6 ms·

I once had to explain, to a copyeditor at one of the leading mathematics journals, that the meaning of a fraction changes if you move stuff between the top and

I once had to explain, to a copyeditor at one of the leading mathematics journals, that the meaning of a fraction changes if you move stuff between the top and the bottom. The annual subscription cost for this journal is $3,250. I am bewildered that we continue to tolerate this state of affairs.

MattGaiser 6y ago
> meaning of a fraction changes if you move stuff between the top and the bottom Sure it was not his 8 year old child?
- HarryHirsch 6y ago
  It's not some kid with a low-voltage humanities degree using Grammarly who got the gig though Upwork, reality is worse than that. Journals employ language editors to smooth out papers written by non-native speakers with a poor command of the language. If you want to edit for language you have to comprehend somewhat the content. People who know mathematics and are willing to put up with poor language skills are rare.
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    > People who know mathematics and are willing to put up with poor language skills are rare. Is that because writing usually pays terribly?
    - redis_mlc 6y ago
      Mainly that lack of precision is irritating and suspicious in a proof.
  - pmiller2 6y ago
    That's interesting. I wonder what such a job pays. I happen to be one who knows some mathematics and might be able to do this as a side gig.
    - HarryHirsch 6y ago
      A long time ago I knew a guy who kept his head above water after he lost his job in the dotcom crisis doing scientific editing. He worked through an agency, but I don't know the name.
- pantaloony 6y ago
  I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if half the adult population of the US has an understanding of fractions that falls apart if you move past what you need to read cooking recipes (which nb. is basically none whatsoever, unless scaling recipes up or down). Maybe a lot more than that. Many with bachelor’s degrees or higher. I think both the level of numeracy in and the degree to which it is perceived to actually matter for the general population is greatly overestimated on sites like HN. [edit] in this particular case the person had likely gotten by pattern-matching 1, a slash, and a 3, as one-third, and simply never cared why one might write 3/1 to mean 3, for example. Why do that, after all? I see a one, I see a slash, and I see a 3. One-third. It’s worked every single time before so why would your thing be a special case?
  - core-questions 6y ago
    It's actually terrifying to think about. I don't want to denigrate people or be mean, but when you realize that your own standard of literacy is something many people truly struggle to obtain, it helps make a lot of things make sense. For example, I saw a thread on Reddit the other day where someone mentioned "taking the 30 seconds to read something"; the discussion went on a tangent where someone called themselves a slow reader because it took them a whole minute, and then others chimed in that it was taking them longer still. So, I timed myself and it took me 14 seconds to read it. What that made abundantly clear to me was that my own experience in the world - seeing _words_ as first class entities everywhere, immediately tagged and understood as whole components, instantly, without ever "reading" them... is not everyone else's experience. Some adults who nominally believe themselves to be literate must actually have to sit there and spend some effort to recognize each letter and sound out a word, the way my children did when they were ~4 (and some children get even younger). What is the world like for these people? I can often speed-read a paragraph and come away with an understanding within seconds, skimming over it for key words and familiar grammatical constructs; my assumption is that most people posting here can do the same. Maybe that's not the case? There's also a lot of talk on the Internet in the last year or two about inner monologue, with the growing realization that it is likely that a large part of the population simply does not experience the ability to talk to themselves within their own head. This makes me wonder if they can read silently without having to mouth the words; perhaps this is the tip of the iceberg for a differentiation in intelligence that hasn't really been extensively studied yet (unsurprisingly, since psychometrics are not in vogue right now).
iNerdier 6y ago
I mean as a broke masters student with a graphic design degree this sounds like the kind of job I would actually enjoy doing, only I have no idea how one goes about finding such things. Is the real problem here the hiring process and where these things are looking for people?
- jahewson 6y ago
  The journals I’m familiar with outsource this kind of work to India.
  - Topolomancer 6y ago
    And the bad thing about this is that their employees there do not receive a lot of training. So they are stuck with not a lot of knowledge about a process and are often the ones who have to endure the wrath of authors.
  - aitchnyu 6y ago
    How underqualified are the staff? I'm Indian and I know Chartered Accountants (5+ years of self study, rigourous exams), pharmacists, lawyers doing outsourcing.
- impendia 6y ago
  As jehewson said, among large commercial publishers it's common to outsource abroad. For journals run by professional societies, it might be more common to do things in-house. That said -- and keep in mind that this might be different in different academic disciplines -- I'm not sure that this would be appealing work for a graphic designer. There just isn't room for creativity of any sort. Mathematics papers have an extremely homogeneous look and feel, and everyone in the discipline is perfectly okay with that. Maybe textbook companies would be a better bet -- although with its $200+ textbooks that industry has its own set of problems. That said, if I were writing a student-oriented book (as opposed to a research paper), I would welcome the chance to work with someone with creative ideas for the visual presentation. Good luck!
tom_ 6y ago
Was that actually their explanation, when asked? That it doesn't matter which way round the values go?
- impendia 6y ago
  I didn't ask for an explanation. As this was one of a huge number of errors, much more than is typical, I skipped straight to making demands.
the_svd_doctor 6y ago
Interesting. I have multiple paper published in SIAM journals (Applied math) and I have consistently be blown away (in a good way!) by the quality of their copy editing.
tdumitrescu 6y ago
Over the years that I published (in a humanities field), I was astonished by the rapid decline in copy editing quality at even top publishers like Oxford University Press. They stopped budgeting for specialists, and started contracting out copy editing to people who couldn't even tell apart common non-English languages. I started getting back "final" proofs with diagrams in the wrong order or with the wrong captions, and was so dearly tempted to just sign off "looks great!" like they were expecting me to. If only it wasn't my own reputation on the line if I let these things through.
- Topolomancer 6y ago
  OUP is also my main 'adversary' these days for certain publications. They do almost everything I described in the article...
  - ppod 6y ago
    I like your blog format, is the code available? It looks like one of the RMarkdown themes a bit?
    - Topolomancer 6y ago
      Thanks! Did not see it earlier; you can find the code on GitHub: https://github.com/Pseudomanifold/hugo-purus https://github.com/Pseudomanifold/hugo-purus Feel free to reach out with any questions you might have!
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

