Einstein award going to Paul Ginsparg for creating arXiv.org
idw-online.de
idw-online.de
I authored a paper about this quantum programming language but had no way to post it to the arXiv. I'm not a traditional academic, but I had posted on the arXiv before, long ago, at a previous job. Problem was that my arXiv credentials were associated with that job's long lost email.
I gave the presentation in a giant ballroom, and afterward, sat down at my assigned spot at one of these large circular tables. Next to me, during a brief coffee break, an old man I didn't recognize told me my talk was very interesting, and asked me if my paper was published yet. "Not yet; we haven't chosen a journal. And posting to the arXiv is delayed, because my account is locked, so a colleague is planning to post on my behalf."
The man responds, "Oh, it should be possible to fix that." I said that I figured as much and have just procrastinated contacting the admins. "They're at Cornell right?"
He said, "No, I mean, I can fix that. You said your name was Reikon Musha right?"
He opens his clunky laptop and continues, "I'm not supposed to do this. But I'm certain that if you gave an invited talk here, you're definitely not spoofing your name. Maybe you can show me your ID? No, no, just kidding."
He continues clicking around. "Was xyz@example.com your old address? What's your new one?" I answered yes, and gave him my new address. He typed it in and said, "straight into the database it goes; just go and reset your password now."
I was absolutely puzzled. I said, "Thanks?? Who are you?"
He says, as a matter of fact, "I'm Paul, I invented the arXiv."
Pah, what sort of security do you call that?!
I think the first part would be rather difficult, probably more so than pwning a server.
Or won't. But it should :P
As a personal aside, I miss those days when things were just so much quieter, heads-down, and collegial. It's difficult to describe how the research and commercial environment has changed for its participants over the last decade.
- That’s how I pronounced them when I first read them.
- That’s how everyone else pronounces them when they first read them until someone who has heard this factoid corrects them.
- They look exactly like commonly-used English words.
- It feels like a dumb prank to take the name of a writing system, whose sole purpose is written word and which will be most discussed in written media, and give it a deliberately odd pronunciation that people don’t usually discover until they talk to someone about it.
I’m grateful to the legendary folks who built these things, but I still wish they would’ve honored the Least Surprise Principle and picked better names.
When I later became an academic, I learned that when you write a paper and submit it, conditions for publication typically include signing away the copyright to the journal, possibly with a license to distribute a few preprints offline.
My advisor at the time pointed out that he actually modified the contract (changing the terms to retain copyright), signed it and sent it back (no journal ever complained, and all his papers are available as PDFs online).
arxiv is the closest thing to what I dreamt of some decades ago and I'm thrilled that Paul is receiving recognition. Personally, I think arxiv is a better path forward than scihub, entirely due to its "legitimacy". In the future, I will always work to "publish" on arxiv and not put my work in journals (fortunately, I am not in a publish or perish situation).
My only complaint is that I don't particularly like PDF and wish there was an HTML-zip format that could be sent around and the browser did all the rendering work, while the udnerlying data tables are stored in well-defined formats so they can be programatically extracted.
Assuming the journals signed it first, this is most likely illegal since they didn’t know they were signing under the different terms. If they sign it after the professor signs it, they technically have the duty to confirm the language is the same, but it still might be seen as a deceptive practice on the professor’s part.
There is no reason to send it back aside from redlining something. So sending a new contract is itself the indication that it has been redlined.
Back when I was doing Math research it was common to submit LateX files to ArXiv. A quick look at some of the Physics papers, though, suggests it may not the case for other fields.
Particle physicists, cosmologists and astrophysicists almost exclusively use LaTeX (anybody using Word would get laughed at). In other fields of physics, Word is more common and also not everyone submits everything to the arXiv. It's an interesting cultural divide...
I don’t particularly like latex though.
What do you mean? I predict the majority of PDFs on arxiv are generated from latex just based on the fields who mainly use it. In fact many papers contain the tex source files.
The Swedish bank (not an OG Nobel prize, but effectively one of them) prize for economics pretty much alternates (A) sharing the prize between econometrics (ie. tooling) and empirical research and (B) awarding deep theory.
PS: the above list good, are we missing anyone important who ought to be on that list?
But I could be misremembering or have misinterpreted what I saw, which was in a non-authoritative source.
On a tangent, is publishing the LaTeX source of a paper or thesis on GitHub something that people do...? I was also toying with the idea of writing my thesis with org-mode while including the code snippets I used for numerical calculations and graphs.
I've definitely seen it done, although I suspect the prime concern is versioning and backup.
Submissions that do not contain original or substantive research, including undergraduate research, course projects, and research proposals, news, or information about political causes (even those with potential special interest to the academic community) may be declined." as explained in https://arxiv.org/help/moderation
If your supervisors decided not to pursue publication then it seems likely that it does not match these criteria either. Note, this isn't a qualitative judgement about your thesis - as it says as much about academia as it does your thesis.
