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Gathered for some ghost purpose
Nov. 15th, 2012 12:28 am
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 4. High today: 6.
I don't know much about basketball history, or for that matter basketball in the present, but I'm going to guess that the Raptors may have just set an NBA record for the biggest drop in points scored from one game to the next by a team that lost the first game and won the second: on Monday, they scored 133 points and lost; yesterday, they scored 74 and won.
Elsewhere in sports, you know what's awesome? When another team gives your team most of its good players, and your team doesn't give the other team any of its good players. That's pretty awesome. The one problem with this Jays-Marlins trade (apart from the small matter of the tens of millions of dollars, but never mind that) is it makes it more difficult to scoff at people who want the Jays to trade J.P. Arencibia for R.A. Dickey or whatever, because it turns out that you can make trades in real life that would be rejected by the commissioners of most serious fantasy leagues. (Major League Baseball: less serious than most serious fantasy leagues.)
Today Leiter linked to this article in The Scientist about an article in Science about how someone did some kind of study showing that articles that were rejected somewhere before being published somewhere else get cited more than other articles in the same journal that are accepted on the first try, even when the accepting journal doesn't have a lower "impact" (i.e., citation rate) than the rejecting journal. The authors of the Science article say this: "Several mechanisms could be involved, but perhaps the most likely explanation is that inputs from editors, reviewers and the greater amount of time spent working on resubmissions significantly improve the citation impact of the final product." I wonder about that--it's clear how rejection could improve a paper if the rejection comes after an initial revise-and-resubmit. But a standard piece of advice given to grad students in philosophy--I don't know about the sciences--is to ignore feedback given with rejections and send the paper right back out somewhere else; if you take the time to accommodate feedback, you'll never publish anything, especially since there's a good chance that the feedback from any particular reviewer is idiosyncratic. Revising the paper to accommodate rejection-feedback seems even less likely to produce a paper that's better than a paper that had never been rejected given that the grounds on which a paper is rejected are, obviously, supposed to be fatal to the paper, or at least fatal to its chances of being publishable in the particular journal it's being reviewed for--otherwise it would've gotten an R&R rather than a rejection. (Then again, who knows how many people don't resubmit R&Red papers to the journal that R&Red them, but send them on somewhere else. I once had a paper R&Red on grounds that made no sense to me, so I sent it somewhere else (of, I suppose, roughly the same "impact" level), where it was accepted. I don't know whether the Science study distinguished between rejected papers and R&Red papers that are sent somewhere else by their authors.) That being the case, rejection-feedback, apparently, should prompt you to either (a) accept that your paper is fundamentally flawed and give up on it (and possibly write a substantially different paper on the same topic), (b) accept that your paper is fundamentally flawed and hope that you can get it published somewhere anyway, or (c) reject the feedback and try to get the paper published somewhere else. There is one other option: you can accept that the feedback is a reasonable misunderstanding of your paper, likely to be shared by other readers, and revise your paper to head off the misunderstanding. But while this will probably make your paper better than it was, it's not clear that it would make it better than other papers, and it's especially not clear why it would make it better in a way that would make it more likely to be cited. I'm more inclined toward the explanation given by one of the study's co-authors in the Scientist article: "'Papers that are more likely to contend against the status quo are more likely to find an opponent in the review system'—and thus be rejected—'but those papers are also more likely to have an impact on people across the system,' earning them more citations when finally published." In other words, papers that are obviously good are less likely to be interesting than papers that are not obviously good. But, to me, this calls for examination of the underlying assumption of this whole citation-count business, namely, that citation-count tracks quality. If you get a paper rejected by Science on good grounds, and then get it accepted by Nature because you happened to get a softer couple of reviewers, then you can see how your paper might attract a relatively large number of citations, i.e., from people attacking it. That's something that happens in philosophy, anyway--grad students looking for quick and easy publishing opportunities seize on vulnerable articles in prestigious journals that they can attack. I would expect that this happens across academia. (I would wildly guess that it is probably the case that most citations in philosophy papers and books are "friendly". I think most people assume that the vast majority of citations are friendly, but I doubt that. (I'm reviewing a book now that is chock-full of "hostile" citations (where I mean "hostile" in the sense that the author basically disagrees with the things cited, not "hostile" in the sense of being a jerk about it or something). Philosophy publications may have an unusually high proportion of hostile citations relative to publications in other academic fields; for instance, philosophy papers are largely free of the social-scientific compulsion to provide multiple supporting references for every declarative sentence. In philosophy you also don't get anything exactly analogous to scientists publishing papers that replicate the results of earlier experiments, although you do get things somewhat analogous, along the lines of "another argument for x"--but even those are often, maybe most often, responses to arguments against x.)
