Slashdot Mirror

Yea, but whitelists can be a pain too, so grany is going to get little Timmy suber-mega-warrior for his X-box, this christmas she goes to legit-video-game-dealer.com because its the most popular game of the year and is sold out everywhere else. She places her order and never recives the confirmation because that domin is not on her white list and because she is barely confortable with the internet at all gets very nervouse something has gone horribly wrong. She does not know she needs to keep adding to her white list and eventually starts getting spam from the business she has whitelisted. See, it helps but its not perfect.

Yah, that one. The one that all students use as their first point of reference anyway, because it's so much faster and clearer than looking at reliable sources. Of course, having done that, there's no substitute for getting reliable information from reliable sources -- same thing is true whether you start with Wikipedia, or the Wall Street Journal, the BBC, or Fox news or CNN or Time magazine. All are useful, all are biased, all make mistakes -- sometimes glaring ones.

Only one out of all these that I've mentioned lets you see how the text evolved over time, or lets you correct obvious errors, or produces the thing you want ("tell me about Quercus Suber!") without launching any popups or playing any videos. Wikipedia, as unreliable as it is, does all three and is remarkably useful. It's worth commemorating.

Well last night I tried to enjoy a cigarette but a girl and her boyfriend approached me on the property of the gas station next to this hotel. I had bought the cigarette at the said gas station and the strangers approached me and used peer pressure to ask for a cigarette out of my pack. I felt that if I did not give the girl a cigarette the collective group of people I was around would make my life even more difficult. The person took my cigarette. That was after a man touched my body while I was inside this hotel. I am typing this message from a hotel. Wifi connection and a chromebook. So a stranger inside this hotel touched me in the hallway last night. And a girl used peer pressure shortly after that on the adjacent property to ask for a cigarette from me. Pretty certain that my money is partially dissappearing from me and going into the hands of others. What this has to do with Ford. I guess they are ok. I will say something about it. I do not feel like I have to constantly make remarks about Ford vehicles or time will stop. Paid for food at a restaurant the other day. It had fuel in it.

"The article originally quoted Peter Suber as saying that the new programme eliminated the six-month embargo NPG places on authors self-archiving manuscripts in online repositories. The six-month self-archiving embargo remains, so this sentence has been removed."

Even if that had been accurate, it's disappointing to see Harvard adopt such a toadying attitude. They've got one hell of a brand, a massive endowment, a great deal of prestige, some excellent faculty and (at least when it comes to dealings in real estate around their campus) a...forceful...approach to negotiation. You'd think that they could put that toward a worthy cause by helping to bring the publishers to heel, rather than making conciliatory statements about pitiful little PR stunts like this.

"The article originally quoted Peter Suber as saying that the new programme eliminated the six-month embargo NPG places on authors self-archiving manuscripts in online repositories. The six-month self-archiving embargo remains, so this sentence has been removed."

This article is being widely panned as lacking controls, published without any critical review, and driven by self-interest from a traditional publisher with the most to lose from Open Access taking off (as it is). Some have gone so far to assert it's an over-reach for how badly it was done, and will make Science as a journal look partisan.

For example, quick scan brought up these three scathing responses:

Mike Eisen (HHMI Berkeley Professor)
http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1439

Peter Suber (Author of the book "Open Access", Director of the Harvard Open Access Project, Faculty Fellow at the Berkman Center)
https://plus.google.com/u/0/109377556796183035206/posts/CRHeCAtQqGq

Mike Taylor (programmer with Index Data and a research associate at the department of earth sciences, University of Bristol)
http://svpow.com/2013/10/03/john-bohannons-peer-review-sting-against-science/

I'm sure this will heat up some much needed debate about poor quality journals and the failings of peer review, but with the lack of any controls at all, it says basically nothing about open access as a model for publishing.

This article is being widely panned as lacking controls, published without any critical review, and driven by self-interest from a traditional publisher with the most to lose from Open Access taking off (as it is). Some have gone so far to assert it's an over-reach for how badly it was done, and will make Science as a journal look partisan.

For example, quick scan brought up these three scathing responses:

Mike Eisen (HHMI Berkeley Professor)
http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1439

Peter Suber (Author of the book "Open Access", Director of the Harvard Open Access Project, Faculty Fellow at the Berkman Center)
https://plus.google.com/u/0/109377556796183035206/posts/CRHeCAtQqGq

Mike Taylor (programmer with Index Data and a research associate at the department of earth sciences, University of Bristol)
http://svpow.com/2013/10/03/john-bohannons-peer-review-sting-against-science/

I'm sure this will heat up some much needed debate about poor quality journals and the failings of peer review, but with the lack of any controls at all, it says basically nothing about open access as a model for publishing.

