Per Ola Kristensson

Learning Haskell

November 8th, 2010

In a previous post I talked about Objective C, probably best known as the primary programming language for Apple’s laptops, desktops and iPhones.

Now I am teaching myself Haskell, a strongly typed functional programming language with type inference. I am reading the book Real World Haskell published by O ‘Reilly (full text also available for free online). I have only read about 50 pages but I am very satisfied with the book so far. It manages to balance the delicate trade-off between introducing concepts so fast that too many details are missing and being so meticulous that the reading becomes too boring. As the book is written now, it is actually quite addictive to read—I want to keep learning more! I love this style of writing a programming language book. However, as a consequence of this (conscious) choice of the authors, parts this book would be very hard to follow for someone who hasn’t taken at least an introductory compiler or functional programming class. However, I regard this as a strength as I wouldn’t want to read a book that assumed no programming experience.

Since I am still at an early learning state it remains to see what I think about Haskell itself. Stay tuned!

Posted in book review, computer science, functional programming, haskell | No Comments »

Bentham open access journal accepted nonsense manuscript

November 6th, 2010

The previous post described various commercial open access publishers spamming for book chapters and journal articles. Now I read that Phil Davis at the blog The Scholarly Kitchen sent a SCIgen-generated nonsense manuscript to “The Open Information Science Journal” published by Bentham. Four months later Bentham accepted the paper and offered to publish it for a $800 fee. No reviews were provided with the acceptance letter.

It looks like at least some of these commercial open access publishers are essentially vanity presses that will publish anything for a hefty fee. It is a shame they are doing this since they may drag down the reputation of reputable open access publishers, such as PLoS. Another danger is that we will see even more use of pseudo-scientific rankings and measures of the impact of journals based on citations just so that people can filter out all the meaningless junk. I suppose no one is any longer interested in reading the actual articles.

In defense of open access journals, a journal called “Applied Mathematics and Computation” which has been published by Elsevier since 1975 has apparently also accepted an automatically generated nonsense paper.

Posted in bibliometrics, computer science, impact factor, open access, peer review, publishers, research, science, spam, spamming | 3 Comments »

Academic spam and open access publishing

November 4th, 2010

Judging by how much spam I get nowadays it seems academic open access publishing is lucrative.

I keep getting targeted spam from Bentham, Hindawi, InTech, and others. The strategy seems to be to mine reputable conference and journal papers for email addresses and then use them for targeted spam.

I have now received five emails from open access publisher InTech about a book chapter based on a previously published paper. These guys never give up! This is an excerpt from the last one:

Dear Dr. Kristensson,

We apologize for contacting you again on the matter of your nomination to contribute to the book named in the title of this email, but since we haven’t received an answer from you, we are taking the liberty of contacting you again (you may have been busy or our previous emails may have ended up in your email filters). However, this is the last email you will receive from us. If you can find time, please reply to our previous email which is below:

My name is MSc Iva Lipovic and I am contacting you regarding a new InTech book project under the working title “Speech Technologies”, ISBN: 978-953-307-152-7.

This book will be published by InTech – an Open Access publisher covering the fields of Science, Technology and Medicine.

You are invited to participate in this book project based on your paper “Automatic Selection of Recognition Errors by Respeaking the Intended Text”, your publishing history and the quality of your research. However, we are not asking you to republish your work, but we would like you to prepare a new paper on one of the topics this book project covers.

Why on earth would I spend time and effort to write a book chapter for a random individual I have never heard of and who doesn’t seem to have any credentials whatsoever in the field? And who reads these book chapters? And what exactly is the point of an open access “book chapter”? Sounds like a web page to me. With the exception I have to pay InTech plenty of money to put it up. I might as well just make the text available on the web myself.

Another open access publisher that likes to send spam is Hindawi. However, news to me was that Hindawi now spams on behalf of EURASIP, an organization I thought was reputable (until now):

Dear Dr. Kristensson,

I am writing to invite you to submit an article to “EURASIP Journal on Audio, Speech, and Music Processing,” which provides a rapid forum for the dissemination of original research articles as well as review articles related to the theory and applications of audio, speech, and music processing.

