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There are several problems that geothermal energy will have to overcome before it can be used for any large-scale power production. First of all, geothermal solutions are terribly corrosive and the pipes are subject to scaling. The maintenance costs associated with keeping the plumbing working are high.

These are just a few of the problems associated with geothermal energy: the variable nature of the reservoirs and fluids; the depth, location, orientation, number and type of wells; the type and size of power plant; the method of disposal of the spent geothermal fluid and the need to conform with local environmental regulations.

Went looking to see what Elsevier had done post-resignation, to see if they were still publishing, who'd taken the editorial positions, etc.

It appears they haven't updated their webpages in the year since the resignation. Elsevier still shows Knuth et al as editors. Clicking the 'editorial board' gets a 2nd page that looks unchanged. I'm not a subscriber and tens of miles from anywhere that might have a subscription, so that's as far as my researching goes...

(3D0G solves -151)

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply all journals do this but many well-known ones including the New England J Med, Springer and Elsevier (includes many, many journals) do:

http://authors.elsevier.com/getting_published.html ?dc=CI

http://www.springeronline.com/sgw/cda/frontpage/0, 11855,5-40007-70-1119401-detailsPage%253Djournal%2 57CcopyrightInformation%257CcopyrightInformation,0 0.html

http://authors.nejm.org/Misc/MsSubInstr.asp

As others have said in this thread, this is an old problem. Interestingly, other professional societies have generally dealt with this reasonably well. Both the American Physical Society and the American Chemical Society assess page charges from the authors to help cover costs, as well as modest subscription costs from libraries.

Even though there are free archives of preprints, where content is available publicly, people are still willing to pay a little for the stamp of peer-review. Certainly one could imagine an automated system that would distribute manuscripts to appropriate referees at comparatively little cost, but you have to remember that not all "peers" view refereeing as good citizenship. Many view it as a burden, not unlike jury duty.

Finally, let's keep our eyes on the big picture: it's typically for-profit publishing houses , not professional societies, that squeeze libraries for every penny, have outrageously inflated page charges, and generally lower quality and standards.

Today I got en e-mail from SCIRUS and they state that they are better than Google in the search of science related information.
The e-mail has an online version.

"In the next few years, I expect to see a fully automated Google OCR product that can not only scan your paper docs, but index them and help you search them too, all while maintaining the electronic copies in their original scanned (think photograph) state, not the some bastardized, mistranslated and screwed up PDF or DOC format."

The scienctific publishing house Elsevier did this in the mid-90's.

They took the past few years of several of their journals, scanned them in, did a less-than-perfect OCR on them, and created an index from the OCR results.
When you "searched," what you got back was a list of sentences. These sentences were riddled with typos/mis-reads. When you clicked on one of them, you got the actual photographic with a box around where text was. There were a few mistakes and you learned to ignore them, but it served its purpose.

Things are a lot better now. Newer (post-mid-90s) publications are available digitally, and the older ones (going back only so many years, of course) have much better OCR-based indexes and usually a PDF which contains the images of the journal.

If you want some obscure journal from 1965 though, be prepared for a trek to library and hope you can get it on inter-library loan. If you are LUCKY the abstracts might be available online somewhere.

Selective quoting from some papers:

-In a recent study, we have seen that neonatal exposure to some brominated flame retardants can cause permanent aberrations in spontaneous motor behavior that seem to worsen with age.[..]Thus, the behavioral disturbances observed in adult mice following neonatal exposure to 2,2`,4,4`,5-pentaBDE are induced during a defined critical period of neonatal brain development.

-These results indicate that brominated flame retardants, especially the brominated phenols and tetrabromobisphenol A, are very potent competitors for T4 binding to human transthyretin in vitro and may have effects on thyroid hormone homeostasis in vivo comparable to the thyroid-disrupting effects of PCBs.

