Dutch would be clear English if it were properly spelt. For example, learn-master would be seen at once to be teacher; but they will spell it leermeester. Of these they write as van deze; window they make weduwe. All this is plain to me, who never saw a Dutch dictionary in my life; but many of their misspellings are quite unconquerable.

I collided yester-day with Brouwer's Fixed-Point Theorem while writing a program that aids artists in creating on-line web galleries.

There's a notion in art of complementary color. The lighter a color is, the darker is its complement, and v.v.. And, if one locates a color on a color wheel, this complement is its diametrical opposite on the wheel. Complementary colors are used, well, to complement things. So, for example, a dark red object is thought to look best against a light green background (if one uses the classic red-yellow-blue color system) or against a light turquoise background (if one uses the red-green-blue system).

I thought (and think) that it would be a fine thing if an image should be automatically displayed on a page whose background color were the complement of the average color of the image. In keeping with this complementarity, it might seem to be a good idea for the page text to be the complement of the background, which is to say that original average color. Well, here is where Brouwer pokes his head in the room and suggests a problem.

Brouwer's Fixed-Point Theorem tells us that every continuous function f from a closed ball onto itself has a point x such that f(x) = x. A color wheel is a closed ball in two dimensions. Grey-scale is a closed ball in one dimension. Half-way between black and white is a shade of grey which is its own complement. The color dead-center on a color wheel is its own complement. So the center of the cylinder formed by the Cartesian product of light-and-dark with the color wheel is its own complement. And any colors near this center have their complements also near this center, which means that there isn't enough contrast for real usability. Color schemes such as medium grey text on a medium grey background just don't cut it.

I don't know what the best adjustment is; I'm not even sure that there is a unique best to be found. But I believe that the proper adjustment would be to alter the lightness — and only the lightness — of the foreground text, making sure that it were different from that of the background by increasing any existing relative difference. (In cases were the brightness is dead-center, a movement in either direction should be fine.)

As previously noted, I submitted my paper on indecision to yet another journal on 28 July. On 11 August, the reported status of the paper was changed to With Editor. Yester-day, 12 December, that was changed to Under Review, which indicates that the paper has been sent onward to one or more reviewers.

Editors generally have the authority to reject papers on their own authority. If they think that a paper might be appropriate to the journal, then they send the paper on to one or two reviewers, with ostensible expertise in the specific area of the paper. These reviewers judge the paper to be suitable as it stands, or suggest revisions that would make it suitable, or decide that it is unlikely to become suitable even after revision. At some journals, editors have the authority to over-rule reviewers, but such is rarely done.

Most submitted papers are rejected by editors before they reach reviewers. Most papers that reach reviewers are rejected by those reviewers. Most that are not rejected are required to be revised in some way, small or large.

I don't know why the paper was listed as With Editor for almost exactly four months. The editor may have been too busy to evaluate the paper at all, or may have spent a fair amount of time in his-or-her own evaluation of it, or may have had trouble finding a reviewer for it.

A recent comment by Zenicurean notes, implicitly, that economic pædagogy often uses a widget as a hypothetical economic good.

I most frequently use the veeblefetzer (borrowed from Harvey Kurtzman) when I want a good about which the audience will know little or nothing, and the hot dog when I want a good that will seem familiar.

I like the hot dog as an example in part because it has a long tradition in economic education while being fairly absurd as an artifact.

I also like it because it is easy to explain the idea of a shift in the demand curve using the hot dog. First, I present my students with a set of prices, polling them as to how many hot dogs they would buy at each of these prices; that gives us an initial demand curve. Then I discuss some of the things that are permitted to go into hot dogs, and we repeat the process for the prices. (So far, the demand curve has always shifted inwards.)

But the main reason that I like to use hypothetical hot dogs is because I think back to a question on the economics GRE when I took it.[1] In the set-up for the question, a family was working-out its annual budget, and decided that they would spend $800 per year on hot dogs, regardless of the price of hot dogs.[2]

The question was of what sort of demand elasticity were here displayed. Elasticity is a measure of sensitivity or responsiveness, with a general form of

or of (Whether there's a negative sign and whether an instantaneous form is used is based on what's convenient and practicable.) In the case of demand elasticity, the y is quantity demanded, and the x is unit price. One might think that demand responsiveness could be measured more simply by slope (Δy/Δx or dy/dx), but elasticity has a useful property. When elasticity is less than 1 in absolute value, responsiveness is sufficiently weak that expenditures (the product of quantity demanded and unit price) increase as price is increased; whereäs if elasticity is greater than 1, responsiveness is sufficiently strong that expenditures shrink as price is increased. The seller gets less revenue by increasing prices in the second case, where the curve is said to be elastic (sensitive); the seller gets more revenue by increasing prices in the first case, where the curve is said to be inelastic (insensitive).

If the elasticity is exactly 1 (in absolute value) then quantity demanded drops or rises to exactly off-set any price change; expenditures are constant as price changes. This is called unit elasticity. (BTW, a demand curve that is everywhere unit elastic will be a hyperbola.)

