Understanding and familiarity

Learning science and technology is largely about understanding new concepts and ideas. The emphasis is not on retaining information, but on organizing it. But some concepts are really hard to understand, or maybe they are hard to explain and few people have ever had it explained to them. Over time, we grow familiar with these concepts and we start believing that we understand them. Then we start conveying our familiarity to others, sometimes to show off, and sometimes to avoid looking foolish. I feel that this is a tendency that we should all be aware of, and guard against. I causes so much misery, especially to children and students.

I once read in a children's book that a ventriloquist is someone who can throw his voice. Of course it made no sense to me. I looked it up in some kind of dictionary and coincidentally found the same definition. Who knows, maybe the author of my book had consulted the same source to find out what a ventriloquist does before he went about telling others about it. Later, I figured that a ventriloquist is someone who can change the sound of his voice and speak almost without moving his lips. It gives the impression that someone or something else is speaking, especially if you have a dummy in your hand, and move its lips. I also realized that sounds like m, p, and b need the lips to be closed. Interesting stuff it was back then, and I tried a bit of it myself. But I still don't think throwing your voice describes it very well.

Reviewing papers

Farbod once told me about a rule of thumb for reviewing papers. I think he attributed it to Prof. Jim Massey.

There are three conditions for rejecting a paper:
1. The results in the paper are wrong.
2. The results have been previously published.
3. The results are obvious or trivial.

I think that is a pretty good rule-book to go by, although I think I would add a fourth condition.
4. The paper is so poorly written that the reviewer, despite being knowledgeable in the area, is unable to make sense of the contributions.

It goes without saying that one should never undertake to review a paper in an unfamiliar field of research. It hurts the field by populating it with superfluous publications.

Checklist before paper submission

In an ideal world, a researcher would not have to worry about formatting mistakes. In the real world, we have to handle much more than just formatting before we can send an article for reviewing or publication. Keeping track of all the things to check is a hassle, so I decided to make a list to go through before submission. If nothing else, the list will alleviate the uncomfortable feeling that an obvious blunder that I missed will catch the eyes of the reviewer.

- spellcheck
- search ? and []. They signify errors or missing references. Since you know that you will be searching for ?, you may put a ? (or any other special character) in places where you want to add something later or if you are unsure of some detail.
- draw a tree showing the hierarchy of sections, subsections, and subsubsections, and see if it is what you intended it to be. Sometimes, two topics of similar importance, which should be at the same level in the hierarchy mistakenly form parent-child pairs.
-check the latex output for errors and warnings.
- search \ref{ and replace with ~\ref{ for sections, appendices, figures etc.
- use consistent and correct hyphens eg. use "ad hoc", NOT ad-hoc, NOT a mix of the two
- read paper and cite appropriate references wherever making claims that need to be supported
- try to number equation arrays consistently either in 1st or in last line (unless you have reason to number all lines)
- punctuation before an equation and at the end of each equation should be consistent and correct
- use consistent format (including font for all figures)
- maintain a consistent format for matlab plots. I stick to 16 by 12 cm, fontsize 12, stretch axes to fill figure (in figure options). It produces easy to read figures in 2 column format.
- check cross-referencing of equations (whether you are referring to the correct equation)
- check that the bibliography references are all consistently punctuated and named. eg. don't let one reference say 'ITW', and another 'Inform. Th. Workshop'. To save space, use the abbreviations for journals recommended by IEEE
- check all abbreviations to see that they have been defined ONCE and only the FIRST time they occur in the text (not in the abstract).
- after the last major change, spellcheck and read entire paper once before submitting.

Do let me know if you can think of something else to add to this list. I will be grateful :)