LIKE ITS HARVARD MODEL, PRINCETON'S OPEN ACCESS POLICY NEEDS TO ADD AN IMMEDIATE-DEPOSIT REQUIREMENT, WITH NO WAIVER OPTION

http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/844-guid.html

1. First, congratulations to Princeton University (my graduate alma mater!) for adopting an open access mandate: a copyright-reservation policy, adopted by unanimous faculty vote.

2. Princeton is following in the footsteps of Harvard in adopting the copyright-reservation policy pioneered by Stuart Shieber and Peter Suber.

4. I hope that Princeton will now also follow in the footsteps of Harvard by adding an immediate-deposit requirement with no waiver option to its copyright-reservation mandate, as Harvard has done.

5. The Princeton copyright-reservation policy, like the Harvard copyright-reservation policy, can be waived if the author wishes: This is to allow authors to retain the freedom to choose where to publish, even if the journal does not agree to the copyright-reservation.

6. Adding an immediate-deposit clause, with no opt-out waiver option, retains all the properties and benefits of the copyright-reservation policy while ensuring that all articles are nevertheless deposited in the institutional repository upon publication, with no exceptions: Access to the deposited article can be embargoed, but deposit itself cannot; access is a copyright matter, deposit is not.

7. Depositing all articles upon publication, without exception, is crucial to reaching 100% open access with certainty, and as soon as possible; hence it is the right example to set for the many other universities worldwide that are now contemplating emulating Harvard and Princeton by adopting open access policies of their own; copyright reservation alone, with opt-out, is not.

8. The reason it is imperative that the deposit clause must be immediate and without a waiver option is that, without that, both when and whether articles are deposited at all is indeterminate: With the added deposit requirement the policy is a mandate; without it, it is just a gentleman/scholar's agreement.

[Footnote: Princeton's open access policy is also unusual in having been adopted before Princeton has created an open access repository for its authors to deposit in: It might be a good idea to create the repository as soon as possible so Princeton authors can get into the habit of practising what they pledge from the outset...]

Stevan Harnad
EnablingOpenScholarship

The first place I go when looking for a new subject is Wikipedia. It usually gives you some background - just hold your nose if it is an even remotely controversial subject. Reading the "wrong viewpoint" won't hurt you :)

The next thing that I'll typically do is look down at the references in the Wikipedia article and use those for my next step. But at some point you have to step back and do your own research as a sanity check.

Again, it depends on the subject.

Oh, and there is a Directory of Open Access Journals for more heavy research. And Peter Suber runs a blog concerned with opening up peer-reviewed research.

Suber's overview of the scene (there's an rss feed somewhere in there too)
- another blog
Alliance for Taxpayer Access
Directory of Open Access Journals
Directory of Open Access Repositories
The "Open Knowledge" Definition
And Wikipedia has lots of text on the subject.

Peter Suber who maintains the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) Open Access newsletter and the Free Online Scholarship (FOS) newsletter has been following this story for years.

You can find a lot of contextual detail relevant to the discussion by starting with the 11/2/2007 copy of this newsletter.

http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/11-02-07.htm

This is "timeselect" piece - you need to be a paying suber. What, you getting kickback from NYT now?

(Krugman is an interesting dude, but that's a separate topic)

if you look at the globe, it would be a warm spot in the middle of the atlantic... I'm not sure what this would do, but since it would be continually pushed, it would mostlikely split off at a fork... making Mauritania and Algeria even warmer and probably creating a SUBER UBER JUNGLE (forgive me) and probably warming up the caribbean as well as lots of hurricanes.... we'll probably have to start using chinese symbols or something after we run out of our symbols

This reminds me of Nomic.

First found in Peter Suber's book "The Paradox of Self-Amendment" or something of the sort.

