coffee and review papers

After my first attempt in a long time to cut back on coffee, I find myself sitting blankly, bleary and screen-staring for a good fifteen minutes this morning. While I wake the dragon and wait for the water to boil I thought I’d collect some thoughts on writing review papers.

I’ve been collaborating on a review paper for the past few months and although it’s coming along quite well, I can’t help but wonder if the structure of a general review paper will be changing in the near future. Typically, in any overview of a technical subject you tend to collect a bunch of references that you think are relevant and pedagogical, write a bunch of sentences that you think are relevant and pedagogical and then interlace the two in as coherent a way as possible. You may also include some summarizing and clarifying stories about the development of the subject and any technicalities which may not be immediately obvious to the novice. My quick review (i.e. search) of the review literature advice columns, http://del.icio.us/ddcttrl/litreview, does not turn up any advice more useful than “write good, not bad”.

The point is that a lot of folks use sites like citeulike and del.icio.us to compile a big mess of content which is tagged, linked and/or annotated in a hap-hazard way. In a review paper, some of this information would be included but it is not standard practice to refer the reader to the writer’s del.icio.us or event citeulike account (I think I did this once for a technical report). Although pdfs are now typically live-linked to content (at least in modern journals), the list is static. Furthermore, if you’re dealing with hundreds of articles in a given subject, it is not always desirable to include all of these in a review paper but it would be nice to have them compiled for readers online somewhere – especially if that somewhere was a place where readers could dump the extended bibliography, en masse, into the bib-manager with a single click. Pubmed and some other sites may offer something like this but it is definitely not universal. I expect citeulike to be there shortly.

This feeds into another hot office topic, which I’ll loosely call social network browsing for academics. Music networks such as last.fm seem to do a pretty good job with nearest neighbor calculations based on historical music preferences. Youtube links videos through some sort of distance metric. Though the data are available for academics, no one around me has found anyone doing a good job (i.e. actually useful) on academic networks. Since citeulike introduced it’s API, my officemate found this preliminary attempt: http://itst.org/culneighbors.php. That approach generates neighbours based on common tags, which isn’t great since tags are user generated and so aren’t likely to be very matching. It’s a nice first go but not very useful. As I see it, and as we have been discussing in the office, what needs to be done is to develop an approach that can present connectivities between (at least) the following types of nodes:

1. authors
2. unpublished researchers
3. users (pseudonyms)
4. papers
5. user (unmoderated) tags
6. suggested (moderated) tags

Note that it may be more conceptually natural to think of some of these nodes (such as tags) as edges.

Anyway, getting back to my original topic of review papers, the real question is: What then should a review paper be (in any subject) in the ideal situation that these user generated meta-data were handled well. It seems to me that all that would be left is a niche for pedagogical papers which may address a certain education gap in fields that are either newly developing or are experiencing “interdisciplinary tensions”.

p.s. if anyone knows how to get auto-linking to work in wordpress …

holliday reading

I was doing some research for chocolate torte recipes and came across this pretty good paper about chocolate. I think the caramilk secret may lie within.

article of dis-interest

I finally had a look at the article mentioned in the previous post and it is awful.  It could have been much shorter:

\begin Journals are overpriced.  Authors do research, write and typeset for free but publish in expensive, slow, restricted access journals out of fear of loss-of-career-potential or something.  Scanning paper-only back-issues is a fixed-cost enterprise which must be done but is probably not so significant since it is a fixed (one time deal) cost.  Many people have said things about this, here is a list of linked references … \end

blah

article of interest – academic publishing

I will read this article later, it might be of interest of anyone else who shouts and fumes over similar side-issues of life.

back_on_track

My new computer arrived so I’m back on line at home. While going through some old photos that I had burned off my dad’s computer two years ago I found this one:

My dad (left) is about 16 in the picture and is with his mom and dad and sister Margaret. I think they are on vacation or something. Suits are great sometimes.

I interviewed a bunch of people to be my roomate and I ended up picking one but he still hasn’t heard about the job he was applying for in Montreal and hasn’t taken the room yet. The whole process of meeting people under these weird circumstances proved to be more stressful and distracting than I thought. Now I’m hesitating about contacting the next person on my list – having your own space does have its perks.

Yo La Tengo and Akron/Family are coming to Montreal.

leaving lone living?

I think I’ve more or less made up my mind to look for a someone to take the small extra room in my apartment. Since I’m not particularly desperate to get rid of the room fast, I figured I’d ask around with friends first if they know anyone looking for a small but cheap room in Montreal.

In other news, on Friday, at the ripe old age of 27, I went to an after hours club for the first time ever. It was a slightly educational and mostly enjoyable experience, though when you’ve spent most of your life associating electronic muisc with cleaning, cardio and coding, a night of breakbeats is a bit of a twisted spank to your inner child … more later probably.

