Some Interesting Articles

This week I found several interesting online articles that I’d like to share here.

The first relates to SOPA and PIPA, the two legislative acts about fighting online copyright infringement. I personally don’t know too much about them but in an effort to learn about these pieces of legislation, I found a report published by the ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, that has a decent amount of influence, especially with scientists and technical people. The article is a bit technical, but the thesis is that the costs associated with blocking traffic (i.e. blocking DNS lookups and search engine hits) is quite high and it cannot be done simply by tampering with US-based DNS servers. Therefore the article proposes that anyone (or entity) that requests a court order under these acts needs to financially compensate the other party for carrying out the court order. This would mean that anyone who would like to censor a website would need to pay for that website to remove itself from DNS servers and search engines. The ACM article states that this is a non-trivial task, meaning that the prosecuting party would have to pay a substantial amount. If these bills were to pass, I hope this would mean that corporations would not be willing to actually carry out these court orders.

In somewhat related news, this NY Times article about academic publishing looks at alternatives to the traditional (read: antiquated) publishing system. This relates also to this article I wrote earlier but is not only better written but also better informed. There are several attempts to circumvent traditional academic journals; one mentioned in the article is ResearchGate, which is more or less an academic social network. I’m really happy to see that people are working on this and I hope that some of these catch one, despite the fact that academia is fairly conservative at adopting change. Another interesting facet of the NY Times article is that they managed to talk to spokespeople of Elsevier and Science, who gracefully toe-d the party line saying that the costs for maintaining curated records of publication motivates the exorbitant prices for journal subscriptions.

Cathy O’Neil, mentioned this article and wrote about one of her own horror stories of dealing with publishers. In fact her experience with publishers partly contributed to her leaving academia. In a nutshell, the publication process is atrociously slow, and this really slows innovation and also makes impatient people incredibly annoyed. Alternative form of publication and recognition could almost certainly speed up the dissemination of knowledge and foster more rapid innovation. I can see how this would really annoy me, but since machine learning is a field where top publication venues are mostly conferences, I haven’t noticed this much. Conferences are a great way to spread ideas quickly and efficiently, but in many fields they are regarded as second or third tier publication venues, so technical content is often lower quality. Maybe one quick fix in other fields is to convince people that conferences are a reasonable way to publish, thereby increasing their impact factor while simultaneously promoting more rapid innovation.

Timothy Gowers, a famous mathematician (a Fields Medalist) and blogger, also wrote here specifically about the bad practices of Elsevier, one of the big academic publishing companies. In his article he publicly declared that he would boycott Elsevier in every way, refusing to peer-review for, publish in, or in any other way serve for Elsevier journals. He also considers both top-down and bottom-up approaches for changing how these companies operate, and his boycott is a step in the bottom-up direction, an individual act rather than a more coordinated effort from academics. Either way, I’m glad to see that academics are taking a starting to take a stand against publishers.

The Code Book

Author: Simon Singh

Singh recounts the history of cryptography, starting from the primitive ciphers used in ancient times, through the famous protocols used in World Wars I and II, and up to the current state of the art in public key cryptography, including a brief tour of quantum cryptography. His discussion starts with the famous Caesar Cipher, which simply shifts the plaintext alphabet by a fixed number of positions to obtain the ciphertext alphabet, which is easily broken by frequency analysis. He then progresses to more advanced polyalphabetic ciphers, which switch between different Caesar shifts over the course of a message, which culminated in the Vigenere cipher that was popular in World War I. Again the Vigenere cipher can be broken by a more careful frequency analysis and Singh details how one can do this with a fairly simple example. He continues to World War II, where the German Enigma machine presented itself as a new challenge for cryptanalysts. Here the work of several British mathematicians, including Alan Turing, ended up breaking the Enigma code, but the technique is quite complicated and very heuristic. Next, he discussion the famous Diffie-Hellman key exchange protocol and RSA public key cryptography, both of which are still in use today. Finally he presents some more theoretical topics, namely how quantum computers can possibly used to break RSA and how quantum cryptography offers a truly unbreakable cryptography protocol. Singh also goes on several tangents, discussing the Navajo Whisperers, archaeological decoding, and some legends involving cryptography.