-The objective of the current study was to characterize the effects of DE-71 (a commercial polybrominated diphenyl ether mixture containing mostly tetra- and penta-bromodiphenyl ethers) on thyroid hormones and hepatic enzyme activity in offspring, following perinatal maternal exposure[..]
There was no significant effect of DE 71 on T3 concentrations at any time in the dams or the offspring. Increased liver to body weight ratios in offspring were consistent with induction of EROD (maximal 95-fold), PROD (maximal 26-fold) or UDPGT (maximal 4.7-fold). Induction of PROD was similar in both dams and offspring; however, EROD and UDPGT induction were much greater in offspring compared to dams (EROD = 3.8-fold; UDPGT = 0.5-fold). These data support the conclusion that DE-71 is an endocrine disrupter in rats during development.

Allthough most, if not all, of this research includes rats, I would still think that you can assume that most of the negative effect would affect humas too. IIRC from my bio class humans and rats share most of the DNA and neurons reacts in the same ways.

Also, check out a lengthy sample chapter.

This is starting to change in computer science, although other fields are a long way behind. I'm studying for a PhD at the moment, and most of the papers I need are available online, either on the authors' websites or on Citeseer. Even in CS, older papers are less likely to be available, but most of the work in my area was published in the last four years or is still awaiting publication. That's the other advantage of publishing online - the process of getting a paper reviewed and published can take years, so in fast-moving fields the journals are really an archive of significant work rather than a news medium. To keep up with recent work you have to look online.

Of course, the problem with self-publication is lack of peer review. However, Citeseer does a pretty good job of finding significant papers based on the number of citations (think Pagerank), and the database of citations also helps you to find papers that might contradict or reinforce the conclusions of the paper you've just read. This makes it less important to have editors filtering out biased or unreproducible results.

I hope that authors in other fields will start to embrace online self-publication. Unfortunately, many institutions see publication count as a good measure of an academic's standing, partly because the peer review process tends to ensure that a frequently-published author is well respected in his or her field. If insitutions started to pay attention to citation count instead, self-publication would become a viable alternative to journal publication, saving students and taxpayers an awful lot of money.

Disclaimer. Whilst every effort is made by the publishers and editorial board to see that no inaccurate or misleading data, opinion or statement appears in this journal, they wish to make it clear that the data and opinions appearing in the articles and advertisements herein are the sole responsibility of the contributor or advertiser concerned. Accordingly, the publishers, the editorial board and editors and their respective employees, officers and agents accept no responsibility or liability whatsoever for the consequences of any such inaccurate or misleading data, opinion or statement.

Actually, it's the smaller disciplines (in science anyway) that have some of the highest costs. Brain Research, for example, runs $10,000 per year, last time I checked. Part of the reason for the high cost is the limited audience to spread the cost of publication around (it costs less per copy for 100,000 subscriptions than for 5,000). Related to that is the skyrocketing costs of science journals which has made libraries, the main market for these high cost journals, drop a lot of them, thereby lowering the number of subscriptions (and usually causing a higher cost for the remaining subscribers).

O.K., checked the Elsevier site, and found a Brain Research subscription has to be purchased as part of a package which costs "USD 21,269 for all countries except Europe and Japan."

ouch.

The problems that rendered Excel 97 unfit for use as a statistical package have not been fixed in either Excel 2000 or Excel 2002 (also called "Excel XP"). Microsoft attempted to fix errors in the standard normal random number generator and the inverse normal function, and in the former case actually made the problem worse.

According to the release mentioned above, Dr. McCullaugh recommends using Gnumeric instead of excel.

http://www.elsevier.com/locate/tele

You'll see "View their sample issue." Click on that, then click on the link for Volume 20, Issue 1. Go there. Then you'll see "A geographic perspective on commercial Internet survivability", and you can download the PDF there.

Looks like it's meant to give you only one chance at the free issue, so I think giving the direct link would be pretty useless. Whatever; you're only three clicks away from greatness. :-)

Well, it looks like more profiteering sleazebags are going to try and steal information that belongs in the public domain and was bought by taxpayer dollars and actually try to charge people for it and shut down public access to information.
now if *I* was president, I would make a short stop to thier HQ with a National Guard contingent and inform them face to face that I was claiming "Eminent Domain" and nationalizing all of thier assets, and If they didn't like it Sgt. Maj. can gleefully hang them from a lamppost.
However, now that Shrub is pretending to be president, I think we shall see more of this as his buddies try a full ham-fisted grab at public resources.

