[A note for non-computer scientists: almost alone among academic disciplines, computer science does not put a strong emphasis on journal articles as a measure of research productivity. Most significant results are first published in "top" conferences like POPL, NIPS, and CRYPTO. Journals typically published expanded versions of conference papers, years after the fact.]

Unsurprisingly, the authors find a strong inverse correlation between the acceptance and citation rates. But there is something interesting here: the best papers at the most selective conferences are cited slightly less often than those that are merely highly selective.

The top-cited papers from 15%–20%-acceptance-rate conferences are cited more often than those from 10%–15% conferences. We hypothesize that an extremely selective but imperfect (as review processes always are) review process has filtered-out submissions that would deliver impact if published. This hypothesis matches the common speculation, including from former ACM President David Patterson, that highly selective conferences too often choose incremental work at the expense of innovative breakthrough work.

Alternatively, extremely low acceptance rates might discourage submissions by authors who dislike and avoid competition or the perception of there being a “lottery” among good papers for a few coveted publication slots. A third explanation suggests that extremely low acceptance rates have caused a conference proceedings to be of such limited focus that other researchers stop checking it regularly and thus never cite it.

This brings to mind a contentious discussion from last winter about the POPL reviewing process. POPL doesn’t even fit into the most selective category—its acceptance rate varies between 15 and 25%—but the consensus in the discussion seemed to be that too many good papers were being rejected for bad reasons, and that an acceptance rate in the 30-40% range could be adopted without significantly affecting the average quality of the accepted papers.

What would happen if every selective conference decided to increase its acceptance rate by 5-10%? It seems likely that the more selective conferences would “steal” the best papers from less selective conferences in the same area. The least selective conferences would be left with fewer worthwhile papers to publish. Perhaps counter-intuitively, the correlation between acceptance and citation rates would get even stronger.

Today’s subject is Haimaey, the largest of the Vestmannaeyjar (Westman Islands). The key attractions on Haimaey are the lava flows of Eldfell, dramatic ocean cliffs, and lots and lots of puffins. The following are not attractions on Haimaey: nightlife, comfortable hotels, a large selection of quality restaurants, or accurate maps.

H recommends that you stay at the campsite on the North side of the island. I was intrigued by a little hostel that we passed on the Southern part of the island (here, I believe), but I can find no information about it on the Internet. Perhaps they don’t welcome foreign tourists.

The thing to do in Haimaey, if you’re not a rock climber (and I’m not), is to walk along the coast and spot puffins. The trail on the West side of the island starts rather vaguely near the golf course. Walk down Hamarsvegur to somewhere near the clubhouse, cut across the course to the top of the cliffs, then turn South. At this point, you’ll still be on the golf course and may be in the way. As you head further South, the course will end and you will find yourself on a reasonably unambiguous hiking trail, continuing pretty much uninterrupted down to the Southern tip of the island.

On the Southern tip, you are face with a choice: double back the way you came, walking up the Western coast, or forge ahead to the East, where the trail is not nearly so well marked and you will be blocked from making a full circuit by the airstrip in the center of the island. Taking the (bad) advice of The Rough Guide, we tried the latter course. It starts off well, with an interesting black sand beach, but then the trail sort of disappears. We reached a fence with no stile and were forced to scramble up a fairly steep hill and then improvise.

Not that it was a total loss. There were ponies

and sheep

but in the end, we had to walk at least a kilometer back into town, sore and tired, along the puffinless road.

A last word of advice: don’t bother trying the puffin, it’s not very tasty. Instead, have a delicious lamb “boat” sandwich with crispy fried onions.

Best wishes and happy Spring,
The proprietor

1. apt-get install qemu-kvm qemu-kvm-extras
2. Download a prebuild image for the guest system you want to run. In my case, I wanted armel, which meant I also had to download initrd and vmlinuz images.
3. If you want to copy files from the host system (i.e., your computer) into the guest, you need to make a “raw” image that you can mount from both sides:

   $ qemu-img create data.img <SIZE>
   Formatting 'data.img', fmt=raw size=...
   
   $ mke3fs -j data.img
   mke2fs 1.41.9 (22-Aug-2009)
   data.img is not a block special device.
   Proceed anyway? (y,n) y
   ...
   
   $ sudo mount -o rw,loop data.img <MOUNT_POINT>
   

   <SIZE> is a size in kilobytes, or use suffixes M and G for megabytes/gigabytes. The image only has to be big enough to temporarily hold the data you want to copy; you can move it to the guest’s root filesystem before you start working with it.

