Tag: Publishing

  • Rebooting the CS Publication Process

    The job of an academic is to conduct research, and that means publishing manuscripts for the world to read. Computer science is somewhat unusual, among the other disciplines in science and engineering, in that our primary research output goes to highly competitive conferences rather than journals. Acceptance rates at the “top” conferences are often 15%…

  • Developing Texts Like We Develop Software

    Recently I was asked to speak at a conference for university librarians, about how the future of academic publication looks to me as a computer scientist. It’s an interesting question. What do computer scientists have to teach humanists about how to write? Surely not our elegant prose style. There is something distinctive about how computer…

  • Lessons from Amazon's 1984 Moment

    Amazon got some well-deserved criticism for yanking copies of Orwell’s 1984 from customers’ Kindles last week. Let me spare you the copycat criticism of Amazon — and the obvious 1984-themed jokes — and jump right to the most interesting question: What does this incident teach us? Human error was clearly part of the problem. Somebody…

  • Thoughtcrime Experiments

    Cosmic rays can flip bits in memory cells or processor datapaths. Once upon a time, Sudhakar and I asked the question, “can an attacker exploit rare and random bit-flips to bypass a programming-language’s type protections and thereby break out of the Java sandbox?” A recently published science-fiction anthology Thoughtcrime Experiments contains a story, “Single-Bit Error”…

  • The future of high school yearbooks

    The Dallas Morning News recently ran a piece about how kids these days aren’t interested in buying physical, printed yearbooks. (Hat tip to my high school’s journalism teacher, who linked to it from our journalism alumni Facebook group.) Why spend $60 on a dead-trees yearbook when you can get everything you need on Facebook? My…

  • Is the New York Times a Confused Company?

    Over lunch I did something old-fashioned—I picked up and read a print copy of the New York Times. I was startled to find, on the front of the business section, a large, colorfully decorated feature headlined “Is Google a Media Company?” The graphic accompanying the story shows a newspaper masthead titled “Google Today,” followed by…

  • Newspapers' Problem: Trouble Targeting Ads

    Richard Posner has written a characteristically thoughtful blog entry about the uncertain future of newspapers. He renders widespread journalistic concern about the unwieldy character of newspapers into the crisp economic language of “bundling”: Bundling is efficient if the cost to the consumer of the bundled products that he doesn’t want is less than the cost…

  • Live Webcast: Future of News, May 14-15

    We’re going to do a live webcast of our workshop on “The Future of News”, which will be held tomorrow and Thursday (May 14-15) in Princeton. Attending the workshop (free registration) gives you access to the speakers and other attendees over lunch and between sessions, but if that isn’t practical, the webcast is available. Here…

  • Future of News Workshop, May 14-15 in Princeton

    We’ve got a great lineup of speakers for our upcoming “Future of News” workshop. It’s May 14-15 in Princeton. It’s free, and if you register we’ll feed you lunch. Agenda Wednesday, May 14, 2008 9:30 – 10:45 Registration 10:45 – 11:00 Welcoming Remarks 11:00 – 12:00 Keynote talk by Paul Starr 12:00 – 1:30 Lunch,…

  • Online Symposium: Future of Scholarly Communication

    Today we’re kicking off an online symposium on The Future of Scholarly Communication, run by the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton. An “online symposium” is a kind of short-term group blog, focusing on a specific topic. Panelists (besides me) include Ira Fuchs, Paul DiMaggio, Peter Suber, Stan Katz, and David Robinson. (See the…