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Restored the searchable bibliography of Chris Wallace's publications after Monash University closed down its users-monash web server including the bioinformatics, computer-science and MML BIBliography search. Some universities have moved to having tightly controlled web-sites with a corporate look and content seemingly derived from central databases in the style of press releases; it is often difficult to find much useful information on current or tentative research. Others still allow researchers free rein to write directly to their audience and community. #university #website
"Citations are widely considered in scientists' evaluation.
As such, scientists may be incentivized to inflate their citation counts. ...
we compile a dataset of ~1.6 million profiles on Google #Scholar to examine
instances of citation #fraud on the platform. ...
Intrigued by a citation-boosting service that we unravelled during our
investigation, we contacted the service while undercover as a
fictional author, and managed to purchase 50 citations. ...
citations can be bought in bulk, and highlight the need to
look beyond citation counts." —
Hazem Ibrahim, Fengyuan Liu, Yasir Zaki, Talal Rahwan,
'Google Scholar is manipulatable',
[arxiv:2402.04607],
Feb. 2024.
Not even slightly surprising (but proof is good).
#Hindex #scholar #academia #citation
"If the traits of more successful individuals are more likely to be adopted, the resulting cultural transmission is described as success biased. [v.] if the traits of 'prestigious' individuals - those who have already been copied many times - are more likely to be adopted, this is described as prestige-biased cultural transmission. In this case, prestige can be a convenient proxy for success. ... results show that success bias effectively plays the role of natural selection, whereas prestige bias effectively plays the role of genetic drift. Prestige bias, which may be strong in highly social communities, also accelerates the evolutionary dynamics, as expected in a rich-get-richer process. ..." — S. Egozi et al, 'Prestige bias in cultural evolutionary dynamics', Royal Soc. Open Sci., [doi:10.1098/rsos.230650] #MatthewEffect #RichGetRicher #success #prestige #fame #KardashianIndex
"Despite the common assumption that citations are indicative of an article's scientific merit, increasing evidence indicates that #citation counts are largely driven by variables unrelated to #quality. The proposed exposure model anticipates that small alterations in factors that affect people's ability to retrieve to-be-cited articles from memory early in their life cycle are magnified over time and can lead to the emergence of highly cited papers. ... We discuss the implications of the model within the context of research evaluation and hiring, #tenure and #promotion decisions." — in 'A memory-theoretic account of citation propagation', M. R. Dougherty et al, Royal Society, Open Science, [www]. #hindex #JIF #bibliometrics #academia #university
Results from a large (11,050) survey in Sweden, "... researchers on average rated themselves as better than other researchers in their field at following good research practice, and rated researchers in their own field as better than researchers in other fields ..." — A. M. Lindkvist et al, 'Bounded research ethicality: researchers rate themselves and their field as better than others at following good research practice', Sci. Reports, 14 (3050), [www], 2024. #academia #ethics #research
"Unseen images* of code breaking computer that helped win WW2. GCHQ has released never before seen images of #Colossus, the UK's secret code breaking computer credited with helping the Allies win World War Two. ..." — [bbc]*. #Colossus #Enigma #Ultra #WW2 #BletchleyPark #GCHQ
"AI cannot patent inventions, UK Supreme Court confirms ... upheld earlier decisions in rejecting a bid to allow an artificial intelligence to be named as an inventor in a patent application. ..." — [bbc] #AI #UK #IPO #patent #law #invention Note, this is specifically about whether or not the AI itself can be named as an inventor, not what an AI might do.
Various University world rankings are out [www]. (Are they being gamed? Just remember Campbell's / Goodhart's law!-) #academia #university #rankings #Shanghai #THES #QS
Had another go at [Insitu Merge] in linear-time and O(1)-space. Hopefully this one is better. #insitu #merge #merging #algorithm
- P. R. Amarasinghe et al, 'Getting ‘φψχal’ with Proteins: Minimum Message Length Inference of Joint Distributions of Backbone and Sidechain Dihedral Angles', #Bioinformatics, 39(s.1), pp.i357-i367, doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btad251, June 2023.
- "The tendency of an amino acid to adopt certain configurations in folded proteins is treated here as a statistical estimation problem. We model the joint distribution of the observed mainchain and sidechain dihedral angles (⟨φ,ψ,χ1,χ2,...⟩) of any amino acid by a mixture of a product of von Mises probability distributions. This mixture model maps any vector of dihedral angles to a point on a multi-dimensional torus. The continuous space it uses to specify the dihedral angles provides an alternative to the commonly used #rotamer libraries. ... Our models are computationally inexpensive to sample from and are geared to support a number of downstream studies, ranging from experimental structure refinement, de novo protein design, and #protein #structure prediction. We call our collection of mixture models as PhiSiCal (φψχal)" #protein #structure #rotamer #bioinformatics
Why oh why is Apple's 'Photos' app for iOS and OS-X such an awful piece of software apparently unable to do elementary things such as sort the pictures in a slideshow by filename or even play a slideshow in the same order on two different devices? #Apple #Photos #iOS #macOS #imac #ipad
Converting an integer, possibly a very large one, a very bigInt,
into its English name is an interesting little exercise, for example,
123456789012345678901 →
one hundred and twenty three million
four hundred and fifty six thousand seven hundred and eighty nine million
twelve thousand three hundred and forty five million
six hundred and seventy eight thousand nine hundred and one.
Surprisingly the use of the word "and" is
perhaps the hardest thing to handle.
See toWords() in bigInts.js at
[Arithmetic],
#integers #bigInt #names #numerals.
- D. R. Powell, L. Allison, T. I. Dix, 'Modelling Alignment for Non-Random Sequences,' in Advances in Artificial Intelligence, Springer, LNCS/LNAI, vol.3339, pp.203-214, doi:10.1007/978-3-540-30549-1_19, 2004.
- Addresses
the problem of aligning
biased and/or repetitive DNA sequences:
"... a new and general method, modelling-alignment:
Population models are incorporated into the alignment process, which can
(and should) lead to changes in the rank-order of matches between a
query sequence and a collection of sequences, compared to results from
standard algorithms. The new method is general and places very few conditions
on the nature of the models that can be used with it. We apply
modelling-alignment to local alignment, global alignment, optimal alignment,
and the relatedness problem."
#sequence #alignment #bioinformatics
Also see software.