Dropbox replacing Subversion for paper writing

You must be thinking that I’m going nuts (I wonder that myself!) by writing this. Let me assure you, this is not a conscious decision, just the observation of a fact. More and more, when writing papers with external collaborators, we end up sharing the paper using DropBox instead of setting a SVN repository for the paper.

I guess the two main reasons are simplicity (no need to create and manage user accounts for the external researchers) and extreme laziness (DropBox synchronizes the files automatically but with SVN you need to ask for the update yourself).

For sure, the merging algorithm in DropBox could be improved so you better avoid working on the same parts of the paper at the same time (already happened to me once that while working on a file, DropBox “synchronized me” and lost the changes; I learnt the hard way to pay more attention to DropBox warnings!).

Are you brave enough to confess that you are doing the same? Come out of the closet!

How people see the work of a Professor

(I’d love to provide the attribution for the image but I’ve no idea who created it, if you do please let me know; I discovered via Martin Gaedke)

RR: Recurrent Reviewing patterns

Fabiano Dalpiaz describes a list of (good and bad) recurrent reviewing patterns.

I’d add that another “easy” way out for a review, just say that the paper is borderline (and then, if needed, during the discussion phase you can just adapt it to follow the majority).

You can read my other posts on the topic of (bad) reviews here

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Cite our papers and not only our tools (thanks)

(originally posted in the modeling-languages.com portal)

CONTEXT: In some domains (as mine), many research works end up with a prototype implementation of the research results. This prototype is usually released using some kind of open source license so that the community can benefit from it.

In AtlanMod , we are very proud of the large user base of our tools and of the benefits (and challenges!) that this brings to the team.

However, this has an undesired side-effect, our tools are by far more popular than the research papers describing/introducing them (e.g. everybody in the software modeling community knows ATL ? but, how many could point to the paper that best describes ATL?).

If you are not a professional researcher you may be thinking “so what?”. The answer is easy: the current evaluation system for researchers (I´d say in any country) gives a lot of importance to the number of citations of paper but almost zero to the number of users of your tools. Simply put, a reference to our paper counts for the CV of all paper authors, indicating the url of a tool (even worse if it is just as a footnote or just by mentioning the tool) does not.

I’m not saying I agree with this (leading/creating widely used open source projects should, and can, be quantified and evaluated as part of the achievements of a researcher) but until then please think about us the next time you use one of our tools in your research work. We´ll really appreciate it.

Btw, as Antonio Vallecillo proposed, to help on this, we should make clear ourselves which paper should be cited when using each tool.

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RR: 10 easy ways to fail a Ph.D.

If you are now a PhD Student, don’t miss Matt Might’s list of 10 easy ways to fail a PhD. I couldn’t agree more with all of them!

My contribution to the list is the following: Remember that your supervisor for sure wants you to be successful (if you publish more, he publishes more) but this doesn’t mean that your objectives are exactly the same. Yours is finishing the PhD ASAP, his is to get as much publications as possible so he may try to push you to publish more than strictly necessary to finish the PhD (who knows where you’ll end up after?). Of course, this does not apply if you’re one of his PhD students, in that case, he will also be interested in you finishing ASAP so that he can claim that he has successfully supervised PhD students.

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Nonsense reviews are a global problem…

We have complained before about bad reviews (e.g. here and here) in the research world but clearly, this is a global problem that affects all kinds of review/recommendation sites.

As an example (via @zef and @drbernhard) the best book review I’ve seen so far (buys a book to learn C and complains that the book talks about “crazy” concepts like Integer and main). Of course, this guy is just a troll but this does not change the fact that his review (i.e. the rating he gives) counts and influences the global perception of the people that is considering the purchase of the book.

I’m afraid we would need a “review police” but of course, then who will protect us from the police?

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A must-see video if you want to get a PhD in (Theoretical) Computer Science

So you want to get a PhD in theoretical computer science
by: econ101

http://www.xtranormal.com/xtraplayr/7520547/so-you-want-to-get-a-phd-in-theoretical-computer-science