The gossip today at WADS concerned the following story: Germany: 100 professors suspected of Ph.D. bribes. As the Associated Press reports, there's an ongoing scandal in which students paid up to 20,000 Euro to a company which promised to help them get their Ph.D. The company then kicked back some part of the money to the faculty who granted the students their degrees. Apparently this involves some 100 German faculty members from many different disciplines, although the article does point out that the suspect faculty are largely not full-time professors; not many details are available due to privacy laws.

California's legislature is attempting to pass regulations on private colleges and other postsecondary institutions, after a previous attempt was vetoed by the governor. In other news, postsecondary education in California is apparently now completely unregulated after a 2007 law on the subject expired.

According to the latest draft, this would have no affect on accredited institutions (which are explicitly exempted) but is intended to set minimum standards of teaching quality and programmatic stability for diploma mills and other unaccredited institutions.

This is a real email I received this morning from a Pakistani researcher:

Sir,

I need few research papers on my account. I am writing on my own.Because I have just 3 months and I have to complete 5 research papers. I can write 2-3 papers. I will be thankful to you if you please INCLUDE my name as 2nd, 3rd or 4th author in your research paper in any journal.

I will be thankful to you for that,

Regards,

Dude, what do you need me for? Use SCIgen and find some trash journal or conference that takes literally everything like that Schlangemann guy did.

(Editorial comparing the likely quality of the SCIgen papers and the 2-3 papers my correspondent intends to write himself omitted, because in a good 3 months I can write 2-3 papers myself and I have some pride in the quality of my own research. Maybe he is good enough to pull that part off. But somehow I doubt it.)

Not Elsevier, this time. The rumor is that SAGE Publications, the corporate publisher of the journal Political Theory, have bypassed the journal's editorial board and unilaterally imposed a new editor. As one commenter (6/17 6:44 on the first thread below) states, "The idea that the editorship of the journal is to be determined directly by them, apparently with no formal consultation with members of the existing editorial community, is like the idea of a faculty search being run by a couple of corporate honchos from a University's Board of Trustees, without consultation with current members of the faculty of the relevant department."

See here, here, and here for discussion, but so far (despite a signed statement by one of the editorial board members) there's a lot more heat than light.

Via Michael Nielsen: Don't Ask, Don't Tell: Rights Retention for Scholarly Articles. My mother, a poet, thinks it very strange when she hears about the system of scientific publishing in which we give away the copyrights for all our papers. In poetry, the authors retain their copyrights, and give permission to publishers to publish their poems; the same is true in fiction writing. The system works without problems: it doesn't prevent publishers from going after people who illicitly copy their works, and it doesn't prevent them from getting exclusive publication rights to the works in question. So what, exactly, do we gain by giving away our copyrights? What we lose is the right to distribute our own works online for free; but as this Harvard Law blog post observes, many of us do that anyway, hoping that the publishers won't demand that we take them down again or sue us for noncompliance with their contracts. And mostly it works, but there's always that risk...

Fortunately, there is a solution: free online journals. The Journal of Graph Algorithms and Applications and the new Journal of Computational Geometry both are free as in free beer (no cost to access the papers, no publication fees) but also free in the sense that authors retain copyright and grant the publisher a license to print the paper. Therefore, I am happy to echo Suresh and Ernie Jeff and announce that JoCG is now open for business and accepting submissions.

One question I had with the new journal was, if it's online-only, how permanent are its archives? If whoever's running the journal gets hit by a bus, what happens to all the old papers? In today's business climate one should wonder about that for commercial journals too, I suppose. JGAA has been handling the issue by collecting its old issues into printed volumes, but as I understand it that arrangement has run into difficulties, so I was curious to hear what JoCG intended. Anyway, the answer is that they're using the Open Journal Systems software and LOCKSS data security model, in which university libraries maintain local copies of open content in order to assure its permanence. So I am greatly reassured on that front.

Therefore, as Samir exhorts us, get those SoCG papers into a journal. And now that we finally have a noncommercial alternative to DCG, CGTA, and IJCGA, let's support it by sending our papers there.

My Ph.D. student Kevin Wortman passed his thesis defense this morning, and is now (or will be when they hold the graduation ceremony in a week) Dr. Wortman.

Kevin (not to be confused with my other recent co-authors Kevin and Kevin, nor with the Utah mathematician Kevin Wortman) has been working with me since 2005, when we had a paper in SoCG on minimum dilation stars, or, less formally, the problem of selecting an airline hub that minimizes the maximum ratio between the route length between two cities through the hub and the straight-line distance. Since then, we've written more papers about fast approximations to the minimum dilation star problem, and minimum dilation stars for metric spaces (to appear at WADS), both of which became parts of Kevin's thesis. The minimum dilation star has led to the definition of a new triangle center, and an interpretation of dilation as a smoothed distance function is a key component of another paper with Kevin on generalized Voronoi diagrams. Kevin's graph drawing algorithms also formed the basis of the somewhat monstrous graph drawing below, a more legible version of the drawings in this post that I needed for my recent work on squaregraphs.

