"I sound my lonely trumpet in the dark trying to relax at the edge of precipice which once again faces me"

Steve sends me this gem, arXiv:0905.1039.  The title of this blog post being a line from the paper:

Citation entropy and research impact estimation
Z.K. Silagadze
A new indicator, a real valued $s$-index, is suggested to characterize a quality and impact of the scientific research output. It is expected to be at least as useful as the notorious $h$-index, at the same time avoiding some its obvious drawbacks. However, surprisingly, the $h$-index is found to be quite a good indicator for majority of real-life citation data with their alleged Zipfian behaviour for which these drawbacks do not show up. The style of the paper was chosen deliberately somewhat frivolous to indicate that any attempt to characterize the scientific output of a researcher by just one number always has an element of a grotesque game in it and should not be taken too seriously. I hope this frivolous style will be perceived as a funny decoration only.

I wonder if this will provoke a response from my dear friend the Sad Physicist?

4 Replies to “"I sound my lonely trumpet in the dark trying to relax at the edge of precipice which once again faces me"”

  1. Uhhh … say … does anyone in the QIS/QIT blogosphere ever post about math, physics, or engineering anymore? Or have we published enough, that we can just write review articles from now `til eternity, with little or no loss of value to the broader STEM enterprise?

  2. I would be interested in that!
    Congratulations by the way to you and your wife on Baby Bacon! Yeah … a fellah doesn’t understand true romance, until this class marital conversation makes sense: Q: “What kind is it?” A: “The kind that means … it’s your turn.”
    Seriously, a post on cryptographic interpretations of QM would be very welcome on The Quantum Pontiff. Just as geometry has been defined as “the study of properties that are invariant under change of notation”, isn’t quantum physics essentially “the study of theories whose predictions are invariant under change of interpretation”? … and this view leads very naturally to cryptographic applications.

  3. Who the hell is Silagadze? I am shocked to see that arXiv has actually accepted this lunatic “paper”. Although, it is no different in its insanity from the BS that JH has been publishing there and other journals.
    I am thinking that it would be useful to create a new funding Agency that would give grants to certain individuals with the condition that they do NOT publish papers. For example, $50K per each year without a single publication. The proud recipients of the Shut-the-hell-up award (or shortly SH-award) should be allowed to use the funds for mental treatment, they seem to need so badly.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *