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Of course, science journals need some revenue and one can understand if they don't just want to open things up for free. But the prizes are just ridiculous. See https://www.elsevier.com/about... Every issue a few hundred dollars. This is similarly insane with textbook prizes. It is hard to understand for journal prizes because almost all content is written by authors who are not payed (in some cases even have to pay to be published) and where also the referees are not payed. Having reliable journals with a rigorous review process is however extremely important. The predatory open access models are not a solution. The best solution would probably be if reputable organizations like AMS, APS, ACS or ASCB would get some funds to publish more open access content and have these available through major libraries. scientific publication is too important to be left to profit driven forces only.

Preprints are useless after publication because they can be out of date, the Accepted Manuscript which Robert Kiley mentioned is the one you know will be identical to the paper in content.

https://www.elsevier.com/about...

"by updating a preprint in arXiv or RePEc with the accepted manuscript"

Patterson is a co-author of this classic text:

Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach

If you're serious about computer science, you should have it and know it.

What greenies want coal converted to oil?
Oil has much heavier use than the rest so of course it is at top. However, coal can not be cleaned up and oil can be. Adding to the pollution, Coal produces the most CO2 even under the best of conditions.
This says checkmate
Top of the list shows why your nation burning 80% coal for electricity, looks so bad but the west does not. Even nations like Saudi Arabia that burn large amounts of oil for electricity, does not look like your nation.

Incorrect.

Elsevier has two pricing models: either you can pay to have your article published as "open access", or the article is paid for only by subscriptions. They (according to their own published policies, at least) don't combine the two.

They are actually among the more reasonable academic publishers. Compared with the practices of, e.g,, the IEEE, they're a model of rectitude.

A lot of datasets are owned by corporations that are very protective of their copyrights. Elsevyr

Elsevier: For US government employees, works created within the scope of their employment are considered to be public domain and Elsevier's publishing agreements do not require a transfer or license of rights for such works. In the UK and certain commonwealth countries, a work created by a government employee is copyrightable but the government may own the copyright (Crown copyright). Click here for information about UK government employees publishing open access

I won't even bother to comment on your subsequent bullshit and fear mongering You just don't know what you're talking about.

Yes, it's fine to require the EPA to make its data available freely: it's good for science, it's good for politics, and it's good for the people. Your delusion that in order for the EPA to do good science, it needs to keep it secret is utterly ludicrous.

Elsevier just says that original work created by the US Government does not need to transfer copyright to Elsevier for that original work in order for it to be published by Elsevier in one of the their journals.

What you cite is completely irrelevant to what people are worried about.

Elsevier does not allow anyone in the license to re-publish work of others which is apparently what this law would require in order for the EPA to consider any science.... therefore .... wait for it... the EPA would still not be able to use 99.99% of published science.

Elsevier:

So I clicked that link, and this is what it said:

Sorry, the page you requested cannot be found.


It may have been moved or no longer exists, or the link used is incorrect.

We suggest you use the Search or Menu functions at the top right of this page or visit the links below:

A lot of datasets are owned by corporations that are very protective of their copyrights. Elsevyr

Elsevier: For US government employees, works created within the scope of their employment are considered to be public domain and Elsevier's publishing agreements do not require a transfer or license of rights for such works.
In the UK and certain commonwealth countries, a work created by a government employee is copyrightable but the government may own the copyright (Crown copyright). Click here for information about UK government employees publishing open access

I won't even bother to comment on your subsequent bullshit and fear mongering You just don't know what you're talking about.

Yes, it's fine to require the EPA to make its data available freely: it's good for science, it's good for politics, and it's good for the people. Your delusion that in order for the EPA to do good science, it needs to keep it secret is utterly ludicrous.

"The magazine is owned and run by Elsevier B.V."

Yessiree, here's an example of one of those prestigious Elsevier journals: http://www.journals.elsevier.c...
Small wonder that scientists line up to pay this buggy-whip publisher $3000 per research paper for the privilege of having their copyright stolen.

This is modded "Insightful"????

The DM took the report from The Sunday Times which was basing it's report on a study published in the journal Atmospheric Environment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.journals.elsevier.c...

Actually, we do have the abstract and the entire article. PLOS Medicine is open source. http://journals.plos.org/plosm... I think you can even follow the links to the original questionnaire.

There's a pretty strong consensus among epidemiologists, including the ones who gave the talk I linked to https://www.elsevier.com/conne... , that you can't infer causation from association.