If you think these guys are sleazebags who should be shot, please visit thier website www.siia.net
or even write some email to some of thier employees
or even Elsiever Science
or mail to Email: usinfo-f@elsevier.com Email: cs_hscanada@harcourt.com although I am sure you can find more email addresses on thier contact page. remember boys, dont email them all at once or you might accidentally /. their server

I have a B.S. in Economics (I graduated in 2001), so yes, I have taken a few courses. These include graduate level micro- and macro-economics, econometrics, and industrial organization (check out these two links for some good stuff on IO), including others.

It's interesting to me that you bring up Apple in an argument in which you accuse a software company (Microsoft) of being a monopolist (or a monopoly, as you put it). Apple couldn't exist if this was the case. Study some IO and you'll come to understand that M$ is certainly not a monopolist, but rather the most successful member of a large oligopoly. This means that M$ does enjoy quite a bit of market power, but certainly not "monopoly" power. Monopolists simply do not occur "naturally" (the term natural monopoly is a bit of a misnomer); they only exist when a government grants such authority (such as with the postal service in the U.S.)

The key here is to break down the markets (demand), the products/services (supply), and the competitive forces (how companies react to the latter) at play. Once you do you'll find that the OS market is dominated -- but not controlled -- by Microsoft, and that several competitors offer similarly fuctional products/services and are constantly driving the industry (and M$) to innovate. Bottom line: alternatives to Windows are available, M$ does not price its products at anywhere near the "monopoly" level, and competitors are constantly nipping at M$'s marketshare. None of these would occur if Bill Gates had created a monopolist.

You're right in stating monopolies are special cases. In order to maintain a Pareto efficient economy, monopolists must be heavily regulated. Microsoft however, just doesn't fit the bill.

To put it another way: How is it you're being harmed?

CRYONICS is a bunch of semi-rich idiots who took their love of glycerol-soaked popsicles too far. See here.

PLEASE keep the distinction as there are a lot of meaningful applications for CRYOGENICS and just a market for liquid nitrogen companies in CRYONICS.

I see. why haven't market forces driven the price down? It would seem to me I could start a scientific journal, charge half and still make money(assuming I spell better there then in my posts ;) ). It might take 5 years to prove I'm a serious journal, but most business don't make money for 3-5 years anyhow.

Why haven't prices gone down? Ask these guys.

Scientists publish in order to gain tenure. Only articles they can get published in peer-reviewed journals are considered in most places when it comes to putting a CV together. If you could get tenured scientists to act as reviewers, your journal might stand a chance. Without that, it wouldn't even be worth trying.

I think we've conflated three distinct issues, and that we'd benefit from separating them:

1. The process by which information is generated and its quality is assessed - peer review, free-for-all, etc.
2. The mechanism and medium by which information is distributed - paper, www, etc.
3. The economic model by which information is distributed - for free, by subscription, per-use, etc.

Quality control becomes a problem with all (free-for-all, *, *) systems. (I disagree with (#41) that "it's about time to shake up the peer review system." Peer review is a great way to assure quality, addressing the questions raised eloquently in (#35, 54, etc.). "Non-elites" may clamor for "democratic" publishing, but Usenet illustrates its impact on quality.)

Similarly, publisher resistance may become a problem with all (*, *, free) systems. Archiving is a concern with (*, www, *). And so on.

By treating each of these three issues separately we can draw useful distinctions, e.g., there are at least two, very different Old Guards:

1. for-profit publishers (e.g. Reed Elsevier) who want to preserve (peer-reviewed, paper, subscription) because it's profitable
2. non-profit publishers (e.g. AAAS) who can accept (peer-reviewed, *, *) because they are driven by the professional demands of their members.