Acceptance Rates and Impact Factors

For those of you who do publish at computer science conferences*:

1) On your CV/Biosketch/Website/etc. list-of-publications, do you include conference acceptance rates?

2) If you do, what  is the threshold for you to mention it? (e.g., 50%, 30%, 10% ?)

For those of you who don't publish at computer science conferences:

0) Hey, why aren't you publishing at CS conferences? We're cool people, and we start counting at zero.  

1) On your CV/Biosketch/Website/etc. list-of-publications, do you include journal impact factors?

2) If you do, what is the threshold for you to mention it? (e.g., do you list IFs for startup journals)?

And for anyone willing to share their field / subfield, I'd be interested to hear that as well. I'm planning to assemble this information into a longer post on the topic in a few weeks.

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* This includes anything which has archival proceedings, like some workshops, symposia, summer/winter/fall/spring schools, etc. 

Advice to people submitting things for review

Dear Author(s): 

Generally, when editors/PC members volunteer hours of their time to read your paper, read reviews of your paper, and give you helpful comments to improve your work, you should be polite, kind, and thankful toward them. That way, if your paper is borderline, we are far more likely to cut you a break.  

If you are a big jerk, and your science is suspect, there is little hope for you.  

No-love,
FCS

I am always shocked when authors say, "I am brilliant, u r dumb" to people in a position of power over the fate of their paper / grant. As if that will really help their case.

Now, there are certainly cases where reviewers are wrong, or they ask something that's well outside of scope of a minor revision. But this is the exception, not the rule.

I am reaching the conclusion that "be a good citizen in the scientific community" classes might be beneficial during new student indoctrination. (Along with some sort of professional writing course that includes a unit entitled "'Yo Professor!' and Other Letter Writing Atrocities.")

Paper top 40 predictions

I've decided I am absolutely terrible at predicting which papers will be "a hit" and which papers will never get cited or read.

Like most academics, I'm usually working on several papers at the same time. In my mind as we're preparing and submitting, I often place bets on how the reviews will come back. Formulating my prediction involves not only the content of the paper, but also the publication venue, who I expect the reviewers might be, and other misc. variables.

I'm nearly always wrong.

And post-publication, the papers I am most proud of are never cited. The papers I am most ashamed of are frequently cited. I am considering employing reverse psychology as I write.

Either that or switch into mobile computing. Those people are so connected every paper has a gazillion citations.

New adventures in publishing metrics

In case you haven't heard, Google Scholar Citations recently opened its doors, allowing academics to set up Google Scholar profiles, track their citations, h-index and i10-index, and see pretty graphs.

At first I thought: Yay! Especially since, for Computer Science, this was right on the heels of Cite Scholar's beta release, which is all about highlighting the fact that in CS we're all about the top tier conferences and journals don't matter much for us.

Then I thought: Boo! Now it's easier for the bean counters to count beans. Also, I sense there's this "who's searched for me" button coming, which creeps me out. This is actually why I don't ever click on academia.edu pages.

After a few weeks of reflection I am still on the fence. While I can't speak for other fields, in CS number of citations doesn't necessarily mean anything about quality or impact of work. I can think of several lackluster papers that have hundreds of citations, whereas others are incredible and barely hardly any. Also, sometimes an insane number of citations simply means you forced encouraged people to cite you by releasing some software or data.

On the other hand, I find these new graphs seem to ignite my "MUST WRITE MORE" instinct, just as the darling tune my new washing machine plays encourages me to do more laundry.

How to make your journal editor happy

And in today's Hints from Heloise...

If you want to make your journal editor / reviewers happy when submitting a revision for review, use colorful highlighting annotations in your PDF document to show what's new. This makes skimming a 48 page manuscript so much more pleasant, and as an editor I am far more likely to click, "Hoo-rah, accept!" than I otherwise would.

Recently I read one manuscript where the authors put their new text in yellow and their revised text in blue. Just this simple gesture made it so easy for me to check if they'd made the required changes.