But any statistical study worth their salt will check the data for bias and other effects.

Yes, they'll check, but without a randomized, controlled trial, it's impossible to rule out bias and other effects.

You beat me to it.

Citation needed.

http://www.healthnewsreview.or...

"Frequent fish consumption was associated with a 50% reduction in the relative risk of dying from a heart attack." Her editor's reaction? Slash. Too wordy, too passive. The editor's rewrite? "Women who ate fish five times a week cut their risk of dying later from a heart attack by half."

  https://www.elsevier.com/conne...

The most obvious approach is to combine the 2 methods - much like humans do, especially in noisy environments.

Obvious, indeed. There's already a textbook for the subject, Multimodal Signal Processing...available for free online, no less.

This is exactly the sort of system you'd want on a flight deck, to supplement the accuracy of speech-recognition in the presence of noise, especially intermittent noise such as turbulence. It can also help with speaker identification.

As for the hopelessly naive idea that "society" should be able to choose whether this sort of thing should exist...the textbook came out in 2009.

Haha. "Geophysics."

Geophysics

Priceless. That's a great word to use in a "you don't know what you're talking about" speech.

I don't get you guys. You have no clue exactly how mindlessly you're parroting things that you read on a blog somewhere, and me pointing it out is going to result in another angry tu quoque. I can't even imagine what series of thoughts that you might have had that lead you to go "I got you now!" with geophysics. But they aren't anywhere near sane.

Here's what people who actually study geophysics focus on in case you still don't grok why you reached peak stupidity.

This is complete flame bait. Here is a link to what Elsevier allows authors to do with their articles: http://www.elsevier.com/journal-authors/author-rights-and-responsibilities#author-posting . The article asserts that posting to your own website is a violation of the agreement; note that Elsevier explicitly states that this is allowed. Posting the submitted version to preprint servers (e.g. arxiv.org) is explicitly allowed. What you can't do is post to some third party for-profit website, which is apparently how they view this academia.edu place. Given that they have an "about" page bragging about their investors, and they have a CEO, it does not seem far fetched to conclude that this academia.edu is gaining commercially from your posting the article, which is an explicit violation of the agreement with the publisher.

So to me, this is a non-story. Disclosure: I have no love for Elsevier, but I have published with them in the past and will again in the future (we junior faculty don't have the luxury of taking principled stands).

If you are a government employee and you submit a paper, instead of assigning the copyright, you send them some sort of standard form informing them that since the work was done by the government, it is not copyrightable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_work_by_the_U.S._government

You'd think that Elsevier had heard of that already and put it at the top of their publishing agreement or something.

It isn't clear here whether the papers in question were the pre- or post-editing versions

They are going after the final, published versions (including Elsevier formatting and all), commercial use of accepted manuscripts, systematic distribution and the like (some of which applies to academia.edu). In other words, what you said was fair game still is - you are allowed to share the accepted manuscript with others (including on your website where Google Scholar will pick it up and render it discoverable in a matter of days, so it's not like this restricts you), you (or anyone else) just can't make money off it and you can't use their typesetting.

For the accepted manuscript version, let me just quote from Elsevier's author rights:

Elsevier believes that individual authors should be able to distribute their AAMs for their personal voluntary needs and interests, e.g. posting to their websites or their institutionâ(TM)s repository, e-mailing to colleagues. However, our policies differ regarding the systematic aggregation or distribution of AAMs to ensure the sustainability of the journals to which AAMs are submitted. Therefore, deposit in, or posting to, subject-oriented or centralized repositories (such as PubMed Central), or institutional repositories with systematic posting mandates is permitted only under specific agreements between Elsevier and the repository, agency or institution, and only consistent with the publisherâ(TM)s policies concerning such repositories. Voluntary posting of AAMs in the arXiv subject repository is permitted.

So you can see how academia.edu falls foul of this while your right to share your work does not.

(Some of my papers are published in Elsevier journals - they are however also all open access. In case you're wondering.)