101 Mathemeticians OR 43 With the Humidex, 49 With the Hungoverdex OR Wow I Spent My Summer

A rough outline of my life since June

• TO – beer with James, York Campus is awful
• Vancouver – hanging with Laura, beach frisbee with Ben, Cool math people go to Ladyfest
• Montreal – friggin hot
• Ontario – really, really crappy camping beside the 401, first experience with deep fried french toast (heavy with oil)
• Montreal – friggin hot
• Newfoundland – ate pounds and pounds of smoked meat, also had the saltiest salted meal I’ve ever had, mouth sores abound
• NS – drinks with Josh and my Mom, Yarmouth is a great place to buy sneakers
• Montreal – 20 degree temperature difference between NS and Montreal
• Toronto – math, so many restaurants
• Guelph – see below
• Montreal – renormalize

All in all I’ve had about 20 days of math conferencing and have only spent a few weeks in my apartment during the past two months. Time to settle down.

Just had a visit with my brother Philip and his family. Callum and Evan are cooking up some pretty cool claymations. Some of the earlier stuff is on YouTube.

On the creative front, I nearly finished a short video for a ‘1-day video challenge’ that my friend Kyd organized. Three ingredients were sent to you the morning of the event and you had to incorporate them into your movie. Maybe I’ll finish it if I get a new computer or fix my old one.

somesongs for “couch day” + a possible end to pseudobeardedness

I just came across somesongs, a site for sharing ‘homemade’ music. It had this jem on it. You might find some stuff you’ll want to listen to more than once. maybe.

Turning to other news, as some of you may know, I’ve been with the same couch for several years now. I decided to honour my couch by pushing aside the piles of clothes and books which usually adorn its curves, and staging a number of flattering photos. The results of which are posted below. As a side note, if you search for “international couch day” on Google, you get one hit from someone’s myspace page and Google asks if you meant “international coach day”. I’m actually a little surprised.

Also, I haven’t been shaving much for at least the past few months. Apparently, I’m not quite a man yet. I had delayed the removal of my virile, facial outgrowth because I was planning to attend a May mustache party. Since I was too tired and lazy this Friday, I missed it and hence haven’t had the need to shave yet. I thought it would be a good idea to document my “look”, so that when I return to my clean-faced puerile ways, I might look back and remember how it once was. Beth said I looked a bit metal-headish.

I’ve started working on those banjo cover requests, so with any luck I might have something to be sorry about in the next week or so.

what todo

I’ve been fooling around with various organizational webtools, especially since I will be teaching again in May. A lot of this has involved trying to do too much with Google Calender. I’m not sure exactly what I’ve learnt yet, but I have managed to arrive at an observation which may be crudely stated as:

“scheduling is not doing”

Surprising as it may be, scheduling does bring happiness but does not seem to affect doingness.

In particular, I have made a todo list at voo2do.com with a plethora of exiting entries that will dictate my life for the next three months. One of the items that has survived a number of days of blissful peckings is “hititrun,raisinghell -> banjo” which is classified under “stupid” (which is short for stupid). What this entry means is that at some point in my haze of marking 5 questions on 300 plus math-for-management exams, I though it would be a great (I mean a really great) idea to do versions of old hip-hop songs by run-dmc on the banjo. Now, I’m not sure who is actually reading this blog (probably just deadjoe – happy birthday again btw) but I’m asking for suggestions for <i>songs I wish were sung with a banjo, right perdy-like, but wern’t never so fortunate to have been done so</i>. Either that, or just beat the banjoviality right out of me next time you see me.

I also had the idea of putting together a few banjo-trance type deals…but all this planning for doing hinges on item number 14 on my todo list: “buy mic”. Recording on the built-in ibook mic is only funny for so long.

strange light, crafty power and roof top time-warps … and email

Craft: Cristal and Charles ransacked my apartment with craft/modeling supplies. There were so many big plastic bags full of foam board or (whatever the hell it is) that I had to take some pictures. They (in the design program) also have ridiculous amounts of markers. I mean like 20 markers that almost all the same colour. In the last picture, Cristal, fist pumping with the flash of light, appears to be making a rock-star entrance from the corner.  Somehow the light + the action kind of reminds me of Jem and the Holograms … or at least some strange Latina arts-and-crafts version of an 80's rock band.

Roof: Since Cristal had left her camera at my place I decided to play around with it. I took some pictures from the roof and spent nearly all day trying to make a panorama using various programs. I ended up using Calico, but also tried the Gimp plugin, nona, hugin and doubletake. DoubleTake was the only one I managed not to give up on before I got it working…but it was crappy and had a big watermark because it's shareware. Hours and hours later, I've got a new menu bar pic on my departmental website. Sure was worth it.

Email: This is definitely boring and probably pretty stupid but it pisses me off daily. For various reasons I was going through my email folders on my school math account and decided to tally some numbers on internal spam in 2006. If you exclude real spam, since Jan 12th, 2006 I've received about 564 messages of which 291 went unread. That means I'm reading about 48 percent of my incoming 'non-spam' email. Something has gone terribly wrong here. In my SPAM folder there are only about 26 messages since Jan. 12, 2006 – though I don't know what kind of total filtering the server might be doing. It looks like internal spam beats spam from THE ENTIRE WORLD by a factor of 10. Great.