Computer History Museum on MagCloud

The Computer History Museum has recently published a number of magazines using MagCloud. The magazine on the IBM 1401 has a delightful back cover image.



There's just something about tangible bits.

Photographic Benefit for Hatian Earthquake Survivors

Photographers for Hati has published a photographic benefit for Hatian earthquake survivors. All proceeds of this magazine will go to the American Red Cross International Response Fund for Haiti relief.



You can read more details in this interview with Lane Hartwell, which includes the following quote from Lane:

"I thought about how I could use photography to raise money immediately."

The resulting humanitarian pages are impressive and inspiring.

Real Virtual Pages and Virtual Real Pages

From the in-box comes two different links to digital pages. In one case it's real virtual pages and in the other it's virtual real pages. From Udi comes a link to a set of collectible magcloud magazines relating to the movie Avatar. Which is interesting - a dynamic and timely publication of a physical artifact based on a movie largely constructed with computer graphics.



But what does this have to do with football you may be asking yourself?

Pigeons missing in action

It used to be that when traveling you had to bring to your hosts presents from your place of origin. This custom is known in many cultures and words like souvernir or おみやげ (omiyage) have been absorbed in many other languages.

Today this is no longer meaningful, because the concept of exotic has disappeared. This is due to the science of logistics, which has made the transportation of goods so efficient that now you can buy everything everywhere and at the same price.

Despite the miracles of modern logistics, it has a point of failure: the operators follow the instructions of computers, and even if goods are tracked at every step, they can disappear when an unanticipated event occurs.

For example, on September 17 I gave a presentation on color cognition and promised to send a printed copy of Nathan Moroney's color thesaurus and the presentation handout for the asking. When I returned home, I ordered the prints from MagCloud and mailed them to the interested parties.

Unfortunately, the envelopes never arrived. Because the recipients where in different countries, I can be certain that the snafu must have happened before the mail was sorted, i.e., between the mail stop near my cubicle and the United States Postal Service Processing and Distribution Center in San Francisco.

I did stamp the envelopes as air mail. Maybe a confused logistics operator strapped the envelopes on carrier pigeons… Were the carrier pigeon then hijacked in the San Francisco Bay and kidnapped to Eyl?

In fact, most of the time logistics operators do not know what they are doing. They are just trained to blindly and efficiently follow the procedures dictated by the logistics computer. This is one of the tenets of the anorexic company — there are no provisions for the unanticipated or even for incertitude. Immediate action must be taken, regardless of whether it makes sense.

Maybe two countries are a little better off: Japan and Switzerland, where workers are expected to always use their brains when they work (possibly with an exception here in Martigny, where many a brain has become yogurt from boozing Fendant). This is achieved through the concept of the apprenticeship, where future workers are employed as trainees in their future profession while also attending vocational school to develop a theoretical understanding of their chosen profession.

At the Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) the DUAL-T project in the field of computer-supported collaborative learning has recently delivered to the Centre Professionel du Nord Vaudois (CPNV) this system to train logistics apprentices:

Some smart young people indeed! Should I have carried the envelopes to Martigny and mailed them from here? Not necessarily, because the logistics at SFO or LAX could have lost my suitcases there.

So, if you come across some lost carrier pigeons with a color thesaurus, please energize them and send them along their way…

Publishing in the cloud

In research the old principle of publishing or perishing has long been replaced by the more quantitative performance metric of publishing in journals with a high impact factor. For example, in the case of the last paper on which I am a coauthor (today papers rarely have a single author, you could not keep up with ranking and funding if you would do that), we did not look which journal is the best fit for our paper.

Instead, we compiled a list of journals that would potentially publish our paper given its subject matter and the importance of its contribution to the advancement of science. Then we sorted the list by impact factor and submitted the manuscript to the New Journal of Physics, with impact factor 3.264. We are obviously very objective and our manuscript will go through a second round after revision, so we picked the correct journal.

Being at the end of my tour of duty as associate editor for a journal with impact factor 0.757, I am very aware of the current bad trend of shopping one's manuscript. In this trend a manuscript is submitted to a top tier journal like Nature (28.751) or Science (26.372) and then submitted again and again to journals with lower impact factor until it is no longer rejected.

Not only does this tax the system by requiring many unnecessary reviews (handling a rejected paper costs about $500, which are not offset by page charges and download fees), but it backfires when a reviewer gets the same manuscript though a different journal. In fact, a good associate editor will seek reviewers that are most familiar with the research described in the paper, so two different associate editors from two different journals will draw on the same small set of potential reviewers. The manuscript then gets rejected as a resubmission of an old manuscript.

It is important to understand that the impact factor is a relative quantity. For example, the Cancer Journal for Clinicians has an impact factor of 69.026, but this does not mean that at 0.757 my journal sucks. On the contrary, compared to other journals in the field it performs quite well. For example its sister journal from the same publisher has an impact factor of 0.455 and that of an other society comes out at 0.220. These journals tend not to publish many survey papers, which inflate the impact factor.

Message 1: use the impact factor with a grain of salt.

As my wife says, even if you win the rat race, you are still just a rat. In reality, today you do not need an impact factor to make an impact. While we can dream of publishing in Science and winning the Nobel Prize (or the Judd Award for us color scientists), today we can shower our incremental knowledge onto humanity with publishing media like personal web sites and blogs. You are reading this post, proving it works!

Granted, it is very informal, but there are some easy steps up. The traditional better medium is the technical report, which can be freely downloaded from the institution's web site, like HPL-2008-109 in the case of my most recent collaboration with co-blogger Nathan Moroney.

For those who want to publish something more glossy, HP Labs is incubating MagCloud, which will satisfy all your vanity requirements. From this link your can order the same technical report, but this time printed on heavy glossy stock and laid out nicely in InDesign instead of LaTeX.

There is even a cloud service to publish the slides of your public presentations. For example, we wrote the above report in the Beamer class, which lays out the same content in a format suitable for overhead projectors (called beamers in German). You can then make available your slides on Slide Share, or even embed them in your blog, like so: http://www.slideshare.net/berettag/cognitive-aspects-of-color-presentation

Finally, since in these difficult economic times everybody is jumping on LinkedIn, you can use a LinkedIn application to post your slides directly on your profile page.

Message 2: use informal media to give impact to your research.