Kevin has a job offer from California State University, Fullerton (also in Orange County, but with heavier teaching loads and less of the heavy emphasis on research that the University of California has) and will start there in August. Landing a job like that in the current economic climate is not easy (we just received word of a hard hiring freeze on our own campus) but well deserved.

Congratulations, Kevin!

Given the revelation that Elsevier published not just one, but six fake journals as advertising for drug companies, the El Naschie affair, the history of gun-running, and the general issue of commercial journal publishers profiting from academic research and locking away the results from the public to nobody's benefit but their own, I think it's time to take a public position that I will neither submit my own papers to Elsevier journals nor referee for them.

The two journals for which this decision would most affect me are (as Jeff already noted) CGTA, and the European Journal on Combinatorics. CGTA has been a very friendly place to publish computational geometry papers, and for now there are no non-commercial alternatives devoted to computational geometry. And EuJC is the main outlet for research in the cubical graph theory I've been working on lately. However, I'd rather have a clear conscience about how I publish my work than continue being part of the problem.

I do currently have one paper in submission to a different Elsevier journal (as well as one still to appear in CGTA); I've considered withdrawing the submitted paper over this issue, but it's already gone through a round of review and I don't want to feel like I've wasted some other academic's time over this issue. So those will stay (although I welcome feedback telling me to do otherwise) but no more.

ETA: More on Elsevier's fake-journal unit and on not publishing with Elsevier.

ETA2: John Baez does some price comparisons.

Scott Aaronson's recent blog post encouraging academics to contribute to Wikipedia has now been slashdotted. I don't expect a lot of new insight to come from the slashdot discussion, but if it encourages knowledgeable new Wikipedia contributors that can only be a good thing.

Remember the part where I posted that next year's European Symposium on Algorithms had been moved from Lund to Copenhagen due to “academic politics at Lund that I can't find any details of online”? Now Joachim posts some details. As he describes (and as I heard at ESA), Lund University has decided to stop offering degrees in computer science, and to close down the associated faculty which has included well-known researchers such as Thore Husfeldt, Christos Levcopoulos, and Andrzej Lingas. There would still be computer engineering at Lund, but not a computer science program.

Thirty recent cases of professors whose colleagues attempted to drum them out of the department, and a background story on mobbing behavior among professors. Two of the victims listed on this site have names that should be well known in the theory community: Jack Edmonds and Adrian Bondy. Via MF.

I'm visiting Eindhoven in the Netherlands this week, as the outside examiner for Elena Mumford's thesis defense which happened today (that is, Monday, though I guess it's officially Tuesday by the time I'm posting this) and which she passed with flying colors. Today I also heard the good news that Elena's paper (with me), Self-Overlapping Curves Revisited, which formed one of the chapters of her thesis, was accepted to SODA. Double congratulations, Dr. Mumford!

University Professor Accused of Passing Military Secret Documents. What he is accused of doing: hiring a Chinese student and an Iranian student and giving them access to his plasma physics research without first letting the government clear them, and bringing copies of his research with him on his laptop on a trip to China. His defense: "All the information he presented had already been made public in conferences and published work." But apparently that's not good enough because one of his colleagues already pled guilty.

In a turnaround from the usual story about a bad student threatening legal action against all the faculty who dare to assess the student as bad, a Dartmouth writing lecturer is threatening to sue her students (and some faculty, and Dartmouth itself) for discrimination. There are too many different postings to link to them all here, but there's a pretty thorough roundup at this post.

The claimed cause for the lawsuits is harassment but, as this story notes, that is not covered by the title under which the lecturer is threatening to sue.

One familiar name in all this is that of Tom Cormen, Dartmouth algorithms guru (and writing program director), mentioned in this interview as having committed the heinous crimes of (1) interrupting classes he was sitting in on, and (2) NOT interrupting the classes he was sitting in on when he stepped out of them.

Three long but interesting posts showed up today on Crooked Timber regarding academic freedom.

First, can anyone play this game? Or, is academic freedom really something different from free speech? Also covering why it might be a bad idea to have a lawyer who specializes in the First Amendment and calls it "a robust marketplace that will marginalize extremism" as Ivy League university president.

Second, some propositions. Moving from the east to the west coast, what is the philosophical basis for academic freedom? Is it a self-evident right? Is it a societal contract, in which academics receive quid (freedom) for quo (some other benefit to society that arises from free academics)? Is it just good management on the universities' part, to keep their employees happy? And what does this all have to do with whether Berkeley should continue to employ war criminal John Yoo?

And third, some resources. Less in-depth than the other two posts, but a useful list for those who find the blog coverage of this issue too shallow and want some real reading.

From the link below:

The world’s largest database on [scientific field], containing citations with abstracts to scientific articles, reports, books, and unpublished reports ... has been changed so that one can no longer search the term [XXX] ... As the representative from [the database] states, “As a federally funded project, we decided this was best for now.”