You'd like to think your reviewers are not this easily manipulated, but I can tell you at least one of them is. :)

Persistence vs. Publish Pressure (PPP)*

An anonymous commenter on a previous post asks, "How do you balance persistence and pressure to publish?".

The big question I have is - who is pressuring you to publish?

If it is yourself, then the way I view all publications/research is: 1) What is the big idea I want to do, and 2) How do I best tell the world about it?

Sometimes, if it's a big idea with lots of pieces, you publish as you go. This is another reason why it's good to diversify your publication venue. So, when you're just sketching ideas out, workshop. Maybe you have some preliminary results, low-tier conference. Maybe your research is rocking the house, top-tier conference / journal.

Some people say, "Bah, least publishable units, growl." But it's not about that necessarily. It's about telling a story, building on previous work, figuring out where you're going. Instead of waiting three years and squashing everything into one paper, you keep the ball rolling.

Sometimes you Don't Publish. And that's ok too. For example, in the middle of my PhD I spent about 6 months doing exactly nothing. Nada. I realized I was spinning to far out into the wrong direction. It was time to retool and rethink my plans.

Now, if someone else is pressuring you to publish, that's a whole other ball of wax. I think in that case it's a question of what relationship they have to you (dean, chair, advisor, colleague, student), and whether their request for you to publish makes sense. Are they pressuring you because they think your work is amazing and ready for the world to see? Are they pressuring you because they think you publishing now will help your career later? Is it to help their career? It helps to explore motives here.

If you need time to persist on a research thread, drop the self pressure to publish and find your center. If you have someone breathing down your neck to publish tell them to lay off for awhile while you get your groove back. The last thing you want to do is publish junk science just because you're being pressured to publish for the sake of publishing.

----------
* For the geeks out there. (See also: this shirt.)

How to get your paper accepted: Orshee

In today's installment of how to get your paper accepted, we shall discuss gender inclusive language.

Back in my days of blissful ignorance, I didn't notice gender use in language very much. "John Doe" and "He" were pretty much par for the course.

At some point, I was reading an article and it was positively littered with "him or her" "he or she" "his or hers", and I wanted to pull my hair (short or long) out. While I appreciated the sentiment it was completely distracting from the prose.

I once was given a Parenting 101 book, and it alternated between male and female examples per section (i.e., every few pages). I liked this approach a lot better, because it made for much easier reading while still being gender inclusive.

Gender exclusive language has no place in scientific writing, unless the author is describing a single case study (i.e., "When Patient M. first came to the hospital, he..."), a gendered-exclusive event (i.e., The Society for Women Engineers summer camp for fourth grade girls), or is somehow written in the third person from the perspective of one of the authors.

It's very easy to use anonymous, gender-neutral subjects in sentences to give examples of people. For example, "the student", "the user", "the agent", "the engineer", "the scientist", etc.

It takes practice to write in active voice while remaining gender neutral; sometimes the writing can get a bit bogged down when you start. Sometimes writing they or them can feel awkward. But like any sort of writing, practice makes perfect. After awhile it becomes second nature.

Unlike those days of blissful ignorance, as a reviewer I am now very distracted and occasionally annoyed by both gender exclusive language (of either gender), as well as by too many Orshees. In some particularly egregious cases of the former I have politely reminded the authors to be more sensitive to their use of language. I know it is often a result of English being a second language.

Google, however, really should know better. Check out this error message I just got in Chrome (emphasis mine):

In this case, the certificate has not been verified by a third party that your computer trusts. Anyone can create a certificate claiming to be whatever website they choose, which is why it must be verified by a trusted third party. Without that verification, the identity information in the certificate is meaningless. It is therefore not possible to verify that you are communicating with  XXX.YYY.ZZZ, instead of an attacker who generated his own certificate claiming to be XXX.YYY.ZZZ. You should not proceed past this point.

If I was a man I might be offended. I'm sure there are plenty of female hackers out there. (Heck, even that attack is poorly named - "man in the middle". I guess it's catchier than "person in the middle", but still).

How to get your paper accepted: Short paragraphs

July seems to be the month for reviews, so I thought I'd organize some of my observations on scientific writing into bite-sized advice posts.

