As many of you may have noticed my site was experiencing many problems during the last month. Everything started when my hosting account at 1and1 was ending and I decided to change host. After comparing many services I decided for a two year plan at Justhost. During the first 3 weeks everything was running smoothly until one day my site was down. After opening a ticket and not having an answer for days I decided to close my account at Justhost and asked for the reimbursement of my payment... then did everything to try to keep me there, from offering me 3 months for free to finally to taking my site (by then hosted at another provider) down. What a painful experience! More than a week of messages forth and back, phone calls and chat, until they finally reimbursed my money. If you are looking for a budget hosting with a customer service I would recommend to stay away from Justhost.

I got today an email from Physical Review Letters announcing a reinvigoration of their acceptance standards. This seems to me as a very necessary measure to cope with the increasing publishing inflation of the last years.

From: PRL Editors
Date: Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 6:16 PM
Subject: Reinvigorating PRL Standards
To: me

Dear Dr. ---,
We at Physical Review Letters always look for ways to do better at our core mission, which is to provide the physics community with accounts of crucial research in a convenient format. PRL at present publishes about 80 Letters per week, and we Editors, and many readers of PRL, have concluded that these cannot all discuss crucial research, and that it is too large a number to be convenient. This view is also held by our editorial board and by others, as we know from a wide range of exchanges with our colleagues.

As a result we will reaffirm the standards for acceptance for PRL. The criteria will not change fundamentally, but we will work to apply them with increased rigor. To meet the PRL criteria of importance and broad interest, a Letter must
1) substantially advance a particular field; or
2) open a significant new area of research; or
3) solve a critical outstanding problem, or make a significant step toward solving such a problem; or
4) be of great general interest, based, for example, on scientific aesthetics.

...

For this effort to be successful, authors must submit only results that meet at least one of the above criteria. Referees must judge breadth of interest based on impact both in the specific field and across field boundaries, and must support favorable recommendations with substantive reasons to publish. Editors will be more discriminating in both their own evaluation of manuscripts and their interpretation of referee reports. In support of these efforts we will revise our statement of Policies and Practices and our Referee Response Form.
...
We note that there are many papers that are valid and important in their area, but are not at the level of importance or broad interest that is necessary for PRL. There are also papers of great importance for their field and/or of broad interest that simply cannot be presented in a letter format. The Physical Review journals have high standards and unmatched reputations and are natural venues for such papers.
We know that these changes will lead to some disappointments. We are convinced, however, that a more selective PRL will communicate the best physics more efficiently.
Sincerely,
The Editors
Please see our Editorial: Improving PRL

In "The Wisdom of Crowds", James Surowiecki describes an interesting episode: In 1968, the submarine Scorpion got lost in the north Atlantic and the navy had only a general idea of its location. To determine the position of the lost ship, various independent experts in different disciplines where asked to give their opinion about the location. Later, by weighting these answers, a naval officer managed to predict the position of the Scorpion within within 220 yards.

The idea now is to try to predict the position of the lost AF 447 flight through a similar scheme. To such end I ask you to examine the available data in newspapers and send the coordinates (latitute + longitude) where you think the main remainings are located by commenting to this post. To ensure that each of your posts is independent there will be a delay between your submission and the moment when the comment appears online.

Please send the coordinates in the format: X.XXXXN XX.XXXXW, or as a distance (XXX.XXX km N/S and XXX.XXX km E/W) from the last transmission point (3.5777N 30.3744W). More info on the Air France 447 flight available in wikipedia and links therein.

Some days ago I bought a book at Better World Books, a singular online bookstore that defines itself as "a pioneering social enterprise — a business with a mission to promote literacy". "Better World Books collects and sells books online to fund literacy initiatives worldwide".

"The online bookstore with a soul" sent me a message today confirming the shipping of my book. This seems just normal. What makes it special is how they did it. Take a look for yourself:

Hello Luis,

(Your book(s) asked to write you a personal note - it seemed unusual, but who are we to say no?)