Maybe another angle on it--a fair number of conference submissions in philosophy come back with reviews saying something to the effect that the paper has a lot of serious problems but it would likely provoke some good discussion, so it would be worthwhile to put it on the program. I guess you get that kind of thing less for publications than for conferences, but as long as some reviewers, and some editors, are more inclined than others to publish a paper because it's stimulating as opposed to because it's good, you'll find stimulating but not so good papers being rejected in one place and accepted in another, and stimulating more response with their stimulatingness than run-of-the-mill good papers.
In other science news, apparently we can read people's minds with fMRI machines now. I wonder if this one will end up in the same file as cold fusion.
One day in the last week I was up at the cottage, I decided to drive down to the end of the country road that connects our one-lane cottage road to the highway. Down there, south of the lake, are the remnants of a farming community called The Ridge, which was there before Coe Hill was there north of the lake. In The Ridge, I've read, they produced milk and shipped it on barges across the lake to a cheese factory on the north shore, which has probably been gone for close to a century if not longer. All that's left of The Ridge now is maybe a few farms, and maybe a few retirees, and a United church. I had assumed that the church was more a museum piece than a functioning church, since there's another United church in Coe Hill, but, looking around its graveyard, I discovered that there are quite a few surprisingly recent stones. I'll post some pictures of those someday--some of them are quite striking, for different reasons. Right now I just wanted to post some pictures of something I barely noticed off to the side of the road, across from one of the farms.
This here sure appears to be some kind of little shanty village. (Thoreau built his cabin mostly out of "shanty boards". He bought some guy's shanty, knocked it apart, hauled away the wood, and built his cabin out of it. Come to think of it, I don't suppose I've mentioned that my grandfather built the cottage mostly out of packing-crate boards. Have I mentioned this? My grandfather worked for a railway company, where he got all kinds of packing crate wood. The guy building the cottage next door worked for Ontario Hydro, and got wood from big spools that electrical cables were rolled on. The son of the guy next door told me last year that his father and my grandfather would trade wood with each other, and he, as a kid, would spend his winters pulling out nails.) As you can see, some of the shanties are not in habitable shape, but some of them seem as habitable as they ever might have been. There was no immediate sign of anyone living in them; there was junk strewn all over the place, but since life--I mean growth and decay--moves so slowly up there (relative to down here, anyway) it's impossible to tell without closer inspection (which I wasn't about to engage in) whether it hadn't all been there for years and years.
I don't know much about basketball history, or for that matter basketball in the present, but I'm going to guess that the Raptors may have just set an NBA record for the biggest drop in points scored from one game to the next by a team that lost the first game and won the second: on Monday, they scored 133 points and lost; yesterday, they scored 74 and won.
Elsewhere in sports, you know what's awesome? When another team gives your team most of its good players, and your team doesn't give the other team any of its good players. That's pretty awesome. The one problem with this Jays-Marlins trade (apart from the small matter of the tens of millions of dollars, but never mind that) is it makes it more difficult to scoff at people who want the Jays to trade J.P. Arencibia for R.A. Dickey or whatever, because it turns out that you can make trades in real life that would be rejected by the commissioners of most serious fantasy leagues. (Major League Baseball: less serious than most serious fantasy leagues.)
Today Leiter linked to this article in The Scientist about an article in Science about how someone did some kind of study showing that articles that were rejected somewhere before being published somewhere else get cited more than other articles in the same journal that are accepted on the first try, even when the accepting journal doesn't have a lower "impact" (i.e., citation rate) than the rejecting journal. The authors of the Science article say this: "Several mechanisms could be involved, but perhaps the most likely explanation is that inputs from editors, reviewers and the greater amount of time spent working on resubmissions significantly improve the citation impact of the final product." I wonder about that--it's clear how rejection could improve a paper if the rejection comes after an initial revise-and-resubmit. But a standard piece of advice given to grad students in philosophy--I don't know about the sciences--is to ignore feedback given with rejections and send the paper right back out somewhere else; if you take the time to accommodate feedback, you'll never publish anything, especially since there's a good chance that the feedback from any particular reviewer is idiosyncratic. Revising the paper to accommodate rejection-feedback seems even less likely to produce a paper that's better than a paper that had never been rejected given that the grounds on which a paper is rejected are, obviously, supposed to be fatal to the paper, or at least fatal to its chances of being publishable in the particular journal it's being reviewed for--otherwise it would've gotten an R&R rather than a rejection. (Then again, who knows how many people don't resubmit R&Red papers to the journal that R&Red them, but send them on somewhere else. I once had a paper R&Red on grounds that made no sense to me, so I sent it somewhere else (of, I suppose, roughly the same "impact" level), where it was accepted. I don't know whether the Science study distinguished between rejected papers and R&Red papers that are sent somewhere else by their