EURASIP Journal on Audio, Speech, and Music Processing is published using an open access publication model, meaning that all interested readers are able to freely access the journal online at http://www.hindawi.com/journals/asmp/contents.html without the need for a subscription.

Another example is Bentham who wants me to write a review on random patents based on keyword searches (the weirdest concept I have heard of so far for a journal):

Dear Dr. Kristensson,

Bentham Science Publishers has launched a series of innovative
journals publishing review articles on recent patents in major
therapeutic areas of drug discovery as well as biotechnology,
nanotechnology, engineering, computer science and material science
disciplines. Please refer to Bentham Science’s website at
http://www.pat-comp-sci.org/AllTitles for further details.

An exciting journal entitled “Recent Patents on Computer Science
(CSENG)” was launched in January 2008. This journal publishes review
articles written by experts on recent patents in the field of Computer
Science. Please visit the journal‘s website at
http://www.compscieng.org for the Editorial Board, sample issue,
abstracts of recent issues and other details.

Recent Patents on Computer Science (CSENG) is indexed in Genamics
JournalSeek, Compendex,Scopus

If you would like to submit a review article to the journal on an
important patent area in Computer Science, then please provide us the
title of your proposed article and a tentative date of submission at
editorial@compscieng.org. Moreover in your reply, could you please
suggest some specific keywords, keyword phrases related to your topic,
so that detailed patents may be sent to you for the preparation of
your manuscript.

I keep wondering who is actually editing and reviewing all these journals and books. While they keep spamming me for paper submissions (and lucrative fees after they have accepted the papers), I haven’t received any invitations to do any reviews.

Posted in computer science, open access, peer review, publishers, research, science, spam, spamming | 48 Comments »

Using Objective-C to teach object-oriented programming?

September 6th, 2010

I am programming in Objective-C right now. It is an interesting programming language, essentially a smaller and simpler alternative to C++. However, unlike C++, Objective-C is a strict superset of ANSI C, which means any valid C code can be compiled by an Objective-C compiler, something that a C++ compiler cannot guarantee (for instance, the need to cast void-pointers is different in C and C++).

What Objective-C does is add additional well-needed abstractions to ANSI C, such as classes, interfaces and inheritance. I have to admit, coming from mostly C and Java programming, I was initially annoyed by the Smalltalk-inspired syntax (and I’m still not convinced it makes any sense).

However, I am starting to think that Objective-C might be a good teaching language for an ambitious programming class. Unlike Java and C++, Objective-C’s syntax clearly differentiates between standard function calls and instance method invocations (message expressions). The syntax also differentiates between method declarations and function declarations.

The theory is that by having distinct syntax for these and other aspects of the programming language the learner is forced to conceptualize the differences. Syntax is enforced by the compiler and conceptual misunderstandings will lead to compilation errors that the learner has to correct. In other words, conceptual misunderstandings are explicitly pointed out to the learner by the compiler. If the learner does not satisfy the compiler the program won’t compile, let alone run. For example, the Objective-C syntax makes it impossible to call an instance method and not realize that this is message passing and not a static function invocation.

Another potential advantage of using Objective-C as a teaching language is that it is somewhere in the middle between Java and C++. It is closer to the hardware than Java. For instance, when an object is created in Objective-C, the idiom is to first explicitly allocate memory for it and thereafter initialize it (e.g. the expression UIButton *button = [[UIButton alloc] init]; first allocates memory for a structure to represent the button, and then initializes it). This first step of allocation and memory management is hidden for Java programmers. However, computer science students obviously need to understand memory management. Yet Objective-C is not as convoluted as C++. For instance, it doesn’t have operator overloading, templates and multiple inheritance. Hence it is not too daunting for the beginning programmer.

This tutorial succinctly highlights the differences between Objective C and C.

Posted in acm, c++, computer science education, java, objective-c, programming languages, teaching, university, university education | 1 Comment »

How to be a “top-100″ university

August 18th, 2010

The idea that you can rank universities in the world has to be one of the most misguided ideas ever conceived. The assumption must be that all universities in all countries have the same objectives. If this isn’t true, the ranking is meaningless.

The Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) has the following criteria:

10%: Alumni winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals.
20%: Academic Staff winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals.
20%: ISI Highly Cited Researchers.
20%: Articles published in Science and Nature.
20%: Papers published that are indexed by the Science Citation Index (SCI) or the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI).
10%: Per capita academic performance of the above indicators.

