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Public underwriting of research and open access
…a social contract…Title page of the first octavo edition of Rousseau’s Social Contract[This post is based loosely on my comments on a panel on 2 April 2014 for Terry Fisher's CopyrightX course. Thanks...
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Heading off to Scotland
…heading to Scotland…“Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh in Scotland, Great Britain” image from Wikimedia CommonsI’m excited to be heading to Scotland for much of June under the Distinguished Visiting...
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» How universities can support open-access journal publishing The Occasional...
To university administrators and librarians:…enablement becomes transformation…“Shelf of journals” image from Flickr user University of Illinois Library. Used by permission.As a university...
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No, the Turing Test has not been passed.
…that’s not Turing’s Test…“Turing Test” image from xkcd. Used by permission.There has been a flurry of interest in the Turing Test in the last few days, precipitated by a claim that (at last!) a...
View ArticleInaccessible writing, in both senses of the term
My colleague Steven Pinker has a nice piece up at the Chronicle of Higher Education on “Why Academics Stink at Writing”, accompanying the recent release of his new book The Sense of Style: The Thinking...
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The Turing moment
…less histrionic…Ed Stoppard as Alan Turing in CodebreakerWe seem to be at the “Turing moment”, what with Benedict Cumberbatch, erstwhile Sherlock Holmes, now starring as a Hollywood Alan Turing in The...
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» Switching to Markdown for scholarly article production The Occasional Pamphlet
With few exceptions, scholars would be better off writing their papers in a lightweight markup format called Markdown, rather than using a word-processing program like Microsoft Word. This post...
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The two Guildford mathematicians
…the huge ledger…Still from Codebreaker showing Turing’s checkout of three Carroll books.The charming town of Guildford, 40 minutes southwest of London on South West Trains, is associated with two...
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In support of behavioral tests of intelligence
…“blockhead” argument…“Blockhead by Paul McCarthy @ Tate Modern” image from flickr user Matt Hobbs. Used by permission.Alan Turing proposed what is the best known criterion for attributing...
View ArticlePlain meaning
In its reporting on yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling in King v. Burwell, Vox’s Matthew Yglesias makes the important point that Justice Scalia’s dissent is based on a profound misunderstanding of how...
View ArticleBecoming tin men
From the 2015 introduction to the 1965 novel The Tin Men by Michael Frayn:“I hadn’t in those days heard of the Turing Test—Alan Turing’s proposal that a computer could be said to think if its...
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Binary search in the Old Testament
The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the Lord. (NIV Proverbs 16:33)…“Lux et Veritas”…Seal of Yale University image from Wikimedia Commons.The seal of Yale University shows a...
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Whence function notation?
I begin — in continental style, unmotivated and, frankly, gratuitously — by defining Ackerman’s function \(A\) over two integers:\[ A(m, n) = \left\{ \begin{array}{l} n + 1 & \mbox{ if $m=0$ } \\...
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Upcoming in Tromsø
Northern lights over TromsøI’ll be visiting Tromsø, Norway to attend the Tenth Annual Munin Conference on Scholarly Publishing, which is being held November 30 to December 1. I’m looking forward to the...
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WWHD?
…personal role model…Image of Harry Lewis courtesy of Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied SciencesThis past Wednesday, April 19, was a celebration of computer science at Harvard,...
View ArticleFour things I’ve learned
Four things that I’ve learned in some three decades as a student and professor at Harvard University:There are a lot of people at Harvard who are, like, really smart.Not everyone at Harvard is, like,...
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