Holy canasta! It's me... it's me! I can't believe it is actually me! You could have picked any of over 2 million books but you picked me! I've got to get packed! How is the weather where you live? Will I need a dust jacket? I can't believe I'm leaving Mishawaka, Indiana already - the friendly people, the Hummer plant, the Linebacker Lounge - so many memories. I don't have much time to say goodbye to everyone, but it's time to see the world!

I can't wait to meet you! You sound like such a well read person. Although, I have to say, it sure has taken you a while! I don't mean to sound ungrateful, but how would you like to spend five months sandwiched between Jane Eyre (drama queen)and Fundamentals of Thermodynamics (pyromaniac)? At least Jane was an upgrade from that stupid book on brewing beer. How many times did the ol' brewmaster have one too many and topple off our shelf at 2am?

I know the trip to meet you will be long and fraught with peril, but after the close calls I've had, I'm ready for anything (besides, some of my best friends are suspense novels). Just five months ago, I thought I was a goner. My owner was moving and couldn't take me with her. I was sure I was landfill bait until I ended up in a Better World Books book drive bin. Thanks to your socially conscious book shopping, I've found a new home. Even better, your book buying dollars are helping kids read from Brazil to Botswana.

Imagine, you read the subject of the message and you think another confirmation message from the bookstore, you open it and, unexpectedly, you find a message written by the book you bought who is telling his story: how he was rescued from a landfill, who were his neighbors and how much he is looking forward to meet you!

I wanted to share it with you as example of a lively and emotional story "made to stick" in the words of Dan and Chip Heath.

How is science built? Is it through small incremental changes or through “revolutionary”, disruptive and singular events?


As emphasized by Nassim Taleb, it is not the expected and mundane events (the white swans) the ones that shape the world but the improbable and unexpected (the black swans). The point that Mark Buchanan makes in his recent Physics World article is that "the publish-or-perish ethic too often favors a narrow and conservative approach to scientific innovation". Are we then pushing the most innovative ideas/people to the margin and transforming valuable people into some kind of golem? poor beings limited in their free will by being stimulated to follow the main stream?

Here it is a brief excerpt taken from Buchanan's article:

Unfortunately, today’s academic and corporate cultures seem to be moving in the opposite direction, with practices that stifle risk-taking mavericks who have a broad view of science. At universities and funding agencies, for example, tenure and grant committees take decisions based on narrow criteria (focusing on publication lists, citations and impact factors) or on specific plans for near-term results, all of which inherently favour those working in established fields with well-accepted paradigms.

The conference room is almost full as the people try to get the last seats while the session is restarting after the coffee break. The speaker is trying to convey his motivation. After a few words he presents a bar graph showing the number of publications on his topic as a function of time showing a huge (seemingly exponential) increase in the last few years. "There is a lot of clever people working on this field" he assesses confidently with an Iamoneofthem attitude.



This kind of phenomenon, called "social proof" is not new. Stanley Milgram and other social psychologists identified it already in 1968 in a series of social experiments. The key is the assumption that if lots of people do something it should be because there is something interesting in it. Therefore, the crowd becomes more influential when it is bigger. As James Surowiecki points out: "every additional person is a proof that something important is happening", "The strategy of following the others if things are uncertain is reasonable but if too many people adopt that strategy, it stops being sensible and the group stops being smart".

Google is now trying "The Wisdom of Crowds"
strategy to find the best ways of saving money. Earlier this month google announced Tip Jar, a new web experiment based on Google Moderator. Tip Jar allows users to submit money-saving tips and vote on them. After a very large number of independent proposals and votes, it is expected that the best tips will somehow emerge (or may be the best tip will in fact be some combination of the most voted tips(?)). So, let's share a tip...

Links: Official Google Blog: Tipping points
The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki.

I would like to recommend a TED talk by Ken Robinson: "Do schools kill creativity?"

This presentation points out to a crucial issue which is mostly overlooked in society: Does our education system encourage creativity? A main conclusion of this talk is that we have to rethink our view of intelligence, which is an essentially diverse quality. This leads to a reconception of the richness of human capacity.

To motivate you to watch Robinson's talk I extracted some quotes from the talk:

"Creativity is as important in education as literacy...
If you are not prepared to be wrong, you will not come with anything original. But by the time kids get to be adults most kids have lost that capacity [of not being afraid of making mistakes]... we estigmatize mistakes.

We get educated out of creativity.

How many presentations have you given during the last year? -not only at conferences but also informal ones- If you are like most scientists the number will be somewhere between ten and sixty - that' s quite a lot. And what if I ask you how many presentations have you attended during the last year? Chances are that the number is this time one order of magnitude bigger - that means without doubt quite a lot of time. But, how many of these presentations do you remember to some extent - let' s say, only the subject and the key points? and how many were particularly good?

The reality is that we attend to(o) many presentations but only a few stick in our minds. This seems like a kind of paradox if we think how much is at play when we present our research: spreading our ideas, establishing a rapport with other scientists, getting a promotion or a better job, and the list continues.

In this post I would like to provoke some thoughts based on a story. Here it goes.

On a cold day of February 2008, I was at the spring meeting of the German physical society. It was early in the morning and I was attending Andre Geim's plenary talk. Anyone who attended one of his talks knows that he is an outstanding speaker. He is also an exceptional scientist, one of his most celebrated achievements being the experimental demonstration in 2004 of graphene, a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb lattice (a material that, due to stability arguments, was not supposed to exist at all in nature!). That day his talk was entitled "Graphene: Exploring carbon flatland". At some point, when addressing the possible applications of this new material, he told a story more or less in these words:

"On a trip to Florida, I was on a boat watching dolphins, and they were jumping out of the water, allowing people to nearly touch them. Everyone was mesmerized by these magnificent creatures. It was an extraordinary romantic moment"- short silence —"well, until a little boy shouted out: "Mom, can we eat that?" Well, it's a similar matter here, okay, we just found this extraordinary material, so we're enjoying this romantic moment, and now people are asking if we can eat it or not. Probably we can, but you have to step back and enjoy the moment first."

Just imagine, you are there in the auditorium listening to a physics talk, your brain is getting tired and starts to ask for a break. Then, suddenly, the speaker, who seems to have heard your brain's prayer, makes a break taking you to the marvelous world of dolphins. You can almost see these sea creatures jumping graciously on the water. The moment is marvelous; your attention is now fully with the speaker, waiting for the next word and then the child asks "Mom, can we eat them?" A hearty laugher spreads all around the auditorium. Through the story the speaker not only conveys a message -which is enhanced by the concrete and emotional story- but also gives a timely pause to keep people awake.

In the The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Nassim Taleb points out an anecdote about the writer Umberto Eco. According to Taleb, Eco owns a very large and impressive personal library of about thirty thousand books and his visitors split into two main categories: the ones who say "Wow, Signore professore, how many of these books have you read?"; and the others who understand the library not as an ego-boosting vitrine but as a research tool. Taleb stresses that a library should contain as many things that you do not know as you can afford, and he calls this collection of unread books an antilibrary.

The main point is that we should focus more on what we do not know, something which seems to be contrary to what society tells us to do. As Taleb say, imagine someone running around with an anti-résumé telling what he does not know. In this sense, although mostly discouraged in everyday life, acknowledging and embracing the unknown is a crucial ingredient for any creative enterprise.

After many conflicting reports Bernd das Brot, the talking loaf of bread that became famous in the German children's channel Kinder Kanal, was released yesterday after many days of captivity.

The Kinder Kanal star was kidnapped in Erfurt by the so-called "129 A-TEAM" on January 21st "to protest their eviction from an occupied building". The tension increased when his image was broadcasted in a home-made video. After the video was released Bernd's creator, Tommy Krappweis, voiced his concerns that Bernd could be experiencing Stockholm syndrome and could be turned over by the captors. Fortunately, the Police found the cult figure in a cellar in Thueringen last Sunday, thereby bringing his captivity to an end.

Some time ago I saw this video that I would like to share you. Helvetica is a documentary about typography and graphic design. Helvetica is a story about how a typeface created 50 years ago proliferated, it's about how type influences our lives.

Helvetica starts with a weird question: What did Helvetica tell you today?

Enjoy the trailer here.