THE RIAA VERSUS THE PEOPLE WHO BUY MUSIC AND MOVIES "New developments have made piracy easy and delightful. The Recording Industry Association of America is up in arms and up in the air over these developments. They have tried, unsuccessfully, to introduce legislation prohibiting this 'unauthorized re-recording'. How ironic this is. These are the same record companies that acquiesced years ago in allowing radio stations to play their records without fees despite the inscription "not licensed for radio broadcast - for home use in phonographs" on the labels. The record companies shafted live music then and are now being hoisted by their own petard." - Charles Suber - From his regular column in Downbeat Magazine, "The First Chorus" - February 18, 1960 Yes, 1960. As most people know, the RIAA is currently staging a battle over piracy that's going all the way to the Supreme Court. What most people probably don't know is that the RIAA has been singing this same song since the advent of the radio, the tape recorder, the video tape recorder, CD-ROM burner, DVD-ROM burner, and now, especially, Peer-to-Peer software clients, or file-sharing. So, according to the RIAA, the radio was going to kill the sale of LPs. Then, when it didn't, they were certain that the tape recorder would. Now people would simply record from another old nemesis of theirs, the radio. When that didn't happen, they waited a while and then really freaked out when the video recorder came along. This was going to kill movie theaters and television. When that didn't happen, it wasn't long before the RIAA was crying about CD burners destroying the sales of CDs. When this didn't happen, they waited and are now really upset about another new development, file sharing, which will surely kill the both the music and film businesses. After all of these years one would think that these folks might finally get it right. You see, the fools missed out again. In the infancy of file sharing, the RIAA and the record and film companies should have seen what was coming and gotten ready with a viable, affordable and fair offer to consumers, offering them exactly what they wanted and what they were going to soon get for free. Incredibly, the RIAA missed the boat again. A really big boat too. Instead they are back to the same strategy they so unsuccessfully employed in 1960, 1970, 1980 and 1990, which is to complain, threaten, harass and decide that your friend can't let his friend borrow some music or video that he has. Now they want the government to tell us that our friend can't borrow or music or films. Ironically, CD sales reached new levels in 2004 and leading the pack of buyers were those that routinely download music from the Internet. It has been statistically proven that people who download music buy more CDs than those that don't. Even Apple saw this one coming, and has gotten on the boat, sort of, considering the file format they are offering is not MP3, WAV, but in their own proprietary format, something they have a long history of doing. Then there's the new Napster. If you discontinue the service, meaning you stop paying them, your files that you downloaded and paid them a monthly fee for doing so, suddenly become unplayable. What are these people thinking? Doesn't the RIAA realize that it is precisely this community of people, the ones that they want to litigate, that are the same people that are leading the way and setting future trends for the industry? Downloading music and films is obviously a very preferred method of obtaining these mediums, so why didn't the RIAA see this coming, like the rest of the world did, and get involved in it early? The answer is arrogance and the audacity to put themselves and their profits above the artists who create it and the people who buy it. "The record companies shafted live music then and are now being hoisted by their own petard." - Charles Suber - 1960 - Downbeat Magazine.

> The initial set is a fully-functional game, with a winning condition and everything

Suber's initial rules are completely unsuited for any online play, because they are serial. If someone quits and doesn't tell anyone, the game hangs forever. Or just doesn't log in for a week. Nothing gets people bored like one "round" in the initial game taking a month. Suber's ruleset also refers to "the player to the left" at least once...

Rule 101 doesn't say you have to obey the rules -- that's inherent in the definition of "rule", and you simply can't make that a rule without infinite regress. Its purpose is that it's a highest-precedence rule that says you must obey all the rules in effect, thus pre-empting a whole class of rules that repeal provisions of other rules without specifically amending or editing those rules themselves. Of course some games do have strange and amusing definitions of "in effect" (Calvinball anyone?)

The first several rounds are pretty dull, and if people don't start creating subgames that are actually FUN really quick, everyone else gets bored and drops off.

I find that this happens usually because people starting online games diverge too far from Suber's rules from the start. The initial set is a fully-functional game, with a winning condition and everything -- and yet, most online games use badly-composed "untouchable" rules that can't be modified at all.

Yes, if you're running an online nomic-like game, you're going to have to modify the original rules -- but *MODIFY* them, don't rewrite them badly.

My advice (and the way I used to run games) was to modify the rules *by the rules* -- start playing with one player: yourself, and "build" rules around whatever platform you're using (website, mud, mailing list, whatever) by adding and amending rules as needed, paying attention to all existing rules, just as you would in a "real" game.

You can even include details like who gets control of the medium (i.e., who gets FTP access to the page, etc.) -- if there are real-world constraints (like that you're paying for it), then you can build some new category of rules that can't be modified by anyone else, etc.

There really is no reason to rewrite the original rules from scratch. That's part of the beauty of the game -- it provides for it's own destruction. Rule 101 says you have to obey the rules -- without that, is it even a game?

