Journal Titles

A colleague who's involved with analyzing journal statistics sent me a list of journal titles that he thought might merit a follow-up post to the book titles one I did earlier.

Bedtime reading

• Arthropod-Plant Interactions
• Cellulose
• Journal of Friction and Wear
• Journal of Bamboo and Rattan
• Journal of Inverse and Ill-Posed Problems
• Journal of Scheduling

Not bedtime reading

• Calcified Tissue International
• Current Bladder Dysfunction Reports
• Journal of Headache and Pain
• Journal of Pest Science

Disturbing

• Autonomous Robots
• Coke and Chemistry
• Journal of Empirical Theology
• Landslides
• Swarm Intelligence

Princeton and Windsor

I work at the University of Windsor. To take this position I left a similar one at Princeton. Windsor is an aggressively mediocre, semi-industrial Canadian institution, while Princeton is, well, Princeton. This simple fact seems to bother some. Why did you come here, they ask, why did you leave there. Unspoken: what's wrong with you? Were you fired?

I give easy answers: nearer my family (slightly), higher level position, the old challenges thing. True enough, or semi-true. It was one of those complicated dances of family and husband and restlessness and opportunity, and not really worth going on about. But the apparent assumption that one would have to be insane to leave a high-end institution for a low one does bother me.

Working for a prestigious institution can be gratifying. It's flattering to get the job offer, and I was a little in awe my first while there - the history, the beauty of the campus, the feeling of brilliant minds past and present all around me. By the time a few months had passed, though, it was just a place to work, just a job. The beautiful town came with a very high cost of living, financing for the equipment my area needed was often unobtainable despite Princeton's unimaginable wealth, and the brilliant minds didn't really have much to do with me, though I attended a few talks.

The students were almost uniformly bright, but I also found them often frighteningly passive and, well, uniform. But that's another rant.

Public library dissatisfaction

I'm currently filling out a "customer satisfaction survey" for the Windsor public library. Only I'm not a customer, I'm a patron, and the survey itself is dissatisfying me. A whole series of questions asks whether library staff bothered me while I was visiting the library - only they don't use the term "bother." The questions ask whether library staff met and greeted me, made me feel appreciated, offered assistance, thanked me for coming and invited me back. Basically, whether they acted like the very most pushy and annoying sales staff that ever sent me slinking in terror from a high-end department store.

Like many library patrons, and librarians, I'm a book-loving introvert. I go to the public library because I'd rather spend time looking at books than talking to people. That means I don't want library staff to meet me, greet me, or initiate contact in any way. They don't need to make me feel appreciated for deigning to borrow their books.

Still looking for one language to rule them all...

From the Encyclopedia of Computer Languages LYaPAS entry:

Some experts believe PL/1 will replace even the widely-used languages such as FORTRAN, COBOL, and ALGOL. If this does occur, it will surely take some time - as shown by the chronological diagram (illustration 2) .

Farming methodists

Not exactly work related, but it is research...

I've been researching my family history online off and on, over the last few months. I was started by my husband - his Jewish European family history seems more compelling to me, but he's expressed interest in my ancestors. So I've been plugging along little by little, and gradually became fascinated.

My mother's family I've always been more familiar with - they go back to England, mostly, and seem to have done various English things over there in places with names like Sedgely and Nottinghamshire.

My father's side was a mystery. He's from a blended family of 9 kids, and it's only while doing this research that I've figured out which were full or half- siblings, on which side. One uncle died in childhood, and I discovered his name just this year. Before that was a blank - we were only in very occasional touch with the surviving aunts and uncles, and my grandparents died before I was born. An aunt showed me a picture of my grandfather, once; my father kept none.

Anyways, what I've found, mostly, going back, is Scots-Irish, Methodist farmers. Wesleyan Methodists, no less, at least that's how they list themselves, all farming and marrying and breeding in this little area of midwestern Ontario where my father came from. A set of great-great grandparents had 13 children, and most of them reproduced themselves too, on down to my father's family of 9.

I have this mental image now of farmers, a whole army of them, with their pitchforks and beards, their wives in long prairie dresses, old ones and young, standing on the land, all looking vaguely somehow like my father. All going to church on Sunday, and getting up at 5 to feed the cows. Some mix of my father's few reminiscences, Little Houe on the Prairie, and Green Acres.

No wonder he fled.

