On Sunday, 11 August 2013 at 16:28:21 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> On 8/11/13 8:49 AM, monarch_dodra wrote:
>> On Sunday, 11 August 2013 at 15:42:24 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>>> On Sun, 11 Aug 2013 01:22:34 -0700
>>> Walter Bright <newshound2@digitalmars.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> http://elrond.informatik.tu-freiberg.de/papers/WorldComp2012/PDP3426.pdf
>>>
>>> Holy crap those two-column PDFs are hard to read! Why in the world does
>>> academia keep doing that anyway? (Genuine question, not rhetoric)
>>>
>>> But the fact that article even exists is really freaking awesome. :)
>>
>> My guess is simply because it takes more space, making a 4 page article
>> look like a 7 page ;)
>
> Double columns take less space and are more readable.
>
> Andrei

Printed, for sure. On screen, doubtful.

On 08/12/2013 05:57 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> On 8/11/13 4:45 PM, Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote:
>> On Sunday, 11 August 2013 at 23:37:28 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>>> That's an odd thing to say seeing as a lot of CS academic research is ten years ahead of the industry.
>>
>> I would personally venture to say that the publication practises of academia in general and CS in particular have many destructive and damaging aspects, and that industry-academia gap might be narrowed quite a bit if these were addressed.
> 
> Could be improved, sure. Destructive and damaging - I'd be curious for some substantiation.

In the case of CS in particular, the publication system is different from much of academia because it's so strongly based around conferences and conference proceedings.  I'd say that's damaging in several ways.

First, it means people write to the submission deadline rather than to their work having reached a satisfactory point of readiness.  All other activities grind to a halt in the run-up to major conference deadlines -- you see students and postdocs in particular pulling all-nighters in order to make sure that everything gets done in time.

Besides the health implications of that, such a last-minute rush has plenty of scope for making mistakes or introducing errors, errors that will be in the permanent academic record with little scope for correction (conference proceedings generally don't carry errata).  There are also more direct sources of bias -- e.g. if the work is based on user surveys, the chances are all the people in the lab _not_ working towards a paper deadline will be shanghaied into completing those surveys, disrupting their own work and also ensuring that the results are based on a very skewed selection of the population.

This pressure to deliver on deadline something that will be accepted by the conference can also lead to quite a superficial approach to the existing literature, with references skimmed quickly in order to find any random phrase that may support the current piece of work (even though on closer reading it may actually indicate the opposite).

The second source of damage comes via the conference review process.  Because conferences are all-or-nothing affairs -- you get accepted or you don't -- there's a strong tendency to submit multiple papers presenting different facets of essentially the same work to multiple different conferences, just to ensure that _something_ gets accepted.  That means overwork both for the authors (who have to write all those extra papers) and also for conference referees, who have to deal with the resulting excess of papers.

Reviewers are also working to deadlines, and with a lot of papers to assess in a short space of time (which is very disruptive to their other work), that can lead to snap and very superficial judgements.  If there's a discrepancy in the amount of work that has to be done -- e.g. a "yes" means just a "yes", but a "no" means having to write a detailed report explaining why -- that can lead to accepting papers simply to lessen the workload.

There are also financial aspects -- because most conferences (understandably) won't accept papers unless at least one author comes to present, it means that authors' ability to publish their work can be constrained by their labs' ability to fund travel, accommodation and conference fees rather than by the quality of what they've done.

And finally, when all is done and dusted, the proceedings of conferences are almost invariably then locked up behind a publisher paywall, despite the fact that almost all the document preparation work is done by authors and conference volunteers.  How many tech businesses can afford the annual subscriptions to digital libraries?  (I'm thinking small startups here.)

I suppose you could say that many of these issues are personal/professional failings of individual researchers or labs, but in my experience these failings are driven by the pressure to publish conference papers, and young researchers are pretty much trained to follow these working practices in order to succeed.

What particularly frustrates me about this particular situation is that the justification for the current system -- that computer science is too fast-moving for journal publication to keep up with the latest results -- simply doesn't hold water in an age of electronic publication.  It's habit and professional career structures, rather than the interests of research communication, that maintain the current system.

I could go on, but I think these examples will serve as substantiation. :-)

On Sunday, 11 August 2013 at 17:20:37 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> rare few who have a monitor that swivels vertically or some

Once you go vertical, you never go back!

No, really, considering how much nicer it is for _every kind of documentation_ (and most code), it's sad that this standard feature of good Dell monitors for at least five years is rare.

-Wyatt

On Sunday, 11 August 2013 at 15:42:24 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> Holy crap those two-column PDFs are hard to read!

Hehe, "Introduction to the DWARF debugging format" by Michael Eager is a 3-column pdf: down, up, down, up, down, left, right, A, B, Instant Kill.

On 08/12/2013 09:12 AM, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> I'm seeing a lot of focus here on the printed page. People can do whatever the heck they want when they go print handouts and such. But that doesn't mean they have to, or should, shoehorn their electronic publications into a form that's poorly suited for electronic use.

One thing that's worth remembering is that printing out copies for reading and thinking purposes is still quite important -- there's a great benefit in disconnecting from screen, from e-reader, from any electronic devices, and reading, scribbling and thinking with just you, a printed copy and some note paper.