   <MOUNT_POINT> is any existing empty directory where you want to mount the image. I just made a directory foo in the same directory as the image.

   You should copy over any data now, because apparently it would be VERY BAD to do that while QEMU is running.

4. Now it’s time to start the sucker. An example command line will be given in the README for the image you downloaded. I use:

   qemu-system-arm -M versatilepb -kernel vmlinuz-2.6.26-1-versatile \
       -initrd initrd.img-2.6.26-1-versatile -hda debian_lenny_armel_small.qcow2 \
       -hdb data.img -append "root=/dev/sda1"
   

   Notice the -hdb data.img argument. That sets up the data image we set up in the last step as a disk drive in the guest system. You can probably login as user with password user. The root password is probably root.

5. Once you’re logged in, make a directory to use as a mount point, then su and do:

   mount -t ext3 /dev/sdb <MOUNT_POINT>
   

6. Now you can copy over your data. And here’s the beautiful part: you should be able to get on the network with no problem. If you need anything that’s not installed, just apt-get update and then apt-get install the missing package. Should work, no problem.

[Sabbath's songs were] about witches and devils and wizards and corpses. But there were barely any stories. Not like in Rush songs where if there was a wizard, or whatever, there would be a whole story, like a Robert A. Heinlein book. [...] Rush songs they all have big stories and lots of things happen and there is some big meaning. On the first Black Sabbath album, the whole story in the song will be like, “There is a wizard and he is going to kill you,” or “There is a devil and you are the sacrifice.”

It strikes me that this quality, implying a story rather than telling one, is exactly what I enjoy in Darnielle’s songs. Sometimes, you just get a sketch of one crucial moment, as in “Heights” from Nothing for Juice:

When the seashells crumbled in your hand,
You looked up at me.
And the sand shifting underneath your feet,
Softened for you and, incredibly,
The sun went through from the sky.
And I was certain I was going to cry.
But then you reached up and you reached out,
We’d been staring at the water all day.
And then you touched me.
You were golden.
You were giving the game away.

Sometimes you get an isolated scene, devoid of any real context, that speaks simply of powerful emotions, as in “Noche del Gaujolote”, collected on Bitter Melon Farm:

All the birds were sleeping in their perches,
The little wind, swaying birches.
And the North American wild turkey
That your father brought home
Woke up and came towards us.

And the moonlight and the turkey waking up.
And the night air and the moonlight on your skin.
And the moonlight and the turkey waking up.
And the quiet yard and the turkey and the moon.
Unimaginable.

Darnielle’s critical supporters probably prefer to associate him with Raymond Carver. But Ozzy’s probably just as good a place to start.

• Be prepared for schizophrenic weather. I’m pretty sure not a day passed that it wasn’t sunny and warm and one point and chilly and wet at another, oftentimes alternating between the two several times through the day. (This was in August. Can’t vouch for the other 11 months of the year.)
• I didn’t go to Iceland expecting to eat anything particularly delicious—what I expected was to choke down some rotted shark or dried herring—so I was very pleasantly surprised to discover the lamb “boat” sandwich, a delightful combination of thinly sliced grillled lamb, crispy fried onions, various pickles, and the mysterious hlölli sauce (some kind of jazzed-up mayonnaise). You can get these at Hlölla Bátar, right in the center of Reykjavik, or at any number of takeout joints all over the place and they’re always pretty damn good even when they’re not great.
• Crispy fried onions! They should be on everything!
• Despite the all-important Bill Clinton endorsement and long lines of tourists and relentless hype from the world media, I’m not sure I’m on board with Baejarins Beztu Pylsur. It’s just a pretty good hot dog, albeit with lots of tasty crispy fried onions.
• Skip the whale meat. It tastes like environmental exploitation (i.e., chewy and gamey).
• The Nauthólsvík geothermal beach in Reykjavik isn’t particularly well advertised in the tourist literature, because it is publicly owned and absolutely free of charge. It’s a bit of a pain to get to if you don’t (as we didn’t) figure out the municipal buses, but it’s not that big a deal and it’s worth a trip. Walk South from the BSI bus terminal around the airport. You’ll pass a ball field, a University dorm (or something), and a discouraging shipping container or two. (You could, if you like, go by way of Perlan, which would probably make more sense.) They have a changing room and showers at the beach, with bins for your clothes (no lockers). The beach surrounds a small geothermally heated lagoon—the water is cool to warmish and doesn’t get deeper than 4 or 5 feet. There’s a hot tub built into the beach that spills over into the lagoon, but that seems to be given over to the splashing children. The adults congregate in a long, shallow hotter hot tub up near the changing rooms (though there’s quite a bit of splashing up there too, to be honest).
• A lot of Icelandic beer is light beer (2.5% alcohol or less)—I think light beer is all you can buy in grocery stores and certain cafes. If you want a real beer, it’s safer to order one of the widely available imported brands, e.g., Tuborg or Grolsch.

