Re: how to write good CS paper

This reminds me of 'How to have your abstract rejected' at http://pauillac.inria.fr/~xleroy/stuff/vanLeunenLipton.html

I am not sure who 'X Leroy' is, but I once stumbled across his site and bookmarked it, some very fun stuff there

(http://pauillac.inria.fr/~xleroy/stuff/)

Enjoy!

Sam

On Sat, 21 Jul 2001 23:26:00 GMT, mikito Harakiri <nospam_at_newsranger.com> wrote:

>After struggling with yet another CS paper (clearly, I'm outsider;-), I'm trying
>to collect some recipies for writing a *readable* paper. Please share your ideas
>if you have some.
>
>One spot that I noticed is indexing. It seems like researcher's tools for
>enumeration are extremely limited, so they use indexing everywhere. So we easily
>get tensor notation in a subject area which is quite simple otherwise. Example:
>
>> 2. NOTATIONS
>> Finite Structures and Logics. All structures are assumed to be finite.
>> A relational signature 'sigma' is a set of relation symbols
>> {R_1 , ..., R_l}, with associated arities p_i > 0.
>
>Here we have some number of relations and authors use subscripts to enumerate
>them within a set. I object! Those indexes would stick to the rest of the paper
>and every orthogonal enumeration, a need for which is discovered later in the
>game, would have to be added on top of it. If the results of the paper don't
>depend on join operations why not to use a single relation 'A' (or universal
>relation?). Now, if joining is coming somewhere into the picture, then why not
>introducing 2 relations only: A and B? The effects where joining 3 relations
>produces something new are subtle, so more than 2 relations aren't probably
>needed in every paper.
>
>Next comes enumeration of attributes within a relation. Advocates of excessive
>mathematical notation, again, would write something like P_i(a_1, ..., a_k)
>(keeping index from previois part, remember?-). Now, what advantages enumerating
>columns like this are? Are we going to use induction on the number of columns,
>or leverage ariphmetic properties of the subscript indexes somehow? Wouldn't
>results of the paper just be fine with relation EMP(name, salary), for example,
>even if some advanced results concerning complexity of queries are concerned?
>
>
>
>
  Received on Mon Jul 23 2001 - 22:33:31 CEST