Recursivity

When Wish Replaces Thought is the title of an interesting but flawed book by Steven Goldberg.

It seems particularly appropriate, though, when looking at this bizarre press release from a guy who calls himself "Adam Dreamhealer" and claims to "[conduct] unique group energy treatments around the globe as he coordinates the energy of all participants into a coherent frequency."

I'd be willing to bet that this guy really believes he has magic powers. But wishing doesn't make it so. I'd be more convinced he's got some powers if he could heal a few amputees on camera.

[Hat tip: Terry Polevoy]

Here is a fatuous letter to the editor, published in the Princeton Alumni Weekly.

The author claims "Life is like a great stage. Besides myriad performers, there are two principal ones. The crucial choice in life is how to specify them as to their order and manner of spelling. One choice is “Me, god.” The other is “God, me.” My theory is that this choice determines one’s choice of ethics."

But what if your choice is "Family, students, friends, colleagues, neighbors, and me" and "god" doesn't even figure at all?

If you're god-soaked, you think everyone else spends all their time thinking about your god. But you're wrong.

The Voynich manuscript is a strange book, written in a strange script, with strange illustrations.



Yesterday I attended a talk on the Voynich Manuscript (VM), at MIT, by Kevin Knight of USC's Information Sciences Institute. Here's a brief summary of his talk:


The manuscript consists of 235 pages on vellum, with color drawings of plants, nymphs, stars, etc. It contains about 30,000
words written in an unknown script, and is owned by Yale University.

It has a character set that has not been observed in any other document. It is broken up into sections called "herbal",
"astrological", "biological", "cosmological", "pharmacological", and a pure text section at the end. These names reflect the pictures in each section. For example, the "herbal" section contains pictures of unknown plants being grafted onto other plants. The "biological" section depicts small nudes in baths with interconnecting tubes of liquids. The "pharmacological" section shows something that has been interpreted as a medicine jar.

A cover letter of Joannes Marcus Marci of Cronland was found tucked in the manuscript. The letter claims that the book once belonged to Emperor Rudolf II and that Rudolf beliefed that Roger Bacon was the author.

There have been many attempts to decipher the book. One was made by William Newbold at the University of Pennsylvania, He claimed that each letter consisted of many other Greek letters, which were anagrams holding the real meaning of the manuscript, and "deciphered" it on this basis. His decipherment is now regarded as completely bogus.

Athanasius Kircher once owned the book, from 1665-1680.

The Voynich script consists of between 23 and 40 distinct characters. (It is hard to say for sure, since some characters appear to be compounds of others.) There are no signs of corrections, which suggests that the manuscript was copied from some other source. There is an unusual distribution of word lengths - most "words" are of lengths 3, 4, and 5 letters. Many words are doubled, and some are tripled.

The cryptographer William Friedman worked on the manuscript during World War II. There are many claimed decipherments. A 2004 Scientific American article by Gordon Rugg, however, suggests that the manuscript is just gibberish. Perhaps Voynich faked it himself.

Kevin Knight discussed some of his own attacks on the manuscript using clustering techniques. For example, if you try breaking up the English alphabet into two types, say a and b, and use expectation maximization to generate two clusters, you get AEIOUy as one cluster, and the consonants in another. Doing the same for the Voynich manuscript, however, doesn't generate anything particularly meaningful.

You could also try this kind of clustering with the words of the manuscript instead of the letters. When you do so, you get two clusters: the words in the "herbal", "astrological", and "pharmacological" sections predominantly fall into one cluster, and the words in the "biological" and "cosmological" sections predominantly fall into another. [To me, this suggests that the manuscript probably had at least two authors.]

Voynich "B" is the "biological" + "astrological" sections. You can then try to divide the words in this section into more classes. If you do this for English, you get a cluster with words like "my, a, an, the,..."; another with "and, but, next,...", another with "had, asked, could, have, are, is, would,...", another with "for, at, in, no, that, be, but,..." etc. If you do this for Voynich you also get clusters but the meaning is less clear.


My guess is that the manuscript is some form of hoax, but I'd be delighted to be proved wrong.

I reviewed Stephen Baker's book, The Numerati, for the Notices of the American Mathematical Society, and you can read it here.

With all the hagiography going on for conservative "intellectual" Irving Kristol, who died on September 18, let's not forget one of his many idiotic statements: that Darwinism is on the way out because it "is really no longer accepted so easily by [many] biologists and scientists."

As Glenn Morton has exhaustively shown, the trope that "more and more scientists doubt evolution" is one of the oldest falsehoods in creationism. But then, Kristol believed that not all truths were suitable for all people, an echo of Martin Luther's view that lying for his god was acceptable.

Anti-evolution idiocy seemingly ran in the family. In 1959, Kristol's wife Gertrude Himmelfarb wrote a terrible book, Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution, demonstrating a lack of understanding of biology and a warped view of Darwin's influence. One perceptive reviewer penned that Himmelfarb had "an advanced case of Darwinitis, a complaint that afflicts those of a literary bent and strong attachments to pre-scientific culture, who find in the theory of evolution a disturbing and mysterious challenge to their values". Kristol wrote a favorable review of Himmelfarb's book for Encounter, without bothering to mention that he was Himmelfarb's husband. So much for Kristol's ethics.

Kristol wrote a piece for the September 30 1986 New York Times about evolution. Here are a few excerpts:

Practically all biologists, when they engage in scientific discourse, assume that the earth's species were not created by divine command. As scientists, they could not make any other assumption. But they agree on little else - a fact which our textbooks are careful to ignore, lest it give encouragement to the religious. There is no doubt that most of our textbooks are still written as participants in the ''warfare'' between science and religion that is our heritage from the 19th century. And there is also little doubt that it is this pseudo-scientific dogmatism that has provoked the current religious reaction...

Though this theory [the neo-Darwinian synthesis] is usually taught as an established scientific truth, it is nothing of the sort. It has too many lacunae. Theological evidence does not provide us with the spectrum of intermediate species we would expect. Moreover, laboratory experiments reveal how close to impossible it is for one species to evolve into another, even allowing for selective breeding and some genetic mutation. There is unquestionably evolution within species: every animal breeder is engaged in exemplifying this enterprise. But the gradual transformation of the population of one species into another is a biological hypothesis, not a biological fact.

Moreover, today a significant minority of distinguished biologists and geneticists find this hypothesis incredible and insist that evolution must have proceeded by ''quantum jumps,'' caused by radical genetic mutation. This copes with some of the problems generated by neo-Darwinist orthodoxy, but only to create others. We just don't know of any such ''quantum jumps'' that create new species, since most genetic mutations work against the survival of the individual. So this is another hypothesis - no less plausible than the orthodox view, but still speculative.

And there are other speculations about evolution, some by Nobel prize-winning geneticists, that border on the bizarre - for example, that life on earth was produced by spermatozoa from outer space. In addition, many younger biologists (the so-called ''cladists'') are persuaded that the differences among species - including those that seem to be closely related -are such as to make the very concept of evolution questionable.

So ''evolution'' is no simple established scientific orthodoxy, and to teach it as such is an exercise in dogmatism...

I imagine we'll be seeing some biographies of Kristol coming out. I can only hope that any honest biographer will make space to assess Kristol's ignorance of biology and his arrogance in thinking that he understood it better than professional biologists.

Here are some tips to give a really bad talk at a scientific meeting. The more tips you follow, the more likely you are to be memorably awful.

These are all based on talks I have witnessed.

1. Come with a retinue of students of the same ethnic background, assert a proof for a famous unsolved problem, give a proof for completely elementary simple cases and omit the proof of the main result, assert your results have been overlooked by those of a different ethnic background, insult established scientists who have recently made progress on similar problems, and have your students cheer wildly when you are done. Extra points if your talk is in "call and response" format.

2. Speak so softly that even with a microphone you are completely inaudible.

3. Speak rapidly with an extremely strong accent, and have your slides full of incomprehensible sentences that look like they were drawn randomly from a bag of scrabble tiles.

4. Sigh frequently during your talk, as if giving it is the most boring thing you can possibly imagine, and you can't wait for the damn thing to be over.

