Pumping the journal impact factor

I found a funny last year story at the forum of Russian researchers. A guy (nicknamed ST) quotes a message that he got from the Editor of one of the physics journals after submitting a paper there:

"Editor's Final Remark
In addition to the reviewers' comments given above, I recommend the authors to address and cite the relevant articles published in "....Journal ....". Such improvement on the revised version of the manuscript would not only provide a solid background to the readers regarding the current state-of-knowledge on this topic, but also promote the awareness of the available information resources in "... Journal ....". I would appreciate authors' concern and sensitivity on this matter."

So, the Editor not even encourages, but 'recommends' citing his own journal. And such 'improvements on the revised versions of manuscripts' seem to work: in his post ST mentions that the impact factor of this journal raised from 2.7 to 3.4 within one year, which is quite a jump.

Cheating is unscientific.

Take care,

Misha

I did not shoot the comic sans!

via Mike-pulsifer.org

(as a sequel to my Comic Sans post)

It's even shorter that the shortest article ever!

In comments to my post "The shortest article ever" EastwoodDC pointed out a paper that is even shorter than that: "The Effects of Peanut Butter on the Rotation of the Earth."

This one belongs to the Improbable research project, but still...

Take care,

Misha

Laser 50 anniversary

This year it's 50 year anniversary of laser. There is a special website about that, laserfest.org, quite a few interesting links there...

Topless models

As you've understood, I do a little literature search now, and I came across the following (Italian) article:



Is there any chance to figure out what the "topless models" are about? It looks like the Google outcome is about something different.

Hm, probably 50 years ago even Italian prime minister was interested in these topless models... :-)

The shortest article ever

I'm pretty sure I've posted it somewhere about 3-4 years ago, but anyway. This is the shortest article I've ever seen, it was published in Physical Review:


Guys involved in the 'variation of fundamental constants' business always show it in the talks. But I wonder whether it was a joke or not...

Phys. Rev. Lett. half a century ago

Imagine, that you publish an article in Physical Review, then find a mistake and a misprint in it, and decide to submit the correction to Physical Review Letters. Sounds crazy?

This was somehow possible fifty years ago:



(by that time Phys. Rev. Lett. was a section of Phys. Rev.)

But anyway, later there was another, real erratum to this letter to the editor...


Take care,

Misha

How would you know?

Here is a quote from the popular article of Nissan Zeldes "Giulio Racah and theoretical physics in Jerusalem":

"Tensor algebra is the natural mathematical tool for treating angular correlations of successive nuclear radiations, as shown first in [Racah, Rhys. Rev. 84, 910 (1951)] and independently in [Lloyd, Phys. Rev. 85, 904 (1952)]".

Well, that sounds fine. Two scientists were involved in the same kind of business and came up with similar theories about the same time - we see that everywhere in science.

The only problem is that in 1951-52 both Giulio Racah and Stuart Lloyd were working at the same place, Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Can one really be sure that the theories were developed independently in such a case?

Stravinsky in jail

In 1940 Igor Sravinsky was arrested in Boston for playing his arrangement of the American National Anthem, which was considered a 'national property' by Massachusetts law (it was forbidden to tamper with any national property). He was released the same day after convincing authorities of his good intentions.

via undernews

Nice quote from the past

"Every attempt to employ mathematical methods in the study of chemical questions must be considered profoundly irrational and contrary to the spirit of chemistry... if mathematical analysis should ever hold a prominent place in chemistry – an aberration which is happily almost impossible – it would occasion a rapid and widespread degeneration of that science."

Auguste Comte, Cours de philosophie positive, 1830

Do you still use Comic Sans in your presentations?

Here is what Vincent Connare, creator of the Comic Sans font thinks about it:

"You know, I just have to ask, like, why? Why the hell do people choose Comic Sans? It boggles the mind. There are more than 200 fonts in Mac OS X and Windows Vista, meaning there are much better fonts out there for most everything. But people still choose Comic Sans for the most retarded, improper uses. I made Comic Sans to fill a dog’s speech bubble in Microsoft Bob. Then the marketing department got ahold of it, and they included it in the OEM version of Windows 95. And that is when my problems began. I don’t know if you can really understand what it is like to have your life defined by the most improperly used font in history. I am introduced as ‘the guy who created Comic Sans,’ and I think people have a viscerally negative reaction to that."