1) If you want to get your paper accepted, please, for the love of all things, use short paragraphs.

I was reviewing a two-column ACM format paper recently, and a few paragraphs took up the entire left-side column and half of the right-side column. My eyes went blurry by the end, and frankly it negatively biased me against the authors.

If authors are concerned about space, they should either use less words or make their diagrams smaller. I'd much rather see smaller diagrams and more readable text than huge diagrams and squished prose.

Also - putting hundreds of lines of code into a paper is rarely necessary. (And XML is never necessary*). Use small chunks. Just the important idea behind the awesome algorithm. If the code paragraphs are taking up more than half a page, please consider an alternate presentation style. (See Justin Zobel for nice presentation ideas).


-------------------
(*) <meta>I'm sure there's a good xkcd comic out there for this sentiment, though my Google fu is weak today.</meta>

Cryptocontributions

John Regehr of Embedded in Academia has a great post about Cryptocontributions in writing:

Even when interesting and unexpected results make it into a paper (as opposed to being dismissed outright either by the PI or by a student doing the work) the discussion of them is often buried deep in some subsection of the the paper. When this happens — and the interesting development is not even mentioned in the abstract or conclusion — I call it a “cryptocontribution.” Sometimes these hidden gems are the most interesting parts of what are otherwise pretty predictable pieces of work. When authors are too focused on getting the thing submitted, it’s really easy to shove interesting findings under the rug. Certainly I’ve done it, though I try hard not to.

I like that in his post, there is a little bit of a cryptocontribution, and that is - by being so conference deadline-driven, Computer Science is, as a Science, still a bit immature. If I have time I'll write more about this topic next week, because it's an idea I've been pondering for awhile.

---

PS - A note to John and other bloggers who run WordPress type-things - I seem to be unable to leave IP-anonymous comments on your blogs via Tor. I try, and try, and try, and am thwarted. So I've given up! But do know I'd love to comment if I could. Maybe this summer if I have some free time I'll write a Tor browser plugin that works with WordPress.

John Nash's Thesis

You know those games where you pick the street you grew up on and add on your cousin's middle name and your first pet's name and then you have the name for a band?

This post isn't actually about that. (Though I do think "John Nash's Thesis" would be a great name for a band). This post is about those myths and legends you hear as a nascent researcher. Probably the first of these I ever heard was: "John Nash's dissertation was only four pages long."

This really is one of those legends that seems to have suffered a whisper-down-the-lane effect. Wikipedia claims it weighs in at 28 pages, on Princeton's website it is 32. Some forum contributor on degreeinfo.com claims it was only 23 pages long.

In any case, it was short, sweet, and revolutionary.

I really respect that. I've slogged through CS dissertations that were approaching 250 pages in length. By the middle you start pulling your hair out and wishing they had the brevity of John Nash.

My dissertation will not be 23 pages long. Why, the table of contents alone is pushing 30! (Just kidding!) (mostly).

Mobile Scholar: Part 3

I've thus far written two posts on how to turn my iPad into a computer. I am doing this both because I am too stingy to buy a MacBook Air and too stubborn* to give up.

My number one "killer app" has been the ability to work on papers from anywhere using LaTeX. I am now able to fully do this (provided the iPad has an internet connection). Here are step-by-step instructions for anyone interested in trying:

Step 1: Get Dropbox

This first step is very easy. Dropbox is cloud-based storage that works on every device under the sun, and is really, really fantastic. It's free up to 2 gigabytes, and you get 500 mb for every friend you invite. Unless your papers tend to have gigantic graphs and images, it's likely you'll never come close to that 2GB limit.

Step 2: Start your LaTeX paper on your computer

If you're familiar with LaTeX, this is also straightforward. If you are new to LaTeX, there is a bit of a learning curve but a lot of help out there. In particular, I highly recommend Lyx, which is a cross-platform WYSIWYG editor.

Get everything set up - your bibliography file, tex file, etc. Save it all to your Dropbox folder.