5. Give your talk by writing with a marker on overhead transparencies, and when you run out of transparencies, lick off one of the ones you already used. While it is still wet, put the slide, wet side down, on the projector so the ink mixes with your saliva and spreads all over the glass plate of the overhead.

6. Begin by insulting the organizers. State that you are so important, they should have found a larger room for you to speak in. Say that everyone else is stupid. Do not give any details, simply refer the audience to your web page.

7. Consistently point at the screen of your computer with your finger, as if you are convinced that by doing so the audience will magically see what you are pointing at on the screen of the projector.

8. Give results in your talk that are identical to those of the previous speaker. When you are questioned about it, deny that the results are the same.

I'm sure these helpful tips will create a memorable experience for you and your audience.

My mother, Louise Shallit, died this morning at 12:55 AM.

More information can be found here.

The obituary from the Inquirer is here.

And the obituary from the Daily News is here.

Poor Michael Behe.

The eminent professor Behe, author of Darwin's Black Box, which was named the 92nd best book of the last century by the geniuses at National Review, is unhappy. I guess he has a lot to be unhappy about, what with his University department posting a disclaimer about his work on their web pages. But no, it's not that his colleagues think his work is junk that is bothering him this time.

This time, it's about something much more sinister. It seems that John McWhorter, a linguist with no biological training that I can detect, recently interviewed Behe on bloggingheads.tv. In the interview, McWhorter gushes that "I just read your book The Edge of Evolution from 2007 and I found it absolutely shattering. I mean, this is a very important book. And yet I sense that from the reputation, or the reception of your book from 10+ years ago, Darwin's Black Box, that it may be hard to get a lot of people to understand why the book is important." Later, he claims that The Edge of Evolution was one of the most important books he's ever read. It seems that McWhorter didn't bother to read or understand the criticism of Behe's claims by actual biologists, such as Dawkins, Coyne, and Miller. Instead, Behe was able to babble without being challenged.

What happened next? Predictably, people who actually know something about evolution and Behe's misrepresentations complained, McWhorter had second thoughts, and the video was removed from bloggingheads.tv. Although I wouldn't have published this gushing, ignorant interview to begin with, I wouldn't have removed it afterwards, either -- it's a useful record of McWhorter's fawning stupidity and Behe's unsupported claims. Luckily, it's been archived.

What interests me more is Behe's reaction to the whole affair. He describes those who complained as "cyber bullies" and "internet mobs". (A bully, in Behe's view, apparently being someone who does not buy his bogus claims, and an "internet mob" is a few people who complained.) He also compares himself to Nikolai Yezhov and his detractors to Joseph Stalin.

Poor Michael Behe. While bloggingheads.tv showed very poor judgment in getting a non-biologist to interview Behe, and even poorer judgment in deleting the interview after posting it, Behe's reaction to the affair is hyperbolic. Behe had an interview deleted; he wasn't murdered in a basement. And the irony is even greater, since Behe posted his complaints on a blog which does not allow any comments!

When you make stupid and unsupported claims, you're going to get criticized -- and sometimes harshly. That's science. Deal with it.

I had this conversation this morning in a Shaw's supermarket:

Me: Can I buy a Charlie Card here?

Clerk: A Jolly Cahd?

Me: No, a Chcharrrlie Card.

Clerk: Oh, a Chahlie Cahd!

Me: ???

OK, time to go watch the Kingston trio now:

When I first moved to Canada in 1990, I was struck by how unfriendly it seemed compared to places in the US that I had lived. For example, if you meet someone in the hallway at an American university, and say, "Hi, how are you?", you will nearly always get a response along the lines of "Fine, how are you?" But not so in Canada. Instead, you will typically get the response "Fine." -- and then the person will walk on, without inquiring about your own health.

For many years I found this astonishingly rude; sometimes I even resorted to mumbling "And yes, I'm fine too, thank you very much for asking" under my breath. Then someone explained to me that in fact it was I who was being rude, since in Canada inquiring about someone's health is considered too intrusive. Instead of rudeness, what I was witnessing was the clash of expectations. Although I understand this on a rational level now, I still continue to find it rude viscerally.

Here's another example: go to any American city, stand on a street corner, open up a map, and look at it. Within 30 seconds, someone will ask you, "Can I help you find something?" or "Do you need any help?" Yet I've done the same experiment over and over again in Toronto, and after 10 minutes still no one volunteered any help. The one time someone did, it was an American tourist! As my wife explained, this is not an example of Canadian rudeness; Canadians simply have a different notion of personal space. They find it rude to approach a stranger and casually offer assistance when none may be needed. Americans find it simple friendliness.

I am struck by this difference now that I've temporarily relocated to the Boston area for my sabbatical. We were standing in Kendall Square looking at the map, and just as the stereotype dictates, within 15 seconds someone asked us if we needed help. Just now we came back from a brief bike ride in a Boston suburb; as my son and I looked at the street map, a woman asked "Can I help you find something?"

For the moment, I'm glad to be living in a place where my cultural expectations match those of my neighbors.

I've lived in Canada since 1990 (not counting our sabbaticals). As an American citizen living in Canada, I occasionally have to consult the American Consulate in Toronto - for example, to renew a passport - and over the past 19 years, the service has gotten steadily worse... and worse.

It used to be you could call and actually reach a human to ask a question - no longer. Now you're stuck with the information provided on the Internet (which is often out of date, incorrect, or loaded with broken links).

It used to be you could show up at the Consulate in person without any advance notice and get your business done. But not any longer. I just got e-mail from the Consulate saying "an appointment will be required for all services at the U.S. Consulate General in Toronto".

The last trip we made to the Consulate to get US passports for our kids took up the whole morning. First, we were forced to go all the way back to our car (parked blocks away) because they would not allow us to take our cell phones in. The final indignity was that they would not even pay to mail the passports to us; we had to go out of the consulate and across the street and provide the Consulate with self-addressed express mail envelopes (a requirement not mentioned anywhere in any of the application forms).

The Consulate General is supposed to represent the interests of US citizens living abroad. At least in Toronto, they're doing a really poor job of it.

Well, most of the boxes are unpacked, and we're working on getting the kids registered for school. I have an office (sort of) and we've found a local place for bagels. My sabbatical has begun!

I'm looking forward to a year of working on papers and book projects, learning new things, and catching up on work that has been postponed for too long.

Where are we? Well, the picture is a hint. I'll give another hint tomorrow.

Serial liar Sarah Palin, in her farewell address as governor of Alaska, said,

"And first, some straight talk for some, just some in the media because another right protected for all of us is freedom of the press, and you all have such important jobs reporting facts and informing the electorate, and exerting power to influence. You represent what could and should be a respected honest profession that could and should be the cornerstone of our democracy. Democracy depends on you, and that is why, that's why our troops are willing to die for you. So, how 'bout in honor of the American soldier, ya quit makin' things up?"

If I were in the media, I'd say "You first, Sarah."

As it is, my irony meter broke reading that.

Check out http://www.zaped.info/, a website that changes Wikipedia content into something bizarre and occasionally delightful.

From today's page:

"Harrison was built-in in North Bend, Ohio, and at age 21 confused to Indianapolis, Indiana, area he became a arresting accompaniment politician."

"During a accent in Montreal, French President Charles de Gaulle declared "Long reside chargeless Quebec!", a account that was interpreted as abutment for Quebec independence from Canada."

"Judy and Alfred were two 90-inch (2.3 m) alpine beef locomotives distinctively advised to fit beneath a arch at Par that was alone 96 inches (2.4 m) high?"

"Today's featured picture: A radar angel of the surface of Venus, centered at 180 degrees east longitude... This blended angel was created from mapping by the Magellan probe, supplemented by abstracts aggregate by the Pioneer orbiter, with apish hues based on blush images recorded by Venera 13 and 14."


It's like moving to a Bizarro world!

My guess is that the algorithm simply chooses words at random from a Wikipedia page, and then replaces them with a random synonym in a consistent way.

In the "open access" model of scholarly journal publishing, articles are freely available online for anyone to read. Sounds great, right?