[UPDATE] Also, you might be wondering: is the Blue Lagoon a tourist trap? Is it worth the money? Yes and yes! You should go! It’s totally fun!

$ sudo chown $USER ~/.bzr.log
$ chmod 644 ~/.bzr.log

I think the lesson of Kevin’s two part finale experience is that Top Chef is not the place for slow-cooked meats. It seems to me that you rarely get the time you need in an elimination challenge to properly cook a brisket or a pork belly (though, Shyamalan twist, Michael won with a pork belly back in the Thunderbirds episode).

Who does mom love more?

Predictions. I was only 5 for 13 with my predictions this season, and that’s not counting a totally ill-advised Jennifer vs. Bryan finale prediction from episode 5 (one has to admit that was pretty close!). I probably would have called Robin’s elimination if I had bothered to blog episode 10 (though maybe I would have chosen Eli for spite).

That’s a bit better than I did last season and about a million percent better than I did on Top Chef Masters.

The Rules. The record for The Rules is much better: 9 of 14 eliminations were arguably rule violations. One for Rule A (“Never make a salad or dessert”: Preeti), two for Rule B (“Play it safe”: Jennifer Z. and Robin), four for Rule C (“Respect your proteins”: Hector, Ron, Ashley, Ash, and Eli), one for Rule D (“Be prepared to change your plan”: Mike I.), two for Rule E (“Be prepared to critique your dish”: Eve and Mattin). The ones that fell through the cracks are Laurine, who set a precedent in going home for being a terrible hostess in Restaurant Wars, and Jennifer, Kevin, and Bryan, who were simply not the best of a very good lot. The only rule that didn’t come into play this season was Rule F (“It’s business, not personal”), which is surprising considering how many team-ups with Robin and Ron seemed headed for disaster.

That’s it for this season. No more TV blogging till who knows when… Any suggestions?

Prediction: It’s sad to see Jennifer go, even if it does put me back on a solid prediction streak. My call from last week stands: Kevin FTW. If you are not convinced by the mere fact that the more-technical chef has prevailed over the simpler-but-more-soulful chef exactly once in Top Chef history (that would be Hung, over the outmatched Dale and Casey; a moment of silence for Tiffani, Marcel, Richard, and Stefan); that Kevin is the all-time winningest chef (although Bryan now stands beside him as the all-time not-losing-est chef, having never once been in danger of Elimination); if Kevin’s toothsome Yukon Cornelius-ness isn’t enough to give you a rooting interest, just consider this: it will be an unpleasant and awkward Christmas at the Voltaggio’s if Bryan loses to Michael (or vice versa).

[UPDATE] I meant to note that this is the first time in Top Chef history where there can be no perverse or outrageous outcome in the finale. Notwithstanding Michael is kind of a dick—it’s hard to blame him since obviously his mother never truly loved him—all three chefs are incredibly talented and none of them is a boo-hiss villain in the Tiffani/Ilan/Lisa/Hosea mold. I’ll be rooting for Kevin, but I wish all the best to the Voltaggios too.

Predictions: I’m putting all my chips on Kevin to win. If you need more convincing, with this episode Kevin clinched the record as the all-time winningest Top Chef contestant, with 5 Elimination wins and 4 Quickfire wins (one, the blind-fold relay, as a team member). He’s won nearly half of the Elimination Challenges he’s participated in (recall he was excused from the Joël Robuchon challenge for his Quickfire win). He’s only been in the bottom once, in Restaurant Wars (that great inverter of Top Chef fortune). In comparison, Stephanie (Season 4) had 5 Elimination wins, including her Season win, and only 1 Quickfire win. Stefan (Season 5) had 4 Elimination wins and 4 Quickfire wins. (Let’s hope that Kevin doesn’t imitate his home stretch performance.)

I am fond of Jennifer, but she obviously has a problem performing under pressure. I expect her to go home next week.