Additionally, you might run into the endorsement system if you're new to arXiv. https://arxiv.org/help/endorsement
Most, if not all master's thesis contain original research, and that is definitely my case as well.
> undergraduate research, course projects, and research proposals, news, or information about political causes
My thesis can't be classified under any of these categories, either.
It does sound like I would be able to publish it there, but I'm going to have to reach out to my supervisors for an endorsement in arXiv, thanks for the tip.
I believe they weren't inclined towards publishing it because I did not quite manage to fulfill their expectations with respect to the scope of the thesis. I came across quite a few bumps along the way which hindered my progress. It was still graded well enough, it has a good amount of original content, and I am relatively satisfied with its quality, though, so it's not like it was a complete disaster.
Another option might be to put it on Zenodo.
That'd be great. Seems dumb to let talented, hard-working student papers moulder on some basement shelf. (Or do they file 13 'em?) I've run across several onlined, very readable and informative masters' works over the years. Tend to be less hidebound about fresh theories/tooling as well.
Typically these are uploaded in some other archive that may be less open (e.g. often outsourced to proquest or something), but many universities have their own open archives. My PhD thesis is available on MIT dspace. Hilariously, it's a scanned copy of my printed thesis, since I had to print it out for submission, even in 2015.
As for theses on GitHub, those happen but often people keep it private since they don't necessarily want the revision history exposed :).
Here is the makefile I use that also generates a .tar.gz for the arxiv (obviously won't help with Overleaf without cloning first, but)
FIGURES=$(wildcard figs/*)
TEXFILES=main.tex included.tex included2.tex ...
main.pdf: $(TEXFILES) $(FIGURES) main.bib
latexmk -pdf -g $<
.PHONY: clean show
clean:
latexmk -C
rm -rf forarxiv*
forarxiv.tar.gz: forarxiv/main.tex forarxiv.pdf
rm -f forarxiv.tar.gz
cd forarxiv && tar --exclude=*.bib -cvzf ../forarxiv.tar.gz *
forarxiv:
mkdir -p $@
forarxiv/main.tex: main.tex main.bib | forarxiv
latexpand --empty-comments $< | sed -e 's#figs/##g' > $@
forarxiv/main.bib: main.bib
cp $< $@
forarxiv.pdf: forarxiv/main.tex $(FIGURES) forarxiv/main.bib
ln -f $(FIGURES) forarxiv/
ln -f foo.sty forarxiv/
ln -f foo.bst forarxiv/
latexmk -cd -pdf forarxiv/main.tex
latexmk -cd -c forarxiv/main.tex
mv forarxiv/main.pdf $@
show: main.pdf
xdg-open main.pdfhttps://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.4.2021110...
https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-story-behind-the-arXiv-org-f...
Well deserved.
1. http://www.chinafirewalltest.com/
2. https://www.comparitech.com/privacy-security-tools/blockedin...
There was a notability challenge in en.wikipedia on Olavo de Carvalho, a Steve Bannon type who wrote some philosophy books (like -- on Aristotle and Epicurus) as a younger man (and keeps getting his "philosopher" self-nomination challenged because he didn't go and get a college major in philosophy). I was for keeping the page, but on balance I think the process, arguments and result were fair -- even if almost certainly carrying some underlying political motivation.
We have to focus on the process. It's the only way to general axiology.
I'm no longer motivated to fight deletionism in my domain. I don't want to spend time that is not appreciated.
I suspect that as soon as a page is tagged for deletion by someone, others that enjoy being the arbiters of what is and is not WP, flock there. If they lack interest in the topic, they will vote to remove with many technical reasons. Statements that others do find it relevant or interesting, are simply ignored.
Inarguably, not arguably. In my mind there is a clear separation between pre and post sci-hub. The stark increase in experienced friction when accessing scientific knowledge since sci-hub's pausing has highlighted its profound value.
There's also libgen, the closest thing to a bastion of all written human knowledge.
It'd be fun to read a short story about an AI trained on libgen data that makes significant contributions to fusion, longevity and cancer but whose creators are ineligible for any prizes and are jailed for life for multiple counts of copyright violation.
A main gripe is that more often than not, the supporting links for claims made in wikipedia articles are broken or of poor quality. Another is the tendency of ideologues to remove anything they disagree with in their particular domain.
It's useful for finding trivial information (flag of Botswana, say) but otherwise I usually block wikipedia from search results.
That reason is because Wikipedia is a tertiary source. It's too far removed from a source of information to be appropriate to cite. It has nothing to do with the reliability of the site; it's basically never appropriate to cite any kind of encyclopedia.
If there's a specific piece of information you found on Wikipedia, you chase down Wikipedia's source for that information and cite that. If you're using Wikipedia as a general reference, you don't need to cite that at all.