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The article points out that Oxman's definition of Euclidean distance is jumbled nonsense. I took a quick look at a related Oxman paper [1] and it is a mess. I f

by kens 3y ago

The article points out that Oxman's definition of Euclidean distance is jumbled nonsense. I took a quick look at a related Oxman paper [1] and it is a mess. I found a different and even more jumbled definition of distance: "Euclidean distance √ (d = x2 + y2, also called the L2-norm)" I don't know how you'd get something this messed up if you understood it at all. The non-superscript 2 is an understandable typo, but the square root is in completely the wrong place. And is it supposed to be applied to all the text in parentheses? I also note that the definition of tesselation is also completely confused: "The breaking up of self-intersecting polygons into simple polygons is called tessellation, or more properly, polygon tessellation." This definition (most of the paragraph is cut-and-paste from Wolfram MathWorld [2]) is a very special case of tesselation since normally you're not dealing with self-intersecting polygons. (For completeness, I'll mention that the paper uses "ray" when it should use "line segment" but that is kind of quibbling.) [1] https://papers.cumincad.org/data/works/att/acadia09_122.content.pdf https://papers.cumincad.org/data/works/att/acadia09_122.cont... [2] https://mathworld.wolfram.com/Tessellation.html https://mathworld.wolfram.com/Tessellation.html

yowzadave 3y ago
Oxman's dissertation was submitted to the architecture department. It's likely that none of her reviewers were actually equipped or motivated to know which aspects of it were nonsense. Architecture as an academic discipline suffers from having practitioners with science-envy, but who don't have the training, the disposition, or the incentives to practice real science. The real end product of Oxman's labor is not a paper that advances science in some way: it's a beautiful piece of sculpture that will be acquired by MoMA. She's actually good at this part of the job! Unfortunately she (along with many others within the field) feels compelled to use science-y jargon to dress up what she's doing.

by kens 3y ago

yowzadave 3y ago

Oxman's dissertation was submitted to the architecture department. It's likely that none of her reviewers were actually equipped or motivated to know which aspects of it were nonsense. Architecture as an academic discipline suffers from having practitioners with science-envy, but who don't have the training, the disposition, or the incentives to practice real science. The real end product of Oxman's labor is not a paper that advances science in some way: it's a beautiful piece of sculpture that will be acquired by MoMA. She's actually good at this part of the job! Unfortunately she (along with many others within the field) feels compelled to use science-y jargon to dress up what she's doing.