Scholarpedia:Invitation to Statistics
Dear %NAME%,
As an editor, I would like to invite you to write an entry "%TITLE%" for the Statistics category of Scholarpedia - the free peer-reviewed encyclopedia. This project, being a synthesis of philosophies of Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia, is ambitious and unique. You can read more about it at http://www.scholarpedia.org. Your article will be peer-reviewed, and upon acceptance, you will become the curator of the topic "%TITLE%" in Scholarpedia (see below).
Most articles in Scholarpedia are written by the original authors. For example, Benoit Mandelbrot, the inventor of fractals, writes "Fractals" and "Mandelbrot Set". Franz Halberg, who coined the word 'circadian', writes "Chronobiology" and "Circadian Rhythm". Richard Karp, the inventor of the notion of NP-completeness, writes "NP-Completeness". Lotfi Zadeh, the inventor of fuzzy logic, writes "Fuzzy Logic". Edward Lorenz, the discoverer of chaos, writes "Butterfly Effect". Herman Haken, the creator of synergetics, writes "Synergetics" and "Self-Organization". Robert Galambos, the discoverer of sonar in bats, writes "Echolocation in Bats" (Galambos is 93). Seiji Ogawa, the inventor of fMRI, writes "fMRI". Ichiji Tasaki, the co-discoverer of saltatory conduction in neurons (with Hodgkin in 1939), writes "Saltatory Conduction" (Tasaki is 97). Gerald Edelman, the creator of Neural Darwinism, writes "Neural Darwinism". John J. Hopfield, the creator of a popular neural net, writes "Hopfield Network". Stott Kirkpatrick, the inventor of simulated annealing, writes "Simulated Annealing", and so on. Among authors of Scholarpedia are 9 Nobel Laureates and 3 Fields Medalists.
Currently, Scholarpedia hosts Encyclopedia of Dynamical Systems, Encyclopedia of Computational Neuroscience, and Encyclopedia of Computational Intelligence. All three will be published in a printed form, though their main purpose is to remain online freely available to the community. These encyclopedias will be seeds to start other focused encyclopedias, in particular, Encyclopedia of Applied Mathematics, Encyclopedia of Statistics, and then Encyclopedia of Mathematics. Your article will be part of many focused encyclopedias.
Click "Random article" (left menu) to see sample peer-reviewed articles. %YOURNAMEWASSUGGESTED% You can write your article alone. However, we strongly recommend to have a co-author, e.g., a former student or a postdoc, who would take care of the article on the long run (as your co-curator). If you want to change the title or have other preferences, please let me know.
I have created the following account for you in Scholarpedia: Username: %USERNAME% Password: %PASSWORD% To accept this invitation, please click %URL%
If you cannot write this article within a reasonable period of time, please let us know as soon as possible by clicking %URL%&no=1 In this case, we would highly appreciate your suggesting the names of the best experts to invite to write this article.
The main idea of Scholarpedia is that articles should outlive their authors via the process of curatorship. Similarly to Wikipedia (a free non-reviewed encyclopedia), anybody can edit or revise articles in Scholarpedia, even after they are peer-reviewed and published. For example, other scientists may find and correct an error in your article, add a figure, rewrite a paragraph that is not clearly written, and so on. In contrast to Wikipedia, each article in Scholarpedia has a Curator (typically, its author), whose name is at the top of the article and who accepts or rejects each such revision. If you read Scholarpedia article "Ito Calculus", which is authored and curated by Kiyoshi Ito, then you know that everything there is either written by or was later approved by Dr. Ito. In this sense, Scholarpedia is unlike anything else that has ever been done with scientific publications. Just think of what your article would look like 50 years from now!
Another unique feature of Scholarpedia is that its authors are either invited by the editor(this letter) or elected by the public. Public election of authors ensures fairness in assigning articles to the corresponding experts in each field.
I hope your schedule would allow you to contribute to the Encyclopedia. If you cannot write this article, please let me know ASAP (by clicking one of the two links above) so that I can invite another expert or initiate election of authors for the article. I am looking forward to hearing from you.
Sincerely Yours, Dr. Michael Hardy – Editor of the category Statistics in Scholarpedia.
PhD, Statistics, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN
