Academic Productivity

Peter Sefton wrote a series of posts on wave. He has published on Scholarly HTML so I read attentively what he has to say. What follows is some highlights of his posts, and my thinking about where things are going. There are at least four things that bother me about wave –as it is today:

1- It’s not really HTML

I thought that waves being XML documents would be a good thing because it’d separate content and formatting. But it seems that they made some strange decisions about how to represent formatting with “very tenuous relationship to HTML”. For example

While there is talk of ‘XML documents’ in the whitepapers etc, a wave document in the current implementation is apparently a series of lines of text. All formatting and what you might think of as structure, such as whether something is a heading or not, is considered an annotation.

(more…)

It was a matter of time before someone wrote a robot that grabbed latex  and returned an image after latex processing. LaTeXy does exactly that and has just increased tenfold the usefulness of wave for academics.

Peter Drucker: "There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all."

About two years ago we talked about filehamster. It was  free, unobtrusive, and simpler than doing version control ‘by hand’ (adding numbers to filenames) or ‘by machine’ (using a proper versioning tool such as subversion or mercurial).

Well, since then filehamster has moved on to be a pain in the ass. Now the free version nags you a lot, and the paid versions are not really giving us any outstanding features. Plus as a .NET application, it eats up RAM.

Enter AutoVer. Completely freeware, no nags, and a much better interface to boot. The GUI and options make more sense too. I even use it for coding when I’m doing something small and a mercurial repo would be overkill.

Eventually, all writing applications should enable smooth versioning and real-time collaboration (Office 2010 beta does! Wave and etherpad are not alone anymore). The slider that controls versioning as in a time machine is fantastic. AutoVer would not give you that. The AutoVer model also breaks when you send the manuscript to a collaborator, and he edits it on his machine (often changing the file name). Still, it’s much better than not doing versioning at all or doing it by hand.

By the way, does anyone know an alternative that is cross-platform?

Sometimes I wonder why many humans (me included) have trouble understanding probability. In cognitive science, probabilistic models are taking over most areas. Still, most people struggle with them. Could it be that the notation is just hard to swallow? What’s Wrong with Probability Notation? is a magnificent post that gives some basic reasons:

The first two issues arise in the usual expression of the first step of Bayes’s rule,

,

where each of the four uses of corresponds to a different probability function! In computer science, we’re used to using names to distinguish functions. So and are the same function applied to different arguments. In probability notation, and are different probability functions, picked out by their arguments.

This is one clear communication problem. Ideally we want more people to follow probabilistic reasoning. Doctors, judges, etc all show significant struggles when given probabilities (see e.g., Helping Doctors and Patients Make Sense of Health Statistics).

But how do we tackle this problem? Changing notation is easier said than done. In fact, anyone departing from traditional notation will have to convince reviewers that his notation is better… and add to the risk of cause a less-than-ideal impression.

Any ideas?