There's a problem, though. Where does the money come from to provide editorial staff and web hosting? Typically, it comes from fees charged to authors. This is nothing new - some scholarly journals have had "page charges" for years. Authors are charged a fee on the size of the article, and this fee is usually paid for by your university or your research grant, if you are luck enough to have one.

Print journals have traditionally waived page charges for authors with no grant or authors from third world countries. Unfortunately, some greedy publishers have not chosen to issue the same kinds of waivers for their open access journals.

Scholarly Research Exchange is one such greedy publisher. They recently sent me a solicitation to submit articles to their journal SRX Mathematics. When I asked the "journal publishing editor", Michael Fayez, what their waiver policy is, he replied "SRX Mathematics totally depends on those mandatory charges to run the journal. So, I regret to inform you that we cannot grant waivers." Considering that their fee is $400 per article, which is more than most people in 3rd world countries make in a year, their policy ensures that only papers from rich countries will be included. That's a shame.

I won't be submitting to this journal.

Like most intelligent design advocates, Stephen Meyer, director of the Discovery Institute’s Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture, has a little problem telling the truth.

I first encountered his dissembling at an intelligent design conference held at Calvin College in May 2001. Meyer had written in 2000 that "Systems that are characterized by both specificity and complexity (what information theorists call "specified complexity'') have "information content''."

The only problem is, information theorists don't use the term "specified complexity" and they don't refer to "specificity" when discussing information. At the time, there was precisely one mathematician who was pushing the term "specified complexity", and that was William Dembski, who tried (but failed) to create a new, mathematically-rigorous definition at information which (were it coherent) would be at odds with how information is defined by other mathematicians and computer scientists.

I went up to Meyer at the conference and asked him, "You wrote that 'information theorists' (plural) talk about specified complexity. Who are they?" He then admitted that he knew no one but Dembski (and Dembski himself is not much of an information theorist, having published exactly 0 papers so far on the topic in the peer-reviewed scientific literature).

So the use of the plural, when Meyer knew perfectly well that information theorists do not use the term "specified complexity", was just a lie - and a lie intended to deceive the reader that his claims are supported by the scientific community, when they are not.

(Another anecdote: while I was waiting in line to ask Meyer this question, I was behind a woman who couldn't wait to meet Meyer. She gushed as she shook his hand, saying she was so honored to meet the man who was responsible for recruiting so many people for Christ through his work. He smiled and thanked her. And they claim ID is not religious!)

Meyer was also caught dissembling about the "No Child Left Behind" education bill, falsely claiming that it obligated Ohio to teach about alternative theories.

Now Meyer is back with a new book, and an op-ed in the Boston Globe to help flog his book. In the op-ed, Meyer claims, "Information - whether inscribed in hieroglyphics, written in a book, or encoded in a radio signal - always arises from an intelligent source." But this is the same old bogus ID claim that is repeated endlessly and endlessly, and it's not true. At least it's not true if you understand "information" in the sense that it is understood by mathematicians and computer scientists. For example, in the Kolmogorov theory, any random source produces information.

But then again, Meyer, with his little honesty problem, doesn't seem too concerned with the truth. What's important is, as that woman ahead of me in line told him, saving souls for Jesus.

Martin Luther once said, "What harm would it do, if a man told a good strong lie for the sake of the good and for the Christian church...a lie out of necessity, a useful lie, a helpful lie, such lies would not be against God, he would accept them." It seems that Stephen Meyer would agree.

Academic publisher Elsevier, not content with raking in the money from all the expensive academic journals they print, is now following in the footsteps of illustrious organizations such as the American Biographical Institute: when your article gets published, they are offering wooden plaques celebrating the glorious occasion.

I recently got the following e-mail from Elsevier:


New! To commemorate your publication, you can now order printed author copies of the journal issue featuring your article, a unique Certificate of Publication, and/or customized full-color posters featuring your article. Please visit https://authororders.elsevier.com/
to learn more.


And indeed, you can find there a wide variety of choices to "commemorate" your publication, including:

- copy of the journal issue in which your article appears;
- "A customized full-color poster commemorating the publication of your article, featuring the article first page and a personalized reference."
- a "Certificate of Publication" which is "delivered ready to display in a high-quality frame, dark brown wood with gold trim."
- "A full-color, 16.5" x 23.4" sized poster of the cover of the issue in which your article appears, displaying a personalized reference to your publication."

Way to be classy, Elsevier!

Every month or so I get a solicitation in the mail like the following one:

Dear Author

Hello?

As a general chair of GESTS, I am happy to invite you for the acceptance of yourpaper to be published in the GESTS International Transactions.


The GESTS is a nonprofit academic society organized by voluntary members aroundthe world since 2002. Every month, we publish the GESTS international transactionswhich are the regular paper journals on CSE and CSP, written by noble authors in more than 50 different countries.

This e-mail has been sent only to the authors who chose as a high quality paper that had been accepted as one of two parts of GESTS international transactions as follows:

-Part 1:

Paper Number : CSE775-727
Paper Journal: GESTS International Transactions on Computer Science and Engineering
Paper Field : Computer and Its Application

Volume Number: Vol.54 and No.3
ISSN Number : 1738-6438
Publication date: July 30, 2009.
Journal Type : hard copy with a green color cover
Online Journals: publication on the web in parallel to the printed journals.

-Part 2:
Paper Number : CSP775-112
Journal Title: GESTS International Transactions on Communication and Signal Processing
Paper Fields : Information Communication Engineering, Signal Processing, Image and Video Processing, Acoustics, etc.
Volume Number: Vol.13 and No.7
ISSN Number : 1738-9682
Issue Date : July 30, 2009.
Journal Type : hard copy with an orange color cover
On-line Issue: publication on the web in parallel to the printed journals.

Please, click the mouse on the "Major Conference Author's Paper Submission" at the home page, http://www.gests.org/. If the paper will be submitted through the web page, we will e-mail back with the details of how to proceed the submission of registration fees and copyright format.

Important dates for publication of the GESTS international transactions are :
- an improved paper and copyright format by July 27, 2009, ( http://www.gests.org/gests-full.rtf )
- the acceptance notification within ten days receiving your paper,
- the registration format with fees by July 30, 2009,
- the publication of GESTS International journal by July 30, 2009,
- and delivery start from GESTS to authors by August 10, 2009.

If you have a new paper or an improved version to be issued in GESTS international transactions, please, send us the final camera-ready version by July 27, 2009. At least one author of each paper must be accomplished with the registration.

We are looking forward to see your contributions at GESTS.

Sincerely yours,

Dr. Bruce M. Bae, a general chair of GESTS,

http://www.gests.org/


I particularly like the "noble authors" part -- not to be confused with authors who have won the Nobel prize, of course.

The idea is, of course, that you submit your paper to this journal that nobody reads and then they charge you "registration fees". You'd have to be pretty dumb to fall for this one.

From Friday's Waterloo Region Record, in the Letters section, comes this gem, from Ray Zehr of Shakespeare, Ontario.

"...My answer is, true reality can only exist if God alone created intelligence because God is perfect then intelligence is true and reality is true.

"If you believe in evolution without God then you have to accept the fact that reality probably does not exist. This is probably the universal question that science has shied away from for centuries and left our youth hanging in the closet..."


It's not our youth, but somebody's brain, that was left hanging in the closet.

Seen in Hoosick, New York:

Based on the description of the book in the World Scientific Press catalogue, I asked my university library to order a book entitled Automata Theory by Matthew Simon. I did so because it seemed to cover many topics not available elsewhere. I now regret my decision, although looking at the book did provide some amusement value. It is weird.

The first thing that a reader notices is each chapter begins with lengthy quotations about the history of slavery. No, I am not kidding. Chapter 1, for example, begins as follows:


TABLE OF MIXTURES

TO BECOME WHITE

White and Negro produces mulatto
Half white, half black

White and mulatto produces quadroon
Three-quarters white and one-quarter Negro...


etc. This strange choice is explained by the author as follows: "While this book focuses upon language, a reminder of the relationship between language, social being, responsibility, and historical context will start each chapter."