Docker looks promising, but there are other existing services stacked on EC2 that address the needs of science workloads. PiCloud does exactly the things you're asking for: http://www.picloud.com/platform/ . And the folks at Cycle Computing use Condor to manage the largest jobs ever run on EC2: http://www.cyclecomputing.com/ . I'm still working on my own stuff based on Groovy and Condor which I call Gondor, but it isn't at all ready for others to use. One thing I have found to be great is that there is a MacPorts portfile for Condor which works dandy. Just "sudo port install htcondor && sudo port load htcondor". http://research.cs.wisc.edu/htcondor/HTCondorWeek2013/presentations/SingerL_MacPorts.pdf . I don't yet see a nice single workflow that gets us to an integrated reproducible published result at the other end like Elsevier's Executable Paper http://www.elsevier.com/physical-sciences/computer-science/executable-papers, but I think we'll be there soon.

Elsevier allows various postings with a few caveats. You can post pre-prints anywhere noncommercial, with the caveat that two of their journals won't accept manuscripts that were already posted, but would allow posting after being accepted for publication. Manuscripts that include peer review work are more tightly controlled than other publishers I've worked with, but can still be posted to ArXiv, personal & institute websites, and distribution through direct contact. They have issue with "systematic distribution," any system that distrubtes and accumulates automatically by subject area, which in large part seems to come down to a spat with Pubmed, while still allowing ArXiv explicitly.

You're talking magazines, we're talking journals, Like the notorious Journal of Molecular Biology, which costs $6,181.87 for an electronic subscription with access for five users. The owners of that journal do the following to earn that money: they print a dead tree format ($9,273.00, or you can have both for just $15,454.87), they have an editor (who I don't know if they're paid or not) whose main function is to shuttle papers around to unpaid reviewers, mainly university professors. The papers if published cost the authors money--they're not even providing content for free! Besides the content there's also the guy running the server, and maybe a copy editor or two, and of course the billing department. Elsevier and the rest of the for-profit journal publishers are parasites, parasites so avaricious they're killing off the host.

According to whom? People who didn't like the conclusions? The study was published in a peer reviewed journal, Food and Chemical Toxicology http://www.journals.elsevier.com/food-and-chemical-toxicology, go read the article than come back and post something intelligent.

Why aren't the scientists copyrighting or putting their work into the public domain prior to submission?

Some do, especially in computer science; see, for example, the cryptology eprint archive. Consider, however, the guidelines for publishing a paper in the Journal of Algebra:

Submission of an article implies that the work described has not been published previously (except in the form of an abstract or as part of a published lecture or academic thesis), that it is not under consideration for publication elsewhere, that its publication is approved by all authors and tacitly or explicitly by the responsible authorities where the work was carried out, and that, if accepted, it will not be published elsewhere including electronically in the same form, in English or in any other language, without the written consent of the copyright-holder.

In case you were wondering who the copyright holder is:

Upon acceptance of an article, authors will be asked to complete a 'Journal Publishing Agreement' (for more information on this and copyright see http://www.elsevier.com/copyright). Acceptance of the agreement will ensure the widest possible dissemination of information. An e-mail will be sent to the corresponding author confirming receipt of the manuscript together with a 'Journal Publishing Agreement' form or a link to the online version of this agreement. Subscribers may reproduce tables of contents or prepare lists of articles including abstracts for internal circulation within their institutions. Permission of the Publisher is required for resale or distribution outside the institution and for all other derivative works, including compilations and translations (please consult http://www.elsevier.com/permissions). If excerpts from other copyrighted works are included, the author(s) must obtain written permission from the copyright owners and credit the source(s) in the article. Elsevier has preprinted forms for use by authors in these cases: please consult http://www.elsevier.com/permissions.

Basically, if you publish an article in this journal, you must give them the copyright, and your submission will be rejected if you published the article previously, including publishing in the public domain. This is not necessarily a bad thing; an unscrupulous scientist might try to publish the same paper in many journals, and make it appear that he has done more work than he actually has. However, in the current system of copyrights and academic publishers, this has the side effect of ensuring that a scientist cannot make his journal articles available to the public at no cost.

Why aren't the scientists copyrighting or putting their work into the public domain prior to submission?

Some do, especially in computer science; see, for example, the cryptology eprint archive. Consider, however, the guidelines for publishing a paper in the Journal of Algebra:

Submission of an article implies that the work described has not been published previously (except in the form of an abstract or as part of a published lecture or academic thesis), that it is not under consideration for publication elsewhere, that its publication is approved by all authors and tacitly or explicitly by the responsible authorities where the work was carried out, and that, if accepted, it will not be published elsewhere including electronically in the same form, in English or in any other language, without the written consent of the copyright-holder.