Having well-laid-out print copies makes that process much, _much_ nicer.  If I compare the not-so-nice 2-column conference proceedings with a well-prepared journal article, there's no comparison.

Typography still matters a great deal for effective research communication.

> Didn't someone here say not too long ago that most of those
> publications are just written in latex anyway? If that's the case, then
> I really don't see any issue with having separate formats for print
> handouts vs electronic distribution (But then I'm not versed in latex, so maybe I'm missing something).

Depends on the discipline.  Some (e.g. physics) are pretty wedded to LaTeX. Others are almost all based around Word.  Different branches of computer science seem to favour one or the other -- ACM and IEEE conference proceedings have templates in both, and the author is asked to generate the PDF copy from whichever they use, and it's the PDF, and _only_ the PDF, that is used for dissemination purposes.  In other cases (e.g. Spring Lecture Notes) the publisher does ask for source copy and does make use of it.

Where journals are concerned, different journals handle things differently but in my experience, these days LaTeX is not so often used as the actual formatting mechanism.  When authors provide LaTeX source, it'll most likely be used as an input for the typesetter's internal workflow, most often using InDesign, with XML, HTML and PDF copies being exported.

There are some physics journals which were almost certainly using LaTeX as their formatting mechanism some years ago, but have now switched to that kind of alternative workflow.  You can tell because the copyediting stage introduces typos that are only explicable if the submitted LaTeX source has been imported into something like Word and copyedited there.

On Sunday, 11 August 2013 at 15:49:25 UTC, monarch_dodra wrote:
> On Sunday, 11 August 2013 at 15:42:24 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>> On Sun, 11 Aug 2013 01:22:34 -0700
>> Walter Bright <newshound2@digitalmars.com> wrote:
>>
>>> http://elrond.informatik.tu-freiberg.de/papers/WorldComp2012/PDP3426.pdf
>>
>> Holy crap those two-column PDFs are hard to read! Why in the world does
>> academia keep doing that anyway? (Genuine question, not rhetoric)
>>
>> But the fact that article even exists is really freaking awesome. :)
>
> My guess is simply because it takes more space, making a 4 page article look like a 7 page ;)

Actually I think the opposite is true. Many CS conferences for
example have page limits and as multi-column allows you to use a
smaller font, and still have a readable document, the
multi-column layout lets you submit a longer paper.

In my experience with conference paper submission (which for me
usually had a 6 or 8 page limit) was getting the thing short
enough to submit.

Craig

On Monday, 12 August 2013 at 11:45:31 UTC, Joseph Rushton
Wakeling wrote:
> On 08/12/2013 05:57 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> On 8/11/13 4:45 PM, Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote:
>>> On Sunday, 11 August 2013 at 23:37:28 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> First, it means people write to the submission deadline rather than to their
> work having reached a satisfactory point of readiness.  All

As a (former) Academia person, I could only concur.

 From this point of view, this "publish or perish" mantra is a bad
one. Believe it or not, but, to date, the most serious school
about that is the Russian school. AFAICT, those guys (at least
those that I encountered), they are really doing some work,
*then* looking for a conference to publish their results.

For many others (of us), it is exactly the opposite: "OMG, the
deadline for that conference in Podung is approaching so fast!
what should I gather from my (unfinished) work to come up with a
paper?"

Let's not even discuss about: "why writing a single paper, when I
could split my work in two or three papers, just to have better
impact factor?" ;)

On Mon, 12 Aug 2013 13:50:19 +0200
"Wyatt" <wyatt.epp@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sunday, 11 August 2013 at 17:20:37 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> > rare few who have a monitor that swivels vertically or some
> 
> Once you go vertical, you never go back!
> 
> No, really, considering how much nicer it is for _every kind of documentation_ (and most code), it's sad that this standard feature of good Dell monitors for at least five years is rare.
> 
> -Wyatt

Yea. (And for vertical sh'mups!) That's also the reason 4:3 monitors
would have to be pryed from my cold dead hands. 16:9 is fine for videos
and games, but my computer isn't a glorified TV (as the manufacturers
apparently insist on pretending). For non-TV uses of a computer (ie,
the whole freaking point) 16:9 is just absolutely awful. 5:4 is
tolerable, but even that's nearly impossible to find now. My
stupid laptop has a 16:9 built-in because I literally couldn't find
anything better. Normally I just have it connected to my 4:3 CRT.

What I've ended up doing is mounting my taskbar on the left side of the screen instead of the bottom. The built-in 16:9 is downright unusable otherwise. And I've found it's even an improvement on the 4:3, too.

The authors of that article sum it up quite well. I used D for the same reasons and I don't see why I should use any other language for new projects, unless it's a very specific thing like web development where PHP etc are handier. For years I had been dreaming of something like D.

On Monday, 12 August 2013 at 16:28:01 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> Yea. (And for vertical sh'mups!) That's also the reason 4:3 monitors
> would have to be pryed from my cold dead hands. 16:9 is fine for videos
> and games, but my computer isn't a glorified TV
> ...

It has bugged me too in laptop screens but I don't feel it is an issue now for large desktop ones. Once monitor gets big enough so that you start needing some sort of tiling to utilize the space, exact shape does not matter that much anymore. Even typical 24" is enough for 3 full-sized terminal windows side by side.

What is completely frustrating though, is horrible DPI on those monitors. 1080p on 24" is a joke and it is a de-facto standard.