On the GRE, I was supposed to identify the demand curve of the family in the question as unit elastic, and so I did. But, because I'm not autistic, I was also greatly amused by this example. Imagine a family that is conscientious enough to budget, but they eat hot dogs. Imagine a family that budgets, but budgets such that if a hot dog costs $1600 then they will try to buy half a hot dog, and if a hot dog costs a penny then they will buy eighty thousand g_dd_mn'd hot dogs!

I laughed when I read this question. And, because I made multiple passes through the test, I glanced at that question repeatedly, laughing each time. I was the only person in room laughing. (The room had people taking different subject GREs, and I may have been the only one taking the economics test.)

When I use hot dogs as an example, it's mostly just in fond memory of that hypothetical family, crazy for hot dogs.

---

[1] This tale may seem somewhat familiar to those who read my now long-since-purged LJ.

[2] The amount may have been $600 per year, or perhaps $400 per year; it has been quite some time since I took that test, and I don't remember. But, mutatis mutandis, my remarks hold.

After the fiasco with Theory and Decision (see my entry of 28 March and that of 18 April), I submitted my paper on indecision to yet another journal on 23 April.

To my surprise, that journal gave my paper for review to someone whom I regard as having a markèd conflict-of-interest. I know to whom they gave it because the rejecting review that I received on 16 Jun was, also to my surprise, attributed rather than anonymous.

Some of the criticism was legitimate, but would best have been handled by directing me to revise-and-resubmit. Some of the important criticism was absurd.

For example, the reviewer declared

this is not how one writes proofs in general (except may be in logic)

Considering that the propositions are almost exclusively formal logic (there not being much arithmetic to the structure), it's rather to be expected that the proofs will look as proofs (in or out of quotation marks) do in logic.

And, in defending the attempt to distinguish indecision from indifference found in Indifference or Indecision? by Eliaz and Ok, the reviewer wrote that Mrs Watson (a hypothetical agent presented in that paper)

is indecisive whenever she deems multiple choices as choosable

But she also deems multiple choices as choosable when she is indifferent, and in both cases (according to Eliaz and Ok) makes her decision by flipping a coin.

(In fact, Eliaz and Ok claim something more interesting about what distinguishes indecision from indifference, but an observable distinction does not result from it.)

I stared for a bit, and then sent to the reviewer a simple request for permission to cite the review in future versions of the paper. (I offered no argument or evaluation; I just requested permission to cite.) The review is plainly not itself a publication; it seems closer to being a personal communication. And one is supposed to secure permission before citing personal communications.

I waited for some days, and got no reply. I concluded that none would be forth-coming. I therefore effected what changes I felt should be made given that I could not cite the review, both to make straight-forward improvements, and to preëmptively meet repetition of what I regarded as illegitimate criticisms.

Then I went over my big spread-sheet o' econ journals, and selected the next journal to which to submit the paper. As with previous submissions, I read the author guidelines, and did some further rewriting and reformatting to tailor a version specific to that journal. I made the new submission on 28 July. Its reported status when I checked this morning was the same as that when I completed the submission process, so I presume that no editor has accepted assignment to it.

Having retrieved a previous month's USPS mail, I was flipping through the July-August issue of American Scientist (v99 #4), and found a picture captioned thus:

Middle-aged and elderly people exercising during Respect for the Aged Day in Tokyo in 2005. Japan's population is aging particularly quickly. The ratio of people younger than 20 compared to those older than 65 is shifting, from 9.3 in 1950 to a predicted 0.59 in 2025. If scientists succeed at slowing aging, this trend may well accelerate.

(Underscores mine.) So the caption is claiming that the population is aging quickly and may age even more quickly if aging is slowed.

Now, what's really happening in that caption is that the verb age is being used in two related but very different senses. In aging particularly quickly, the sense is one of increase in average chronological age; in slowing aging, the sense is one of become decrepit. The underlying thought is entirely reasonable; the expression is inept, because it moves from one meaning to the other (and then implicitly back to the first) without signally that it is doing so except in the sense that the passage is otherwise absurd; best not to make the reader sort-out such things.

I don't know who wrote that caption. The author of the piece in which it is embedded actually notes

the word aging refers to different things

exactly to explain how confusions of these meanings results in practice in logically invalid arguments.

Greek seems to be in-fashion these days. First, last night, a friend called me to ask how to say man who touches elephants in Classical Greek. Then, to-day, as I was attempting to comment to a 'blog earlier to-day, I was presented with the following 'bot challenge: That's right, the string was unadresG ψ1,, and that's a psi, not a w nor a u with a slash through it. Entering a ψ worked just fine. (Not that I actually have my keyboard configured to deliver psi, but I keep Greek characters about, for copying-and-pasting.)

But to assume from the superiority of Galilean principles in the sciences of inanimate nature that they must provide the model for the sciences of animate behaviour is to make a speculative leap, not to enunciate a necessary conclusion.

