Tuesday, March 11, 2008

#50. Off-topic

For the interested readers, you can download the mamooth paper of Anton Kapustin and Edward Witten, 231 pages widely known as the Kapustin-Witten paper, from the net.

Electric-magnetic duality and the geometric Langlands program (2006).

That was written in 2006 and, as far as I know, is still unpublished or was never meant to be published traditionally.

You can also download the more recent lectures notes of Kapustin on the same topic, based on a 2007 course. They amount to a mere 38 pages and may be more readable.

Lectures on electric-magnetic duality and the geometric Langlands program


And no, I don't understand a word of what these gentlemen say but I will make my way through it anyway.

49. Editorial post

We are about to reach fifty posts and one year and a half on the net.

When I started this blog, I thought I'd send an e-mail informing each cited researcher. However, I felt that if only few posts were available, they would classify the blog as an anecdote of little use and probably not be back. So I sent the blog's address only to close friends and colleagues.

Now, the blog has received 1,349 visits and ranks in fifth position (over 280,000 search results) when you google for "fuzzy sets"+"statistics". One thousand visits is a modest number for a common blog (my personal blog has had 19,000 page loads in the same time, and it's a modest one) but maybe not so when the information delivered is so highly specialized and arrives at a slow rate of two posts per month.

The blog looks quite serious now and contains many links to interesting papers and books. As an important development, I have added a box in the right column so that readers can have the new posts delivered at their e-mail address. So I think it's about time to undertake the task of promoting the SPFS blog by informing all cited researchers that their work has been linked here.


As to `editorial' decisions to be announced at a moment like this, there are three of those.

1. Post 25 was off-topic and I have decided that a 4% of off-topic posts is OK.

2. Begining with post 51, a number of entries will be devoted to linking to the SPFS material in Google Books. If you know, Google has been digitalizing books for some time, with or without permission from copyright owners, and I've been shocked to find out how much material is there. It will take some time to make a careful search and organize the results, though.

3. Some effort in the following direction will be made: posting about applications and presence of fuzzy statistical methods in different fields. For instance, I have long wanted to write a post about fuzzy methods for microarray data (I downloaded a couple of papers but were not very good).


And, finally, an observation. If you remember, only links to publicly accessible papers are posted, so it's a little frustrating to me when I find good new papers that can be accessed only on a pay-a-third-party basis. I bring to everybody's attention that currently many publishers will let you retain the right to post your papers at your website, or at a public repository. You needn't go through creating and maintaining a website to have them accessible to everyone: a blog and a file hosting service is all you need, and there are plenty of free providers for both things. Actually, you can get started in less than ten minutes.