Step 3: Get latexmk going

Latexmk is, by far, the most brilliant piece of software ever written, ever.  If I could write a love letter to its author, John Collins, I would.

What this program does is sit happily in a directory watching for changes to any changes to your tex files... or any associated files (e.g., .bib files)... OR, any other tex files that your main paper references (e.g., chapter1.tex, chapter2.tex).

What does this mean? This means you can have something watching your dropbox folder all day and all night and automatically recompiles your pdf on the fly. Now we're gettin' somewhere.

I believe latexmk is now bundled with all the major TeX distributions. To run it, the magic command you want is:
    % latexmk -pdf -pvc mypaper.tex

Step 4: Get Tex Touch

Tex Touch is a program that lets you edit LaTeX files on your iPad.

I have to tell you, I am not deeply in love with this program because it is extremely clunky for a $9.99 app. (No multitasking support, sometimes crashes, has no syntax highlighting). BUT, it does the one thing no other piece of iOS software does - it understands the LaTeX workflow and syncs to Dropbox. It also sports an easily accessible and well-designed symbol editor so you don't have to go through 18 soft-keyboard screens to find an α.

Step 5 (Maybe?): Get Mendeley

I have Mendeley Lite on my iPad, and while it is also pretty clunky at least it's functional. While writing I can search my bibliography, export a citation in bibtex format (using the web view), plunk it into my .bib file in Tex Touch, and voila. A Mendeley -> DropBox .bib connection would be really nice, and if Mendeley opens up their API maybe I'll write one. In any case, I have high hopes for the Pro version of their iPad software.

That's it! I still would like offline compilation of LaTeX source on the iPad, but I figure by the time someone writes that I'll have bought a MacBook Air. :-)

Happy writing. If you end up trying any of this (or have any suggestions/questions), please drop a comment - I would love to hear how things have worked for you.

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(*) Something that occurred to me recently - possibly one of the best skills you can have as a computer scientist is stubbornness. If you are tenacious and keep trying lots of different things and talking to lots of people until you can get something to work, you will do well in this field. Even if you can't get something to work in the end, just going through the process of trying is a great learning exercise.

Being Brilliant vs. Writing Well

In the vast world of academic Computer Science publishing, I am about to tell you the greatest secret of all:

You can make up for lack of genius by being a good writer.

Being a good writer will never guarantee a paper acceptance. But I'll tell you, if your paper is like butter for a reviewer to read, it makes it all the more difficult for them to tear it apart. If your writing is crisp and clear and sharp and snappy, it makes reviewers feel joy in the hearts. Especially compared to the other poor abuses of the English language they had to sludge though before your paper walked through the door.

It's actually quite easy to learn to write well. Here are some tips:

1) Practice, practice, practice. A blog can really help, actually. Twitter probably not so much. You want to aim for cogent prose.

2) Read a lot. Read well-edited publications - newspapers, magazines, journals. Journalists are excellent at grabbing your attention and keeping it. This skill is invaluable in scientific writing.

3) Less is more. You are not getting paid by the word here. (In fact just the opposite - many conferences have page charges if you go over the limit!). It is not necessary to give every gory detail. It is highly unlikely you need to paste code into your paper. Just convey the information that is most important - what is it you want people to take away after reading your paper?

4) Once you're confident, take some risks. I know your 3rd grade teacher told you all of these things about structure and topic sentences and a conclusion section and an outline section and all that jazz. But really you need to figure out your own style that best helps you convey clear ideas.

5) Proofread your paper very carefully before submitting it. I am shocked when I read papers with grammar errors, spelling errors, and typos, particularly from senior academics who are fluent English speakers. Take the time to proofread, or outsource. (Occasional errors are understandable, but a paper should not be littered with them).

6) Practice!

Publication Venues in Computer Science

In academic Computer Science, there are basically three publication venues that "count": peer-reviewed conferences, peer-reviewed journals, and peer-reviewed workshops/symposia. There are of course many other perfectly credible ways to publish one's work (e.g., technical reports, books), but these are the top three.