Some book titles come across during this year's weeding

Complex:

• On the null spaces of fully symmetric basic rules for quadrature formulas in s-dimensions
• Defect and local error control in codes for solving stiff initial-value problems
• Some GCD and divisibility problems for sparse polynomials

Dated:

• Faster, faster; a simple description of a giant electronic calculator and the problems it solves
  
• FORTRAN IV with WATFOR
• FORTRAN IV with WATFOR and WATFIV
• EVAMEA I ; a computer program for economic analysis
• Job control languages : past, present and future

Curious:

• Zap! : how your computer can hurt you and what you can do about it (1994)
• Programmers : elite of automation
• Programmering ssprak
• Microprocessor background for management personnel (1981)
• Reader's digest how to do just about anything on a computer (2000)
• Enchanted looms : conscious networks in brains and computers
• Marshall McLuhan meets the millennium bug : the first 100 years of computers, and how we can make it

:

The hiring process

I've just been placed on another search committee, my second this year. In the faint hope that someone will read this and that it will spare some future search committee a little pain, I'd like to offer a few tips for applicants on the Cover Letter.

Search committees are cursed by applications. They just keep coming in, more than we want, more than we need, most of them completely useless additions to the pile of paperwork. After a while, we're punch-drunk, virtually incapable of giving your application the special care you probably think it deserves. The fifth or seventh cover letter telling me that the applicant is a “proactive, people-oriented go-getter” who “synergizes and leverages” while being “results-oriented” leaves me wanting to throw up on the application rather than hire the applicant.

Make things concrete. I've worked with a friend applying for a teaching-oriented position whose letter didn't mention her Masters' in Education, another whose letter expressing interest in a cataloging job didn't refer to her five years' experience cataloging. Please! Mention your most recent, most relevant positions and spell out exactly why they are relevant. Mention relevant degrees.

Basically, the key to a good cover letter is to write as if you were trying to explain your qualifications to a young, not especially bright child with a short attention span. Don't expect the search committee members to read between the lines of your resume to deduce your qualifications, or even read your resume at all. We're not going to assume you're qualified if you don't say you are. Use your cover letter to spell out why you are appropriate for this position using short sentences consisting of words with few syllables, using verifiable facts to do so.

Don't even THINK about making us think.

Utility function

I recently volunteered to proof-read articles for the journal of a library association that I belong to. My first article was a wonderful exemplar of the axiom that no good deed goes unpunished. The paper concerned ways of getting people to make certain research products available to the general public, and was written from an economist perspective. (The journal in question is emphatically not aimed at economists.) I have some economics background, but...

This paper talked about things like the Pareto-optimal allocation of resources, non-cooperative game theory and incentive inefficiency. It contained several utility functions to be maximized and two and a half pages that consisted mostly of equations. I spent about a week, off and on, editing it, and there were individual sentences that I spent as much as fifteen minutes trying to decode with the help of a colleague with an economics degree.

I'm pretty sure I now understand the paper, and I'm also pretty sure that I can sum the whole thing up as follows: to get people to do X (X being the action of concern here), you need either a reward that is higher than the cost of doing X or a punishment that is more costly than the cost of doing X. Otherwise, it makes more sense for them to not do it.

I can think of no way in which either the writing or the reading of this paper can possibly maximize any sort of utility function. Unless the original author just really enjoys doing that sort of thing, I guess.

Weeding

It's occurring to me now that people who love books really shouldn't try to do certain library tasks. I discovered back in Library School that I probably couldn't be a cataloguer. I remember that day when a professor handed each of us aspiring cataloguers a stack of books to practice our subject-heading skills on. At the end of the class, very few subject headings had been applied to my books, and I was sitting there reading.

Or, take weeding, the process of selecting books for deselection, as we euphemistically call it. I'm currently going through some antiquated technology books, and I can't help but pity the poor things, even or perhaps especially the ones that have sat unused for over 20 years. It brings me back to those laws of library science we learned, every reader his or her book, every book its reader. And no matter how dated or seemingly useless the book I'm considering, I find myself picturing the reader that this one would be exactly right for.

Take the dated programming guides to defunct languages. (Take them off my mind, if you would.) Someone maintaining legacy software, or a historian of the evolution of programming, might find them invaluable. Software manual? A hobbyist, or someone trying to decode an old file. And many of the old texts have insights still as relevant as Ranganathan's are, if only the ones who need them would look...

But I'm afraid they wouldn't, and won't be able to in any case.