The problem isn't "subgames" -- it's people not knowing how to play Nomic.

Now I get it. ... So basically it is a game of politics where you win by beating the system.

For the sake of greater understanding I will point out two things, and then a very not-concise draft-quality discussion of Nomic, which you are free to ignore.

1) Trying to "get" Nomic usually causes one to grow dizzy and pass out. As with most things, you'll eventually discover something about it that you hadn't noticed before, and suddenly "get it" much better than you did before. This cycle of enlightenment won't ever really stop, unless you're, like, the Buddha, or Don Knuth, or something.

2) "A game of politics where you win by beating the system." is a reasonable explaination of what Nomic begins as, when playing by the original rules. It is neither a literal interpretation of the rules, nor a adequate description of the possibilities of what the game may become.

(I point these things out because I find Nomic deeply interesting, not because I think anyone else is wrong for not seeing it this way.)

For instance, winning is itself defined by a rule. In Suber's original Nomic, the initial winning condition is to score 100 points, and another rule says that the winning condition can't be changed to anything other than scoring a number of points.

The literal approach would be to get as many proposals passed as possible, by giving the other players reasons to vote for them, and to be on the winning side of every other vote. This, itself, is a deep game.

The "beat the system" approach (which never fails to excite people new to the game) involves trying to create rule paradoxes or very primitive combos, or invoking loopholes. Often, though, the game devolves into a kind of tug-of-war between people trying to craft incorruptable rules (patching every hole) and people trying to win by some clever master stroke (arguing over what the definition of "is" is). The game is still very "play-to-win", and winning usually means making a number bigger or 'killing off' the other players. It is still zero-sum.

It's beyond this, you start getting into the really fun part. It basically happens when people consciously or unconsciously agree to cooperate. Winning ceases to be the point (even if it is, in the rules) -- it's about continuing play. It becomes non-zero-sum.

This takes some getting used to, but it makes for the most interesting and stimulating games.

What happens when you : eliminate the rule that says the game is over when one player wins? eliminate winning altogether? eliminate voting? eliminate the first rule, the one that says players must abide by the rules? At what point does it stop being a game?

The last example should highlight the fact that what happens is entirely dependent on the players.

If you ever watch group improvisation (comedy, theater, jazz, or just children playing), you might notice that it works because each player accepts what the other players give them.

If Actor A says to Actor B : "Hi, Doctor B!", then B immediately becomes a doctor. If Doctor B says "Hi, Nurse A!" right back, then A becomes a nurse, even if he wanted to be a patient.

When it doesn't work, it's usually because someone rejects what the other players give, or tries to steer the act in another direction. If I touch you and say "Tag, you're it!" and you say "Oh, no I'm not!", well then we've got a pretty crappy game of Tag.

This isn't to say you should just except any change that another player offers -- but rather that your criteria for accepting or rejecting them becomes more about fun, and continuing the game, than than winning or losing. It's like having a conversation, not having an argument.

If you're interested in Nomic conceptually (rather than seeing it as "just" a game to be played) I can reccommend several books:

James Carse's Finite and Infinite Games, Herman Hesse's Magister Ludi, and Peter Suber's own The Paradox of Self-Amend

A good starting place is suber's original nomic game:
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/nomic.htm

The idea was to make a game out of making rules for the game. So each
turn, a player proposes a change to the rules, and people vote on it
and stuff. (This is usually done with people in a room writing on
index cards and posting to a bulletin board, though sometimes it is
played over email.) But when players disagree on the interpretation
of a rule, they call to a "judge" (who is just another player) to sort
it out for them.

Now think perl, and think self-modifying code, and think web forms
instead of index cards. No judges needed, because the script either
runs or it doesn't, and whatever the scripts allow are the "rules".

Now think obfuscated code, and hidden loopholes, and unfortunate
little bugs that allow you to get way more points than we expected you
would get when we all voted on your proposal.

That's the idea, anyway.

Here are some links for those who want more background and detail on the open access movement:

Open Access Overview
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm
(my introduction to OA for those who are new to the concept)

Open Access News blog
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html
(my blog, updated daily)

SPARC Open Access Newsletter
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/arch ive.htm
(my newsletter, published monthly)

FAQ on the NIH public-access policy
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/nihfaq.htm

Timeline of the open access movement
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/timeline.htm

What you can do to help the cause of open access
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/lists.htm#do

Peter Suber