Unlike in most scientific fields, including our closest cousins Engineering and Mathematics, journals are not the de facto place to publish papers. I can't speak for all subfields of CS, but basically everyone I know only publishes in journals because they feel they have to (e.g., multi-disciplinary tenure and promotion committees that expect journal publications, research rankings organizations that still don't seem to 'get' conferences, etc.). Some subfields this is not the case, such as in interdisciplinary fields like Bioinformatics and CS Education, but for most major areas of CS, conferences are where the action is.

For these fields, the top conferences have extremely low acceptance rates, many less than 17%. The program committees are comprised of the top scholars in the field. And in some fields, anyone who is anyone attends these conferences, so managing to get a paper accepted is a pretty big deal that gets a researcher much visibility.

Some journals have similarly rigorous standards of review and are known for their quality, for example the IEEE Transactions and ACM Transactions family of journals are highly regarded. There are occasionally other journals that are good, but the vast majority are either decidedly mediocre or utter rubbish. We don't really have any comparable C/N/S type journals.

Workshops and symposia generally have a much higher acceptance rate than conferences and journals, but they are still peer-reviewed and are often archival (e.g., ACM Digital Library, IEEE Xplore). They have quite a few advantages. First, they are usually co-located with a conference, which means you can often go to both on your University's dime. Second, they present a fantastic opportunity to float half-baked ideas and get one-on-one feedback from your peers. And third, oftentimes workshops are the only place you can meet other scientists interested in the same area of specialized research as you, which nearly always leads to good things.

But the most useful thing about conferences and workshops over journals is that you have the opportunity to tell potentially hundreds of people about your work. These are all people who learn your name and face and start to match it to a research area. This is invaluable, because it leads to professional relationships that will see you through your career - jobs, funding, tenure/promotion letters, etc.

Journals don't really get your name and face out there as well, unless some news outlet picks up on your article. People do read journals, but I suspect most readers associate papers more strongly with an institution than a name, particularly if it's a new name on the research scene.

So I think it's nice to have a diverse portfolio when it comes to publishing. It's good to have a mixture of papers in the top conferences with low acceptance rates, in journals that are well-respected, and in workshops that are useful to the researcher.

Letter Reminders

Since this is the season for writing and requesting reference letters, just a gentle reminder to all the letter writers out there to be aware of your language use when penning letters for female candidates. There's a nice article in last Wednesday's Inside Higher Education, "Too nice to land a job":

You are reading a letter of recommendation that praises a candidate for a faculty job as being "caring," "sensitive," "compassionate," or a "supportive colleague." Whom do you picture?

New research suggests that to faculty search committees, such words probably conjure up a woman -- and probably a candidate who doesn't get the job. The scholars who conducted the research believe they may have pinpointed one reason for the "leaky pipeline" that frustrates so many academics, who see that the percentage of women in senior faculty jobs continues to lag the percentage of those in junior positions and that the share in junior positions continues to lag those earning doctorates.

The research is based on a content analysis of 624 letters of recommendation submitted on behalf of 194 applicants for eight junior faculty positions at an unidentified research university. The study found patterns in which different kinds of words were more likely to be used to describe women, while other words were more often used to describe men.

In theory, both sets of words were positive. There's nothing wrong, one might hope, with being a supportive colleague. But the researchers then took the letters, removed identifying information, and controlled for such factors as number of papers published, number of honors received, and various other objective criteria. When search committee members were asked to compare candidates of comparable objective criteria, those whose letters praised them for "communal" or "emotive" qualities (those associated with women) were ranked lower than others.

For more specific letter-writing suggestions, here are some great tips from the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) to consult when writing letters for women. It has suggestions for how to help avoid biased language, for example, focus on the technical/research/leadership skills as opposed to interpersonal ones, avoid "doubt raisers" (i.e., "it appears her health is stable...", "she sure managed to publish a lot despite having twins"), an so on. For research jobs, keep the teaching-gushing to a minimum - it's much, much better to gush over her research.