Here is his presentation I Hate Comic Sans.

Take care,

Misha

Hamster Tisha

It turns out that some years ago graphene pioneer Andre Geim published an article co-authored by his hamster Tisha, here it is:

A. K. Geim and H. A. M. S. ter Tisha, "Detection of earth rotation with a diamagnetically levitating gyroscope", Physica B 294-295, 736 (2001)

That's crazy.

via Igor Ivanov's Buzz

When theorists are forced to do experiments

It is well known that Nobel laureate Ernest Rutherford was a brilliant but very authoritarian type of scientist. He was a head of the Cavendish lab in Cambridge and many well known scientists passed through it, such as Piotr Kapitza (Nobel Prize`78), Patrick Blackett (Nobel Prize`48), and Robert Oppenheimer (later chief of the Manhattan Project).

These three were increasingly at odds, due to their different relationships with Rutherford. While Kapitza shamelessly flattered and courted his boss, who in return gave him favours and even friendship, Blackett, who admired Rutherford's creative running of the lab, never had time for such things.

Also, Blackett was tutoring Oppenheimer by teaching him the art of experiments, for which Oppenheimer had little aptitude, and Blackett knew well about that. The tension between the two became so strong that one day Oppenheimer left on Blackett's desk an apple poisoned with chemicals from the lab (!).

Hopefully, Blacket survived, and Oppenheimer didn't lose his job only because his parents persuaded the university to put him on probation, on the understanding that he will have regular sessions with a psychiatrist.

A few months later Oppenheimer completely switched to theoretical physics.

Graham Farmelo, "The strangest man"

Scientific glastnost

Interesting Nature Editorial about Russian science:

"A small, but telling example came to light last month when the popular online newspaper gazeta.ru published an interview with Yuri Osipov, president of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. Pressed by the reporter about the very low citation rate for articles published in Russian-language science journals, Osipov dismissed the relevance of citation indices, questioned the need for Russian scientists to publish in foreign journals and said that any top-level specialist 'will also study Russian and read papers in Russian'."

Well, nothing to discuss here – I second every single word of the Editorial (not Osipov's :-).

Take care,

Misha

Not even intelligence

When famous Italian physicist Enrico Fermi was asked what characteristics Nobel prize winning physicists had in common, he said:

"I cannot think of a single one, not even intelligence."

Google Buzz

As you probably know, Google launched the Buzz project quite recently. This is something in between blogs and twitter - you post messages that appear in a followers' roll, and those are not restricted to 140 symbols. You can also link Buzz to your blog stream or posts you share in Google Reader - they will appear there immediately.

A few scientists already took advantage of this, for instance here is the Buzz stream of the Field's medalist Terence Tao. For Russian speakers I would recommend the Igor Ivanov one.

If you use Buzz or know anyone from the scientific community who does, drop a comment about it. )

Take care,

Misha

Some photos of Albert Einstein

A famous theoretical physicist Michio Kaku posted some historical Einstein photos on his facebook page. These pictures come from Michio's private archive and are mostly not very well known.

That's all about the blood, the sweat, the tears

Yesterday Amy Bishop, a Harvard PhD and a faculty member of University of Alabama in Huntsville unfolded a shooting in the biology department over there. Three faculty members were killed and many more were injured as a result of her shooting spree.

The most possible reason is that Dr. Amy Bishop was denied tenure at the University of Alabama at Huntsville last year.

Nice post about spam

Tom Martin sent me a link to his post about spam.

I always get lots of spam-like comments with no links to any porn, or warez, or anything else. Just "It was very interesting for me to read this blog post...", and so on. At some point I just gave up on erasing those – who cares about spam with no spam content? But after having a look at Tom's post I understand that I should...

