"So what is the point of publication? Certainly you want your paper easily read and cited. But also you want a careful peer review leading to a polished version that has the stamp of approval by appearing in some respectable conference or journal. Publishing also acts as a filter, allowing the reader to get some idea of the level of quality of the paper before reading it. Almost any paper can appear on an archive site but it takes more to be published."

"The primary exploratory target of this research project is to find a strategy hopefully better than any other known for evolving, through genetic algorithms, cellular automata rules for global synchronization tasks. By better we mean that synchronization rules need to emerge more consistently, faster and with higher probability compared to previous studies under the same initial conditions."

interesting; need to scare up the PDFs

"WITH A FIVE PERCENT P MOTHERFUCKER"

'The study, "The Coming Entrepreneurship Boom," found that several facts have emerged in the course of Kauffman Foundation research that indicate the United States might be on the cusp of an entrepreneurship boom—not in spite of an aging population but because of it. These factors include the shifting age distribution of the country, the continued decline of lifetime employment, the experience and tacit knowledge such employees carry with them, and the effects of the 2008-2009 recession on established sectors of the economy. The study follows research from Duke University's Vivek Wadhwa, also published by the Foundation, which found that the average age of U.S.-born technology founders when they started their companies was 39.'

"Ironically, Popper’s original critique of empirical foundationalism thus paved the way for a new theoretical foundationalism. Either you are grounded in theory, or you have no grounds at all for claiming to be a competent participant. The new foundationalism here reveals its elitist and technocratic face as well as its impractical nature at once. It burdens researchers and professionals with the impossible role of having to “explain,” by virtue of their advantage of theoretical and methodological expertise, to all others what in a concrete situation would be a correct understanding of “the problem” and what might be done about it. At the same time, it largely immunizes these “explanations” against the critical efforts of concerned citizens. If they do not agree with the experts’ monologically presented findings and conclusions, it is their problem, as it were; for the reason can only be that they are insufficiently informed or […] unable to understand the reasoning of the experts."

"I study the building of bridges, wikis in organizations, and interventions with newly hired employees in order to understand how distributed work gets done and how social computing technologies are engaged in that work. I'm especially interested in learning that takes place when people work together. I aim to contribute new ways of thinking about distributed work, learning in collaboration, and the roles of social computing in both. "

"Can a combination of a wiki, karma, and a voting method like reddit or digg substitute the current system of academic publication?"

[A: yes]

"Also, I approach the issue from the direction of looking at the nature of rationality - superstition being perhaps the most infamous example of what is seen as humans failing to be rational. Given such an approach, superstition is of interest as it shows something of how human reasoning works by showing how it fails to work. In particular, it is of interest to me as I think that rationality, not just human rationality but any rationality at all, must be understood to be inherently limited or, to use Herbert Simon’s term, bounded. In that context, the study of superstition becomes the study of the bounds of reason."

"AMG is a multilevel technique for solving large-scale linear systems with optimal or near-optimal efficiency. Unlike geometric multigrid, AMG requires little or no geometric information about the underlying problem and develops a sequence of coarser grids directly from the input matrix. This feature is especially important for problems discretized on unstructured meshes and irregular grids."

"What this all takes is patience — more patience, sometimes, than I am good at. I am impatient to know things, and impatient for things to make sense more quickly; and the discipline (ah, that apt term) just doesn’t work that way. A colleague of mine told me that he’s been Only Collecting for over ten years, and can now knock out a 3000 word paper in under two days, simply because all his material is already at hand; it exists in the stuff he’s picked up in his intellectual infancy and adolescence, which at the time he didn’t know how to use, and perhaps didn’t even know was important."

Nice intro to R

Having trouble getting earlier references

"But I’m actually thinking that there are some lessons here that the mathematics community could learn from..."

via:Sivacracy

Considering possibility of submitting some MSS

"This is a site for large data sets and the people who love them: the scrapers and crawlers who collect them, the academics and geeks who process them, the designers and artists who visualize them. It's a place where they can exchange tips and tricks, dev

Innovation is a process by which value is created for customers through public and private organizations that transform new knowledge and technologies into wordy wordy wordy wordy

Somebody should do a Distributed Proofreaders social network visualization

Stupid government. Call your representative.

via Garrett Scott, Bookseller

also via: Danny Yee

Important

"Give a damn. Your students are not fungible data-production units..."

This may or may not be true each discipline; depends on their folkways.

via Open Reading Frame

"...new start-ups are being actively locked out of the market by means of patent and trade secrets litigation so that a combination of old and new interests can fight over what's left of the shrinking pie."

Among other things, testing the ability to bookmark a "related articles" link at Google Scholar.

Important.

"given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow"

Several genetic programming folks were asking after "real world" datasets last week. Here some are.

And when I review your Complex Systems or GA paper, do <i>not</i> show me tables of numbers. Show me graphs and histograms. Of all real data, with fits superimposed.

Hold that thought....