[University Rankings]

Tidied up the code for an algorithm to generate all sequences of 'b' pairs of matched brackets (parentheses), e.g., b=3: "()()()", "()(())", "(())()", "(()())", "((()))". This old combinatorial problem is equivalent to generating all general rooted trees of b+1 nodes: starting at the root node, think of "(" as go "down" the next sub-tree and of ")" as go back "up", e.g.,

()()() ~ .  ..., (())() ~ .  etc.
        /|\              / \
       / | \            .   .
      .  .  .           |
                        .

"The ranking of universities & colleges at the national & global level is a well-known dubious practice. Flawed methodologies generate distorted & inaccurate profiles of these institutions. Yet, #rankings have remained a popular ... prestigious law & medical schools have started to walk away from this 'evaluation.' ... There are many theories about how higher education in the United States lost its way. A reasonable hypothesis is that it started in 1983 when U.S. News published its first [ranking] list. It's been downhill ever since. Time to turn it around." -- H. Holden Thorp, Editorial, Science, 379(6631) [doi:10.1126/science.adg8723][2023] #academia #universityrankings #THES #university #rankings

'Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time', M. Park et al, Nature, 613, pp.138-144, doi:10.1038/s41586-022-05543-x January 2023.

'Is the rate of scientific progress slowing down?', T. Cowen & B. Southward, GMU Working Paper in Economics No.21-13, ssrn:3822691, August 2019.

'Large teams develop and small teams disrupt science and technology', L. Wu et al, Nature, 566, pp.378-382, doi:10.1038/s41586-019-0941-9, February 2019.

#research #progress #breakthrough

In the 1980s and 1990s I wrote an interpreter for PFL / λ-CCS / π-calculus in Pascal. When the wwweb came along I put the interpreter on the Computer Science web server as a runnable cgi-bin program. Changes to the (later) Faculty of Information Technology (#FIT) and #Monash University web servers broke quite a few cgi-bin programs. I had always intended to translate the interpreter from Pascal to Java but Mozilla etc. "went off" Java. Finally I translated it into Javascript instead. Inspired by CSP, CCS and the original PFL. See [λ-CCS]. #CCS #piCalculus #PFL #CSP

"Getty Images is taking legal action against the makers of an artificial-intelligence image-creation tool [Stable Diffusion]. ..." — [bbc][19/1/2023].
"It is Getty Images' position that Stability AI unlawfully copied and processed millions of images protected by copyright and the associated metadata owned or represented by Getty Images absent a license ..." — Getty Images [www][17/1/2023]. #Getty #Gettyimages #copyright #StabilityAI #StableAI
Also see 'CoPilot' below.

It was reported that a class action had begun against Microsoft, GitHub and OpenAI over #copyright when GitHub's Copilot is trained on open-source software and used to generate code "without appropriate attribution, #copyright notice, or adherence to licensing terms." — [spiceworks.com][8/11/2022], #microsoft openAI #github #copilot

Allison's law: "Any set of private information[*] used to establish the identity of an individual who is remote[#] will rapidly become unfit for purpose." ... this in the wake of the Optus[+] data breach and in the spirit of Goodhart's/Campbell's law. (The principle is v.probably out-there from long ago, although maybe I can still claim it in an instance of Stigler's law?)
[*] e.g., date of birth (dob), phone number, pet's name, licence number.
[#] e.g., phone, email, login.
[+] and then there was the great data breach of Medibank. #Optus #Medibank #security #identitytheft

'Subclasses of Class Function used to Implement Transformations of Statistical Models', L. Allison, arxiv:2207.04218  Also see [source code] and documentation. #AI #MML #statistics

"... transformations of statistical Models are considered and implemented within the [software-] library so as to have desirable properties from the object-oriented programming and mathematical points of view. The subclasses of class Function needed to do such transformations are defined."

It seems twitter is good for something. 'Rebel. My Escape from Saudi Arabia to Freedom,' by Rahaf Mohammed as told to Sally Armstrong, Harper Collins, isbn:0008412669, isbn13:978-0008412661, 2022, is a gripping book about true events: the escape of an 18 year old woman from Saudi Arabia and her family, while on holiday in Kuwait, January 2019. Making it as far as Bangkok, she knew that if returned to her family or to Saudi Arabia she would almost certainly be killed, as others had been. Saudi officials, acting freely within Bangkok airport, repeatedly tried to capture her but she barricaded herself in her hotel room to avoid being put on a plane and, using her mobile phone, appealed for help on social media. There followed many messages of support, and also many death threats. This resulting "twitter storm" caused the press and foreign governments to take notice and the Thai authorities to change their attitude. Australian journalist Sophie McNeill flew in for protection and to report. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) took over. Australia's then Lib/Nat Government and Foreign Minister Marise Payne come out badly, dragging their feet, but the Canadian Embassy quicky issued a visa to Rahaf. She was met at Toronto Airport by the Canada's then Minister of Foreign Affairs, Chrystia Freeland (accompanied by her own daughter). Also see [wikip].
And then there is, "Salma al-Shehab: Concern for Saudi student jailed for 34 years over tweets ..." — [bbc][17/8/2022]. #saudiarabia #twitter

D. Sumanaweera, L. Allison, A. S. Konagurthu, 'Bridging the Gaps in Statistical Models of Protein Alignment', 30th Int. Conf. on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB), doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btac246, Madison, USA, July 2022.
S. Rajapaksa et al, 'On the Reliability and Limits of Protein Sequence Alignments', 30th Int. Conf. on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB), Madison, USA, doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btac247, July 2022. #bioinformatics #protein #alignment

It looks more and more that even modest alcohol consumption is bad for your health but, at the moment, moderate coffee consumption is still looking good: 'Association of Sugar-Sweetened, Artificially Sweetened, and Unsweetened Coffee Consumption With All-Cause and Cause-Specific Mortality', D. Liu, et al, Annals of Internal Medicine, [www], 31 May 2022. #alcohol #coffee #humanhealth

S. Rajapaksa, et al, On identifying statistical redundancy at the level of amino acid subsequences', IEEE Int. Conf. on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine (BIBM), pp.64-71, doi:10.1109/BIBM52615.2021.9669282, 9-12 December 2021. "... The results identify, among others, a surjective mapping between 110,598 local sequences (with an average length of 82 amino acids per sequence) and 1,493 topological shapes. ..." #bioinformatics #protein #compression

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