XKCD: Academic Imposters

This old xkcd comic is amusing. It also includes an (I believe) unintended joke about centrality measures.

(Tip of the cap to Carlos Castillo Chavez.)

Another New Journal on Network Science

I am on the inaugural editorial board of IEEE Transactions of Network Science and Engineering, which is a new network-science journal on the engineering side.

Indeed, I am part of what seems like a small army of current and former Caltech CDS, EE, and AMa/ACM/CMS people on the editorial board.

It's really cool that the engineers seem to like the work that I am doing! This journal is very much more on the side of 'it is important to be domain-specific' rather than trying to be too universal. As many of you know, this philosophy resonates very strongly with my approach.

GoldieBlox: The Engineering Toy for Girls

I love Kickstarter because it allows one to back eminently worthwhile projects like GoldieBlox: The Engineering Toy for Girls.

Help fight gender steretypes and also one of the earliest leaks in the science./math/engineering pipeline!

This project is just a big win.

(Tip of the cap to Rae Yip.)

Stick a Fork in It

One of the windows in Green's Cafe was messed up and wasn't able to close, which was rather unfortunate, as it's rather cold and somewhat rainy outside. The solution? Simple: One of the workers used a fork to jam the window closed. I approve!

P.S. The weather sucks ass right now.

Steve Strogatz on Networks and the Phillips Machine

I had never heard of the Phillips Machine, but there is a refurbished one at Cambridge that "works". As Steve Strogatz explains in his latest guest column in the New York Times, it's basically a miniature hydraulic caricature of the economy. The article then relates this briefly to some modern work in networks and complex systems, more generally bringing up the point that one of the really exciting and challenging things of these subjects is the attempt to move beyond reductionism.

Submitting abstracts versus papers to speak at conferences

There is going to be a complex systems conference at Warwick in September.

Instead of just submitting an abstract, one has to submit an entire paper in order to give a talk. The paper is up to 6 pages long if one is trying for a 20-minute talk, and it is up to 15 pages if one is trying a 40-minute talk. (One can submit only an abstract if one is trying for a poster.) This resembles CS (and presumably other engineering) conferences more than what I usually attend, where the longest required document I have seen are 2-page extended abstracts that are only marginally annoying. Although I am very interested in attending this conference, given that (1) I can present my work at equally or more prominent conferences that don't have such stringent (and, more important, time-consuming!) submission requirements and (2) conference proceedings and the like count next to nothing in mathematics, there is really no incentive at all for me to do this. (Note that if I weren't so self-motivated about writing things up anyway or if I wanted to push myself to write something up in a timetable that happened to correspond roughly to the submission deadline, then I would consider doing something like this for that reason.) It would be a waste of my time, and that's before I consider the fact that the conference may well conflict with my Examination duties at Oxford. I considered e-mailing the relevant organizer to mention this, but it's not worth it. (I have e-mailed someone involved with the conference whom I know essentially just to remark that I think it's a very bad policy if one wants to optimize the quality of a conference.) I think that part of the reason for the submission requirement is as a self-selection procedure for people who are willing to go through the major hassle, but frankly I would find it pretty surprising if lots of people aren't turned off by that whole thing. I also expect that this will lead to heavy biases in the backgrounds of the people attending in favor of people from subjects where conferences are usually like this.

If the conference doesn't conflict with Examination duties, I may show up for a bit without giving a presentation (depending, of course, on who is speaking). It's in Warwick, which is an easy train ride away.