The typesetting and notation are really awful. For example, the author uses the capital letter "X" to represent ×, the cross product symbol. Terms are used without being defined: for example, "semi-automata" is used on page 7 but has not been defined. Some material is simply repeated; for example, both pages 9 and 11 contain a definition of semigroups (which are sometimes written "semi-groups"). The author frequently uses notation and abbreviations that are unique to him, such as "NDFSA" for what everyone else calls "NFA", etc.

Most of the book consists of pages and pages and pages of examples, with little explanation of what the examples are intended to illustrate. When theorems are stated, they often miss the point. For example, the pumping lemma for regular languages is stated as follows: "If an FSA has n+1 states and accepts a string ω where ω = a₀ a₁ ... a_n+1, thus |ω| = n+2, then the FSA accepts an infinite number of strings." But this is not the pumping lemma, which is a statement about languages, not automata.

This is, without a doubt, the strangest book I have every read on the theory of computation. I honestly don't know how this book ever got published.

There is also an interesting positive review of the book on Amazon:


Automata Theory by Matthew Simon is an unusually welcome book. The many examples shown include subjects not often covered, such as: the Chomsky-Schutzenberger Theorem, Kuroda Normal Forms, Ginsberg-Griebach Theorem, Simple Pushdown Automata, Syntactic Pattern Recognition, and Shape Grammers. The use of a consistent and standard notation throughout the book is also welcome, as many different subjects are discussed. The focus of the first chapter is upon Semigroups and Automata Theory(including wreath products), from a more elementary, less abstract, less mathematical viewpoint than that found in the dozen or so books covering this subject. Thus examples from automata theory are emphasized. While departures from the notation of Clifford and Preston do take place, the notation is as close as one can come to being standard, as no standard notation currently exists. Each chapter starts with a commentary or quotes relating to subjects that arise in socially oriented linguistics and automata theory. Such commentary is often omitted in books covering automata theory but is of interest to people studying Anthropological Linguistics, General (historical)Linguistics, Philosophical Linguistics, and other academic areas dealing with linguistics, but often neglected by the engineering, Computer Science and Mathematics communities.


I leave it up to the reader to try to figure out who might have written this review.

For many years I have boycotted the local United Way because of their unwillingness to fund Planned Parenthood. My attempts to address the issue with the leaders of United Way KW were always met with evasion, and in some cases, misleading accounts of the reasons for their refusal. The real reason, of course, was that at Planned Parenthood one could learn about abortion as an option for an unwanted pregnancy (although the local Planned Parenthood does not actually do abortions). At the same time, the local United Way was happy to fund Birthright, an organization which refuses to refer women for abortions if that is their choice.

Now, I'm happy to say, the local United Way has seemingly seen the light. They gave a grant of $8,000 to PP for their "Women's Wellness" educational day and for a pilot project concerning Sudanese and Afghan women. Strangely enough, though, the United Way's list of funded agencies doesn't include Planned Parenthood. Maybe the local United Way still isn't willing to be forthright about their decisions.

I'm going to continue to boycott United Way until they fund Planned Parenthood and proudly say so on their website.

Just when you thought the saga of clueless and soon to be ex-governor Sarah Palin couldn't become any stupider, she (via her law firm) is now threatening to sue people who say bad things about her for defamation:

"To the extent several websites, most notably liberal Alaska blogger Shannyn Moore, are now claiming as “fact” that Governor Palin resigned because she is “under federal investigation” for embezzlement or other criminal wrongdoing, we will be exploring legal options this week to address such defamation. This is to provide notice to Ms. Moore, and those who re-publish the defamation, such as Huffington Post, MSNBC, the New York Times and The Washington Post, that the Palins will not allow them to propagate defamatory material without answering to this in a court of law. The Alaska Constitution protects the right of free speech, while simultaneously holding those “responsible for the abuse of that right.” Alaska Constitution Art. I, Sec. 5. http://ltgov.state.ak.us/constitution.php?section=1. These falsehoods abuse the right to free speech; continuing to publish these falsehoods of criminal activity is reckless, done without any regard for the truth, and is actionable."

Considering that Palin is a documented serial liar, it's pretty rich when she threatens to sue others for what she claims is lying.

I heard something on WHYY-FM (Philadelphia) last Sunday that positively gave me goose bumps. On the 2nd hour of the show American Routes, they played the demo-tape version of Janis Ian's song, "Society's Child". Janis Ian arrived in New York at the age of 14, and one year later, in 1966, she recorded "Society's Child" on the home tape recorder of Sis Cunningham and Gordon Friesen, publishers of Broadside.

It is a phenomenal recording for anyone, let alone a 15-year-old. You can listen to it here: click, choose the June 24th show, and then click on "Listen to Hour 2". Or you can go directly to the show as an mp3 file here. In both of these links, "Society's Child" begins at 16:20 into the show, so don't expect to hear it right away.

Here's a rarity: a July 1967 interview with my father, Joseph Shallit, conducted by interviewer Gene Poll, about my father's piece in the Reader's Digest, "We're Up to Deuteronomy". Yes, we really did read and discuss the Bible at dinner when I was 9 years old. The interview is in mp3 format.

This fine moose is decked out to celebrate Canada Day. But it lives in Bennington, Vermont.

Just in case you didn't know what an arrow was, this sign on a Kitchener street helpfully explains it.

Whenever I pass by this dry cleaner's, I am always struck by the logo. The arrow through "speedy" is obviously meant to convey speed, but for me it just looks like the word "speedy" has been struck out. They used to be speedy, it says to me, but aren't any longer. Logo fail!

Yesterday I attended a talk by Christian Scientist Barbara Fife entitled "The Power of Prayer", held at the University of Waterloo in the building where I work, the Davis Centre. Although the room can hold about 250 people, I would estimate that no more than about 25 people were present.

For those who don't know much about it, Christian Science is a sect of Christianity that maintains unsupported claims about "spiritual healing". (For a critical look at Christian Science claims, see my article here.)

Supposed evidence for Christian Science claims is nearly always anecdotal, and Barbara Fife did not disappoint there. She started with an anecdote about her husband who wanted to quit smoking. She prayed for him, and he was able to quit. This was offered in support of the idea that prayer can bring about change. From a scientific point of view, however, this kind of claim is essentially worthless, since it does not have any control. What if she had not prayed? Maybe her husband would have quit even sooner! Without a control, it is impossible to conclude that prayer was effective.

Ms. Fife discussed various definitions of prayer. In one definition, a prayer is a petition. Prayer, she claimed, is more effective if it is for self-improvement rather than material gain. Her prayer for her husband was unselfish and so it was answered.

Ms. Fife discussed various aspects of Mary Baker Eddy's life. She claimed Ms. Eddy was "scientific", when in fact Eddy conducted no experiments, had no scientific training, and was completely unfamiliar with the notion of double-blind study.

Ms. Fife related the story of her son, who had a bike accident and hit his head while at Principia College, the only Christian Science institution of higher learning in the world. Afterwards he threw up. Although his face was gouged, he was only treated with prayer and cleaning and bandaging of the wound and quickly recovered. Three weeks later at graduation his wounds were hardly visible. Again, this was offered as proving the power of prayer. But it is not surprising at all that one can naturally recover, without prayer, in three weeks from a wound like that. And it is certainly irresponsible, after a head injury with vomiting, that one does not get checked out by a competent neurologist.

She said that "God had a divine purpose" for everyone and nothing could change that, certainly not a bike accident. It makes me wonder, what was the divine unchangeable purpose behind Pol Pot?

Prayer, Ms. Fife claimed, helps us see and think differently. It is not to help God hear us; it is for us to be close to God.

She told the story of a woman who had uterine fibroid tumors. After she took up Christian Science the tumors shrank and disappeared. She did not mention the fact that fibroid tumors often shrink spontaneously, and this is perhaps due to changes in estrogen levels.

Ms. Fife claimed that Mary Baker Eddy's book Science and Health actually heals; there is a 130-year history of healings. Mary Baker Eddy "proved everything she wrote". There is a law of God underlying Creation. Anyone can pray and find healing.

All told, it was a fairly typical Christian Science performance: vague stories of healings, usually with no names given; claims of miraculous healing following prayer; no controlled studies ever referred to. After tepid applause, Ms. Fife did not take questions from the audience.

I went up afterwards and asked her, if Christian Science healing is effective, why is Principia College one of the very few universities in the US that has recurring measles epidemics? Why did Mary Baker Eddy need glasses? Why didn't she heal herself of poor vision? Why do Christian Scientists live shorter lives than non-Christian Scientists? Fife had no answers to any of these questions, saying only that Christian Science healers "need to do better". She said she had not read Simpson's study comparing longevity of Christian Scientists and non-Christian Scientists and she also said she was uninterested in reading it. Clearly, Ms. Fife is a woman whose mind is not open to evidence against her point of view.

Why was the University of Waterloo chosen as the venue for this talk? Possibly it was due to a wildly optimistic forecast of the number of attendees, but I would guess it was partly to give a "scientific" veneer to the claims made.

Denyse O'Leary is a local Roman Catholic pro-intelligent-design, anti-evolution "journalist" whose writing is typically at the grade six level -- perfect for her audience. Based on what I've seen, she seems impervious to actual argument, preferring instead to slam what she delightfully calls "Darwinbots". In her writing, she rarely interviews people who disagree with her, and she elevates people who agree with her to the status of authorities. For example, she routinely refers to creationist David Tyler as a "physicist"; I guess that sounds better than admitting that he is a professor of "clothing design and technology".

But today she has sunk to a new low, by attempting to blame the recent murder at the Holocaust museum on Darwin's theory of evolution. Nearly all the commenters point out how insane this is, but, as usual, O'Leary is completely impervious to their reasoning.

If O'Leary were consistent, she'd also be blaming the crash of Air France 447 on Newton's theory of gravity.

Update: no surprise here - O'Leary's claimed "breaking story" isn't original with her; it comes from the odious David Klinghoffer.

Mathematical Reviews is a journal that attempts to provide a brief review of every legitimate paper published in the mathematical literature. Reviews are intended to summarize the content of the paper and put it into context, but sometimes the opinion of the reviewer shows through.

Here is one that I stumbled on today: "In the paper under review, ... performs elementary manipulations to produce several equations. The first few of these formulas involve P_r(n,k), the number of partitions of n into k relatively prime parts, while the last few involve R(n,k), the number of decompositions of n into k relatively prime parts. These formulas do not provide insight into the behavior of P_r(n,k) and R(n,k) so much as they demonstrate what sort of formulas result from certain elementary manipulations."

Ouch, that one's gotta hurt.

I have to admit, I wrote a review like that once, too. Here's an excerpt: "Their main result, Lemma 2.1, is equivalent to the statement that multiplication of 2 × 2 matrices is associative."

At the recent Canadam conference on discrete and algorithmic mathematics, Jason Brown of Dalhousie gave a great talk on mathematics and music. He accompanied his talk on the guitar, playing excerpts from jazz and rock standards to illustrate his points.

Jason was featured in the Wall Street Journal, among other places, for his work on using the Fourier transform to decode the mysterious opening chord in the Beatles song "A Hard Day's Night" (it turns out that the key ingredient is an F played on the piano).

Jason used his analysis of the mathematical underpinnings of Beatles songs to compose a song in the style of the Beatles, which he then recorded in the studio with musicians Scott Ferguson, Alex Vaughan and vocalist Hal Bruce. There's a great video of the performance of "A Million Whys" here.

Dejean's conjecture is one of the oldest conjectures in combinatorics on words. Yesterday, at the CANADAM conference in Montréal (where I also gave a talk), James Currie and my former Ph. D. student Narad Rampersad announced the final step in the proof of this famous conjecture. That's Narad at the left and James on the right. (Photo courtesy of Amy Glen.)



Dejean's conjecture concerns repetitions in infinite words. A square is a repetition of the form xx, where x is a nonempty word. We can write this in shorthand as x². Examples of squares include the English word hotshots and the French word chercher. A cube is a repetition of the form xxx; the only example I know of in English is the sort-of-word shshsh. About a hundred years ago, the Norwegian mathematician Axel Thue gave examples of an infinite word over a 2-letter alphabet containing no cubes and an infinite word over a 3-letter alphabet containing no squares. It is easy to see that there are no infinite words without squares over a 2-letter alphabet, or cubes over a 1-letter alphabet.

More generally, one can try to avoid rational powers, not just integer powers. We say a string w is a p/q power if it can be written in the form x^kx' where x' is a prefix of x and the length of w is p/q times the length of x. For example, the French word entente is a 7/3 power, as it can be written in the form (ent)²e. Similarly, entanglement is a 4/3 power.

Dejean's conjecture concerns the largest possible exponent e such that there exists no infinite word over a k-letter alphabet avoiding powers of exponent e or greater. We write this exponent as RT(k), where RT stands for "repetitive threshold". Thue proved that RT(2) = 2. In 1972, Françoise Dejean proved that RT(3) = 7/4. She conjectured that RT(4) = 7/5 (which was later proved by Pansiot) and RT(k) = k/(k-1) for k ≥ 5.

Over the last 35 years the range of exponents for which Dejean's conjecture was known to hold slowly increased. Moulin Ollagnier proved the conjecture for 5 ≤ k ≤ 11; Mohammad-Noori and Currie proved it for 12 ≤ k ≤ 14. A real breakthrough occurred a couple of years ago, when Carpi proved the conjecture for all k ≥ 33. Currie and Rampersad then improved Carpi's construction to resolve k ≥ 27, and more recently they used Moulin Ollagnier's techniques to resolve the remaining cases 15 ≤ k ≤ 26. This competely resolves Dejean's conjecture. You can read Currie and Rampersad's paper here.

At the conference we also learned that (as is often the case in mathematics and computer science) nearly simultaneously, a proof of the remaining cases along different lines has been described by Michaël Rao of the Université de Bordeaux.

So congratulations to James Currie, Narad Rampersad, and Michaël Rao for finally resolving this famous conjecture!

Here's a link to a fascinating poll conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

According to the results, 62% of white evangelical Protestants say torture against suspected terrorists can "often" or "sometimes" be justified. But only 40% of the "unaffiliated" agreed with that.

Among those who attend religious services at least weekly, 54% agreed that torture can "often" or "sometimes" be justified. But only 42% of those who "seldom" attend religious services agreed with that.

In other words, the more you are drenched with God-talk, the more you are likely to okay the abhorrent practice of torture.

The next time some theist rails about the immorality of atheists, point them to this poll.

I just discovered last night that the slow leak we had in the kitchen sink leaked through the kitchen floor to the basement below. Unfortunately this was exactly where I was storing my issues of Skeptic (I had a complete collection starting with Vol. 1 No. 1) and Skeptical Inquirer, with the result that nearly all of the issues I had been saving have been destroyed by water and mold. I am now, with mask over mouth, removing all the issues and dumping them. Too bad -- I had planned to donate my complete collection of Skeptic to the local public library.

Whenever the Discovery Institute wants to hire a new spokesman, I imagine a conversation like this:

"Who can we get who is abysmally ignorant, illogical, and not afraid to show it?"

"Casey Luskin?"

"No, we already hired him. How about Michael Egnor?"

"Great idea. He has the added bonus of the arrogance of a surgeon. I'll send the invitation off right away."

Michael Egnor read my recent piece criticizing Margaret Somerville's article in Academic Matters. Somerville claimed that when parents decide to abort a child with Down's syndrome, that is a "eugenic" decision. "Only the decision not to abort when the fetus has Down's syndrome", Somerville claimed, "is not a eugenic decision". I pointed out that Somerville was doing here exactly what she decried earlier: labeling a decision she doesn't like as "eugenic", and therefore bad, without explaining why it is bad. I also pointed out that many parental decisions, such as choosing whom to have children with, could be considered "eugenic" in exactly the same way, yet I imagine Somerville would consider those acceptable. Following Somerville's logic, only picking someone at random for your mate "is not a eugenic decision."

But of course, Egnor missed the point entirely (and also managed to misspell my name). The point was not about eugenics, or Down's syndrome children at all; it was about Somerville's hypocrisy.

There are lots of other fallacies in Egnor's piece; you may enjoy spotting them all. Here are a few:

Here is how Egnor defends religion: "The existence of God is not a “ridiculous and unverifiable claim;” it's the conclusion reached by the vast majority of human beings living today and who have ever lived, and is a viewpoint held by most of the best philosophers, ethicists and scientists in history." Here he is using both the Fallacy of Appeal to Belief and the Fallacy of Appeal to Authority. Two fallacies in one sentence; truly a remarkable achievement.

Next, he claims there are thoughtful arguments for atheism (but doesn't provide a single example of an argument he believes is "thoughtful"). Then he dismisses the arguments of "Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Myers, and Hitchens" as "puerile". (Of course, like Somerville, he doesn't give a single reason why he thinks this.) This is the Fallacy of Appeal to Ridicule.

He then invents an argument against Christianity -- ‘some bad things have been done by Christians, therefore Christianity is untrue’ -- and implies it is something that I believe (or that Dawkins et al. believe). This is the Fallacy of the Straw Man.

Next he goes on to smear Planned Parenthood, the National Organization of Women, and the Pro-Choice Resource Project as "eugenic". There's no denying that the word "eugenic" has a nasty reputation in our society, and Egnor doesn't hesitate to exploit it. (For the same reason, creationists love to associate "Darwinism" with both fascism and communism; they know how effective a smear can be to incite the Fallacy of Appeal to Emotion.) I can't resist pointing out that along the way, Egnor confuses "inference" with "implication".

Why does "eugenics" have a nasty reputation? It is not because the goal - to have healthy offspring - is something any parent would disagree with. After all, parents of Asheknazi Jewish heritage get tested for the Tay-Sachs gene, but I don't see Egnor labeling Dor Yeshorim as "eugenic" (but he would have to if he were consistent). No, it is because "eugenics" is equated in many people's minds with the centrally-directed, government-enforced, coercive eugenics advocated by the Nazis. It is one thing - and I think entirely acceptable - for parents to decide to not have a child with Tay-Sachs; it is another thing entirely for the government to murder or sterilize people perceived to have defective genes. Labeling both as "eugenic" is facile -- par for the course for Egnor -- but misses an essential difference.

Egnor goes on to say "In the atheist/Darwinian view, eugenics is moral, even virtuous." Here he is committing yet another fallacy: the Fallacy of Is-Ought. Darwinists (more properly, any scientist or person who understands the theory of evolution) are what they are because they hold to a scientific theory, not a description of ethical behavior.

Egnor then gives three reasons against parental choice. Unfortunately, none of them are very good. His first is "I have fairly traditional Christian beliefs, and I find the assertion that people should be bred and culled like farm animals to be repugnant." But when partners decide not to have children because (say) they both carry a gene like Tay-Sachs, or decide to abort a fetus that will have the disease, that has nothing to do with "be[ing] bred and culled like farm animals", unless the farm animals Egnor is thinking of are breeding themselves. By equating government-enforced eugenics with parental choice, Egnor commits the Fallacy of Equivocation. Furthermore, since 80% of pregnancies end unsuccessfully, with about half that figure attributed to genetic defects, it may be fairly said that Egnor's god is the Great Eugenicist in the Sky.

The second is "eugenics has stained my profession". But again, the eugenics that stained the medical profession consisted of, e.g., forced sterilization, not parents deciding whether to have children or to abort a fetus with a severe defect.

The third reason is that Egnor knows children with cognitive defects and finds they have value. That's nice, but nobody's claiming that these children should be killed or their parents made a mistake. What Egnor misses entirely, because of his sectarian religious viewpoint, is that for many parents, the decision is not between "having this child who will die a painful and gruesome death from Tay-Sachs before age 4" or "not having any child at all", but rather "having this child who will die of Tay-Sachs" or "not having it, and having a healthy child later on".

Finally, recall that my original question was "Why, exactly, would the world be better off with more Down's syndrome children?" Egnor says in response "The world is made better by every person." Even if we ignore the fact that Egnor's Pollyanna claim is clearly untrue (how was the world made better by Hitler or Pol Pot?), his response doesn't address the question. Parents are faced with limited resources. If they choose to raise a healthy child instead of an unhealthy child, why does Egnor want to refuse them that choice?

If Egnor really believes that the world would be better off with more Down's syndrome children, he should be doing everything he can to promote their production. As a medical doctor, he should be counselling couples to postpone having children until the wife is at least 40; after age 45, that increases the chances of having a Down's syndrome child to 1 in 19. Similarly, he should be encouraging older men to have more children, since paternal age is apparently a factor, too. Since he does not, it is clear that even Egnor does not believe that the world would be better off with more Down's syndrome children.

About 90% of parents decide to abort after a Down's syndrome diagnosis. If I shared Michael Egnor's fondness for logical fallacies, I would say that is evidence he is wrong. Instead, I will simply point out that most parents do not view having a Down's syndrome child as a good way to spend their limited parental resources. I don't demand that parents choose the way I would under the circumstances; I have great sympathy for parents faced with such a difficult decision, and I support their right to choose, no matter how they decide. Despite his attempt to tar me with the eugenic brush, it is his viewpoint that has more in common with totalitarian thinking.

And like the totalitarian, Egnor chooses to attack me from a forum that does not allow comments. What is he afraid of?

A pleasant surprise arrived in the mail today: Jason Rosenhouse's new book, The Monty Hall Problem. I read a first draft of the book and found it excellent.

Alf van der Poorten says that the definition of a good book is that it mentions you. Under that criterion, this is a very good book indeed, as I appear on the back cover, giving the book an endorsement.

I recommend this book to anyone interested in probability.

If you search for 2212 Line 34, Shakespeare, ON on Google Maps, you get a ___location that is something like 50 km from the true ___location. Shakespeare is actually between New Hamburg and Stratford, Ontario.

Google Maps seems quite unreliable for Southern Ontario. It used to be that when you searched for the Waterloo-Wellington
airport, you would get a ___location about 25 km from the true one.

It would be interesting to understand what about the data or algorithm results in such a bizarre error. It would also be nice if it were easier to report errors in Google maps.

One of the principles of publishing in mathematical and scientific journals is that, generally speaking, you cannot publish results that are already known.

Of course, publishing known results happens all the time anyway, because authors and referees cannot know the entire literature, and different authors use different terminology and notation. I once rediscovered a simple way to provide a lower bound on the size of nondeterministic finite automata, and published it, but later found out the result had already appeared in the literature -- indeed, the author had even sent me a reprint which, to my chagrin, I found languishing in my files. The point is that

1. Authors should not knowingly attempt to republish known results;

2. Referees should make at least some attempt to verify that the claimed results are new;

3. Editors should not agree to publish papers containing known results presented as if new.

There are some exceptions to these rules, however. Often one needs to state other researchers' results because the statement is crucial to the exposition. In this case, authors must be careful to provide the attribution and correct citation to the literature. In a "survey paper", one often brings together a large number of known results and tries to tie them into an overarching theme. Again, authors must be careful to provide the correct citations.

It is a violation of scientific/mathematical ethics to knowingly publish as new, results that are already known.

Recently a paper was submitted to a journal I edit. I sent it out to a referee, who observed that he/she had already refereed the paper for another journal, and the referee sent me the old report. That report pointed out that several of the results claimed as new were actually already in the literature. The authors had resubmitted the paper to me without making the required changes, acknowledging priority to others. This is a violation of mathematical ethics.

Here's a piece by McGill philosopher Margaret Somerville in the OCUFA publication Academic Matters. (OCUFA is the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations.) I found it very shoddily argued.

For example, she rightly decries the suppression of speech on campus (something that I have also done; see here). But she then says "some people are going even further: they want to force physicians to act against their conscience under threat of being in breach of human rights or subject to professional disciplinary procedures for refusing to do so". I think these cases are not remotely comparable. The latter question revolves around whether physicians have the right to shirk their professional duty and engage in discrimination simply by calling their view "religious". Would Somerville also support the right of a physician to refuse to treat black patients, because the physician belongs to an Aryan church that views blacks as subhuman? I doubt it. Then how can she support the "right" of physicians to treat lesbian couples differently from heterosexual couples?

