{"id":1114,"date":"2014-04-01T19:37:25","date_gmt":"2014-04-01T19:37:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/glencora\/?p=1114"},"modified":"2014-04-01T19:38:40","modified_gmt":"2014-04-01T19:38:40","slug":"ball-coverage-property-great-journal-turnaround-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/glencora\/2014\/04\/01\/ball-coverage-property-great-journal-turnaround-time\/","title":{"rendered":"The ball-coverage property and a great journal turnaround time"},"content":{"rendered":"

Erin Wolf Chambers and I had a paper<\/a> accepted yesterday to the journal Discrete & Computational Geometry, a journal I now highly<\/strong> recommend.\u00a0 This entry is a story about that paper as well as the journal.<\/p>\n

In a keynote talk at CanaDAM 2011, St\u00e9phan Thomass\u00e9 referred to the following theorem of Chepoi, Estellon and Vax\u00e8s:<\/p>\n

Any planar graph of diameter at most 2R has a subset of O(1) vertices such that every vertex in the graph is within distance R of that subset.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We’ll call this coverage of the graph by O(1) balls of radius R the “ball-coverage property”.\u00a0 The proof is quite deep in that it calls on the fractional-Helly property of the set system of radius-R balls.\u00a0 In his talk, Thomass\u00e9 states that the constant is not computed in the paper, but was done so by a student.\u00a0 I don’t remember the exact number, but it was around 800.<\/p>\n

Surely that can’t be the right number.\u00a0 I worked for a while on coming up with a different, more direct proof that would result in a better number.\u00a0 Something reasonable.\u00a0 Like 5.\u00a0 Or 7.\u00a0 The best known lower bound is 4.<\/p>\n

I haven’t been successful.\u00a0 Erin and I, in our first successful collaboration which involved an allergic reaction to St. Louis (actually to a hand cream, not St. Louis), generalized the result to bounded genus graphs.\u00a0 That is this paper<\/a>.\u00a0 We thought we had it generalized to clique sums of surface embedded graphs … we can handle apices, but vortices and clique sums proved … tricky.\u00a0 As they seem to be.\u00a0 But I would suggest that minor-excluded graph families have the ball-coverage property.<\/p>\n

We had this result written up in the summer and debated where to send it.\u00a0 SoCG was out as Erin is on the PC this year.\u00a0 Rather than wait for a spring submission, we decided to go straight for a journal.\u00a0 We submitted to DCG on October 22, 2013.\u00a0 We were asked for what turned out to be minor revisions on March 12, 2014 and resubmitted on March 19.\u00a0 The final acceptance came in on March 31, 2013.\u00a0 Just over 5 months from first submission to acceptance.<\/p>\n

That is comparable to the roughly 3 months for conferences, with the added benefit that you can actually have a back-and-forth as needed with the reviewers through the editor.\u00a0 No rejections based on misunderstandings.\u00a0 No rejections based on “we only have X spots”.\u00a0 No rolling the dice.\u00a0 And no travel to yet another far away conference.<\/p>\n

If only more journals were like this.\u00a0 If only conferences were more about giving a place for people to meet (regionally as well as internationally) and less about picking the X top papers without a truly full review even though it is treated like a fully published result … well … that would be great.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Erin Wolf Chambers and I had a paper accepted yesterday to the journal Discrete & Computational Geometry, a journal I now highly recommend.\u00a0 This entry is a story about that paper as well as the journal. In a keynote talk at CanaDAM 2011, St\u00e9phan Thomass\u00e9 referred to the following theorem of Chepoi, Estellon and Vax\u00e8s: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3747,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[106190],"class_list":["post-1114","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-tcs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/glencora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1114","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/glencora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/glencora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/glencora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3747"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/glencora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1114"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/glencora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1114\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1117,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/glencora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1114\/revisions\/1117"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/glencora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/glencora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/glencora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}