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Perish or publish: the half century mark

Sep. 5th, 2004 at 10:34 PM

Well, I was preparing a list of my refereed journal papers, book chapters, conference papers, and tech reports, and was suprised to learn that I now have 50 publications.

That includes 8 journal papers and book chapters, 19 full-length conference papers, and 23 extended abstracts, poster papers, and papers from workshops and symposia.

It does not count 3 journal papers I have in preparation with Haipeng Guo,

zengeneral and Julie Thornton, and Steve Gustafson and

hermes_imagod, respectively. Nor does it count (5) student papers authored by Haipeng, Julie, Ben Perry, and Steve Gustafson.

--
Banazir

Current Mood: pleased
Current Music:Dido - Hunter

Comments

( 18 comments — Leave a comment )

(Anonymous)

Sep. 14th, 2004 02:50 am (UTC)

I've lost track of the size of my portfolio of advertising wiffle ...

Demosthenes

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Sep. 14th, 2004 02:58 am (UTC)

Braggart!

So does each bit of copy count as a publication!?

No fair!

--
Banazir

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(Anonymous)

Sep. 14th, 2004 03:00 am (UTC)

Re: Braggart!

Yes! Actually, no. Actually, shirt.

Demosthenes

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Sep. 14th, 2004 11:29 am (UTC)

Eat my shirts!

Shirt?
Wot are yew, a half-elf or sumfink?

--
Banazir

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prolog

Sep. 14th, 2004 11:08 am (UTC)

Wow, I'm impressed!

I have...1. ;)

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Sep. 14th, 2004 09:09 pm (UTC)

You'll get there

50 papers is nothing in the grand scheme of things, BTW, though they are sufficient for the big T if on par with the expected level of quality, so say the wise.

Just remember that what "counts" in CS usually consists of papers refereed at a 50% accept rate or less. Journal papers, if they have a CiteSeer or InCites impact rating, generally always count. That includes special issue papers (of which I have 2), refereed papers (the other 6), and invited papers (of which I have none). As for conferences: most of my "good" 19 are refereed at the 20-35% rate, with award nominations narrowing it to about 10-15%. A lot of crap gets through the basic review sometimes, even at the reputable conferences.

(Heh. Guess who has refereeing stats on the brain?)

--
Banazir

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hermes_imagod

Sep. 14th, 2004 11:43 am (UTC)

Re: Perish or publish: the half century mark

Actually, it is "Publish or Perish", or perhaps you knew this and your heading has some twisted meaning that I can't understand :-)

Anyways... way to go... keep them coming! next stop: 100 ;-)

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scottharmon

Sep. 14th, 2004 08:35 pm (UTC)

Re: Perish or publish: the half century mark

Actually (X || Y) has the same meaning as (Y || X). The 'or' operator is commutative. So basically choose at least one to be true to make your statement true.

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Sep. 14th, 2004 09:16 pm (UTC)

Commutativity of OR

Yep, you beat me to it. :-D

For a sec I thought you were writing K-L distance, D(p || q).
Too used to thinking in terms of | or $\vee$ these days, and reading info theory stuff with Julie.

Of course, that's just the literal interpretation.
There's also the implicitly modal denotation,
Before(E, Done(X)) OR At(E, P(X))
but then I claim you can say
Before(Time-To-Publish, Perished(X)) OR At(Time-To-Publish, Must-Publish(X))

i.e., either you perishED or you are obligated to publish. :-P

--
Banazir

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hermes_imagod

Sep. 16th, 2004 09:54 am (UTC)

Re: Perish or publish: the half century mark

In this case, your argument does not apply. If we were talking of the logical OR, as understood in classical logic semantics, then you were right. However, you must keep in mind that spoken language has different semantics than classical logic. It's the beauty of spoken language: it is so marvelously ambiguous :-) In particular, the phrase in question has an implicit causal relationship between "Publish" and "Perish":

Not(Publish) => Perish

So, when you translate from spoken language to a formal logic, you have to be very careful with the semantics. In the phrase above, "Publish or perish" is used to say: "If you don't publish, then you will perish". And so the correct translation is the one shown above. Since the implication relation is not symmetric, then there is a difference between "Publish or perish" and "Perish or publish". Bad thing I guess is that all this semantices are always hidden in spoken language and so make sentences ambiguous. But, usually speakers take hand of "common sense" and have no problem assigning the correct semantics to phrases. For example, in the phrase in question, it is easy to infer that the causal relation has to go from "Publish" to "Perish"... and so on. In the same manner you would say to your kid "Do your homework or you'll be grounded" not the other way...

Just keep in mind that in spoken language, 'or' is not necessarily symmetric...

To make a case on this "common sense", I googled "publish or perish" and got 31,400 hits, whereas "perish or publish" got 316 hits, all which where from phrases like: "Publish or perish" or "Publish or perish", or "Publish or perish" or publish ...

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scottharmon

Sep. 16th, 2004 06:57 pm (UTC)

Re: Perish or publish: the half century mark

Hmmm, it seems that is is more common that this sort of 'or' in the English language means logical XOR. Publish XOR Perish. Grounded XOR Do(Homework).

Also 'Not(Publish) => Perish' can be rewritten as 'Not(Not(Publish) OR Perish' simplifying to "Publish OR Perish" (converting to CNF).

