Musings

Nice effort. Maybe I could bug the Cryptology ePrint guys to implement something similar.

I notice that I had the bad habit of linking to papers using the german mirror URL de.arxiv.org. All these links don’t appear as trackbacks now.

On a related note: I have seen that on CosmicVariance there is sort of an auto-trackbacking in operation, in that entries that refer to previous entries in the same blog automatically generate a trackback notice in the comment section of that previous entry. Would that be hard to implement here or, say, on the String Coffee Table?

And we thought trackbacks were dying. Thanks for your efforts Jacques, this is a great addition to an already invaluable resource.

I do have one query. The arXiv’s page on the system describes a sensible sounding moderation system:

Trackbacks will not be immediately visible. Because of widespread Trackback spam we have a semi-automated editorial process that approves trackbacks for display. Trackbacks from known blogs should become visible in a few minutes, but it may take longer for us to recognize new blogs.

But your post suggests that crackpots will be blocked. In that case, it’s not clear what “known blogs” means in the arXiv’s description. Who’s right? Who are the “serious physicist-bloggers”?

Dear Jacques,

Please allow me the liberty of sending my first impressions on the subject of backtracking in the hope that if the problems I raise from the depths of my ignorance are at all sensible, they might be the beginnings of an FAQ and might even get answers from the arXiv itself.

For quite some time, you have been linking to my readings from quant-ph page

I therefore presume that you might allow me into your category of “serious physicist-bloggers”.

If so, it might be appropriate for links to be established between my comments on papers and the original abstracts of those papers.

This brings us to the first of my questions for you:

Take my comment on quant-ph/0506083. In full, this reads

****
N.P. Landsman, “Between Classical and Quantum” quant-ph/0506082

An excellent review of a variety of ideas about the relationship between classical theories and quantum theories. Landsman begins with a well-informed discussion of the significance of such ideas in the early development of quantum mechanics and in the Copenhagen interpretation. He then turns to three relevant areas of mathematical physics and discusses theories of quantization, theories of classical limits, and some aspects of infinite system theories. I think his descriptions of these difficult but important theories are of exemplary clarity. He concludes with some remarks about decoherence and consistent histories.
****

Now, what do you see as the purpose of the backtracking system in relation to this comment?

Is it merely to make a link from Landsman’s abstract to my comment, or is it to place at the arXiv a note of my approval of Landsman’s paper?

More particularly, what would you recommend as the relevant “excerpt” from this comment, and do you expect this to appear at the arXiv?

Here are three possible excerpts:

a) The whole comment.

Is there a length limit?

b) “An excellent review”.

Note that the comment I picked just happens to start appropriately. My next item begins “Members of a criminal gang are being held in separate cells”!

c) Something that I can generate automatically, such as “Matthew Donald comments on this paper here”.

d) No excerpt.

c and d are the easy options for me.

I have two further problems with the idea of trackbacking, both of which apply to many people who have useful public comments on arXiv papers.

I am not a blogger in the strict sense. Indeed, my “readings” page is just a single, fairly long, occasionally-updated, “hand-written” HTML page which now has comments on around 145 papers. This means that:

1) I don’t have internal html tags indexing the separate items on my page. I could put them in, but I’m not sure whether this would be essential. I’m inclined to think that if you want to find a comment on a paper then you should be prepared to search a page when you get to it.

Would you agree?

2) I don’t use blogging software and I don’t particularly want to; although if backtracking takes off and there are no work-arounds, I might eventually do so.

According to the arXiv help page, “Trackbacks from known blogs should become visible in a few minutes, but it may take longer for us to recognize new blogs.”

This suggests (assuming that “from” really means “from” and not “about”) that the arXiv is going to check that there is a link between the IP address from which they receive a ping and the IP address of a comment.

Does this mean that I will be able to use a standalone TrackBack tool downloaded from here and placed on my site to ping? If so, what are the precise placement restrictions?

Is there a simpler mechanism?

The technical specification page says that pings are made using “standard HTTP calls”. This suggests that I might be able to automate the process using essentially a self-generated HTML form and appropriate text processing. Is this right? (I’m way out of my depth here.)

Am I right to believe that pinging is something which only need be done once, and that it is subsequently up to the arXiv to check for dead links?

If the arXiv recognises my readings page as a legimate source of comments, but does not check the source of pings then it will have no way of telling whether a ping about my readings actually came from me, or from your “recognised” blog, or even from anyone using one of several sites including (for example and without any endorsement) this one which offer public and free “pinging” services.

Perhaps however, such a service is something that the arXiv itself could offer (behind its password protection) to its registered submitters. In such a case, I would be able to ping the arXiv each time I wanted to notify it that I had a comment on a paper which I wanted to share with other readers and the arXiv would already be reasonably sure of my identity.

This is a fairly tedious (and difficult to automate) mechanism from my point of view, but that also means that such comments are less likely to be spam. It would be most useful for those with only the occasional comment, but again, the arXiv would have to decide whether it wanted to require/check that the linker was linking only to his own site.

With best wishes,

Matthew Donald.

web site: a many-minds interpretation of quantum theory .
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About not having blogging software, well, it seems that the implementation is very trivial, the only thing one needs is an utility able to send POSTs (and I am not sure if ArXiV admits GETs instead, does it). Lynx or some variant should work. But The ArXiV should make clear which of the non compulsory fields are compulsory for them (eg title? excerpt?)