I visited the Amazon Bookstore in Columbus Circle when it opened. It was evident that with its vast computing and data facilities, Amazon can solve economic allocation problems with an accuracy and precision beyond the wildest dreams of the planners of the command economy of the former Soviet Union.
Unfortunate. University IT departments are susceptible to neoliberal evangelical insanity. When it happened to my department, I decided that I was unworthy to clean the digital bedpans of a destructively competitive, rank and pedigree conscious faculty and took off, never to support faculty again. Here's a rebuke to the smug, platitudinous know-nothings who insist that the university is a business. http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2016/02/proofs-that-un...
It has control mechanisms. What it doesn't need is precisely what you describe: a self-appointed, self-styled group of "leaders" who followed the wasteful winner-take-all, judgmental, rank and pedigree conscious ethos of their discipline.
Self-promotion is suspect in this highly competitive, and not infrequently nasty field. It was known that there was some transport mechanism--now there are details. But I would caution some skepticism, especially when the discoverer trumpets the extraordinary significance of the discovery.
Downvoters can take a warm piss on a power line. The researchers are quoted asserting the profound significance of their discovery. This is reason to be skeptical, given the field has a reputation for Nobel prize winners rushing to publish work they hear about from less well known researchers, and then claiming the less known researcher stole their ideas from them.
"Mathematics and the Internet: A Source of Enormous Confusion and Great Potential" http://www.ams.org/notices/200905/tx090500586p.pdf Is critical of scale-free networks of the preferential-attachment type, in particular of Barabasi's work. The paper is unusual for its polemic tone and for its name dropping. Researchers will trash each other in private--it is unusual to see this in print.
Much of the article is consumed with invidious comparisons of scale-free, preferential attachment network models of the internet with the authors’ own HOT (”highly organized/optimized tolerances/tradeoffs”) models: “In view of such a simple physical explanation of the origins of node degree variability in the Internet’s router-level topology, Stogartz’ question, paraphrasing Shakespeare’s Macbeth, ‘…power law scaling, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing?’ has a resounding affirmative answer.” The authors seem to suggest by this literary reference that a scale-invariant model of the Internet is a “tale told by an idiot.” This would not be lost on the readership of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society.
Its authors spare no opportunity to criticize their competition, as well as mathematicians and physicists generally, whom they regard as foppish, insular ivory tower aesthetes, whose nostrils are unacquainted with the bracing scent of an expertly soldered electrical connection.
Despite all of that, the authors are correct. I mention Doyle et al. because other authors have been critical of work on scale-free networks--this is not new. Doyle et al. warned about the misapplication of such networks to biology, though they mysteriously claimed that such failures of the scientific method "would reflect poorly on mathematics," as if mathematicians ought to be held responsible.
Not a great deal of explicit category theory in this. Somone ought to implement Moggi's paper on exceptions and show exactly what the constructions mean.
Yes. Many category theorists would find Moggi91 opaque. It could benefit from commentary and more detail than would be standard for a published paper, if the intention is to make the categorical semantics of functional programming with side effects accessible to a wide audience. I guess one could suss this out of Robert Harper's book on the foundations of programming languages, but I was thinking of something more direct.
Ah. Yes, the diagram generating libraries are harder to implement. Since we don't actually implement the primitives that TeX uses, we can't just import libraries like xypic or tikz wholesale, we'd have to rewrite them from scratch. Maybe a project for when we've got most of the actual math working.
As for why we didn't work with MathJax, this started out as more of an internal project for making our own math fast, and has slowly built up to what we have today.
We also didn't think that we could get the speed we wanted while still supporting all of the obscure features MathJax does (like SVG rendering).