History of science: Gulio Racah kicks ass

As many other branches of atomic, molecular, and chemical physics, the field of chemical stereodynamics emerged from nuclear physics. Basically all this business about how molecules rotate after a chemical reaction, or how to boost the reaction efficiency controlling the reagents – it was already there, in nuclear reactions and spectroscopy.

In 30's some people were involved in studying double gamma decays, when a nucleus goes from some excited state A to state B and then to the ground state C, emitting two gamma-quanta. Already in 1940 Dunworth proposed that there might be some correlations between the directions of emission of these two quanta. Here "correlations" mean that, for instance, if we detect the first gamma-ray from the upper side of the nucleus, the second one most likely will be emitted to the left, less likely to the bottom, and never to the right.

Dunworth was not able to check this experimentally, but induced Donald Hamilton to theoretically prove that there should be some correlations. A few years later Edward Brady and Martin Deutsch from MIT found an experimental evidence of gamma-gamma correlations in the decay of Co(60) and Sc(46) nuclei.

In the meantime theorists published lots of papers, step by step trying to improve approximations and thoroughly elaborate the problem. This lasted for more then a decade, from 1940 to 1951, when a brilliant article by Gulio Racah was published.

He starts it literally as: "Hey guys, last ten years I was interested in something else, but I just bumped into you and I see that you are really stuck. Well, the problem becomes very easy if you use the tensor operator algebra that I developed about a decade ago..."

And, of course, the problem turned out to be solvable in a very natural and straightforward manner. Now tensor operators is an important tool, not only in nuclear physics, but anywhere in physics in general. We all use it and like it.

Take care,

Misha


UPD: By the way, I never knew that Gulio Racah was a cousin of Ugo Fano...

Learn something every day...

The words "introvert"and "extrovert" appeared in English in 1923 upon translation of the Carl Jung's book "Psychologischen Typen" published in German two years before.

Something you should know about vodka

On the 31-st of January 1865 the author of the periodic table of elements Dmitri Mendeleev defended the doctoral dissertation "On the Combinations of Water with Alcohol":


People often say that in this piece Mendeleev proved that the solubility is the best for 40% of alcohol and 60% of water, and thereby invented vodka as we know it. Unfortunately, that's nothing but an urban legend: Russians were drinking vodka long before Mendeleev was even born.

Web of Knowledge - how Google sees it

Everyone knows that ISI Web of Knowledge maintained by Thomson Reuters, is a very raw and unfinished, but still commercial project. Here is what Google thinks about it:


I think that's unlikely to get better unless any substantial alternatives to WoK appear.

Two quotes from Paul Dirac's letters

I certainly loose it if I don't write it up somewhere. These two quotes picked from letters to Manci Balázs, entirely describe Dirac's childhood:

i) 'I did not know of anyone who liked someone else – I thought it did not happen outside novels', 7 March 1936

ii) 'I found it to be the best policy as a child [...] to make my happiness depend only on myself and not on other people', 9 April 1935


Take care,

Misha

The Gunning-Fog index

Nature publishing group has a science blogroll with a bit of statistics for each blog, here is how it looks like for mine:

• Ranked 18 in science (377 overall)
• 2 post(s) per week (on average)
• 65 post(s) collected so far
• 7,032 words per post (on average)
• 14% complex words (on average)
• Readability by Flesch-Kincaid : best understood by university graduates
• Readability by Gunning-Fog : 146.0
• On 0 blogroll(s)
• 2 links to other science blogs
• 0 links from other science blogs

The first thing that crossed my mind was "what the hell this Gunning-Fog index is?". If you follow the link you get that "The Gunning-Fog index [...] is a rough estimate of the number of years of formal education that a person requires in order to understand the text on a first reading."

So, basically an average person needs to study for 146 years to get a rough idea what I'm writing about, while a well understandable text should have the index below 12. First I thought that this is due to appalling English I'm used to, but if you read further you'll see that there is nothing to do with that. The Gunning-Fox index comes from analysis of the average sentence length and the average number of syllables in words.