MattGaiser 6y ago

> meaning of a fraction changes if you move stuff between the top and the bottom Sure it was not his 8 year old child?

HarryHirsch 6y ago
It's not some kid with a low-voltage humanities degree using Grammarly who got the gig though Upwork, reality is worse than that. Journals employ language editors to smooth out papers written by non-native speakers with a poor command of the language. If you want to edit for language you have to comprehend somewhat the content. People who know mathematics and are willing to put up with poor language skills are rare.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  > People who know mathematics and are willing to put up with poor language skills are rare. Is that because writing usually pays terribly?
  - redis_mlc 6y ago
    Mainly that lack of precision is irritating and suspicious in a proof.
- pmiller2 6y ago
  That's interesting. I wonder what such a job pays. I happen to be one who knows some mathematics and might be able to do this as a side gig.
  - HarryHirsch 6y ago
    A long time ago I knew a guy who kept his head above water after he lost his job in the dotcom crisis doing scientific editing. He worked through an agency, but I don't know the name.
pantaloony 6y ago
I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if half the adult population of the US has an understanding of fractions that falls apart if you move past what you need to read cooking recipes (which nb. is basically none whatsoever, unless scaling recipes up or down). Maybe a lot more than that. Many with bachelor’s degrees or higher. I think both the level of numeracy in and the degree to which it is perceived to actually matter for the general population is greatly overestimated on sites like HN. [edit] in this particular case the person had likely gotten by pattern-matching 1, a slash, and a 3, as one-third, and simply never cared why one might write 3/1 to mean 3, for example. Why do that, after all? I see a one, I see a slash, and I see a 3. One-third. It’s worked every single time before so why would your thing be a special case?
- core-questions 6y ago
  It's actually terrifying to think about. I don't want to denigrate people or be mean, but when you realize that your own standard of literacy is something many people truly struggle to obtain, it helps make a lot of things make sense. For example, I saw a thread on Reddit the other day where someone mentioned "taking the 30 seconds to read something"; the discussion went on a tangent where someone called themselves a slow reader because it took them a whole minute, and then others chimed in that it was taking them longer still. So, I timed myself and it took me 14 seconds to read it. What that made abundantly clear to me was that my own experience in the world - seeing _words_ as first class entities everywhere, immediately tagged and understood as whole components, instantly, without ever "reading" them... is not everyone else's experience. Some adults who nominally believe themselves to be literate must actually have to sit there and spend some effort to recognize each letter and sound out a word, the way my children did when they were ~4 (and some children get even younger). What is the world like for these people? I can often speed-read a paragraph and come away with an understanding within seconds, skimming over it for key words and familiar grammatical constructs; my assumption is that most people posting here can do the same. Maybe that's not the case? There's also a lot of talk on the Internet in the last year or two about inner monologue, with the growing realization that it is likely that a large part of the population simply does not experience the ability to talk to themselves within their own head. This makes me wonder if they can read silently without having to mouth the words; perhaps this is the tip of the iceberg for a differentiation in intelligence that hasn't really been extensively studied yet (unsurprisingly, since psychometrics are not in vogue right now).