In case you were wondering who the copyright holder is:

Upon acceptance of an article, authors will be asked to complete a 'Journal Publishing Agreement' (for more information on this and copyright see http://www.elsevier.com/copyright). Acceptance of the agreement will ensure the widest possible dissemination of information. An e-mail will be sent to the corresponding author confirming receipt of the manuscript together with a 'Journal Publishing Agreement' form or a link to the online version of this agreement. Subscribers may reproduce tables of contents or prepare lists of articles including abstracts for internal circulation within their institutions. Permission of the Publisher is required for resale or distribution outside the institution and for all other derivative works, including compilations and translations (please consult http://www.elsevier.com/permissions). If excerpts from other copyrighted works are included, the author(s) must obtain written permission from the copyright owners and credit the source(s) in the article. Elsevier has preprinted forms for use by authors in these cases: please consult http://www.elsevier.com/permissions.

Basically, if you publish an article in this journal, you must give them the copyright, and your submission will be rejected if you published the article previously, including publishing in the public domain. This is not necessarily a bad thing; an unscrupulous scientist might try to publish the same paper in many journals, and make it appear that he has done more work than he actually has. However, in the current system of copyrights and academic publishers, this has the side effect of ensuring that a scientist cannot make his journal articles available to the public at no cost.

Why aren't the scientists copyrighting or putting their work into the public domain prior to submission?

Some do, especially in computer science; see, for example, the cryptology eprint archive. Consider, however, the guidelines for publishing a paper in the Journal of Algebra:

Submission of an article implies that the work described has not been published previously (except in the form of an abstract or as part of a published lecture or academic thesis), that it is not under consideration for publication elsewhere, that its publication is approved by all authors and tacitly or explicitly by the responsible authorities where the work was carried out, and that, if accepted, it will not be published elsewhere including electronically in the same form, in English or in any other language, without the written consent of the copyright-holder.

In case you were wondering who the copyright holder is:

Upon acceptance of an article, authors will be asked to complete a 'Journal Publishing Agreement' (for more information on this and copyright see http://www.elsevier.com/copyright). Acceptance of the agreement will ensure the widest possible dissemination of information. An e-mail will be sent to the corresponding author confirming receipt of the manuscript together with a 'Journal Publishing Agreement' form or a link to the online version of this agreement. Subscribers may reproduce tables of contents or prepare lists of articles including abstracts for internal circulation within their institutions. Permission of the Publisher is required for resale or distribution outside the institution and for all other derivative works, including compilations and translations (please consult http://www.elsevier.com/permissions). If excerpts from other copyrighted works are included, the author(s) must obtain written permission from the copyright owners and credit the source(s) in the article. Elsevier has preprinted forms for use by authors in these cases: please consult http://www.elsevier.com/permissions.

Basically, if you publish an article in this journal, you must give them the copyright, and your submission will be rejected if you published the article previously, including publishing in the public domain. This is not necessarily a bad thing; an unscrupulous scientist might try to publish the same paper in many journals, and make it appear that he has done more work than he actually has. However, in the current system of copyrights and academic publishers, this has the side effect of ensuring that a scientist cannot make his journal articles available to the public at no cost.

What is laughable is that the publishers now also do things like offering an option to have the paper available on-line for free. However, to exercise this option, they want *me* to pay them a large fee.

Actually, Elsevier allows the publication of a preprint on a personal or the university web site. The $3000 option is only to make the publishers version freely downloadable from their web site.

Elsevier withdrew their support for the RWA three weeks ago.

Maybe an update that included that little detail would have been more useful?

Peer review,

A valuable resource for those in traditional medicine as well as complementary practitioners, Homeopathy publishes peer-reviewed articles that will appeal to a multi-disciplinary audience. Homeopathy

It is only as good as it's reviewers. A big part of what Cuccinelli was trying to determine was whether the research was in fact peer-reviewed or cronie-reviewed

and it is good to hear it is dead, but on the other hand, the man pulling the strings will most likely be pushing for something else.
 

Or maybe not.

As in Football, the best Defense is a good Offense.

With the second bill introduced to MANDATE public access, Elsevier is now on their heels, trying to defend their turf, and may not have the clout to fight both fronts. They are pretty much going to have to spend their blood and treasure fighting the Federal Research Public Access Act, because if it passes anything they could propose would first have to overcome that hurdle.

