[SystemSafety] Safety-Critical Systems eJournal

[Peter Bernard Ladkin]

On 2022-02-02 13:56 , Derek M Jones wrote:
> 
> A more appropriate comparison would be with architects
> giving their colleagues awards for the design of buildings
> that people did not enjoy working/living in.

I really don't think so.

The problem here is you are trying to characterise a human activity of which I suspect you have no 
experience. A search of Google Scholar turned up preprints, articles on your WWW site, and one 
contribution to a MISRA C conference. I suspect some of the articles on your WWW site are papers you 
might have presented at other conferences.

But as far as I can tell, you have not successfully grappled with the submission and reviewing 
processes of any major journals. You are certainly entitled to your preference as to whether to do 
so, but it does mean that your opinion of that process is based on no experience whatever.

Whereas there are a number of people on this list who do engage regularly, and successfully, with 
that process and I suspect that they would agree with me that, for all its faults, it is a process 
which largely reflects scientific consensus and not any spurious authority.

> Academic prestige is a reinforcing echo chamber.
I agree that intellectual prestige in a given science is a reinforcing echo chamber. The echos are 
called citations and the reinforcement effect is through their number. Other people speak of 
standing on the shoulders of giants.

BTW, I do suggest you don't fall into the trope of trying to contrast "academic" research with 
"practical" computer science. Sometimes one can make a distinction, but at the very top you can't 
any more. I just went through the list of Turing Award winners. Three fifths of them won their 
awards for practical contributions to programming or HW, and two fifths for things people might 
prefer to count as "theory" (for example PKI or RSA). They don't split into "academic" and 
"practical" except for a small minority who are pure theorists (Blum, Karp, Pnueli and so on).

I think if you knew a number of Turing Award winners, you would come to understand at first hand 
that these generally are people with far superior computer-scientific abilities than the likes of 
you and me. I don't know why anyone would disparage the journals in which they publish their 
(thoroughly peer-reviewed) insights.

PBL

Prof. i.R. Dr. Peter Bernard Ladkin, Bielefeld, Germany
Tel+msg +49 (0)521 880 7319  www.rvs-bi.de




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