He’s narrative is framed as an arms race between the code makers and the code breakers, and one of the prominent themes of the work is that necessity is the mother of invention. In other words, there is no need for innovation if the current state of the art is good enough. This happened many times on the side of the code makers, if their existing messages could not be decrypted, then there appeared to be no motivation to develop stronger protocols. Similarly, on the side of the code breakers, if their techniques worked well enough to decipher enemy messages (or if there was no threat from an enemy), there was no need to develop more advanced methods. This is why a lot of the advancement in cryptography, on both sides, takes place during times of war.

Another interesting theme is how secretive all of the advancements and cryptanalysis research was until very recently, and also how important it was that things remain secret. When the Vigenere cipher was broken, the British government successfully covered up the fact that it was broken and the Germans continued to use it throughout World War I. Only before WWII did it become apparent that the British could read messages encrypted by the Vigenere cipher, prompting the Germans to develop the Enigma machine. It is also interesting to know that both RSA and Diffie-Hellman key exchange were independently discovered by British academics, but this information was not released to the public until very recently.

Overall, “The Code Book” combines elements of science, mathematics as one would expect, with interesting historic, political and personal elements as Singh introduces all of the major players in the cryptographic arms race. Most of the cryptography itself is fairly primitive, because for much of history things were done by hand, and the resulting protocols are far from secure in the age of computers. However, this progression set the stage for the modern cryptographic protocols which are now in widespread use.

As far as a “The Code Book” is a popular-science book, I did not get too much out of the book, probably because I already know a decent amount about cryptography. In many cases it was obvious to me where the primitive protocols broke down and how one could break them. However, when viewed as a historian, I found it interesting to see how and why cryptography has developed to where it is today.

Fahrenheit 451

Author: Ray Bradbury

In Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury describes a dystopian supposedly-futuristic society in which reading is not allowed. This policy is enforced by book burnings orchestrated by government-employed firemen. The novel follows Guy Montag, a fireman who starts questioning the censorship policy after meeting a young girl with a unique curiosity, and after he watches a woman voluntarily burn herself alive with her books. He collects some books and starts reading them, but is soon found out and forced to flee the city. He escapes and runs into some other fugitives living in the forest. These people have memorized whole books and serve as the protectors of literature, waiting for a era devoid of censorship. At the end of the story, war breaks out and the city is bombed, leaving the exiled people to rebuild the city (presumably also the country) and start the new era.

Bradbury prediction about the future is not entirely inaccurate. His main qualm is that technology has changed the pace of life and how people think to a point that creative, inquisitive thinking does not happen anymore. Specifically his criticism is against television, but I would argue that many other technological advancements are contributing to this transformation. Now days it is increasingly common that people are unwilling to devote more than a couple of minutes to any single task and consequently people are not informed to the point where they can make educated decisions and ask provoking questions. The increasing popularity of twitter as a media source is evidence for this phenomenon. I don’t mean this as a criticism of twitter, it is actually a criticism of the population, who soaks up an application that is just providing what they want. This is along the same lines as Bradbury’s criticism; the media is giving people what they want, the problem is that people prefer television, news clips to potentially more intellectual tasks like reading literature.

Another related theme is that people are wrapped up in their own fantasy worlds, often oblivious about reality. This results in less stimulating conversations with people as well as a lack of appreciation for complex things like natural beauty. My guess is that this also contributes to people’s preference toward television and mass media. In Fahrenheit 451 this theme is portrayed by Mildred Montag, Guy’s wife, who is constantly listening to the radio or watching tv, ignoring Guy’s existence and oblivious to her surroundings.