And for letter askers (of both sexes) - a really nice thing you can do for referees is to give them a bulleted list of things you'd like them to mention in the letter, particular action verbs you'd like them to use, and so on. And don't be shy about explicitly mentioning things you'd rather they didn't mention.  For example, marital status, parental status, family caregiving duties, disabilities, etc. Even if it's obvious to you these things don't belong in a letter, your referees might forget and mention them. That's where a checklist can be very helpful.

Can't Cite This

In someone's blog a few months ago (Prodigal's? GMP's? I forget), there was a discussion about getting students to be better about citing articles when they prepare manuscripts. The problem was that someone's students were under-citing (e.g., they should have 50 references and they have 10).

This is not my problem.

In fact, this is so not my problem, I am utterly dying under a current journal's citation limitation. I cannot write a paper with only N citations. If anything, I'm an over-citer. Anytime I say anything even potentially contentious or isn't my idea, boom, citation. I once submitted a paper and one of the reviewers wrote, "Wow. I've never seen so many citations for a conference paper." That's me!

So with N citations, I am dying. I am scouring google scholar for good survey articles and books that have what I need, because it's just ridiculous I can't have, say N*3 citations. I have this secret desire to throw in N+2 citations just to see what the editor does. Particularly if those extra citations are from his own journal!

I understand why printed journals do this - space limitations, paper costs, etc. But I think citation limits ultimately engender plagiarism. I swear, I just wrote a sentence like, "Many people in the field of rubber duckery have found yellow ducks float better than evil, red ones by 10%." Yes, this is a fact, but it feels so disgusting to me to not have a citation after something like that, because it is not common knowledge.

Tonight I will have nightmares of my high school English teacher standing very tall over me, wearing a pilgrim hat, glaring and clucking her tongue.

Mobile Scholar: Part 2

Awhile ago I promised I'd write about my adventures attempting to turn my iPad into a laptop when traveling. I guess a lot of this is soon moot since Apple just announced the new Macbook Air, which replicates most of the lovely features of the iPad (solid state memory, for instance), but in the meantime what we have is what we have!

For my upcoming trip, the tasks I need to complete are: review several papers, work on a paper due in a few weeks, take notes in meetings, and keep up with the usual barrage of emails. To prepare, I've found a few applications to help make being laptop-less, and at many times network-less, a bit easier.

1. Dropbox for iPad

This is just about the most useful application ever invented. I know, I know, rsync has been around since dinosaurs roamed the earth, but honestly I just never found it usable. I use too many different operating systems and machines and devices that rsync-based solutions were just a nightmare.

Dropbox has been positively a joy to use.  For this trip, on my laptop I downloaded the papers I need to review into my Dropbox folder. Then I synchronized them to my iPad/phone.

Also, most all of my past papers and work-in-progress papers (including my thesis) are stored in Dropbox. I guess this is a bit risky in case they're evil or their servers go down, but it's just a gem when traveling.

2. iAnnotatePDF

From Dropbox, you can send PDF files directly to iAnnotatePDF. I really like to use this application when reviewing papers, because I can put text notes in the margin, circle and highlight things, etc. I mostly use it for commenting on papers written by colleagues and students, but sometimes I use it for conference and journal reviews. 

Its cloud support is a bit weak. Your workflow turns out to be DropBox -> iAnnotatePDF -> [Annotate stuff] -> GoodReader -> Dropbox. 

3. GoodReader

This is the best $.99 you'll ever spend. It strangely claims to be a PDF reader, but really it's a just nice way to access the filesystem, and read/write files to Dropbox, GoogleDocs, WebDAV, and whatever else cloud service you might use. You also can use it as a nice wget/fetch service (e.g., grabbing files off the net and storing them on your iPad). It's indispensable.

Remember my last post about
pseudo-anonymity? I figured
handwriting recognition would
fail if I wrote like a 10 year old.
I'll have you know I am a
Picasso in real life.

4. AudioNote

Honestly, I didn't get this application for the audio recording feature (though that is nice), I got it because you can both take notes with typing as well as sketch with your finger in the same document. I tried about 10 different note taking apps, and this was the only one that handled this feature well. 