Now, assume I am a worried university administrator. How can I improve my institution’s ranking?

I would propose the following strategy:

Greatly expand research in selected areas of medicine and the natural sciences that tend to have articles published in Science and Nature.
Expand selected areas in engineering that publish in easy-to-publish IEEE conferences and journals that are indexed by SCI. Better yet, require all undergraduate and graduate students to publish about six or so “SCI papers” with their advisor’s name on it to get their degree.
Sack everyone else.

Also: Make sure you work in an institution which is at least about 100 years old and have focused on medicine and the natural sciences in the past. Remember: Nobel Prizes collected by staff and alumni over 50 years ago, they still count!

I leave it up to someone else to decide if such a rank-optimized university is what should characterize every university in the world.

Posted in bibliometrics, politics, ranking, research, science | 1 Comment »

Milking the moon

August 4th, 2010

I bought a random book about two years ago called “Milking the moon” that I have just finished reading. It tells us the life story of Eugene Walter and is based on extensive interviews with him carried out by Katherine Clark, then a professor of literature.

Eugene grew up in Mobile, Alabama. He had no formal education, yet he quickly became a member of the literary community in the 1940s and 1950s. The book chronicles his life in Mobile, then New York, then Paris, then Rome, and then back to Mobile. Eugene Walter is probably not well known. However, he hanged around with the famous and influential all his life. He won a literature award and made contributions to the Paris Review literary magazine. He also served as an editor for Botteghe Oscure for many years.

I enjoyed the positive message in this back: let’s not worry too much about tomorrow, if you spot a good opportunity then just go for it! By following this advice Eugene got to befriend some of the most interesting people of his time, for instance the Italian film director Fellini. Eugene also had minor roles in some of Fellini’s films. Eugene clearly had a good time, in particular in Rome, where he also wrote the lyrics for the song “What is a youth” in the 1968 film Romeo and Juliet. Yet I think this book is only giving us half the story. The book clinically omits any mention of Eugene’s love life. Did he ever have a family of his own? In one part of the book it suggests his friendships tended to last up to 15 years. So while we get to hear a lot about his views about other people (most of it interesting, and sometimes fascinating), we get to hear very little about Eugene himself. I think it is a shame. The foreword gives me the impression he was quite the character. Despite this, I would recommend reading this book. In particular, the first chapters in the book about his upbringing in Mobile was a vibrant and refreshing read on life in the American south during the first half of the 20^th century.

Posted in book review, eugene walter, literature | 1 Comment »

My first paper reaches exactly 100 citations

August 3rd, 2010

I just noticed that according to Google Scholar my first publication, a CHI 2003 paper, has exactly 100 citations now. It seems to be my most cited paper so far.

Posted in acm, bibliometrics, computer science, hci, research, science | No Comments »

Darwin College, Cambridge

July 25th, 2010

The College seen from the Garden:

The Hall:

The Garden in the snow (view from the Hall):

The Old Granary:

The bridge to the College’s first island on the river Cam:

Posted in cambridge, darwin college, photos, university of cambridge | No Comments »

Tyranny of evaluation

July 21st, 2010

A recent paper by Gonzalo Génova in the Communications of the ACM talks about the role of empirical evidence in evaluating computer science research. The article talks about computer science in general but it reminds me of Henry Lieberman’s 2003 paper The Tyranny of Evaluation, which attacks the tendency in HCI to reject papers describing groundbreaking systems and techniques solely due to their lack of empirical evidence. Henry makes a comparison to Galileo’s experiments of dropping balls from the Tower of Pisa. As he eloquently puts it: “Trouble is, people aren’t balls.“

Posted in acm, computer science, hci, research, science | No Comments »

Consensus among climate scientists

June 24th, 2010

A recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that 97-98% of active climate scientists are in agreement with IPCC. Perhaps not particularly surprising (data is always good though). This is slightly more amusing: the paper also shows that those in disagreement have substantially lower climate expertise and scientific prominence. I suppose this settles the question on whether there is consensus among climate scientists.

Posted in climate change, global warming, research, science | No Comments »

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