This theme again is becoming more and more pertinent to our society, where people are always listening to music, on their smartphones, or otherwise unaware of their environment and the people around them. This is one of my main criticisms with smart phones and I really believe that it is ruining society, so I was glad that Bradbury wrote about it in Fahrenheit 451. On my bus ride to school, everyone is listening to music or playing games on their phones, making it that much harder to strike up potentially stimulating conversations. At meals people are constantly distracted by their smart phones that conversation becomes much more superficial and uninteresting. Needless to say, I find it incredibly annoying.

Technology has a lot to offer in terms of efficiency, but there are negative side effects, like hindering social interaction and decreased attention span, that are often neglected but are also hard to quantify. How do we combat these negative side effects, so that we can enjoy the positives? For one, we can consciously avoid using technology in places where we could be interacting with other people. My friends have a “no phones at the dinner table rule” which I think is a great example of this. I also generally try to avoid using my cell phone when I am with other people, but it is important that everyone buys into this. As far as decreasing attention span, one solution is to promote reading literature. I think this is the approach Bradbury is aiming for.

So to summarize, Fahrenheit 451 is very applicable to modern society. It is interesting, well written, and its implications to our world are certainly thought provoking and hopefully inspirational.

Born to Run

Author: Christopher McDougall

In “Born to Run,” sports journalist McDougall helps organize an epic 50-mile race between some of the best long-distance runners in the world. These athletes include several champion ultra-marathoners from the U.S. as well as several Tarahumara, a native american people living in the Copper Canyons of Mexico. Organizing the race is challenging, as the Tarahumara typically keep to themselves and don’t tend to leave their homelands, meaning that the American athletes would have to venture into the dangerous, harsh terrain of the canyons. Yet, the actual race is, while exciting, not a critical point of the book. Rather, McDougall conducts interviews with many of the American athletes, providing insight into motivational, evolutionary and physiological aspects of running that can change the way recreational runners think about running. Additionally, the histories of many of these athletes, particularly the history of the Tarahumara competing with Americans, is fascinating in its own right.

Two interesting asides are biological in nature. The first takes an evolutionary biology perspective at answering the question “why is it reasonable to think that humans can run ultramarathon distances (30+ miles)?” The answer lies in the fact that humans used to be persistance runners, who chased their prey at a leisurely pace for miles until their prey literally collapsed with exhaustion. A morphological study of humans reveals that we are uniquely adapted to this form of hunting, in that we stand upright so that our lungs do not collapse as we run, our hamstrings, essential for running, are very strong, and we can breathe effectively while running, rather than needing to stop and pant (like many quadrupeds). It turns out that this form of hunting was much better suited to the changing climate (post ice-age) when humans ousted Neanderthals (which may be a different species) as the dominant species. Persistance hunting is still practiced in some parts of Africa, and it is not uncommon for hunters to run tens of miles. In light of this, ultramarathons do not seem all that crazy.

Another interesting aside in “Born to Run,” and probably the sticking point with so many runners, is the argument for barefoot running. McDougall cites evidence showing that many running shoes offer too much padding, changing the way that we run and actually increasing the likelihood of overuse- and impact-related injuries. On the other hand, running barefoot allows us to run naturally, in accordance with our physiological design, and not only reduces injuries but has the added benefit of being more efficient so that we actually run faster. This sort of thinking has become popular recently and has sparked a new barefoot running movement, backed by top physiology researchers.

The athletes in “Born to Run” are also quirky and their lives and past races are fascinating. It is really interesting to read about how these people started running and what drives them to keep pushing their physical limits. Apart from the biology, “Born to Run” is inspirational in that reading about these people motivates one to get running and see how far they can push their own limits. I certainly was inspired.

The Call of the Wild

Author: Jack London

The first e-book I have read, “The Call of the Wild” is one of those teenage-classics that everyone reads when they are in high school. I never read it so when I found that it was free in the iTunes book store I figured I might as well. It is a good read, with interesting plot and character development, and London is a great writer, but ultimately I did not get much out of it.

