Via Ranjit’s new blog, Cultural Sabotage, I read this article from ZNet. I don’t always find myself agreeing with ZNet on a lot of issues, but they frame the debate in more interesting ways than most “mainstream” publications, which don’t seek to have a debate. What follows below the fold are disorganized first impressions on the topic of academic boycotting of Israel, and is likely to be riddled with self-contradicting statements.
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Tag Archives: academia
parallel readings
Things (books, papers) I am trying to read in parallel:
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to use in my thesis
Here’s a good quote I heard at the conference yesterday:
Tom Cover: Is there a theorem that says the capacity is the directed information?
Speaker: Actually, you proved that in 1989.
Classic. I need to remember that one for the chapter in my thesis on “previous results.”
not that windy
I’m in Chicago for the 2004 International Symposium on Information Theory. I fully expect my brain to explode in the next few days from overload. Given the current progress I’ve made on my research, I have a suspicion that the next week will be rather depressing.
perseverance
I’ve been able to bike most of the way up Hearst now, although rather than run the risk of being flattened by a bus I duck into North Gate and work my way up around the Naval Architecture shack. I realized at some point that all it took was a little more willpower to get up the section right after Tolman.
I was recently told that I had good potential but needed to work harder. Somewhere twixt Boston and Berkeley I lost my work ethic, but perhaps all it will take is a little more willpower?
BibTeX database
Thankfully, someone has written a PHP-based document database program for BibTeX. This will allow research groups to create a shared bibliographic database so that you don’t have to pass around some “master bibliography list,” or, worse yet, re-type in from scratch references that are used over and over again.
Unfortunately, it will require me to get my own server with a PostgreSQL database on it (ergodicity.net doesn’t have one). I know if I try to suggest it to the computing support people here they’ll be uninterested, even though you can create several instances of it on a single machine, so if they put it on the main server every group could make their own database. It’s not worth my time to argue the virtues of it to them, especially since I am no expert on the software and they will have fifteen reasons they shouldn’t do it, most of which rhyme with “understaffed.” One thing I definitely miss about MIT was the integration and depth of tech support. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a lot better organized than it is here.
Perhaps, if I am lucky, we will get a machine for the group on which I can install the software.
publications
I waste an inordinate amount of time, but today I decided that if I couldn’t focus on work I’d at least do something useful, so I made a template for publications. Of course I’m using CSS, so the style is completely configurable to your colorscheme preferences. Thanks to John Owen’s advice page for the reference to CMU’s Robotics Institute style, which I stole and CSS-ified. I’m a scripting ignoramus, but I think with a little work I’ll be able to make a PHP script which will let you enter the information in and then generate the HTML for you automatically. Naturally, it’s not the perfect format for all people, but it has enough in its barebones-ness for the “busy researcher.”
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probability surveys
The professor for my Statistics class this year, David Aldous, is the editor of a new open-access journal called Probability Surveys. It highlights another problem in corporate journal publishing. Tutorial articles are often invited papers at the editor’s discretion or for special issues. This journal will be full of survey articles, and treads the line between those collections of research monographs and more bleeding-edge research journals. It’s not a profitable area for publication, because survey articles serve graduate students and intersted outsiders, and therefore do not lead to subscriptions, which is what commercial journals rely upon.
Of course, it’s not off the ground yet, but I’m pretty excited. I’m usually willing to spend an hour reading up on some subject I know very little about, especially if it’s an expository article.
tokenizing
I posted a while back about how Cover and Thomas’s book was posted online now, but it turns out that the license for online access uses “tokens.” Once Berkeley has run out of “tokens,” access is denied to the book. This is one of the stupidest decisions I have ever heard of, akin to the music industry’s head-in-the-sand approach to digital music. The way in which online book resources are used is different from print medium, and to force the library to buy more tokens is akin to selling someone a book which they can read only a certain number of times. I’m not saying that they should not charge at all for the book, or that they should charge less than for a library-bound hard copy, but this token system displays a fundamental misunderstanding of how books are used. I wonder if the person who designed this system has ever had to use a book other than “How To Stick Your Head Up Your Ass for Dummies.”
Yes, I’m angry.
penalizing ambition
Steve Clemon’s op-ed piece in the NY Times is all about the $100 visa application fee that international citizens have to pay, regardless of whether their visa is approved. The fee doesn’t vary from country to country, so it is disproportionately high in countries such as India. But $100 is a steep price to pay in any country.
In addition to the points brought up by Clemons, the delays in getting visas approved are ridiculous at US consulates in other countries. When I was interviewing at Caltech I met a student from Iran who told me he simply cannot go home because he would be delayed for a semester waiting for his visa there, whereas going to Mexico to renew is much easier.
A curious position I found myself in when reviewing graduate applications is that I was told to apply a much stricter standard to international applicants than I would for domestic applicants. I’m pretty sure they meant residents/nonresidents, but it may have also been citizen/non-citizen. I’m pretty sure that has to do with Berkeley being a state school, but I’ve been told that there is a lot of pressure to admit fewer international students even though they may be better candidates.
I’m not sure how I feel about all this yet — the visa thing I’m clearly against, but how to strike a balance between serving your constituency (US residents) and recruiting the best and the brightest (among all applicants) is tricky. It’s not really a case of affirmative action, so I don’t think the solutions should be the same. Although if you oppose affirmative action it seems that you should have to adopt the view of admitting only the best-qualified candidates regardless of nationality in order to remain philosophically consistent.
An Ergodic Walk 