About the title

About the title

I changed the title of the blog on March 20, 2013 (it used to have the title “Notes of an owl”). This was my immediate reaction to the news the T. Gowers was presenting to the public the works of P. Deligne on the occasion of the award of the Abel prize to Deligne in 2013 (by his own admission, T. Gowers is not qualified to do this).

The issue at hand is not just the lack of qualification; the real issue is that the award to P. Deligne is, unfortunately, the best compensation to the mathematical community for the 2012 award of Abel prize to Szemerédi. I predicted Deligne before the announcement on these grounds alone. I would prefer if the prize to P. Deligne would be awarded out of pure appreciation of his work.



I believe that mathematicians urgently need to stop the growth of Gowers's influence, and, first of all, his initiatives in mathematical publishing. I wrote extensively about the first one; now there is another: to take over the arXiv overlay electronic journals. The same arguments apply.



Now it looks like this title is very good, contrary to my initial opinion. And there is no way back.
Showing posts with label educational content. Show all posts
Showing posts with label educational content. Show all posts

Friday, March 7, 2014

About expository writing: a reply to posic

Previous post: Graduate level textbooks: A list - the second part


In the post Graduate level textbooks I I mentioned an advice given to me by a colleague many years ago:
"Do not write any books until you retire". posic commented on this:
"Do not write any books until you retire"?! One is tempted to generalize to "do not do any mathematics until you retire". Or, indeed, to "do not do anything you find interesting, important or meaningful until you retire"...

Gone are the days when Gian-Carlo Rota wrote "You are most likely to be remembered for your expository work" as one of his famous "Ten lessons I wish I had been taught". Not that I so much like this motivation, that is one's desire to have oneself remembered at any expense, but compared to people doing mathematics from the main motivation of getting tenure, grants, etc., it was, at least, leaving ground for some cautious hope. Presently I do not see any.

I am sorry for the long delay with a reply. Here are some thoughts.

The advice of my colleague does not admit such generalizations. He based it on the opposite grounds: he wanted me to do something more interesting than writing books.

He made a couple of common mistakes. First, he has no way to know what is interesting to other people, including myself. A lot of people do find writing expository works (at any level, from elementary school to the current research) to be very interesting. Actually, I do. At the same time, many mathematicians complain about lack of necessary expository writings. Some direction of research died because the discoverers are not able to write in an understandable manner, and others were discouraged to write expositions. At the same time, writing down some ideas is a creative work at a level higher than most of “Annals of Mathematics” papers.

Second, he followed a prejudice common at least in the US: expository writing is a second-rate activity compared to proving theorems. This prejudice is so strong that proving “empty” theorems is valued more than excellent expository writing. Apparently, this is a result of external with respect to mathematics influences. The main among them is the government funding of pure mathematics. There is essentially only one agency in the US providing some funds for pure mathematics, namely, the NSF. The role of few private institutions is negligible. It is not surprising that NSF has its own preferences, and the pure mathematics is not its main concern. Moreover, it is very likely that NSF is even not allowed by law to fund expository writing (I did not attempted to check this).

G.-C. Rota is right. He almost always right, especially if you at least try to read between the lines. Actually, the most cited (and by a wide margin) work of the mentioned colleague is a purely expository short monograph. So, he does not put his money where his mouth is.

Actually, I am not inclined to read G.-C. Rota so literally. He is a too sophisticated thinker for this. Whatever he says, he says it with a tongue in cheek. He wanted to encourage expository writing. The motivation he offered isn’t really the fame. It is the usefulness. You will be remembered most for things most useful for other people. For many expository writing will be much more useful than publishing a dozen of “research” papers.

I think that it will come as no surprise to you that the government agencies, supposedly to work on behalf of the people, demand a lot of work hardly useful to anybody, and do not support really useful (at least to some people) activities. I also believe that only few other mathematicians will agree.

Doing mathematics for getting tenure or its equivalent is essentially doing mathematics for having an opportunity to do mathematics. There are no other ways. If you know a way to do mathematics without an equivalent of a tenured academic position in the US, please, tell me. I do have tenure, but I am quite interested.

This is not so with "grants, etc.", especially if you have tenure. Working for grants is a sort of corruption. Unfortunately, it is so widespread. Well, some people, for example G.W. Mackey, predicted this at the very beginning of the government funding. They turned out to be correct.