The novel follows Buck, a domestic dog who gets stolen and shipped to the Yukon to be a sled dog, and his transformation from domestic to wild animal. Buck gets set up as an omega dog in a team and quickly works his way to be the head dog, become more and more aggressive and authoritative as he gains experience in the Yukon. Towards the end of the novel he becomes more and more wolf-like, ultimately actually joining a wolf pack and completing his transformation from domestic to wild. Throughout his transformation the reader learns about the tough life in the Yukon, the strenuous role of being a sled dog and also meets some interesting human and dog characters.

But apart from poetic writing, interesting plot and character development, I don’t feel like “Call of the Wild” has much to offer. The book is certainly well written; London paints vivid images of the Yukon scenery and the stories events. Moreover, It is certainly interesting to follow Buck’s transformation and one could maybe draw insight from some of his interactions with other sled dogs (i.e. how he fights only when he has too, is great at manipulating them and earning their respect) as well as some of the seemingly unnecessarily aggressive behavior of the Yukon humans, but I personally didn’t gain much from the novel. Thus, while I was not disappointed with the novel, it really is a story and not much more.

Life of Pi

Author: Yann Martel

Disclaimer: This review will ruin the book for you if you have not read it. Please read the book (it is fairly short) and then come back here. The book is amazing so I highly recommend it anyway.

“Life of Pi” is superficially a story about a boy lost at sea and his struggle to survive. Pi Patel and his family decide to move from India to Canada, and their ship crashes in the middle of the Pacific. Pi ends up on a life boat with a tiger, a zebra, a hyena, and an orangutan, and recounts his story of how him and the tiger (Richard Parker), miraculously survive. While this story is not lacking in violence (as is natural living with a tiger), and its fair share of sadness, it is ultimately a beautiful story about friendship (between Pi and Richard Parker), cooperation, and the serenity (almost to a spiritual level) of nature.

Pi’s story is truly incredible, so when he first recounts it to two Japanese officials, they somewhat naturally do not believe him. There is no evidence that almost any part of the story is true, as Richard Parker fled as soon as they landed, and the ship had no other survivors. The Japanese officials are looking for someone to hold responsible for the crash, and Pi’s story offers no helpful evidence for them. Pi at first firmly stands his ground, maintaining that his recounting is truthful, until he realizes that the officials cannot accept anything as true unless it fits into their limited understanding of the world. Pi tells another version of the story to appease the officials; this one is horribly gruesome, involving murder and cannibalism, and showcasing the worst aspects of human nature. Yet, this story is accepted by the Japanese as truth, despite still not providing any insight into the cause of the ships sinking. The reader is left asking which account is the truth.

But in some sense, why does it matter which was factually correct? Regardless of whichever version of Pi’s adventure is correct, there are no consequences to the future of really anyone, so who cares what the truth was? Given this premise, why not believe the first, beautiful, story, which leaves you hopeful and inspired, over the second, which leaves you feeling jaded and disillusioned? I think this at least one of the takeaways of the novel. The reader fully believes the first recount, up until Pi tells the second. Immediately the reader starts doubting himself. I asked myself two related but pretty different questions when I realized this: “Why do people believe certain things but not others?” and “Why do we incessantly search for the truth, or why can’t we (read: I) believe things without proof?”

We have some intuition for what make sense and what can occur in nature, but can’t it be wrong? For example, we rely very heavily on vision and group-think to confirm truth, but then it becomes much harder to believe things that we haven’t or can not see. In fact this is a large part of why the officials do not believe Pi’s first story; the carnivorous island Pi visits has never been seen nor reported by anyone else, so they cannot imagine that it is plausible.

So what happens when our intuitions are wrong? When we find something that we cannot believe, we search endlessly for either an explanation or an alternative. As a statistics/mathematics research, I’ve notice that this happens more often than I would have thought. An exploratory stage of our work is often to conduct simulated experiments, to get a better feeling for the problem. We usually go into this stage with some intuition about the results, but in some cases the experiments do not match our intuitions. We are left searching for an explanation as to why the experiments turned out the way they did, and worse, this often results in us looking for excuses rather than changing our initial intuition (e.g. data wasn’t generated correctly, the implementation was buggy, etc.). Only when we later develop proofs do we accept changes in our intuition, because they have been mathematically verified.

A Bayesian way of looking at this is that our intuition serves as a prior for what we believe. Without any data, we tend to believe that our intuition is correct, but as we collect more and more evidence, we may become more and more confident in our intuition, but the evidence may also shift the belief away from the intuition. Different kinds of evidence have different influences, so in my previous example, simulation experiments can not unhinge my intuition but they can confirm it. Mathematical proof can do both. I think a potential problem is that we place too much weight on our prior, so that we are looking for reasons to reject other contradictory evidence. This is what seemed to happen in “Life of Pi”, as the officials rejected Pi’s first story in favor of the latter, and also what happens when I conduct statistical simulations.

The other question is much more spiritual, “why can’t we believe things without proof?” I am fundamentally a scientist, so I do not accept something as true unless I have seen a certificate (usually in the form of a proof) of its validity. And once some doubt has been introduced into my mind, I have to get to the bottom of it and uncover the truth. For example, I accepted Pi’s first story as true up until I read his second story. I started questioning his first account, and I no longer believe it. I need another, more convincing certificate to believe in that story again. Of course I doubt I will ever get a more convincing certificate, so I will always be agnostic about Pi’s story. A consequence of this is that I cannot assertively stand for something that I am agnostic about, and I remain agnostic about things until I have convincing evidence. I don’t know how people can accept something as true without evidence, maybe it is just a different interpretation of “convincing”, but there are times when I want to be able to do that.

So for example, if someone were to ask me which of Pi’s stories is true, I would say that I think the first story is true but I am not sure. This is a really wishy-washy answer and it would be much nicer to truly believe the first story is true. It seems that some people have the ability to do this, but I certainly do not. I wonder how people develop that ability.

Guns, Germs, and Steel

Author: Jared M. Diamond

In “Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies,” Diamond answers a fundamental question that shaped human history: What enabled some groups of people to colonize, obliterate, or otherwise exert substantial influence over other groups? One popular belief is that some groups of people are simply more intelligent, more aggressive, better humans than others. Diamond counters this racist argument by showing that in fact, a completely plausible explanation for cultural domination can be traced back to purely geographic origins, namely access to large, domestic-able mammals, high-nutrient, domestic-able crops, and ability to spread ideas, technologies, and information readily between local cultures. These ultimate factors can explain the proximate factors that enabled cultural dominance, which range from weapons, disease resistance, technologies, and several others which Diamond calls “Guns, Germs, and Steel.”

While also noticeable on smaller scales, a suitable candidate with which to clarify Diamond’s ultimate factors is the case of Eurasian cultures subjugating the native cultures of Africa, Australia, and the Americas for the most part (There are some exceptions). At at proximate level, this is because the European and Asian cultures were much more technologically advanced, endowing them with ability to cross seas and travel to the remaining continents, along with advanced weaponry and unfamiliar epidemic diseases that decimated native populations. A central question in “Guns, Germs, and Steel” is: Why didn’t the people of Africa, Australia and the Americas develop advanced technologies and subjugate the Eurasians? The answer lies in Diamond’s ultimate factors.

