply don't do those photo-ops with daughters; just the position will cause a problem. Up to this year, Zapatero didn't travel too much, and it's obviously its first photo with a president of the USA, which might explain it.
Second one, sadly enough, is English. Our president does not speak English, and if his daughters are a typical product of the Spanish educational system, they won't speak more than a few words. If he wasn't accompanied by a translator in this event, probably somebody explained to him the whole stuff (up to and including the fact that the pictures were going to be published, not filed and/or emailed to him), but he just said OK, not understanding a word. If he had been fluent, he would have realised before standing for the picture what was going to be done to them, and would have told his daughters to stay apart just for this time.
Third one, even more sadly, is the Internet (or maybe the world at large). Showing something for a little while in a website is bound to have been seen several, or even thousands of times. If the Kosovo first family picture shown above is any guidance, it's gathered several thousands views. And once it's on the Internet, it's impossible to stop its spreading from one website to the next, and from that one to a photoshop-toting person with some time in his hands. So even if you ask the State Department to delete it from Flickr, and the state press agency to not release another picture, it's bound to show up again and again. Anybody with a bit of understanding of how the Internet works would probably have embraced the oportunity to out his whole family, instead of clumsily trying to stop a picture from being shown.
Etiquetas: politics, photo-ops, reflections over a picture
- House plays on the piano the 4 starting notes for Beethoven's 5th. This plays with the freedom theme the whole episode is about. During the second world war, the V sign meant more than victory: being the initial for vrijheid or freedom in Dutch, it was also used as a secret sign by the Dutch resistance; adding more load to the symbol, dot-dot-dot-dash (which is a very succint representation of the same notes) represent the V letter in Morse code, so those notes ended up being a synonim for the freedom House is yearning for. Ironically, an orderly closes the piano after House plays them
- Does the face of one of the mates in the psychiatric ward look familiar? I mean the one who is paranoid, didn't get his name. Well, its Curtis Amstrong, Booger in "The Revenge of the Nerds", excellent (as in "so bad it's excellent") movie from the 80s
- There should be a third, I know, so I'll put it even if this is most probably somewhere else: House is put on SSRIs, which for the layperson is basically Prozac. What we're watching, thus, is basically House on Prozac instead of House on Vicodin. What's next? House on Fire?
Etiquetas: I enjoyed it, anyways, keep the kleenex at hand
Peer review is the system by which when you submit a paper to a major scientific journal (and most congresses) the editor selects a few reviewers, which (purportedly) read the paper, write a report on it, and based on those report, the editor decides to accept the paper, reject it, or accept it after it has undergone a series of changes.
As
this recent article on the Guardian argues, it's not perfect, but it's the best we've got. Its main advantage is that it avoids kooky, false or misleading papers being published; most awful papers also bend it before arriving to the end of the process, and many bad papers do not go either.
Having been on both ends of the process quite often (though I've never been an editor, I've assigned papers to referees as part of it, the best method being
using an evolutionary algorithm) the main problem I see with this is that quality of a paper is more defined by proximity of research methods than by the bigger picture of how much the paper matters to the scientific community at large. The way I see it in computer science, small cliques of scientists all devoted to a single method examine it to the latest twist, nut and bolt and write papers on it, refereeing each other, approving grants submitted by others, and citing each other; sometimes even publishing its own journal that perpetuates its own parrochial scientific subculture. The same cliques, when they open up to the wided community, are usually rejected due to lack of significance or pure shoddy work, which just reinforces its behavior.
That kind of things can be easily spotted through coauthorship and citation network analysis for any new paper that is submitted. ¿How many citations has the line of research received? ¿Where do they come from? In fact, the same method
used to detect whether the target of a link is a spam page or not can be applied in these cases. Though one needn't go so far: just making sure that editors are independent of the research area, or that at least one of the rewiewers comes from "outside".
That's not going to happen, of course. But one keeps dreaming...
Etiquetas: what? my paper rejected _again_?, no way!
Just came back from a trip to Dublin, which seems to be a very popular destination mainly about Americans, but surprisingly also among Spaniards and Italians; there was no corner of the city or traffic light where we didn't hear Spanish spoken; many families, too. It's probably due to the cost of flying, which was also the reason our family chose it.
Cheap lodging for families is also available: we got
this one from Expedia, and found most of what the reviews tell more or less true. However, if you're tired after a long day of walking, it's basically OK, and it's good value for money (~ 100 ¤ per night for the whole family!).
Though I got an impression of Dublin very similar of what I got from Amsterdam, that is, that the main streets look like a shopaholic Disneyland made only for tourists, Dublin is geneally an hospitable city, with lots of places to stop for a friendly coffee or beer, generally inexpensive, and with lots of things to see and do. Four days was OK for most of what we intended to see; only we were kind of disappointed in Anglican churches that couldn't be visited during services... Catholic ones didn't have any problem with that; for that reason, and in two occassions, we missed the Christchurch cathedral.
Etiquetas: travel, account, that's it