G.-C. Rote wrote these words quite a while ago. Things did not improve since then. The expository writing is valued even less than at the time. Nobody cares if he/she or you will be remembered 100 years from now, or if a current paper will be remembered 10 years from now. Everything is tailored for the medicine and biology. Reportedly, almost no papers there are remembered or cited after 2 years. Anyhow, the infamous impact factor of a journal takes into account only the citations during the first 2 years after the publication. The journals are judged by their impact factor, the papers are judged by the journals where they are published, and academics are judged by the quantity (in the number of papers, not pages) and the "quality" of their publications.

Apparently, mathematicians are content with the current situation and are afraid of any changes more than cosmetic ones. Is there a hope?


Next post: To appear

Wednesday, April 3, 2013

Simons's video protection, youtube.com, etc.

Previous post: What is mathematics?


Technically, this is a reply to a comment by Dmitri Pavlov. But it is only tangentially related to the discussion in Gowers's blog. At the same time, I see in it a good occasion to start a discussion of issues related to the infamous by now copyright law. This notion had some worthwhile components just 10 years ago. Now it looks like a complete nonsense obstructing progress. It does not even succeed in making big movie studios and music labels (the main defenders of extreme forms of the copyright law) richer. At the very least, no proof was ever offered.

------------------------------------------------------------------------


Dear Dmitri,

Thanks a lot. You certainly know that I am not an expert in software. I am not using UNIX, I am using Windows, and I have no idea what to do with your code. I definitely have the latest version of Adobe flash, or at least the previous one. I doubt that there is some version released in March which is required to deal with a video posted more than a year ago. 

The browsers I use most of the time, Firefox and Opera, have several extensions allowing downloading almost everything by just pressing a button and selecting the quality of the stream. These extensions don’t see any video content on Simons’s page.

I got the idea, and it looks like I will be able download these files even without your list. But your list will save me a lot of time, if I decide to do this (at the time, I am not inclined).

But this does not mean that files are not protected in the legal sense. Files are not protected if there is either a download button, or a statement like the following: "You are free to inspect our code and download our videos if you will find a way to do this". Your suggestion amounts to doing the latter without permission.

A third party software told me that it is able to see the video (actually, another one, much more interesting for me), but will not download it because this would be illegal. Moreover, the software stated that I have only one legal option to have the video in my computer: to take screenshots of each frame.

“If they were aware of this issue,
 they would almost certainly
 add HTML5 video elements and direct download links.”

You see, I contacted a mathematician who is to a big extent responsible for this whole program of interviews, posting of them, etc. He agreed that videos should be downloadable, and said that he will contact appropriate persons. I have no reasons not to trust him. So, the people at the Simons foundation are aware of this for more than a year and did nothing.

Even if these links would be on the page (I am not able to see them, and I don’t know what do you mean by “plain video URLs are embedded in the text.”), there are 26 files for Lovasz alone. This is a far cry from being convenient. I will need to use an Adobe video editor (which I accidentally do have on another computer by a reason completely independent from mathematics – most mathematicians don’t), and to glue them in one usable file. It would be even possible to add a menu with direct links to these 26 parts, very much like on a DVD or a Blu-ray disc. But, frankly, why should I to this? Is Simons’s salary (which he determines himself, being the president and the CEO of his company at the same time) not sufficient to make a small charitable contribution and hire a local student to do some primitive video-editing? His salary a year or two ago was over 2 billions per year. I did not check the latest available data.

Concerning youtube.com, I would like to say that if something looks like an active attempt to protect a video for you, it is not necessarily so for others. Personally, I don’t care how their links are generated. For me, it is enough to have a button (even three different!) at my browser which will find this link without my participation and will download the file, or even several simultaneously. Moreover, I doubt that youtube.com really wants to protect videos from downloading. They have a lot of 1080p (Full HD) videos, and I don’t know any way to see them in 1080px high window at youtube site. There are two choices: a smaller window, or a full screen. I haven’t seen a computer monitor with exactly 1080px height. Anyhow, the one I have is 1600px high, and upconverting to this size leads to a noticeable decrease of quality. The only meaningful option for 1080p content is to download it.

Buy the way, the Simons foundation site suffers from a similar, but much more severe problem. The size of the video window appears to be small and fixed. And they may stream into it 1080p content; this was the case with the video I wanted to watch a year+ ago. A lot of bandwidth is wasted. And my ISP hardly can handle streaming 1080p content anyhow.

Please, do not think that I am an admirer of youtube.com policies. Nothing there is permanent, i.e. everything potentially interesting should be downloaded. Their crackdown on the alleged (no proof is needed) copyright violators is the online version of the last year raids of the US special forces in several countries simultaneously.



Next post: To appear.