Some links for 25.03.12

(1) Picture-hanging puzzles by Demaine and coauthors

(2) What the referee reports on some citation classics might have looked like? (computer science)

(3) Why do physicists need a salary raise?


Take care,

Misha

How long does it take for an article to be accepted?

I posted it on facebook at some point, but it certainly deserves a wider audience :-)

Take care,

Misha

A bit of computational sound art

Batuhan Bozkurt does good stuff. It's definitely worth checking out the Otomata - a music synthesizer based on cellular automata, and Circuli - another funny music toy.

They sound the best together, and you can add rain and fire to make it just perfect :-)

Take care,

Misha

The 1917 in mathematics

You probably know that in 1917 the October Revolution happened in Russia: the bolsheviks got power and created the Soviet Union five years later. The revolution split many lives into the "before" and "after" the 1917.

Here is how famous Russian mathematician Dmitrii Menshov tells about those times:

"...In 1915 we studied function series, in 1916 - orthogonal series. And then the 1917 happened. That was a very memorable year in our lives, this year there happened an event that had drastically affected our future lives: we started looking at trigonometric series."

source (in Russian)

I wish I could care that little about anything that's not science :-D

Take care,

Misha

Boycott Elsevier

It turns out that a number of people suddenly discovered my blog and I didn't update it for a while. In a nutshell: I moved to the US, changed the research subject a little (I just have to write a popular post about my research at some point!), and things of that sort, which is nothing but peanuts :-) Here comes some funny stuff.

After coming to the US I was surprised how many people are opposing Elsevier, and deny publishing, reviewing, or collaborating with them otherwise.

The reason is that Elsevier was actively pushing so-called Research Works Act, the directive that would prohibit open-access publishing of the federally funded research. Apart from just being unscientific, this directly contradicts the NIH policy stating that the taxpayers-funded research must be freely accessible online.

This very effort was triggered by mathematicians and spread widely across the general scientists' community, a good example is the website, where everyone can sign the "boycott petition."

Finally, Elsevier withdrew the support for the act, but it seems that most of the scientists' activity was prompted by Elsevier's pricing and things of that sort alone, without people discussing the Journal of Chaos Solitons and Fractals (Google it) and 6 fake medical journals they've been publishing. A few years ago my PhD institution and I had a funny story related to it, which made some established scientists join the boycott movement (if we met - ask me in person :-).

Apparently, all that is a consequence of Elsevier being run as a money-making machine, as juxtaposed to many publishing houses ran by scientific societies, like APS, ACS, AAAS, and so on.

It's nice that we don't hear such stories about the Nature magazine that also belongs to the commercial publisher.

Take care,

Misha