See this link (or these earlier ones) for details. And don't tell me I'm censoring anything for leaving out those details here: I've left out the key words describing exactly who at Hopkins runs this database and what they censored, deliberately, not as a matter of censorship but because I think this is appalling no matter the field and I'd prefer to focus more on issues of academic freedom and less on any emotional reactions people might have to the specific topic. It's a term that is relevant and likely to be searched within this field of scientific inquiry. It's still present in its uncensored glory if you follow the link.

ETA: Wired, /., BB; C+L update, NYT, JHU.

I've seen advice floating around the net on several occasions regarding the risks of untenured academics (whose youth makes them more likely to be into recent technologies such as card readers paper tape line printers crt terminals graphical user interfaces social networking software) using said software to blog under their own names.

Quotes like the following are typical: “pretenured professors should be aware of the risks of blogging and develop strategies to avoid or mitigate the pitfalls of blogging without a tenure net.”

I had thought that this was primarily about not arousing the suspicion of the old fogies more senior faculty who will be deciding hiring and tenure decisions but don't know about or care about blogging, and that the math/CS blogs are in general innocuous and technical enough that anyone who reads them would find them mostly harmless (physics is another story). But after seeing a few recent exchanges (which I will not link to) I'm starting to think that the dangers are real...

Which is to say: if you aren't getting comments on your posts suggesting that you are coming across in an unflattering light, this post isn't aimed at you, but if you are, it might be worthwhile paying attention to them.

ETA: An interesting related post.

The Quantum Pontiff asks about pseudonyms in scientific publication. Several good examples are mentioned in the comments, including Bourbaki (group publication under an individual name), Kovalevskaya and Germain (women publishing under men's names to avoid prejudice), and Student (of Student distribution fame, William Seally Gosset, an employee of the Guinness brewery who wasn't allowed by his employer to publish under his real name). Drink Guinness!

Since someone asked me what this was about at SODA and this gives me an excuse to remove the bookmark from my desktop: the perfect coffee mug. From the Girl Genius web comic, a poster (and coffee mug) in imitation of Mucha's art nouveau beer ads. Larger web graphic version here. I bookmarked it instead of just buying myself one because I mostly drink espresso and hence am not in great need of mugs. But if I did need another coffee mug, I'd want this one.

Google sketchup for dummies. Watching a couple of these videos helped me get from completely clueless to able to make primitive and clumsy models in sketchup, Google's free 3d modeling software. Much like watching a video or two on woodcraft might help me to nail a couple two-by-fours together without hammering my thumb, but it wouldn't get me to the point of building fine furniture. Maybe if I bought the book the videos accompany, I'd be able to do more than that, but I'm not yet convinced that it's the program for me. In any case the videos are free and maybe helpful to others.

And, God Plays Dice discovers my web site on Euler's polyhedral formula. A discussion on which proof to use in one's lectures ensues. Sorry, no commercial beverage or book tie-ins on this one. This space available for your ad?

Peter Woit has provided an update on an ongoing plagiarism scandal involving at least 60 physics papers, by several groups of students and professors. The arXiv has replaced the papers with descriptions of the plagiarism, but they were also published in at least 18 journals which have been much slower to react. One commenter at Woit's blog claims that the corruption extends to high levels of administration at certain universities, and that these institutions have been wrapping themselves in the flag and denouncing exposers of the plagiarism as unpatriotic instead of rooting out the problem. One item that shocked me (also from the comments at Woit's post) was that one of the plagiarized papers, gr-qc/0011027, has a much lower citation count than the paper that plagiarized it, gr-qc/0505079.

In the meantime, the romance novel publishing world has been hit by the news that one of its most prolific authors, Cassie Edwards, is a serial plagiarist of multiple authors, well known and otherwise. See also: Newsweek, NY Times, Telegraph. Her publisher “takes any and all allegations of plagiarism very seriously” but the only thing we've seen from (allegedly) Edwards herself involves wrapping herself in the flag her claims of having Native American ancestry and denouncing exposers of the plagiarism as unpatriotic picking on her the way (showing her deep grasp of the history of her subject) “Native American Indians have always been picked on throughout history”.

I suppose it's too much to ask that the people with the chutzpah to steal from others and claim the credit for themselves, when caught, behave properly apologetically?

How to criticize computer scientists, by Doug Comer. Containing the important observation that one should aim different types of barb at theorists and experimentalists, with useful tips for telling the two apart. I found the theorist parts most amusing, probably because the shoe fits.

This doesn't seem to be new, but it was new to me. Found via some automated web-scraper fake blog that for some reason gets through Google blog search's inadequate spam filters. I won't bother linking to it.

He still has to turn in the thesis itself, but my student Josiah Carlson (chouyu_31) passed his final public oral examination today. This seems as good an excuse as any to talk a little about Josiah's thesis work, concerning several problems of optimization in trees.

( Optimal pruning )

( Optimal source location )

( Optimal-angle tree drawing )

Again, congratulations, Josiah!