I never thought those indexes even exist. I promise, I promise to keep sentences shorter... )

Take care,

Misha

In fifty words or less

In his book “Indiscrete thoughts” famous Italian-born American mathematician Gian-Carlo Rota mentions that Stan Ulam was used to say “Whatever is worth saying can be stated in fifty words or less”.

Well, these days he would probably adjust it a bit:

“Whatever is worth saying can be stated in 140 symbols or less”

)

True random numbers: linguistics may be of help

I'm completely ignorant in computer science, but even I know that it's tough to get true random numbers. The problem is that any software-based algorithm generates "pseudo-random" numbers, that is there is still some regularity in a row of those, and the sequence will repeat itself after a while.

People are used to get the real randomness from the outside, like picking up the thermal noise of the sound card, the displacements of mouse (that are supposed to be random), or even monitoring the atmosphere. But, there is at least one challenging method to get true random numbers out of the software part.

Let's take a block of English text (say, a .pdf of a paper), written by a native Russian speaker. What is to do, is to analyze the articles "a" and "the" over there. If the correct article is used, we have "1", if not – "0". In such a way, we get a truly random sequence of 1's and 0's, and we can generate true random base-10 numbers out of it.

Is there anyone who wants to give it a try? )

Take care,

Misha

A bug in Mathematica: Clebsch-Gordan coefficients

A technical issue for those of you using Wolfram Mathematica. Apparently there is a bug in the function furnishing Clebsch-Gordan coefficients, check it out:


These two inputs are equivalent, but the outputs are different somehow. Actually, this Clebsch-Gordan coefficient is zero, because the angular momentum j=9/2 cannot give a projection of m=0. In general, for a coefficient to be nonzero all the (j+m)'s should be nonnegative integer numbers.

The ClebschGordan[] function in Mathematica is used to test all the conditions of existence, such as the triangle rule, but as we see it fails when it comes to substitutions of parameters.

I dropped a message to the Wolfram support team, and they promised to do their best to figure out where the problem comes from. I hope to hear from them soon and I'll keep you posted about it.

Take care,

Misha

arxiv.org seeks donations

Keeping it short, the arxiv.org preprints server faced serious problems after significant budget cuts for Cornell university library. The annual budget is as large as $400,000 and the library will provide only 15% of it. The rest is expected to be donated by top 200 heavy user institutions, allowing to keep both submission and downloading of preprints free of charge. Here is the arXiv support FAQ.

Fake structures published in Acta Crystallographica

Stop press from the wonderful world of scientific misconduct:


"Regrettably, this editorial is to alert readers and authors of Acta Crystallographica Section E and the wider scientific community to the fact that we have recently uncovered evidence for an extensive series of scientific frauds involving papers published in the journal, principally during 2007. Although several thousands of structures published in Acta Crystallographica Section E every year will continue to reflect results of serious scientific work, the extent of these problems is significant with at least 70 structures demonstrated to be falsified and meanwhile acknowledged by the authors as such...

...The falsified structures have many features in common: in each case, a bona fide set of intensity data, usually on a compound whose structure had been correctly determined and reported in the literature, was used to produce a number of papers, with the authors changing one or more atoms in the structure to produce what appeared to be a genuine structure determination of a new compound. The worst example generated no fewer than 18 supposedly original structures from a single common set of data. There is nothing to suggest that the authors of the original papers describing the real structures are in any way aware of, or complicit in, this fraud...

...The initial set of falsified structures arises from two groups. The correspondence authors are Dr H. Zhong and Professor T. Liu, both from Jinggangshan University, Jian, China. The co-authors on these papers included other workers from Jinggangshan University together with authors from different institutions in China. Both these correspondence authors and all co-authors have signed forms agreeing to the retraction of 41 papers published by Dr Zhong and 29 by Professor Liu. Details of these retractions appear elsewhere in this issue of the journal. Having found these problems with articles from Jinggangshan University, all submissions from this University to Acta Crystallographica Sections E or C have now been identified and are being checked for authenticity. Preliminary results indicate that further retractions will result from this exercise."


Huh, this way they will end up with checking every single submitted structure by hands soon...