Parkinson's law first published in an article of 1955 states: work expands to fill the time available for its completion.

This observation by C. N. Parkinson is finding now a quantitative justification in a recent arxiv preprint.

Peter Klimeck and collaborators at the University of Vienna and the Santa Fe Institute have recently reported the results of numerical simulations:

"Within the proposed model it becomes possible to work out the phase diagram under which conditions bureaucratic growth can be confined. In our last model we assign individual efficiency curves to workers throughout their life in administration, and compute the optimum time to send them to old age pension, in order to ensure a maximum of efficiency within the body – in Parkinson’s words we compute the ’Pension Point’ " they claim.

Another of Parkinson's findings stating that "committees with more than 20 members are unstable", or in other words, that there is a threshold value for the committee size above which it becomes inefficient was also tested by the austrian-american team.

Have you ever felt that your workplace or learning environment is hindering you from doing your work? Have you ever felt being inside a box where your ideas cannot grow? Then you will probably find this video by the author of Brain Rules interesting.



The bottom line, supported by research, is that there is a need to redesign work and learning places. In this sense physical exercise seems to be a crucial ingredient that is missing.

" There's an ancient reason our brains respond to exercise. Millions of years ago, if we sat around on our behinds for even a few minutes, we could be somebody's lunch. We walked up to 12 miles a day, scientists think." Taken from Brain Rules, watch it here.

This time I would like to comment on an interesting language tool I found. I spend a big deal of my time writing and I was always looking for a tool like ThinkMap's Visual Thesaurus.

If you type for example the word vision in Visual Thesaurus, then you get something like the map shown below.


If then you click on the node "the formation of a mental image" you get the following map:



I think that by now you know what I mean. Congrats to the people at ThinkMap for this very cool tool which unfortunately is not for free...

PS: By the way, this seems to be available in many languages as well. Cool!

Let us know your opinion about Willie by answering our first Poll. Just use the widget on the right. The final results will be published in two weeks.

UPDATE:
The time to vote in our first poll is over. Thanks to all of you who voted!
Here are the results.

Which of the theories about Willie is more likely?

1. The east German theory. 14%
2. The silicon theory. 0%
3. None of the above, I'm Willie. 86%
4. Other. 0%

Therefore we can conclude that most of us feel identified with Willie, after all we are all somehow striving to get out of the box. I hope that this thoughts serve as a sort of forum to share our experiences and bring some light on issues related to creativity and scientific communication, but not only.

PS: If you didn't do it yet, subscribe to this blog either by email or in a reader!

Following the first post, you would probably be willing to know more about Willie. Together with some friends we collected the main theories about his whereabouts.

1. The East-German hypothesis
This theory leads us somewhere in the East of Germany just before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

"In the chaos of the days leading up to the actual destruction of the wall and the fall of East Germany's communist government, frantic Stasi agents sent trucks full of documents to the Papierwolfs andReisswolfs — literally "paper-wolves" and "rip-wolves," German for shredders." Wired

The East-German hypothesis says that Willie would be a piece of one of those documents schredded by the dying stasi (the east german secret agency). Due to the increasing pressure, there would have been a defect in the schredding process that led to Willie’s fate. If this hypothesis turns out to be correct, Willie could now probably be lying in an office aimed at reconstructing the old documents somewhere in Berlin.

2. The Silicon hypothesis
Other clues seem to indicate a different scenario named the “the silicon hypothesis”. According to this, Willie would be a defected piece of silicon on insulator somewhere in Crolles (near Grenoble, France). Due to the financial crisis, the project for which Willie was produced would now be suspended and Willie would be stocked in a cellar “for future use”.

This site was inspired by Willie. Willie is a being of whom the only concrete information I got is an old notebook containing a collection of thoughts attributed to him. Although Willie lives in a world of perfect squares, his aspect ratio is that of a rectangle and, to make things even worst, two of his corners are smooth.


This blog was built not only as a tribute to Willie’s struggle to escape from Squareland but also –and more importantly- it was built in the hope of helping him to achieve the awaited freedom.

The best drawing I could make of Willie is shown in this post.