authors.) That being the case, rejection-feedback, apparently, should prompt you to either (a) accept that your paper is fundamentally flawed and give up on it (and possibly write a substantially different paper on the same topic), (b) accept that your paper is fundamentally flawed and hope that you can get it published somewhere anyway, or (c) reject the feedback and try to get the paper published somewhere else. There is one other option: you can accept that the feedback is a reasonable misunderstanding of your paper, likely to be shared by other readers, and revise your paper to head off the misunderstanding. But while this will probably make your paper better than it was, it's not clear that it would make it better than other papers, and it's especially not clear why it would make it better in a way that would make it more likely to be cited. I'm more inclined toward the explanation given by one of the study's co-authors in the Scientist article: "'Papers that are more likely to contend against the status quo are more likely to find an opponent in the review system'—and thus be rejected—'but those papers are also more likely to have an impact on people across the system,' earning them more citations when finally published." In other words, papers that are obviously good are less likely to be interesting than papers that are not obviously good. But, to me, this calls for examination of the underlying assumption of this whole citation-count business, namely, that citation-count tracks quality. If you get a paper rejected by Science on good grounds, and then get it accepted by Nature because you happened to get a softer couple of reviewers, then you can see how your paper might attract a relatively large number of citations, i.e., from people attacking it. That's something that happens in philosophy, anyway--grad students looking for quick and easy publishing opportunities seize on vulnerable articles in prestigious journals that they can attack. I would expect that this happens across academia. (I would wildly guess that it is probably the case that most citations in philosophy papers and books are "friendly". I think most people assume that the vast majority of citations are friendly, but I doubt that. (I'm reviewing a book now that is chock-full of "hostile" citations (where I mean "hostile" in the sense that the author basically disagrees with the things cited, not "hostile" in the sense of being a jerk about it or something). Philosophy publications may have an unusually high proportion of hostile citations relative to publications in other academic fields; for instance, philosophy papers are largely free of the social-scientific compulsion to provide multiple supporting references for every declarative sentence. In philosophy you also don't get anything exactly analogous to scientists publishing papers that replicate the results of earlier experiments, although you do get things somewhat analogous, along the lines of "another argument for x"--but even those are often, maybe most often, responses to arguments against x.)
Maybe another angle on it--a fair number of conference submissions in philosophy come back with reviews saying something to the effect that the paper has a lot of serious problems but it would likely provoke some good discussion, so it would be worthwhile to put it on the program. I guess you get that kind of thing less for publications than for conferences, but as long as some reviewers, and some editors, are more inclined than others to publish a paper because it's stimulating as opposed to because it's good, you'll find stimulating but not so good papers being rejected in one place and accepted in another, and stimulating more response with their stimulatingness than run-of-the-mill good papers.
In other science news, apparently we can read people's minds with fMRI machines now. I wonder if this one will end up in the same file as cold fusion.
One day in the last week I was up at the cottage, I decided to drive down to the end of the country road that connects our one-lane cottage road to the highway. Down there, south of the lake, are the remnants of a farming community called The Ridge, which was there before Coe Hill was there north of the lake. In The Ridge, I've read, they produced milk and shipped it on barges across the lake to a cheese factory on the north shore, which has probably been gone for close to a century if not longer. All that's left of The Ridge now is maybe a few farms, and maybe a few retirees, and a United church. I had assumed that the church was more a museum piece than a functioning church, since there's another United church in Coe Hill, but, looking around its graveyard, I discovered that there are quite a few surprisingly recent stones. I'll post some pictures of those someday--some of them are quite striking, for different reasons. Right now I just wanted to post some pictures of something I barely noticed off to the side of the road, across from one of the farms.
This here sure appears to be some kind of little shanty village. (Thoreau built his cabin mostly out of "shanty boards". He bought some guy's shanty, knocked it apart, hauled away the wood, and built his cabin out of it. Come to think of it, I don't suppose I've mentioned that my grandfather built the cottage mostly out of packing-crate boards. Have I mentioned this? My grandfather worked for a railway company, where he got all kinds of packing crate wood. The guy building the cottage next door worked for Ontario Hydro, and got wood from big spools that electrical cables were rolled on. The son of the guy next door told me last year that his father and my grandfather would trade wood with each other, and he, as a kid, would spend his winters pulling out nails.) As you can see, some of the shanties are not in habitable shape, but some of them seem as habitable as they ever might have been. There was no immediate sign of anyone living in them; there was junk strewn all over the place, but since life--I mean growth and decay--moves so slowly up there (relative to down here, anyway) it's impossible to tell without closer inspection (which I wasn't about to engage in) whether it hadn't all been there for years and years.