A Dutch company trying to dictate publishing policy to the US Government isn't likely to play well with the US tax payer in an election year.
That gives a year's grace to push the Public Access Act thru, with the major political parties both jockeying for position as the party of open-ness.

I'm one step ahead of you!

Have at it, boys!

More complete references to the above papers:

Yu-Sung Su: "It’s easy to produce chartjunk using Microsoft Excel 2007 but hard to make good graphs"

A. Talha Yalta: "The accuracy of statistical distributions in Microsoft Excel 2007"

B.D. McCullough, David A. Heiser: "On the accuracy of statistical procedures in Microsoft Excel 2007"

All published in "Computational Statistics and Data Analysis", 2008

It's measured in the ability to RTFM, which Chinese scientists seems to excel at:

"The figures are based on the papers published in recognised international journals listed by the Scopus service of the publishers Elsevier."

Given some of the crap that Elsevier publishes, I'd wait for independent confirmation.

In the case of Sea Launch, the U.S. requires that American individuals or corporations obtain a license to launch from the FAA, whether they're launching within the U.S. or not. Interesting article on all the legal ramifications here.

Other countries likely have similar rules. But it just proves the overall point: whether the legally-sketchy activities take place in space or in international waters, whoever is controlling those activities generally lives in an actual country, and the laws of that country can be brought to bear against them.

Here's the journal (Preventive Medicine) website: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/622934/description

First, it's an Elsevier journal; they produce good journals. Second, the journal has an impact factor of 3.17, which is quite respectable. It's not Nature or Science or the New England Journal of Medicine but then again, very few journals are in that class.

Don't knock the article just because the site hosting the article is distasteful to you. Or maybe you just have something against UCLA and the type of research they produce. Or, maybe you don't agree with the findings so you resort to ad hominem attacks.

Where's your evidence that refutes the findings in the article? I'd love to read it (seriously).

You mean the poor farmer in Bangladesh will experience the same hardship from sea level rise than a Miami millionaire? One loses his livelihood and the other has to move his yacht pier up 3 feet - yes, that seems about the same.

Yes, the 2.8mm/year rate of sea level rise is sure to take away the livelihood of that farmer in Bangladesh... he should start running now, or else he may never escape!!!!!

You don't realize the absurdity of your extremist appeals to emotion BECAUSE YOU DONT EVEN KNOW THE FACTS OF THE VERY SHIT YOUR ARE SUPPORTING.

No, you don't know the facts of the "shit" you are supporting. To start with, Bangaldeshi farmers can't start running because they live in one of the most densely populated areas on earth and the national boundaries there have been drawn in the 20th century to stop traditional migrations. And while 2.8mm/y may sound like nothing, try to remember that a) it has been going on for decades, b) that projection is probably too low and c) it is already causing serious problems in low-lying island nations such as Tuvalu and the Maldives as well as in Bangladesh itself.

So get your head out of your fat Western ass and start paying attention.

...and as long as we can tax you so that you never get to keep even 50% of what you earn, Al Gore is happy! His family ran out of dead Kulaks to exploit so they need your property now. Pass the carbon credits!

You mean the poor farmer in Bangladesh will experience the same hardship from sea level rise than a Miami millionaire? One loses his livelihood and the other has to move his yacht pier up 3 feet - yes, that seems about the same.

Yes, the 2.8mm/year rate of sea level rise is sure to take away the livelihood of that farmer in Bangladesh... he should start running now, or else he may never escape!!!!!

You don't realize the absurdity of your extremist appeals to emotion BECAUSE YOU DONT EVEN KNOW THE FACTS OF THE VERY SHIT YOUR ARE SUPPORTING.

No, you don't know the facts of the "shit" you are supporting. To start with, Bangaldeshi farmers can't start running because they live in one of the most densely populated areas on earth and the national boundaries there have been drawn in the 20th century to stop traditional migrations. And while 2.8mm/y may sound like nothing, try to remember that a) it has been going on for decades, b) that projection is probably too low and c) it is already causing serious problems in low-lying island nations such as Tuvalu and the Maldives as well as in Bangladesh itself.

So get your head out of your fat Western ass and start paying attention.

First, you'd need Chinese rates rather than Canadian ones, as there are non-trivial cultural differences in play.

Second, you'd need rates for the specific demographics that are employed at the factory, and not just ones for the population as a whole. In the US, the elderly have a higher rate than the population as a whole, but the elderly are less likely to be employed in a factory.