She says, "Political correctness operates by shutting down non-politically correct people's freedom of speech. Anyone who challenges the politically correct stance is, thereby, automatically labeled as intolerant, a bigot, or hatemonger. The substance of their arguments ... is not addressed ..." But then, just a few paragraphs later, she labels Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens as "fundamentalists". I do not know exactly what she means by "fundamentalist" in this context, but it seems to me she is doing here exactly what she decried previously: applying a label to them without addressing the substance of their arguments.

Later she says "Only the decision not to abort when the fetus has Down's syndrome is not a eugenic decision". But here she is begging the question: why are decisions that she labels as "eugenic" necessarily bad? Why, exactly, would the world be better off with more Down's syndrome children? By her reasoning, positive assortative mating would be considered "eugenic"; yet most of us practice some form of it.

She seems to imply that religion deserves an equal place at the table as science. But she doesn't say why, other than to point out the obvious fact that many people hold religious views. Many people believe that 9/11 was a US government conspiracy, too, but I don't see why we are obligated to take their views seriously. With respect to religion, why should religious dogma, which maintains ridiculous and unverifiable claims, be treated in the same way as science and rational thinking?

Probably you can find more examples of shoddy argument in this piece. Academic Matters has a history of publishing anti-science and anti-rationalist screeds.

Here is an interesting scam that I hadn't seen before. Someone is sending out mail purportedly from the academic publisher Elsevier soliciting professors to submit papers to vaguely described journals. The scam is apparently that your paper gets "accepted" and then you are asked to pay "processing fees", which go to the scammers without any article ever appearing anywhere.

Then again, anyone who could be fooled by the ridiculous message below probably deserves what they get.


From: Elsevier Journals

*ELSEVIER*

*BUILDING INSIGHTS; BREAKING BOUNDARIES*
------------------------------

* *

*MANUSCRIPTS SUBMISSION*

Dear Colleague,

On behalf of all the Editors-in-chief of Elsevier Journals, we wish to
Communicate to you that we are currently accepting manuscripts in all Fields
of human Endeavour.

All articles published will be peer-reviewed. The following types of papers
are considered for publication:

- Original articles in basic and applied research.

- Critical reviews, surveys, opinions, commentaries and essays.

Authors are invited to submit manuscripts reporting recent developments in
their fields. Papers submitted will be sorted out and published in any of
our numerous journals that best Fits. This is a special publication
procedure which published works will be discussed at seminars (organized by
Elsevier) at strategic Cities all over the world. Please maximize this
opportunity to showcase your research work to the world.

The submitted papers must be written in English and describe original
research not published nor currently under review by other journals.
Parallel submissions will not be accepted.

Our goal is to inform authors about their paper(s) within one week of
receipt. All submitted papers, if relevant to the theme and objectives of
the journal, will go through an external peer-review process.

Prospective authors should send their manuscript(s) in *Microsoft Word or
PDF format* to *[email protected]* and should Include a cover sheet
containing corresponding Author(s) name, Paper Title, affiliation, phone,
fax number, email address etc.

Kind Regards,

Emily Robinson(Prof.)

PS: Pls. show interest by mailing *[email protected]* if your
Manuscript is not ready but will be ready soon.


I love the claim that "Papers submitted will be sorted out and published in any of
our numerous journals that best Fits."

Here is some (redacted) e-mail I received today:


Dear Professor Jeffrey Shallit,

I am a Ph.D. student in the University XXX in XXX . I passed the theoretical courses and comprehensive exam and plan to defend my Ph.D. thesis proposal in next few months.
I would like to have your scientific support in my Ph.D. program as a co-supervisor. My Ph.D. thesis is about Cryptography Protocols.
In fact my research interest is about the following topics:
1. Distributed Cryptography Protocol such as Threshold Cryptography, secret sharing, ...
2. Security and Privacy Issue (specially Location Privacy)
3. Desinging and Evaluating Interactive Protocol
4. Digital Signatures

Please let me know if you could help me to define a research probelm or to define a project on any of the above topics to do it co-operatively.
I should mention that my M.Sc thesis was about XXX under the supervision of "Dr. XXX".

I do not need any finantial support. I'm looking forward to hearing from you.

I have attached my CV to this e-mail.


This student seems quite misinformed about the process. Finding a topic for a Ph. D. thesis is the job for the student and supervisor together; the supervisor suggests possible problems to work on, and the student surveys the literature and attends conferences to get ideas about others. But sending e-mail to request good topics is very likely to fail because (a) the number of really good problems is small (b) they tend to be jealously guarded by professors in order to distribute to their own students and colleagues. By a "really good problem" I mean one that few have thought of or worked on before, or a new approach to an old problem, and one that is likely to be interesting and have impact, and yet solvable in 2-4 years.

Finally, the student chose me to ask for topics, even though I have never published in any of the topics he/she listed.

This student is not getting very good advice from his/her advisers.

The UW 9/11 Research Group, which previously sponsored two presentations by truthers, has finally gotten around to hearing the other side.

Ron Craig, a professor at Ryerson University with extensive training and experience in explosives, gave a talk Friday night in the Arts Lecture Hall at the University of Waterloo. Here's a brief summary:

He started by asking, "How many people here believe the WTC buildings were brought down by explosives?" Sadly, about half the people in the audience of approximately 100 raised their hands.

He then showed clips of the WTC buildings collapsing, some eyewitness testimony, and excerpts of last year's appalling presentations by A. K. Dewdney and Graeme MacQueen. He then asked rhetorically, "After seeing all this, how could you not believe the towers were brought down by explosives?"

Briefly, his answer was "expectation bias": investigators reach a premature conclusion without examining all the relevant data.

9/11 "Truthers" start with a presupposition, then look for data to support it. By contrast, real fire investigators start with documents such as NFPA 921, which outlines a scientific basis for investigating these incidents.

Craig pointed out that the WTC buildings used an innovative design for lightweight construction. They were the first super-high buildings to use this kind of construction, without heavy girders. The buildings weighed only 1/2 of what a conventional building would have weighed.

When demolition experts want to bring down a building, he said, they drill into columns and place the explosives. But no cement columns were used in the WTC. Furthermore, maintenance at the buildings reports that core beams above the 84th floor were inaccessible.

He then examined one claimed scenario for controlled demolition: in this scenario, explosives were placed on every floor. He then estimated how much explosive would be needed in this scenario, and came up with 1300 pounds of TNT-equivalent per floor, for a total of 143,000 pounds. Clearly this would be infeasible to set up without someone noticing.

Furthermore, such a large amount of explosive would have blown out windows in other buildings for blocks around. But this did not occur. In an explosive detonation, the typical inury is from flying glass, but there is no evidence that this occurred, nor evidence of other kinds of projectile injuries.

Explosives create heat of as much as 7000 degrees. Thermal injuries will be accompanied by primary blast injuries caused by pressure when the shockwave progesses through the body (e.g., middle ear injuries). "Blast lung" can occur at 50 to 150 psi. But not a single person in NY exhibited any symptoms of PBI.

Claims that thermite was used is undermined by the fact that no barium nitrate was found in the debris. He estimated that 61,000 pounds of thermite would have been needed. Again, it would have been impossible to set this up without someone noticing. Claims that sulfur was a signature of thermite/thermate are silly, because both the elevator shafts and stairwells were constructed with drywall, which is gypsum (calcium sulfate with 18% sulfur content).

Claims that molten steel was still flowing 21 days after the attacks are implausible. He showed one slide that supposedly depicted white-hot metal being observed by workers; it was actually just a worklight, as a video showed.

There is no good evidence that there were pools of molten steel. Many metals were at WTC, and low-temperature alloys could easily have formed. NFPA 921 says "if this occurs it is not an indication that accelerants were used or were present in the fire."

He then addressed the claim that "no other steel frame building has ever collapsed because of fire". He addressed other fires, such as this one at Delft. During the fire there was a partial collapse with "squibs" visible just as in the WTC.

He compared the WTC fire to other fires, such as the one in Madrid and One Meridian Plaza in Philadelphia. Both of these buildings had designs quite different from WTC.