5. Instapaper

Every time I see an article I want to read but don't have the time for, I have a little function in all my web browsers, "Save to Instapaper". It pulls down the text (sans advertisements), syncs to a server, and then syncs to all my mobile devices. Then when I'm sitting around in airports I catch up on articles.

I also use Instapaper when I want to save local information about the city I'm traveling to and might not have net, such as train schedules. Sometimes I use Dropbox for that too, but Instapaper is even more convenient because it's a simple one-click process.

6.  RSS

I am still looking for a good RSS reader that syncs with Google Reader. I've just found Mobile RSS which seems pretty decent at first glance. I was using Reeder for awhile, because everyone was singing its praises, but I found it to be too minimal - to the point of being unusable. A few people spoke highly of Byline, but the one time I tried it my finger slipped and I unwittingly did something awful, like, marking several hundred articles as read or unsubscribing to some feeds. I thus deleted the application in a big puff of disgust. 

I'm all ears if anyone has RSS reader suggestions.  

7. Off Maps / OpenStreetMap / OpenMaps

A colleague recommended some open maps apps (heh) to me, and I'll be giving them a shot on this upcoming trip. I'm more inclined to just suffer roaming charges and use Google Maps, but I like the idea of open source maps, and will give it a shot.

8. VLC

This is a jack of all trades video player. It's probably the most useful app I have on my laptop, so I'm thrilled to have it on the iPad. It's great for copying video files to your iPad that you don't feel like converting to some goofy iTunes format (e.g, AVI, XviD, etc). 

9. iSSH

This application is indispensable when traveling. With it I can connect to machines anywhere in the world, easilly get a shell, tunnel stuff, get a nice VNC connection to someplace, etc. Well worth the $10. 

I think that's it. I'm still working on a workable LaTeX solution, which hopefully I'll figure out by the time I write Part 3 in this series.

Sadly blogger is practically unusable from the iPad, so I probably won't be around much for the next week or two.  There are a few blogging apps, but I'm not really ready to shell out for them - I'd rather just google give better support native editing on the iPad. *ahem, evil overlords, ahem*.

Hope you all have a good week and see you soon.

Mobile Scholar: Part I

Image by Mike Licht

I am trying to turn my iPad into a laptop in order to lighten my load while traveling (and save my poor neck). It will never replace a proper computer from a software development perspective, but from a scholarly reading and writing perspective I am almost there.

The Chronicle had a nice post in ProfHacker regarding PDF annotation and organization, and Christopher Long has also written in greater detail about how one goes about "Closing the Digital Research Circle". For PDF annotation, syncing, and citing, I strongly suspect Mendeley is going to win the race. As much as I love the idea of Zotero, I just don't use Firefox on any of my machines or mobile devices. (I did enjoy using the open source Aigaion, but once my entire bibliography got trashed while upgrading I decided to stick with the pros). Mendeley can be buggy, but as one person said, "When it works, it works really well," and they're right.

Anyway, that's still just consumption and management of existing content, which is only half the problem. The other is creating and editing manuscripts.

In my field, everyone writes papers in LaTeX. Some journals and conferences occasionally permit the submission of Word documents, but personally I have a hard time understanding how anyone can do that without pulling their hair out. The last time I wrote an article in Word I spent several days dealing with misplaced references, unusual figure formats, caption problems, and incompatibility issues. When I write in LaTeX I can just focus on the writing and ignore everything else. (Kind of like writing a program in Java vs. C++)

But how to write LaTeX on the go? Due to a lack of multitasking in the present OS, as well as Apple forbidding any applications that compile code (e.g., no easy way to typeset your documents), what's a body to do?

I recently found LaTeX Lab, which lets you edit and typeset LaTeX Google Docs. Hooray! Almost there!

...sadly, Google Documents are not yet natively editable on the iPad.

I can, of course, remote login to my machines back at the office using virtualization software and edit LaTeX files there, but that just feels so inelegant. So we're not there just quite yet. I'm going to try a few things over the next few weeks and will report back.