And in China, suicide is the leading cause of death for young adults (15–34 years of age).

Last, as I understand it, they've had 9 suicides at the factory, not just 9 suicides by people employed by the factory. The article isn't clear on whether Foxconn paid benefits for any suicide by an employee or just ones that happen on Foxconn property, but if it's the latter it's certainly a motivator.

What you fail to understand is that all lived in free dormitories at the factory, and all died at the dormitory during their free time.

A lot of papers were published in the 1990s claiming that endocrine disruptors such as BPA will cause children to have delayed onset of puberty.

Citation? Everything I've seen says BPA exposure advances puberty:

• A great overview of the research in Environmental Health Perspectives
• "Exposure to bisphenol A advances puberty", in Nature: like it says in the title, for female mice at least
• "Low dose effect of in utero exposure to bisphenol A and diethylstilbestrol on female mouse reproduction" in Reproductive toxicology: BPA makes female mice sexually mature faster.

Supposedly the human male's penis is also designed to remove other male's sperm from the vaginal tract.

For those that are interested in considering scientific paper without the media filter:

Ferroir, Tristan, Leonid Dubrovinsky, Ahmed El Goresy, Alexandre Simionovici, Tomoki Nakamura, and Philippe Gillet. 2010. Carbon polymorphism in shocked meteorites: Evidence for new natural ultrahard phases. Earth and Planetary Science Letters 290, no. 1-2: 150-154. doi:10.1016/j.epsl.2009.12.015. http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0012821X09007389.

I sure wish that secondary sources properly cited primary sources, even if they are only interviewing the main scientist involved. Giving the journal name and date as Discovery News did is a good step, though.

You appear to have developed your silly idea by only considering silly books. It's quite common for academic publishers to have separate pricing schemes depending on who is doing the purchasing. If you want a print subscription to The Lancet, a library will pay about five times the price that an (undiscounted) individual would- and more than ten times what a student subscription costs. This is common in academic publishing.

If all you want in your library is the latest in angsty teenage vampire fiction(i.e. silly books), the libraries get a good deal. For serious academic works, the reverse is true.

Links that are not reputable or factual but seem to support my case... (but I'm not a doctor so I can't tell)

http://archinte.highwire.org/cgi/content/summary/90/4/513
http://www.fao.org/docrep/009/a0442e/a0442e0m.htm
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/28630.php
http://www.alternet.org/story/274/
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/280264/obese_britons_also_at_risk_for_malnutrition.html?cat=51
http://www.springerlink.com/content/r718533228ph9g55/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8581766
http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S155072890800600X ...but in all truth I am not nearly as qualified as you are to talk about these things. I'm parroting things I've seen in biased documentaries. I bow before your might.

"Start with the contention that Bunn's coffee maker was negligently designed because [...] 'at the temperatures at which this coffee was brewed and maintained the structural integrity of the styrofoam cup into which the coffee was poured would be compromised making it more flexible and likely to give way or collapse when its rigid lid is removed.' It is far from clear to us that this effect, if a substantial one, should be laid at the door of Bunn rather than of the cup's producer[...]."

Judge Easterbrook is pointing out that the manufacturer did not make the decision to design their coffee maker with full knowledge of the containers into which they would be poured; obviously McDonald's is in a different position and there is no clear conclusion that the judge would've held differently than was in the McDonald's case based on these facts alone.

Also, I was mistaken regarding the study of temperatures of coffee at other restaurants; the study was done for a different case in 1986 in Texas but the results still hold true and were reported in the WSF (as cited here: http://www.vanosteen.com/mcdonalds-coffee-lawsuit.htm)

I realize we've gone far astray from my initial point (the success of modifying corporate decisions via the torts system) but for years I believed the myths about this case and saw it as a symptom of what was wrong with the legal system in the U.S. The more I learned about the actual case the more I realized that I was mistaken; I take the opportunity to enlighten others about the facts if possible. I recognize that frivolous lawsuits exist but do not feel that this is one of them. Ms. Liebeck died in 2004 after contending with not just the "incident" but also many jokes unjustly made at her expense and I think that's a shame.

I'm not sure from the Google Scholar description of this 1999 paper whether it refers to mention of octopus tool use in 1940 or in Roman times:

... Historia, Liber IX, 48; Plinius Secundus, 1940) reported a description of tool-using behaviour ...