Early on Saturday morning, I submitted my paper to yet another journal. Alas, on Sunday, I discovered a typographical error in one of the formulæ.

The formula should read But instead it read That's because I had been using a vertical bar for such that, intended to replace it with a backwards epsilon (to be consistent), but got lost or distracted and instead dropped-in a second disjunction sign.

Perhaps I should contact the editors, but this formula simply appears in an incidental remark. I can correct things if the paper is accepted, and I will just hope that no reviewer is so offended as to reject the paper based on the error.

[Up-Date (2011:05/23): I've been sufficiently perturbed about this matter that I decided that, were the paper not bounced-back to me before it had been in their hands for a month, I would send them a note, with a link to a correction. (The idea in waiting a month was to ration any pestering of the editors.) I did so a few minutes ago.]

My previously reported message to Springer, announcing that my paper was no longer on offer to them, was sent at 7:03 PM PDT on 28 March. (My last entry on the history of the submission was posted a couple of minutes later.) At 7:31 PM PDT, I received the fastest reply that I'd got from Springer:

We are extremely sorry for the delay.

I have not yet received any response from the editor in this regard.

However, I have taken your mail with high priority and will surely inform you about the outcome.

Many thanks for your patience.

As a general matter, it's an interesting tactic to act as if someone has not made a declaration that one doesn't want them to have made, in the hope that it will be rescinded de facto; sometimes that tactic works. But, while I would have been open to Springer's negotiating for the article, I continued to operate on the presumption that the paper would have to be submitted elsewhere.

I changed various things (largely as I'd indicated at the end of my previous entry on the paper), and began looking for-and-over a list of other journals to which I might submit it. (Unsurprisingly, I no longer considered any of those published by Springer to be candidates.)

Meanwhile, I noted that Springer's Editorial Manager continued to list my paper as Under review, and offered me no way of changing its status to indicate that it was not available for consideration. This creäted a potential problem. Typically, simultaneous submission of an article is not acceptable; and, while the article would not in fact have been simultaneously submitted, there was an all-too-plausible scenario under which it could appear to be.

Assuming that the handling editor at Springer has not been even more negligent than he appears to have been, there has been — and should be expected to continue to be — a very real problem finding reviewers for my paper. When the next journal begins looking for reviewers, they will be looking at largely the same pool. I could envision a reviewer saying Wait! I am already reviewing that paper for Theory and Decision! and an ugly mess ensuing.

To-day, at 12:39 PM, I sent the following to the Springer JEO Assistant, with a CC to the Editor-in-Chief,

On 28 March, I informed you that I was no longer offering this paper to you. However, I note that Editorial Manager continues to list it as "Under review", with seemingly no option for me as an author to stop that.

On 23 April, I will be submitting the latest version of the paper to another journal. If indeed this paper is somehow now in the hands of reviewers for Springer, then there is the unfortunate possibility that this other journal would call upon exactly the same reviewers. As I do not want the inappropriate conclusion to be drawn that the paper is being simultaneously submitted, you must contact any reviewers before 23 April, and inform them that the paper was withdrawn from your consideration on 28 March.

If the institutional arrangement there is such that handling editors do not tell you who in particular is reviewing a paper, then you are going to need make a sort of general announcement, as you plainly cannot rely upon the handling editor to act.

At 1:00 PM (even faster!), the following arrived:

I have received the decision from the Editor on your manuscript, THEO789 "Indifference, Indecision, and Coin-Flipping"

With regret, I must inform you that the Editor has decided that your manuscript cannot be accepted for publication in Theory and Decision.

Below, please find the comments for your perusal.

I would like to thank you very much for forwarding your manuscript to us for consideration and wish you every success in finding an alternative place of publication.

There were, in fact, no comments what-so-ever below. We may reasonably infer that they were not so much omitted by the JEO Assistant as simply never made in the first place.

It's of course somewhat offensive that Springer has the felt need to suggest, even pro forma, that they rejected an article which was not theirs to reject. But, at least, I can move on to the next submission without the worry that I'll be accused of unethical behavior.

Anyway, as I indicated to them, the paper will be submitted to a different journal on Saturday.

Up-Date (2011:04/19): This morning, my e.mail included five more messages from the Springer JEO Assistant, all from within a span of two minutes. The first was a CC of a message to the Editor-in-Chief,

Please find the mail below from [confused rendering of my name] who is willing to withdraw the paper.

Kindly let me know if I can set the final disposition in EM as “Withdrawn”.

Thank you very much and looking forward to your response.

This was followed then by three messages directed at my e.mail system as such, attempting to un-deliver that first message (something that some systems permit), then a message

Thank you for your mail.

The editor has rendered the decision for your paper.

Curious, I have checked the Editorial Manager status for the paper, which remains that of alleged rejection, rather than of withdrawal.

I'd already suspected that the last message from yester-day had not actually come from the JEO Assistant, though the e.mail address was hers, and that it was likely to have been an automated result of someone else entering a rejection into Editorial Manager. Beyond that, I don't know what here is mindlessness and what here is editorial pique.