One computer and one system-upgrade ago, I tried to convince people to set up their own MOPP (My Online Publications Page).

The essence of such pages is that they need an update, once in a while… I’m a bit embarrassed to admit it, but, I failed to re-install the package, following my own instructions.

Fortunately, there are plenty of good alternatives around, today. After playing a bit with bibtex2html, Ive settled for the bib2html perl script by Patrick Riley.

Included are well documented directions. The most important being that you have to do a

sudo ln -s /usr/bin/perl /usr/local/bin/perl5¹

and change the user-specific entries in the bib2html.conf configuration file (if you have already key.pdf files around, you can just drop them in the output-directory and set . as the paperfiledirlist, and they will be found and linked to automatically. If not, you can always include links in the bib-file). Further, if you want to link to web-pages of your coauthors, remember that the script expects you to use : LastName, FirstName | http://webpage even if you used a different convention in your bib-file.

The result can be seen here. For ebook-download-junks : Ive included again full PDF-files of all versions of my book (starting with version 1 from 1999 to the final published version of last year). They can best be found using the sort-by-type page.

1. thank you Rupert, via the comments [↩]

Terry Tao is reworking some of his better blogposts into a book, to be published by the AMS (here’s a preliminary version of the book “What’s New?”)

After some thought, I decided not to transcribe all of my posts from last year (there are 93 of them!), but instead to restrict attention to those articles which (a) have significant mathematical content, (b) are not announcements of material that will be published elsewhere, and (c) are not primarily based on a talk given by someone else. As it turns out, this still leaves about 33 articles from 2007, leading to a decent-sized book of a couple hundred pages in length.

If you have a blog and want to turn it into a LaTeX-book, there’s no need to transcribe or copy every single post, thanks to the WPTeX tool. Note that this is NOT a WP-plugin, but a (simple at that) php-program which turns all posts into a bookcontent.tex file. This file can then be edited further into a proper book.

Unfortunately, the present version chokes on LaTeXrender-code (which is easy enough to solve doing a global ‘find-and-replace’ of the tex-tags by dollar-signs) but worse, on Markdown-code… But then, someone fluent in php-regex will have no problems extending the libs/functions.php file (I hope…).

At the moment I’m considering turning the Mathieu-games-posts into a booklet. A possible title might be Mathieumatical Games. Rereading them (and other posts) I regret to be such an impatient blogger. Often I’m interested in something and start writing posts about it without knowing where or when I’ll land. This makes my posts a lot harder to get through than they might have been, if I would blog only after having digested the material myself… Typical recent examples are the tori-crypto-posts and the Bost-Connes algebra posts.

So, I still have a lot to learn from other bloggers I admire, such as Jennifer Ouellette who maintains the Coctail Party Physics blog. At the moment, Jennifer is resident blogger-journalist at the Kavli Institute where she is running a “Journal Club” workshop giving ideas on how to write better about science.

But the KITP is also committed to fostering scientific communication. That’s where I come in. Each Friday through April 26th, I’ll be presiding over a “Journal Club” meeting focusing on some aspect of communicating science.

Her most recent talk was entitled To Blog or Not to Blog? That is the Question and you can find the slides as well as a QuickTime movie of her talk. They even plan to set up a blog for the participants of the workshop. I will surely follow the rest of her course with keen interest!

The next thing on my tech-to-do-list : learn all about Yahoo Pipes :

Pipes is a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web. Like Unix pipes, simple commands can be combined together to create output that meets your needs. Here are a few popular ways the service can be used:
- create your ultimate custom feed by combining many feeds into one, then sorting, filtering and translating them.
- geocode your favorite feeds and browse the items on an interactive map.
- remix your favorite data sources and use the Pipe to power a new application.
- build custom vertical search pages that are impossible with ordinary search engines.
- power widgets/badges on your web site.
- consume the output of any Pipe in RSS, JSON, KML, and other formats.

I’ve posted before on setting up your own lifestream, or your own planet, or scraping feeds, or subscribing to my brain, or … whatever. The good news is : all these ideas are now superseded by Pipes!

Pipes is a free online service that lets you remix popular feed types and create data mashups using a visual editor. You can use Pipes to run your own web projects, or publish and share your own web services without ever having to write a line of code. You make a Pipe by dragging pre-configured modules onto a canvas and wiring them together in the Pipes Editor. Once you’ve built a Pipe, you’ll be able save it on our server and then call it like you would any other feed. Pipes offers output in RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0 (RDF), JSON and Atom formats for maximum flexibility. You can also choose to publish your Pipe and share it with the world, allowing other users to clone it, add their own improvements, or use it as a subcomponent in their own creations.

This is the essential message to get : yahoo-pipes allows you to remix the web, filtering out all noise! And the good news is

1. There are plenty of public pipes around to get you going, and
2. Pipes has an iTouch-friendly interface (see above left). All you have to do is to Safari to iphone.pipes.yahoo.com and use them.

Here are a few public-pipes you can use out of the box!

• iPhone / iPod Touch: The Most Comprehensive Feed Ever!, doing what it promises : giving you the best iTouch-posts without having to roam for them.
• JSON Geocoder, returning lat/lon/address info from the the given address.
• Uber Blog Search, Search all the blogosphere with one query. Hits Google, Ask, Technorati, and icerocket then returns the unique results. Below the web-interface giving the results for ‘noncommutative’…

• Meta Search Alerts if you want a less ‘neverendingbooks’-based reply

and finally, one of my favorites, implementing to some extend the Lifestream-idea (iTouch-interface above left)

• lifefeed - virable, Easily Aggregate your social whereabouts great for blogs profiles and more! Aggregates Your Feeds From: -Digg -Last.fm -Twitter -Flickr -Del.icio.us and your very own blog Adopt and Improve, enjoy!

I’ll promise to spend some time soon to set up my very own pipes and make them available…

Great! You’ve finally managed to arXiv your paper after months of laborious research, and now, you’re eagerly awaiting response…

The odds are you’ll be disappointed, if not frustrated. Chances are high that if you get any response at all it is only to clarify that someone else (usually the person emailing you) proved this result a long time ago, or that your result could be generalized enormously, or that you could have shortened your proof tremendously if only you were more educated, or … Mathematics seems to be more of a pissing contest than anything else, at such moments.

Imagine someone would be kind enough, at that particular moment, to send you an email saying not much more than : “Gee thanks! Ive just browsed through your paper arXived today and you really made my day! Keep up the good work, all the best :: lieven” (change the name to your liking)

Sadly, math-circles are not known for their ‘good-vibes’ generally. Mind you, Ive send similar emails to people posting on the arXiv, but, admittedly, I did it far fewer than I might have. Often I like (even admire) a result but repress the urgent need to communicate that feeling to the author, perhaps my Asperger kicking up…

Now that you may feel some empathy with the situation, let’s get to a similar situation in math-blogging. Sometimes, you spend a lot of time writing a post ¹ , release it to the world, see tons of RSS-bots and genuine hits passing by and then what?… nothing! no reply, no email, no comment, nothing at all!

Personally, I’m not that influenced by this. When I blog I do it because (1) Ive the time, at that particular moment and (2) I like to write about the things I do, at that moment. But sometimes, it comes to us all, that feeling of ‘why am I doing this after all? can’t I spend my time more sensibly doing something else?’ and when you begin to have these doubts it usually marks the beginning of a long silence at your blog²

So, here’s an appeal to all you lurkers at math-blogs : give these people, once in a while, something back…. Ive thought for a long time that this lurk-but-no-comment attitude was something typical of mathematicians, but, as often, when researched in more depth, I have to admit that I’m wrong! Read the post Participation Inequality: Encouraging More Users to Contribute by Jakob Nielsen to find out that most blogs act along a 90-9-1 scheme :

User participation often more or less follows a 90-9-1 rule:

90% of users are lurkers (i.e., read or observe, but don’t contribute).
9% of users contribute from time to time, but other priorities dominate their time.
1% of users participate a lot and account for most contributions: it can seem as if they don’t have lives because they often post just minutes after whatever event they’re commenting on occurs.

So, the good news is, it’s not that particular to us autistic mathematicians. But, wouldn’t it be even better if you could do something positive about it? Speaking for myself : often I read a post I like, and (being a semi-pro myself) appreciate the work had to be put into producing such a post, but even then I don’t feel the urge to communicate this positive feeling to the blogger in question. Perhaps, we could accelerate things by having a bookmarklet in your bookmarks-bar that does the following : when you like a post, go to the post-page where you are asked to leave a comment. Hit the bookmarklet and it will automatically fill in your name, URL, email adress and a supporting message along the lines of “Nice post! I’m not so much of a commenter, but rather than not replying at all, I found it important to let you know that people actually read and like your post. All the best (and perhaps later I’ll comment more to the point) :: lieven (again, change the name to your liking).

Well, I’ve just done that! So please take a few minutes off your time to read and follow-up the instructions below and have a math-blog-bookmarklet up in your bookmark-bar to tell the blogger in question you really liked her/his post. This may just be enough motivation for them to carry on…

Okay! Here the nitty-gritty (it takes under 2 minutes, so please, do it now!).

part 1 : copy the following text and save it as blogmarklet.html

• Download mathblogmarklet.txt and save it into your favorite text-program as bookmarklet.html and change your URL, name, email and custom message (please extend on your compliments…)

• Once you saved the file as bookmarklet.html open the file under your favourite browser (Safari or Flock) and drag the link to your bookmark-bar.

part 2 : use it!

• Whenever you visit a blog-post you like, go to the page of that post where you can leave a comment. Hit the bookmarklet and your comment-fields are filled (but PLEASE ADD TO THE DEFAULT COMMENT IF YOU FEEL LIKE IT) and press the submit-button!

• That’s it!

For example, Ive just changed the layout of this blog. Please leave a specific comment what you think about it.

1. but probably you have to be blogging yourself to appreciate the amount of energy it takes to write a genuine post compared to a link-post or a couple-of-lines-not-going-into-the-specifics post [↩]
2. browse my archive and I can tell you specifically what happened at that particular moment to stop blogging [↩]

What better way to start a series on Web 2.0 & Mathematics than to reflect on the potential dangers of majority-approved sites, such as Google, Wikipedia and META-sites. Bee has written a great essay The Spirits That We Called

Now you can tell me everyone of us should be rational, we should always check sources, doubt unverified reports even if repeated several times. We shouldn’t believe what we read without questioning it. We should seek accuracy and not easy entertainment. We should, we should, we should. But face it, many people don’t. Because they just don’t have the time, or are not interested enough, and the most commonly used criteria in this case is to follow the masses. Read what others read (the posts with the most comments?) go where many people link to, talk what others talk about, pay attention to what many people consider relevant. Majority offers security, Wikipedia is trustworthy, Google has proved useful.

To wet your appetite to take a break, and start reading the full essay (11 printed pages available from this pdf link), her opening paragraph, in which she outlines possible consequences of tempering with social bookmark sites.

MARCH 13th 2008: Until Wednesday, the Presidential candidate [insert name here] scored high in the polls. Then a Google search for his name showed up as first hit a report on an alleged child abuse committed by the candidate, published by Mary S. (name changed) on her personal website. The story was backed up by the following highly ranked hits that indicated two similar events during his youth, though reliable sources were missing. Within less than one hour, the reports were echoed on thousands of weblogs, appeared on digg and reddit, the original websites received 200,000 hits within the first 6 hours, until the server crashed down. Immediate press releases by the candidate’s PR groups did not appear on the Google listing, and could only be accessed by secondary links. It took until the next day that printed newspapers could attempt to clarify the situation.

Another, equally interesting essay, to which Bee points is Digital Maoism by Jaron Lanier,

The Wikipedia is far from being the only online fetish site for foolish collectivism. There’s a frantic race taking place online to become the most “Meta” site, to be the highest level aggregator, subsuming the identity of all other sites.
The race began innocently enough with the notion of creating directories of online destinations, such as the early incarnations of Yahoo. Then came AltaVista, where one could search using an inverted database of the content of the whole Web. Then came Google, which added page rank algorithms. Then came the blogs, which varied greatly in terms of quality and importance. This lead to Meta-blogs such as Boing Boing, run by identified humans, which served to aggregate blogs. In all of these formulations, real people were still in charge. An individual or individuals were presenting a personality and taking responsibility.
…
In the last year or two the trend has been to remove the scent of people, so as to come as close as possible to simulating the appearance of content emerging out of the Web as if it were speaking to us as a supernatural oracle. This is where the use of the Internet crosses the line into delusion.
…
In March, Kelly reviewed a variety of “Consensus Web filters” such as “Digg” and “Reddit” that assemble material every day from all the myriad of other aggregating sites. Such sites intend to be more Meta than the sites they aggregate. There is no person taking responsibility for what appears on them, only an algorithm. The hope seems to be that the most Meta site will become the mother of all bottlenecks and receive infinite funding.

Now, please print out these two essays, turn off your computer for an hour, and read them! Perhaps they change your opinion as to whether or not getting involved into some of these bookmark sites. Being aware of their potential danger is one (important) thing, neglecting them altogether has drawbacks too.

You might want to repeat the experiment I performed last night : type in your favorite technical term (mine was ‘noncommutative’, when this failed to return a hit, I tried ‘geometry’) into bookmark sites such as StumbleUpon, Digg, MyBlogLog, Reddit, blinklist, Magnolia and a dozen other similar ones.

You will discover that there is hardly any mathematics of value to be found there. As more people are using such sites in search of information, an inevitable consequence is that mathematics will become even more marginal, unless we take some action.

In my experiment, there was one noteworthy exception¹ : CiteUlike which has 427 articles tagged noncommutative, perhaps a result of the action I started 2 years ago. So, there is still hope!

1. delicious was another ok-site [↩]