Eurasia had three key geographic advantages over the other continents that can explain the relative advancement of Eurasia with respect to the others. First, Eurasia was teeming with large mammals that could readily be domesticated whereas Australia and Africa were completely devoid of such mammals and the Americas enjoyed only the llama, which was much less useful as a domestic animal than the horse, sheep, cow, and pig. In my opinion this is the most prominent reason, as domestic animals, allowed for more efficient agriculture resulting in higher population densities, division of labor, and consequently advanced technology. The second factor is that of the major agricultural crops that humans currently farm, the majority of them, and the most nutritive ones, are native to Eurasia, so agricultural societies were much more successful in Eurasia, in comparison to the other continents. Lastly, the fact that Eurasia’s major axis is east-west versus north-south allows facilitates spread of ideas and technologies, while the Americas, Africa, and Australia are highly isolated by deserts and mountain ranges, and climatically very diverse. The fairly consistent climate of Eurasia, for example allowed the easy spread of farming knowledge, which lead to many self-sufficient farming populations that shared innovations and ideas, resulting in a highly advanced societies.

The “domesticable mammals” factor is one I had not considered before, but now I think that it is one of the most important. One must ask, “Why didn’t the other continents have domesticable mammals?” Interestingly, among the geographic factors (i.e. the Eurasian plains were more habitable for them), is the fact that when people first migrated to The Americas and Australia, they encountered several large animals that were unaccustomed to being hunted, because they evolved in safe habitats. The hunter-gatherers quickly found these animals as easy prey and exterminated them, obviously lacking the foresight that these animals could be crucial for later advancement. A causal factor here is that humans arrive in Eurasia much earlier than they arrived in Australia and the Americas so the wild animals in Eurasia had the chance to co-evolve with humans and develop defenses, making them much harder to exterminate. When humans arrived at the other two continents, they were already skilled hunters, but the animals were defenseless, leading to their rapid extermination. Once these continents had no domesticable mammals, they were destined to fall behind the Eurasians.

It is also interesting to think about how scientists, archaeologists, and historians have been able to piece together enough information to make these kinds of arguments. On one hand, a lot of it is very speculative. However, a lot of it is based on completely reasonable, well justified interpretations of archaeological evidence. One particularly interesting technique for studying population origins and migrations, which Diamond mentions and uses, relies on evolutionary linguistics. Essentially, people can trace cultural origins by studying the evolutionary history of languages. This has been used to characterize the migration of the Bantu people from West Africa into central and south Africa, as well as their interactions and for the most part their conquest over the Pygmies and Khoisan people of those areas. I think it is amazing that language undergoes the same evolutionary process as organisms and that it can be used for these sorts of studies.

To wrap up, Diamond makes clear, eloquent arguments against the racist view that cultural dominances is a product of human superiority, showing that instead, almost all conquests in history can be traced to geographic factors. “Guns, Germs, and Steel” is very multidisciplinary, combining elements of archaeology, history, and various subdisciplines of biology, into a pretty interesting read. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone interested in any of those subjects.

How We Decide

Author: Jonah Lehrer

In “How We Decide,” Lehrer recounts many of the scientific developments in neuroscience that contribute to our current understanding of how humans make choices and decisions. This discussion inevitably leads to philosophical topics like rationality, ethics, and morality so Lehrer also presents popular philosophical ideas that can be reconciled with modern scientific thought. And, of course, as a pop-sci book, “How We Decide” is riddled with cute, relatable anecdotes that help convey scientific and philosophical ideas. All of this come together in a fairly quick, interesting read with some nice takeaways about the way humans think and the trade offs between emotional and rational thinking.

Essentially, the thesis is that our brain is composed of a rational, calculating part and a more emotional part, and that these two are always competing to make decisions, but each is better at specific things. For example, the emotional brain is like a supercomputer; it is much better at making complex decisions, but it suffers from several historical drawbacks (risk and loss aversion among others) that make it worse than the rational brain at making simple decisions. On the other hand, the rational brain is great for making decisions where only a few factors come into play, but it has much less computational capacity so it struggles in the face of complexity. So, each is good for specific things, and we can improve our choices by thinking about how we make decisions and making efforts to use the “correct” part of the brain, depending on the situation.

The interplay between the two brains often leads to very interesting psychological phenomena, several that Lehrer mentions in his book. One example that I found particularly interesting is the ability to rationalize decisions/opinions/beliefs made by the emotional brain. This can come at the cost of ignoring glaring evidence in support of the contrary, and is something that we all need to be aware of. If one expresses certainty about something, one risks not being open to contradictory evidence, and this can be very dangerous. Lehrer talks about how it almost lead to the fall of Israel in the Yom Kippur War; the administration simply refused to believe that the Egyptians and Syrians would attack, despite the glaring evidence that they would.

It is also worth discussing how we can figure anything out about the neuroscience aspect. Lehrer mentions many experiments where people are placed in MRI machines and asked to make decisions. The activations measured in the MRI give insight to what brain regions are involved (often in combat with each other) in making decisions. However, these and other psychological experiments can only reveal so much, like what regions are involved in decision making, and cannot really reveal the function of each region. To gain insight here, neuroscientists and psychologists study patients with damaged brains, such as psychopaths. For example, people without properly functioning dopamine pathways have trouble learning from their mistakes. Others with damaged emotional brains have trouble making even the simplest decisions. And psychopaths specifically have trouble imagining how others would view their actions (called mirroring) so they lack any sense of ethics and can rationalize practically anything. Lehrer talks about all of these scientific developments and how they contributed to our still very incomplete understanding of the brain.

To summarize, “how we decide” is quintessential popular science. I personally learned quite a lot from the book, but I don’t know much about philosophy, psychology or neuroscience, and from my understanding, most of the knowledge is pretty basic. At the same time, the book is a quick read, so not much is lost if you don’t gain much from it.

Ender’s Game

Author: Orson Scott Card

One of the classic sci-fi novels, Ender’s Game is the first of novel in the Ender saga. The novel is probably more suitable for younger readers but it is a fun, quick read and there are certainly some interesting takeaways.

The novel follows Ender, a child prodigy as he is trained to command the human army against an alien species called the buggers. He is put through taxing trial after trial, either intentionally as part of his training or inadvertently by his peers (who are all older than him and prone to bullying). Throughout his supervisors watch him cope with stress and constant fatigue, but never intervene so that he learns he cannot count on anyone looking out for him. Ultimately, Ender flourishes, and potentially one can learn a lot from his experiences, i.e. how he deals with fatigue, antagonistic peers, and high-pressure situations.

I think there are a lot of useful leadership skills that can be learned from Ender. He quickly gets placed in charge of several cadets and has to deal with internal dissent, egotism and a general bad attitude toward him as a leader. He learns how to lead by example, and while many of his cadets despise him, it is clear that they all respect his abilities as a soldier. Later, when he is places in charge of a team of novices, he instills in them a strong drive to improve their fighting skills. In part this is because he is such a talented fighter (leading by example) but also because he uses psychological tactics to motivate his team. In this way, the novel was a interesting lesson in leadership, which I think carries over from fiction to reality.

Some thoughts on Academic Publishing

With the wide-spread adoption of the internet, the traditional academic publishing system has become somewhat antiquated. This has caused a lot of uproar within the academic communities, and many prominent researchers have been thinking about alternative publishing systems. There’s a lot of material about this floating around the internet, but in this article I will outline some of my thoughts and ideas.

The Problem
If you are familiar with the problem, you might want to skip down to the next section where I talk about some proposals that I and others have thought about.

To start out: What is wrong with the current system? It is actually quite complicated, but the main idea is that publishers (Elsevier, Springer, etc.) no longer seem to be adding any value while continuing to exorbitantly charge both authors and readers. Traditionally, the role of the publisher was to aid in distribution of academic material, and when this was legitimately a service, I completely understand them charging for it. However, now that almost all content can be obtained electronically, the role of distributor is no longer necessary. Yet publishers continue to charge ridiculous fees for journal subscriptions, which are required for an institution to obtain even electronic access to journal articles. I remember reading somewhere that university libraries spend the majority of their budget on journal subscriptions.