Perhaps someone with a subscription can check it out.

No need. Pliny's Natural History was published at some point around AD 78. However, when you cite your sources as a scholar, you put the date of the edition you have in your hands. Hence, this person put "1940".

They may have the first video evidence, but I'm sure I've heard about octopodes using tools before, and Google turns up one reference almost three years ago about a very similar case, and a 2008 paper (PDF) which reports observation of octopus tool use and references a 1984 paper as describing certain octopus behaviour as probably tool use. I'm not sure from the Google Scholar description of this 1999 paper whether it refers to mention of octopus tool use in 1940 or in Roman times:

...
Historia, Liber IX, 48; Plinius Secundus, 1940) reported a description of tool-using behaviour ...

Perhaps someone with a subscription can check it out.

That's not actually in line with most of the studies that have come out over the past 10-15 years. Sure, there are a lot of quack methodologies, but following an accepted, mainstream program of counseling for a disorder for which the program is recommended by a mainstream body like the APA, carried out by properly accredited specialists, is generally associated with better-than-control outcomes (and better than informal counseling by a primary-care physician). Here and here are two recent systematic meta-analyses of the results for depression (the best-studied disorder).

Whether counseling is better or worse than drugs is more up in the air, and seems to depend pretty heavily on the demographics, the specific disorder, the type of counseling, the type of drugs, and the time period of which you're looking (and even within all those, there are huge variances among studies). This survey is typical of the generally mixed/inconclusive results such comparisons come up with. (In addition, most disorders are much less well studied than depression, and sample sizes, especially within demographically comparable groups, are much smaller.)

In any case, I'm not aware of much in the way of peer-reviewed research that supports a hardline "pills are effective, and counseling is not" claim.

Paper at http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S1388248109003889 The capacity of the prototypes was very small, but they are hoping to acchieve 10 Ah/g.

So how much is that in potato batteries?

Paper at http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S1388248109003889

The capacity of the prototypes was very small, but they are hoping to acchieve 10 Ah/g.

It seems that the exact mechanism is not entirely clear (though some prominent hypotheses have been advanced), but there is no shortage of studies that show gender ratio changes in populations exposed to particular chemicals.

I vaguely recall seeing evidence that some chemicals do actually have a debilitating effect on sperm carrying the Y chromosome but other possibilities include fewer Y sperm being produced and Y embryos being less likely to implant successfully or more likely to miscarry.

It should be noted that Medical Hypotheses is (deliberately) focused on publishing very preliminary and unconventional stuff. Their description.

Obviously, all theories go through a wildly unproven stage; and some of the stuff in Medical Hypotheses may well grow up to be conventional wisdom some day; but it is there because it isn't now.

My favorite is this magnificently tactless work.

Unlike glucose, fructose is almost entirely metabolized in the liver. "When fructose reaches the liver," says Dr. William J. Whelan, a biochemist at the University of Miami School of Medicine, "the liver goes bananas and stops everything else to metabolize the fructose." Eating fructose as compared to glucose results in lower circulating insulin (pancreatic beta cell insulin release is controlled only by blood glucose levels) and leptin levels, and attenuation in the suppression of ghrelin postprandially.[53] These hormones are implicated in the control of appetite and satiety, and it is suspected that eating large amounts of fructose increases the likelihood of weight gain.[54]

Or you could google it, read, say, this review see, this article in elsevier and see for yourself that it is already pretty well-accepted that HFCS is bad.
As to the link to your post: You assert that GMO haters are unreasonable, or something to that effect, and that there is no reasoning with them, (but that they're wrong; at least, that seemed to me to be your unspoken conclusion/assertion). In response, I suggested that they might be less wrong than you suppose, and further, that it's not entirely unreasonable to be careful when considering how next to mess with human food intake, specifically because, per my assertion, metabolism is ill-understood, and we know very little of what the body actually needs to function properly. And that it's not a priori unreasonable to assume that we have evolved uses for everything we used to eat, and that some of these new functions we were able to develop are now things we can no longer do without without breaking.
I'm really sorry that you were so shocked by my assertion that Americans are somewhat fucked by being forced to eat quite so much junk (just because HFCS is cheaper to produce than other sugars), but it sort of saddens me that you were so shocked that you couldn't even be bothered googling the two relevant terms just to see if there is a suggested link between HFCS and diabetes (and other metabolic diseases) before stating so triumphantly that my post contains "zero science".