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Want Fame? Be a First Mover

Is fame and fortune what you seek (or at least fame)? Be a first mover, according to a new paper, arXiv:0809.0522

The first-mover advantage in scientific publication

Authors: M. E. J. Newman

Mathematical models of the scientific citation process predict a strong “first-mover” effect under which the first papers in a field will, essentially regardless of content, receive citations at a rate enormously higher than papers published later. Moreover papers are expected to retain this advantage in perpetuity — they should receive more citations indefinitely, no matter how many other papers are published after them. We test this conjecture against data from a selection of fields and in several cases find a first-mover effect of a magnitude similar to that predicted by the theory. Were we wearing our cynical hat today, we might say that the scientist who wants to become famous is better off — by a wide margin — writing a modest paper in next year’s hottest field than an outstanding paper in this year’s. On the other hand, there are some papers, albeit only a small fraction, that buck the trend and attract significantly more citations than theory predicts despite having relatively late publication dates. We suggest that papers of this kind, though they often receive comparatively few citations overall, are probably worthy of our attention.

Guess what field was used as an example for this effect? Network theory.

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Got NSF?

I really need to create a category for blog posts for things which Google’s products do which amuse me. Today in reading an email about the National Science Foundation:
Many a faculty member’s got NSF, I guess, and are damn sick or writing grants to continue having NSF.

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Wisely Using Your Advantage

When I was a little kid I used to take a pair of dice and throw these dice repeatedly. At each throw I’d fill in a box for the corresponding number on some graph paper and I would essentially “race” the numbers against each other. I suppose for that reason I’ve always been fascinated not just by probabilities, but in the convergence of repeated trials to the limiting “probabilities.” Which explains not just why I’m an uber geekazoid, but also why I was quite shocked today when I Googled “gambler’s ruin” and found that the intertubes only returned about 16000 hits (“card counting,” by the way, returns about 845,000 hits.) Gambler’s ruin is one of my favorite basic probability exercises (and a reason why many a poor soul, even if they have an advantage, ends up losing their money.)
Continue reading “Wisely Using Your Advantage”

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Still a Lot to Do

Over hyped press releases are a standard for quantum computing research and a stable of what makes me sound like a grumpy old man. Really I’m not that grumpy (really! reall!), but I always forget to post the stuff which isn’t over hyped. For example, today I stumbled upon an article about a recent experimental implementation of a code for overcoming qubit loss done in China. In this article I find a graduate student whose was able to get a reasonable quote into the article:

While optimistic critics are acclaiming the newly achieved progress, the team, however, is cautiously calm. “There are still a lot to do before we can build a practically workable quantum computer. Qubit loss is not the only problem for QC; other types of decoherence are to be overcome,” remarks LU Chaoyang, a PhD student with the team. “But good news is, the loss-tolerant quantum codes demonstrated in our work can be further concatenated with other quantum error correction codes or decoherence-free space to tackle multiple decoherence, and may become a useful part for future implementations of quantum algorithms.”

Ah, that makes me happy.

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National Medal of Science

David Wineland, laser cooling god and ion trap quantum computer builder extraordinaire, has been awarded the National Medal of Science. Much awesomeness.
Also winning the medal this year is a name familiar to computer scientists and engineers worldwide, or simply who have spent time at USC: Andrew Viterbi, inventor of the Viterbi algorithm and cofounder of Qualcom, among other notable achievements.

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London Eye Is Falling Down Illusion

The London Eye is a gigantic tourist trap rotating wheel, which you can ride to get a great view of London. The trip takes about 30 minutes. While riding it the other day, I noticed an odd illusion. The London Eye is made up of pods which are attached to the wheel in such a way that each pod is always horizontal. What I noticed was that if you were going up on Eye and looked up and toward the top of the Eye, it felt as if the entire contraption was falling over (i.e. the top of the wheel seemed as if it was falling over.) Anyone have any idea what causes this disorienting effect?
(I suspect it must be related to the similar effect you get when staring up at the spotlight at the Luxor in Las Vegas. The spotlight goes straight up, but from below, looking up at night, it seems as if the beam of the light bends.)

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Back! From Outer Space! Without That Sad Look Upon My Face

Ironically, of all the posts I scheduled to run while I was away on vacation last week, the only one which didn’t get automatically posted was the one saying that I’d be away and that the next weeks posts would be scheduled. Doh. So yeah, I was away.
For your viewing pleasure, Greek boats
and a Greek church
Bonus points for anyone who can identify this Greek town: