Tag Archives: professional

The Elsevier boycott

There is a lot of information available about this, including the petition page, the official statement explaining the petition,  the PolyMath journal publishing reform page. I won’t repeat that here. This is just a note to say that after an internal struggle, I have signed the petition. Some of the details of this publisher’s bad behaviour were new and rather shocking to me. It is clear that a new system for dissemination, archiving, and evaluation of research is needed, and this boycott looks like a necessary, though not sufficient, step.

 

Moshe Vardi on CS conference talks

In CACM, Moshe Vardi opines that conference talks must be improved by force, in order to justify even having a physical conference. I have long shared this opinion, although the CS talks I have heard seem better overall than the ones I recall hearing in mathematics conferences. Lance Fortnow thinks conferences as a means of scoring publication credit must give way to their core function of promoting discussion and dissemination, while journals assume the other function. I definitely agree with this.

Public relations and social capital for nerds

I just went to a nice talk by Michael Trick at the 42nd ORSNZ Conference being held at the University of Auckland today and tomorrow. The gist of it was that while Operations Research as a subject is doing really well, with many interesting applications arising in the service sector of the economy in particular, the OR societies are not thriving and it does not have a clear “brand” at least in the public mind. This is partly because of the “Bowling Alone” phenomenon described by Robert Putnam (less engagement in any sort of civic activity by younger people), partly because the very success of the field makes it more likely to fragment, and partly because of a lack of effort at cohesion. He urged the use of new technology (blogs, etc) to try to create more sense of community and focus.

The theoretical computer science community have realised that even within computer science their contribution is greatly misunderstood (see the Theory Matters wiki), and convincing the public is likely to be much harder. I would love to hear from anyone who knows the most effective way to address this problem of correcting misperceptions. It causes problems like the job market time lag and other evils, and we academics really need to attack it more seriously.

Research funding in New Zealand: more money, less form-filling needed

I recently came across a submission by Nicholas Wormald (who a long time ago worked in the building where I am now) to the 2005/6 National Strategic Review of Mathematical Sciences in Australia. Two things stood out for me: how similar Australian government ideas are to those in New Zealand, and how different they seem to be from those in Canada. The rejection rate for the only serious fund for “pure” research in NZ, the Marsden Fund, is about 93%, resulting in much cynicism and quite likely a Matthew effect (one of my pet hates – I would love to see evidence that giving so much more money to the already successful is somehow better for science overall). It seems clear that many proposals are rejected simply for lack of funding, not because of any problem with the proposal. The Canadian NSERC system appears much more enlightened: smaller grants, spread more widely, with less paperwork.

If it makes sense to do so, please sign the Marsden Fund Open Letter from the New Zealand Association of Scientists, requesting a tripling of the fund.