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Posts Tagged ‘Science’

The Tower of Babel

October 25th, 2011 by Martin No Comments

If you write a scientific paper, you typically write it in English. In fact, English dominates the scientific publication world: all top ranked journals are in English (Science, Nature) and scientists simply do not have a choice other than to write in English. Actually, I cannot pinpoint to the exact reason of this, but my guess that has to do with historical developments. Now that science is dominated by countries like the US it is “natural” to use English for scientific publications. One argument for the use English is that it prevents from reinventing the wheel: papers published in different languages could end up unnoticed and uncited. This is perfectly true and maybe has helped us in the past from reinventing lots of wheels.

This brings me to my own episode with the English language. One of the reviewers of one of my last papers pointed out that my paper needs to be written better, a critique to which I fully agree. But what really surprised me that the reviewer went on with this critique and finished the paragraph with

There is a footnote in German!

as if THIS was a really bad thing to do. Actually, the footnote is the name of an App which is called “Wien wie es isst”. Granted, you need to look a bit closer and maybe google this and I could have added a iTunes Link to the footnote for emphasizing this even more. But I got the impression that the reviewer somehow wanted to make the point that I sloppily redacted the paper (there are grammar mistakes in my work which I’m not proud of) and that I didn’t even bother to TRANSLATE from German to English.

After reading this as a non English-native speaker, I somehow got the impression that there is a kind of “language arrogance” in science. Simply put: if you don’t write in English it does not count as much as an English text. I miss some open mindedness for having different languages in science and later translations (to English for example). After all, some of the most important scientific works were written in different languages than English, like “Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper”, which was only translated later. One could argue that translation is a tedious and long process that leads to a delay for scientific discoveries. This might be true, but in the case of “Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper”, the delay of the translation didn’t really matter, as far I can tell. After all, if the scientific discovery is really good, it will make it through translations as well .

your ikangai science team

Tracing the Scientific Paper Writing Process

June 22nd, 2011 by Martin No Comments

As discussed in our last post, we plan to write our next scientific paper publicly by posting the content directly on the blog. Making this process public has some interesting consequences. First of all, you break a fundamental rule: you tell the world about your ideas and concepts which are not yet carved in stone, i. .e, published in a peer-reviewed journal or in conference proceedings.
Publications in the latter can be easily counted and the more you have (in “good” journals, conferences) the better for you. And even better, if your work is actually cited by others, then your work has some measurable impact, because only good papers are cited. However, if for some reason, your work is rejected, then you are in trouble. In academia, your status is measured by the number of publications and citations. If you fail to get your work published, then you fail in academia (this kind of failure has been known to happened to famous computer scientists as well). Your work is simply invisible, because there is no public trace of it.

Making your work and the process of writing it public can help with this problem. If you publish each step of your work, for example, by blogging each chapter or parts of your paper, you produce a public trail of your work. Thus, your work is not invisible, even if your paper is rejected. This also helps with the alleged idea transfer phenomena between paper authors and paper reviewers: unless your work is visible as a publication, some reviewers might be overly inspired by your work and not be able to refer to you as originator.

An open publication production process is of particular interest, when put into the context of public funding. Universities get their money (for the most part?) from the public hand. Consequently, there is an interest by the public, to know what actually happens with the public money. The control of spending is easy when hardware material is bought – just go to the University Lab and check if there are really such expensive new computers. The assessment of the output of intellectual work is a different story. You cannot visit universities and measure this directly. This requires different mechanisms. But, what happens? Of course, publications are counted. This is easy and everyone understands it. The higher the numbers, the better. All very clear and simple. One of the obvious consequences is that failure to publish is very severe: you have no trace of your work and thus your intellectual output is zero.

Again, if you make your work transparent and publish your unfinished work on a blog, you produce a public trail. Something that is visible and can be counted if necessary; a proof of the existence of your scientific work, if you will, even if your work is unfinished or gets rejected in the end.

