Re: [tlug] Japanese input method

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Raymond Wan writes:

 > I'm not too sure if circular linking has anything to do with it.

I'm pretty sure it does by now.  Just watch an unfortunately prominent
subset of the Chinese academic community "circle jerk" their citation
counts into the stratosphere.[1]  My students aren't good enough to
tell the good scholars from the bad, so I just have to tell them to
basically ignore papers in their native language because citation
indicies and impact factors are almost completely unreliable, at least
in the social sciences.  This is unfortunate for the many excellent,
honest scholars who can't get the exposure they deserve.

The exact same principles apply to PageRank (impact factors are
basically a variation on the theme of the PageRank algorithm).

 > Of course, this was the original 1998 pagerank algorithm (up to my
 > level of understanding) -- over the years, no doubt Google has
 > updated it.

One of my students investigated last year.  As far as he could find,
Google never published their actual algorithm, and said of several
algorithms "that's not it, we substantial have improvements".  So, as
far as I know "Google PageRank" is a trademark, not an algorithm. :-)

 > The part I don't know is if a poorly ranked web page (i.e., mine) is
 > A, does it contribute very little to page B or does it penalize page
 > B.  Of course, if it contributes a little, that's no big deal.
 > Penalizing wouldn't be any good.

A low rank won't cause a penalty in any version of PageRank I've seen
(all coefficients are positive, so more is better).  But it's possible
that there are "negative ranks" in Google's algorithm, I suppose.  I
don't see why you'd get one of those.

Footnotes: 
[1]  They're not fooling anybody in the international research
community, this is aimed at the people who determine promotion and
salary.