Overall, I'd rate this part of the presentation as an A-. I think his points were very effective, although he could have also referenced the 1967 McCormick Center fire in Chicago, and he could have pointed to the lack of seismic evidence for explosions.

After the talk, there were some questions from the audience. One questioner asked him if he considered the "geo-political context" for 9/11. To his credit, Craig said that this was not his area of expertise; he is a fire and explosives expert, and his job is to look at the hard evidence, not speculations about motives.

Another questioner suggested that the Towers were brought down by some high-tech explosive invented by the government but unknown to everyone else. Craig found this suggestion (and a similar suggestion that "lasers" were used) ridiculous, saying that he regularly attends explosives conferences and such a thing could not be kept secret from experts.

Another questioner brought up the collapse of WTC 7. Craig said that he did not know for sure the cause of the collapse of that building, because not enough evidence was gathered yet. He said that he expects we will eventually know, because there is a strong motivation by architects, engineers, and insurance companies to understand the reasons behind the collapse, and many people are working on it.

I'd rate the question-answering portion as B+. Sometimes he simply reiterated previous points, instead of attempting to address the question from another angle, but overall he was generally effective.

Overall, I thought Ron Craig did a good job of demolishing the bizarre and unsupported claims by truthers that explosives brought down the World Trade Center buildings. Regrettably, it is unlikely to have much impact on truthers, who typically hold their beliefs with a religious fervor.

The Humanist Association of Canada Spring 1992 Newsletter contained the following item. Perhaps it is apocryphal, but it's funny even if not true.

"For writers only -- Every writer has received rejection slips; too many of them for most. The "Financial Times" has quoted the "mother of all rejection slips", translated from a Chinese economic journal. It goes like this:

We have read your manuscript with boundless delight. If we were to publish your paper, it would be impossible for us to publish any work of lower standard. And as it is unthinkable that in the next thousand years we shall see its equal, we are, to our regret, compelled to return your divine composition, and to beg you a thousand times to overlook our short sight and timidity."

Here is some conference spam I recently received:


Re: INVITATION for oral presentation at ICCE-17th Hawaii, USA

Upon review of your expertise in composite and nanotechnology of materials or physics/chemistry of materials/devices, and metals and concrete research, it gives me pleasure to invite you to orally present a paper at the coming 17th Annual International Conference on Composites or Nano Engineering, ICCE-17, July 26-31, 2009 in Hawaii, USA.. This is a truly “international” conference held in the USA, where the majority of the participants are from outside USA. The topic is broad to include almost all science and engineering, due to the emphasis of interdisciplinary research in nanotechnology.

The ICCE-17 Hawaii Call for Papers has received overwhelming responses of over 600 abstracts. The emphasis of the conference is to

(1) to learn the state of the art in hot topics where funding exists, such as Biomedical and Nano research on multifunctional materials and structures,

(2) provide a forum of exchange of ideas between Chemists, Physicists, Biologists, Engineers, mathematicians and mechanicians, to promote interdisciplinary approach to Nano/Biomedical/ Composites Technology,

(3) encourage participants to conduct interdisciplinary joint research and write joint research proposals

The venue hotel rate is being negotiated (prices falling due to recession), and the venue hotel and the island will be announced soon. The conference web is,

www.uno.edu/~engr/composite

These ICCE-17 detailed abstracts will be reviewed and appear as short papers in World Journal of Engineering, upon payment of registration fee and attendance of ICCE-17. Further, “all” full length version of these short papers, with paper title change, will be reviewed and published in WJOE or in Composites B journal. Thus, all participants will have two journal papers as a benefit of coming to ICCE-17 Hawaii. Due to budgetary constraints, we are unable to offer financial assistance.

Looking forward to seeing you in Hawaii.

Yours sincerely,

David Hui, Ph.D.,
Chairman ICCE-17 Hawaii, USA
Professor of Mechanical Engineering Univ of New Orleans
Editor-in-Chief, Composites Part B:
Doctor Honoris Causa (Italy, Nov. 2008, Vietnam, Dec. 2006, Ukraine, Nov. 2004)
[email protected]


This invitation has many signs of bogosity:

1. It was sent to an old address I set up 15 years ago for a conference and have not used since, a clear sign the author has used some spam service.

2. It falsely claims that I have been invited because of my "expertise in composite and nanotechnology of materials or physics/chemistry of materials/devices, and metals and concrete research", all fields that I have never done any research in. Also note the wide variety of unrelated topics listed as the theme of the conference -- this is quite unusual for a legitimate conference.

3. It has random grammatical errors and punctuation inconsistencies, such as capitalizing "Chemists" but not capitalizing "mathematicians", and putting "all" in quotes.

4. The author lists his honorary doctorates.

Sorry, I won't be going to this conference.

The Whininess Quotient (or WQ) of a class of students is defined to be the dimensionless quantity

(number of questions asked about how marks are assigned)
---------------------------------------------------------
(number of questions asked about content of the course)

The WQ can be classified as follows:

WQ < 1/2: Your class really cares about the material! Congratulations!

1/2 ≤ WQ < 2: Caution: whiners are beginning to dominate the conversation.

2 ≤ WQ < &infin: It's going to be a long semester.

WQ = ∞: Time to look for another university.

German has several words for which there is no English equivalent, and so we've adopted them into our language. Of these, perhaps the most famous is Schadenfreude (literally, something like "harm-joy"), which means "pleasure taken at the misfortune of others".

Another good one is Ohrworm. Literally "ear worm", it refers to a catchy song that you just can't get out of your head.

My colleague Jean-Paul Allouche introduced me to another some time ago: Sprachgefühl. Literally, "language feeling", this word refers to a native speaker's intuitive understanding of the subtleties of his own language. When a French speaker says, "We now prove this by recurrence on n", Jean-Paul looks at me and mouths the word "Sprachgefühl", because he knows that the speaker should have said induction, not recurrence. Similarly, French speakers often say couple instead of pair, and speak about notations instead of notation. (Notation is usually a mass noun in English and hence rarely appears in the plural in mathematics and computer science research -- unless the paper is written by a non-native speaker!) French speakers also often say something like "We denote by |x| the length of the word x", when a native speaker would probably say something like "We let |x| denote the length of the word x".

Based on this, I've coined a new word: TeXgefühl. This means "the intuitive understanding of what is proper usage in the mathematical typesetting language TeX". (There is also the related word, LateXgefühl.) Neither word appears in a Google search, so I really do appear to be the first to say them online.

Both TeX and LaTeX have some subtleties which beginners find difficult to master. These include constructs that improve the appearance of the manuscript, like knowing to put "\ " after any lower-case letter followed by a period that does not end a sentence, as in "Dr.\ Smith"; if you don't do this, tex inserts too much space between "Dr." and "Smith". Another example of TeXgefühl is knowing to use the proper kind of dots in a mathematical expression -- you should write "x_1,   x_2,   \ldots,   x_n" but "x_1   x_2   \cdots   x_n". The subtleties also include knowing that both TeX and LaTeX have reasonably good algorithms for deciding on spacing, so that manuscripts should not be littered everywhere with "\noindent" and \bigskip", and that there is no need to put "\par" or "\\" at the end of every paragraph.

If you have LaTeXgefühl, you know not to hard-code references to theorems, lemmas, etc.. Instead, you use labels inside theorem environments to store the name of the theorem, and then you refer to to the theorem by saying something like Theorem~\ref{thm1}. (The twiddle after "Theorem" is another example of TeXGefühl.)

Those with TeXgefühl know that single-letter functions are always in the italic font, using something like $f(x)$, but that multi-letter functions, such as sin and cos, are nearly always in the roman font, and should be specified using the built-in expressions \sin and \cos. (For some reason, many people also forget this for \gcd.) They know that left-quotes in TeX are different from right-quotes, so that you should write ``quoted expression'' instead of "quoted expression". And they know that page ranges should be specified with two hyphens, like "237--246".

It's hard to attain Sprachgefühl in a foreign language - I will probably never get there in French or German. But with a little work, nearly everyone can attain it in TeX.