Your "common sense" google study only shows that those two words are normally used in a certain pattern. For example, I searched for "black or white" and received about 357k pages. "white or black" returned about 140k pages. "to be or not to be" turned up about 169k pages, while "not to be or to be" turned up only 190 pages.

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scottharmon

Sep. 17th, 2004 07:32 am (UTC)

Re: Perish or publish: the half century mark

Thinking about it a bit more (ya, how do I shut this off? Runaway threads!). I think you are right about it having more meaning. Many times, when we give a choice, we seem to place the choice we favor first---i.e. "Give me liberty or give me death," "Publish or perish," etc... So maybe it should be encoded: (Publish XOR Perish) AND Prefer(Publish) ?

Also, following the logic I just stated, it does seem a bit strange that

banazir says "Perish or publish," this hints that he would rather perish than publish. ;-)

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hermes_imagod

Sep. 18th, 2004 09:59 am (UTC)

Re: Perish or publish: the half century mark

It's not about having more meaning. It is not a preference relation, it is causality. You are basically saying "If this does not happen, then that will happen". It is just that we commonly say it like "This happens or that happens"... On second thought, perhaps there is some notion of preference, in the sense like the above could be said like "This better happen or that will happen". I also think that it'd probably be less confusing if it was written "This better happens or else that will happen". I think the "or else" exposes more the asymmetry of the sentence...

Anyways, I think this kind of debate is very entertaining :-)

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hermes_imagod

Sep. 18th, 2004 09:53 am (UTC)

Re: Perish or publish: the half century mark

It is more common that 'or' in spoken language is equivalent to XOR... that doesn't mean always :-) By the way, your transformation is not CNF :-) And your translation using XOR is still wrong because it implies it is symmetric. You won't ground your kid until the Not(DoHomework) is true. Anyways, think about it...

Oh, and your conversion from Not(Publish) => Perish to Not(Not(Publish)) or Perish still makes my point, because the latter is still not symmetric with respect to the propositions...

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scottharmon

Sep. 18th, 2004 03:37 pm (UTC)

Re: Perish or publish: the half century mark

Why is it not CNF? (Perish OR Publish) AND (true) is CNF (isn't it? maybe I'm missing something). In this form the 'OR' is symmetric, but as you pointed out, I cannot then convert that back to an implication. But, I never claimed anything about implication. In fact, I simply claimed that that fact was "Publish OR Perish" which is equivlent to "Perish OR Publish".

Also wrt You won't ground your kid until the Not(DoHomework) is true. You are correct that I show no time relation wrt to the events---I ignored the sequential ordering. If I took into consideration the order of events as you suggest (and as you suggest in your other post), I would have to make a time operator such as HappensBefore(x,y), where x happens before y wrt to time ordering. So again with the example: 'Perish or Publish' (Perish OR Publish) AND (HappensBefore(Publish, Perish)). If the ordering in the phrase determines the HappensBefore operands then

banazir's original phrase "Perish or Publish" would be encoded (Perish OR Publish) AND HappensBefore(Perish, Publish) <> (Perish OR Publish) AND (HappensBefore(Publish, Perish)).

So again, there are different subtle meanings to 'or' phrases that even sometimes depend on the inflection of the voice.

Now, let me think about this more. For actions do 'or' phrases always imply a 'HappensBefore' relation? Maybe. :^)

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hermes_imagod

Sep. 18th, 2004 04:45 pm (UTC)

Re: Perish or publish: the half century mark

Nice! :-) I think you got to the bottom of it... in conclusion, it'd be moderately accurate to say that the phrase that started the thread "Perish or Publish", is not correct, with respect to the conventional meaning and usage of the original phrase "Publish or Perish"... :-)

Spoken language... so ambiguously beautiful! :-)

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Sep. 19th, 2004 09:23 am (UTC)

Uh...

You guys, see my modal definition above. In case I hadn't made it clear, the commutative interpretation was meant ironically. :-)

The usual interpretation is really:

\forall X . Tenure-Track(X) \rightarrow By(Time-To-Publish, Published(X)) OR At(Time-To-Publish, Perish(X))

I'd say y'all have way too much time on your hands, but then, I'd be including myself for following up to this thread. ;-)

-
Banazir

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hermes_imagod

Sep. 20th, 2004 08:37 am (UTC)

Re: Uh...

\forall X . Tenure-Track(X) \rightarrow By(Time-To-Publish, Published(X)) OR At(Time-To-Publish, Perish(X))

This is another way to view it.... although I am not totally comfortable with it either. Of course, you avoid Rusell's paradox with the first predicate, which in addition, makes it more clear, but I don't like the explicit mention of 'Time-To-Publish'...

I'd say y'all have way too much time on your hands, but then, I'd be including myself for following up to this thread. ;-)

I'd love to believe that I have way to much time... I'd probably post more consistently to this journal instead of once every decade or when I remember... I admire other people who post so consistently here (well, at least I try to keep up readin from time to time) because then I feel I am bad at organizing my time, for I juat can't find time to do the same... I don't know how they do it...

But it's good that at least someone can do it... Again, I have a life (a wife, a daughter, friends, etc.), I guess some people out there don't have to invest so much time in maintaining a life... I envy them! :-)

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( 18 comments — Leave a comment )