iNerdier 6y ago

I mean as a broke masters student with a graphic design degree this sounds like the kind of job I would actually enjoy doing, only I have no idea how one goes about finding such things. Is the real problem here the hiring process and where these things are looking for people?

jahewson 6y ago
The journals I’m familiar with outsource this kind of work to India.
- Topolomancer 6y ago
  And the bad thing about this is that their employees there do not receive a lot of training. So they are stuck with not a lot of knowledge about a process and are often the ones who have to endure the wrath of authors.
- aitchnyu 6y ago
  How underqualified are the staff? I'm Indian and I know Chartered Accountants (5+ years of self study, rigourous exams), pharmacists, lawyers doing outsourcing.
impendia 6y ago
As jehewson said, among large commercial publishers it's common to outsource abroad. For journals run by professional societies, it might be more common to do things in-house. That said -- and keep in mind that this might be different in different academic disciplines -- I'm not sure that this would be appealing work for a graphic designer. There just isn't room for creativity of any sort. Mathematics papers have an extremely homogeneous look and feel, and everyone in the discipline is perfectly okay with that. Maybe textbook companies would be a better bet -- although with its $200+ textbooks that industry has its own set of problems. That said, if I were writing a student-oriented book (as opposed to a research paper), I would welcome the chance to work with someone with creative ideas for the visual presentation. Good luck!

tom_ 6y ago

Was that actually their explanation, when asked? That it doesn't matter which way round the values go?

impendia 6y ago
I didn't ask for an explanation. As this was one of a huge number of errors, much more than is typical, I skipped straight to making demands.

the_svd_doctor 6y ago

Interesting. I have multiple paper published in SIAM journals (Applied math) and I have consistently be blown away (in a good way!) by the quality of their copy editing.

tdumitrescu 6y ago

Over the years that I published (in a humanities field), I was astonished by the rapid decline in copy editing quality at even top publishers like Oxford University Press. They stopped budgeting for specialists, and started contracting out copy editing to people who couldn't even tell apart common non-English languages. I started getting back "final" proofs with diagrams in the wrong order or with the wrong captions, and was so dearly tempted to just sign off "looks great!" like they were expecting me to. If only it wasn't my own reputation on the line if I let these things through.

Topolomancer 6y ago
OUP is also my main 'adversary' these days for certain publications. They do almost everything I described in the article...
- ppod 6y ago
  I like your blog format, is the code available? It looks like one of the RMarkdown themes a bit?
  - Topolomancer 6y ago
    Thanks! Did not see it earlier; you can find the code on GitHub: https://github.com/Pseudomanifold/hugo-purus https://github.com/Pseudomanifold/hugo-purus Feel free to reach out with any questions you might have!
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]