Would you include your blog in your T&P file?

What's the difference between a blog and a book, as far as "publications" are concerned? It's not quality -- it is not much harder to get a book published than it is to write the equivalent material in a blog. So if you are happy to list a book in your Tenure & Promotion file, would you also include your blog?

I know of people who have done it, like our former science librarian John Dupuis (his excellent blog is here). But I expect John is the exception rather than the rule.

I see a couple of things holding most researchers back from using their blog professionally.

On False Positives

Methods

One mature Atlantic Salmon (Salmo salar) participated in the fMRI study. The salmon was approximately 18 inches long, weighed 3.8 lbs, and was not alive at the time of scanning. The task administered to the salmon involved completing an open-ended mentalizing task. The salmon was shown a series of photographs depicting individuals in social situations with a specified emotional valence. The salmon was asked to determine what emotion the individual in the photo must have been experiencing. Stimuli were presented in a block design with each photo presented for 10 seconds followed by 12 seconds of rest. A total of 15 photos were displayed. Total scan time was 5.5 minutes.

 Source. See also.

Low bandwidth

So the sabbatical is more intense than expected. I am SO BUSY sipping sherry or drinking mojitos on the beach or whatever us lazy-ass do-nothing professors do (LOL @ Margaret Wente).

All this to say, updates will be infrequent for the foreseeable future.

Some alternatives to the word "Webinar", in no particular order

I hate the word "webinar". It sounds like a piano falling five stories onto pavement. But sadly, it is a real and widely used English word.

So here's my attempt find alternatives.

1. Webtalk
2. Binar (Web log -> weblog -> blog, Web seminar -> webinar -> binar)
3. Reminar (Remote seminar?)
4. Electure (e-lecture, like electronic lecture, but first syllable like "election")
5. Caplet (Captured lecture, for lecture capture, i.e. recording and streaming lectures)

Or, the wild card: a category-killing company in the webinar space, whose whimsical company name will be used instead of "webinar" from now on, like saying "Google" instead of search.

Any other ideas? Throw them in the comments.

Why is WiMob so expensive?

WiMob -- officially the IEEE International Conference on Wireless and Mobile Computing, Networking, and Communications -- is a prominent conference in communications and networking, organized by the IEEE Computer Society. It also happens to be far more expensive than its peers.

Suppose you're a professor with two graduate students; both your students have accepted papers, and all three of you want to attend the conference. The cost (just for registration) is given below for WiMob, compared with several peer conferences, from 2011 and 2012.

(For the professor, we're assuming the least expensive "limited" registration, at the early-bird IEEE or ACM member rate. For the students, we're assuming the student IEEE or ACM member rate. The plot is sorted in increasing order of 2012 cost.)

First off, kudos to ComSoc for running some of the least expensive conferences in the space.

So what makes WiMob 50% more expensive than PIMRC? It's the double whammy of a high student registration rate ($570, compared with $300-350 at most of the others), plus the requirement that each paper have a non-student registration (or an extra paper fee, almost as much as a registration). Three papers per registration is typical of the other conferences.

However, even if we consider a professor and one student with one paper, WiMob is still the most expensive for 2012, and second-most for 2011:

On the WiMob 2011 web site, the organizers say that "Due to the low acceptance ratio, each paper must have one full registration." And WiMob is a smaller conference than, say, ICC or Globecom, so it doesn't have the same economies of scale.

Yet ACM's Sigcomm is a smallish conference with a lower acceptance ratio than WiMob (see here), and still manages to be quite a bit less expensive. So what's going on with WiMob?

(Hat tip to Allen Mackenzie for pointing this out.)

The incredible growing Transactions on Information Theory

My complimentary copy of the Transactions on Information Theory came in the mail today, my reward for publishing this paper. I haven't received one of these copies in a few years, so I was pretty surprised by the size of it. You're looking at 891 pages of journal right there.

It's not just me. The Transactions on Information Theory are getting much, much bigger.

ISIT 2012 as it happened

I created a Storify of my tweets tagged #isit2012, after the jump.  (As far as I know, I was one of only three people using this tag: the others were Josep Font-Segura and Da Wang. We need more information theorists on Twitter.)

It was an excellent ISIT -- one of the best I've attended. I missed 2010 and 2011 but I'm now motivated to attend more regularly. See you next year in Istanbul, hopefully!