So why do researchers continue to publish in these journals? Well it is well known that academia is instilled with a publish-or-perish mentality, and moreover the specific venue in which you publish influences how your peers regard your work. Journals are scored by impact factor and publishing in journals with high-impact factor indicates that I am a good researcher. The quality of journal in which I publish plays a significant role in hiring decisions and other career opportunities and this, at least to me, is the primary reason why researchers continue to submit to these closed journals. There are some other factors, that motivate researchers to publish in journals, such as the peer-review system and the fact that publication is a sanity check that the work is correct and reasonable. However, I think the main motivation is to demonstrate one’s research ability. Noam Nisan talks about some other reasons and more details about this problem here.

To summarize, as it stands, the publishers provide no real value, but they restrict access to the elite journals. This motivates researchers to stick with their clearly flawed system. If we could introduce an open system to score and critique papers, with a mechanism for recognizing outstanding papers, it seems like we could break free of the existing system.

A Popular Solution
One popular solution to do this is a combination of Reddit and the ArXiv for academics. Researchers can post their papers online and then other people can leave comments and reviews of the paper. Everyone has a reputation score and the influence of one’s comments depends on their reputation. Maybe papers can get assigned scores, so anyone can score the paper, but the weight of their score depends on their reputation. That way, on my CV I can write down all of my papers along with their scores, so that others can quickly glance at my CV and get an idea of how important my research is. This is the basic idea but obviously there are a lot of details so that one cannot game the system. I’ve spent some time thinking about this and I think that if you implement it carefully in enough you can make it work. Timothy Gowers also seems to think so and he has thought about many of the details. If you are interested, please read his blog post, here.

One of the comments left on the Timothy Gowers’ blog post is that we might not want to turn life into a game, where reputation points mean everything. I really agree with this; some black-box is calculating my reputation on this website and the score output by this has serious consequences on my life in terms of career opportunities, etc. It makes academic life too much like a game, where everything I am trying to do revolves around increasing scores on my papers and increasing my reputation. So while I still think the system could work, it may not be what all academics want.

A less popular proposal
Gowers briefly talks about another idea, or at least an extension to his existing proposal that I think merits some additional discussion. The idea is this: anyone can start, edit, and curate their own online journal about whatever they want. They assemble a team of reviewers, who could be peers, friends, collaborators, or really anyone else they know. The editor of a journal and the team of reviewers is public information, and their reputation (not necessarily based on a scoring system) is what helps determine the quality of the journal. When I write a paper, I can submit it to one of these online journals, where it will go through the peer-review process, and possibly be accepted. Submissions and reviews can potentially be done anonymously, to allow for double-blind reviewing. Acceptance into someone’s online journal is a stamp of approval of a paper, and on my CV I would list which online journals my papers were accepted into. As in the other system, once a paper is accepted somewhere, maybe anyone should be free to comment on and score it.

There are several ways this system can account for journal quality/impact factor. A simple one is to use the editor’s and reviewers’ reputations as a proxy for the quality of the journal. Another is to allow journals to have reputation scores, based on the scores of that journal’s papers. This second solutions presents a startup problem, but I think you could bootstrap by using the first solution until the journal has a substantial number of articles. Also note that this same problem arises when I want to start a real journal. Again there are some details that need to be worked out but I do believe this sort of system could be made to work.

As a sort of aside, Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR) is an example of some of these ideas at work. The journal is open, providing free online access of all of its articles, and it still has a fairly high impact factor. In 2004, apparently it had the second ISI impact factor of any computer science journal (source). This small-scale experiment suggests that this sort of idea might actually work.

In Conclusion
If anyone reads this, I’d be interested to know what you think about these proposals. Do you see any serious complications/problems? Do you have any alternative proposals?