I believe that an open, traceable process can be of benefit for all involved. Authors of scientific papers can get early and direct feedback for their work and do not depend on a sometimes lengthy review process. Authors are inclined to write higher quality papers, because their work can be read by anyone – no more “speculative” paper submissions, where the author hopes for a “nice and kind” (unexperienced ?) reviewer. “Memetic” idea transfer from the author’s head to some reviewer’s head becomes more difficult: authors have proof for their work. And last but not least, the public hand has a right to know what has been done with their money.

your idealistic ikangai science team

Public Paper Writing

June 20th, 2011 by Martin 2 Comments

The process of writing a scientific paper is typically invisible to the outside world – authors typically submit their work to a conference or a journal after completing it. After the reviewing process is finished – and if the result is positive – the work is published. The time span from starting the work until it is publicly available varies: it can be a matter of weeks, months or sometimes even years. This also depends on the venue: some conferences have a longer (two-staged) review process which leads to longer waiting times.
Waiting for reviews can be frustrating and especially after a long wait rejections are difficult for the authors to cope with. After rejections, papers are rewritten and submitted to different conferences or journals (to be rejected again – as malicious tongues might say). This goes on and on, but eventually some reviewers have pity and accept the paper.
As discussed on numerous occasions, the peer review process itself is very important, but also has its (design?) problems. One of them has been discussed in the previous two paragraphs: review waiting time.
I propose to have an open and transparent process for writing a scientific paper: simply publish all material already during the writing process on a blog and make it available to everyone. Optimally, you get early feedback on your work, aside from feedback from your colleagues. It also helps you to think of your work in a more profound manner: by iteratively publishing parts you need to have something that readers can follow. Consequently, it helps to structure your work, and external opinions can be help to reshape your ideas – without having to wait for reviewer comments.
I am aware that there are objections like “what happens if somebody steals my ideas and publishes them earlier?” or “this all sounds very nice but it appears too idealistic, nobody would read your blog and comment on this”. The answer to the former is that “You can never be sure that a reviewer doesn’t steal your idea. But if you publish your idea/concept on your blog, then at least you have proof that it was your idea.” The second answer is simply “I will try this with my next paper. And besides: I’m being paid to be idealistic ”.

your ikangai science team

Writing Scientific Papers

August 27th, 2010 by Martin No Comments

We did it! We submitted our first scientific paper to a conference. Our target conference is the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) which will take place at Hawaii (obviously a very nice location ) between May 21st and May 28th 2011. The competition is more than tough – we expect an acceptance rate around 10 per cent. Thus, we consider our paper more or less a “stunt”: high risk, but potentially high rewards.

So what is our paper about? Well, it is about the application of SOA principles on mobile operating systems like the iPhone OS and the implications of this approach. We investigated the role of Apps and App Stores with regard to the SOA triangle and discussed how to use our Apps (q·.:Launcher and q·.:Card) for this. Interested in more? I guess then you’ll have to wait, until we receive notification of the ICSE program committee, which is due on November 19th. In the meantime we will continue working on our new project with woodapples and write another scientific paper which is a joined effort with Distributed Systems Group of Vienna Technical University. This time, the topic is centered around crowd sourcing and how we do this at ikangai solutions.

your ikangai team

ikangai @ ICSE – Cape Town

May 5th, 2010 by Martin No Comments

The science branch of ikangai is currently on a road trip – one month, three cities, on two continents. The first stop was Cape Town where this year’s ICSE took place. Cape Town is a marvelous place, buzzing with activity. But, hey! This is a working trip, not a holiday ! So what about ICSE? Well, the three days are already over and have been quite interesting (of course ). I attended a two-days workshop and learned a lot about services and what they really are. In short: the service community is not exactly sure what a service really is… During the discussions we found out that even a chair could be called a service, because it provides “added value”. This may feel a bit far-fetched, but depending on the actual viewpoint, this can be argued quite well . Anyway, I think this sheds some light on how people in the scientific community sometimes think .

- Your ikangai team

Who says that scientific papers have to be boring?

March 24th, 2010 by Martin 1 Comment

In my everyday job at university I have to review papers. This requires that I go through the papers and check them for correctness and scientific contribution. Usually, most reviews are not that exiting because scientific papers tend to be written in a very dry style. Things like:

According to Lemma 3.1 that we introduced in Section 3 we now can prove the semantic correctness of the abstract syntax tree with regard to the completeness theorem which we proved in Section 2.

But sometimes I review papers, which are written in a very “flowery” style and which makes the review process fun. I’d like to share a few highlights of a paper I recently reviewed:

… that is responsible for the message payload, itself described with the equally famous protocol SOAP. – I didn’t know that protocols can become famous. Now I do.

… are being increasingly popular for the big usefulness… – Yep – big usefulness is always good.

… should stick by the same concerns stack, this following way. – Sing with me: I will follow you will follow me:

… have simulated the emergence of a new computing paradigm… – I agree: why stimulate when it is much safer to simulate the emergence of new paradigms?

… the context awareness of such applications is the subject of a recent field of studies called – Now? What would you think? – context aware systems. – Hey! That’s what I call a scientific breakthrough!

Your ikangai university team