is there any reason to create the sort of roadblocks and barriers in front of valuable research
Honest answer: it's part of a bigger problem. If you want a job, you need to publish papers. If you want to publish papers, you have to do it in the major journals. It's called 'publish or perish' and it is killing academic science. But a lot of people in charge are too damned lazy to do anything about it, even though everyone with two brain cells to rub together knows it is terrible.
So people do it because they have to. If you do the right thing, if you take a stand and refuse to play that game, you will not be rewarded for it. Someone else will get the job. Sad fact of the matter.
The journals meanwhile are all too willing to play ball, and charge obscene fees for the papers that are published in the journals. They surely know the stupid culture of science that enables this, so they've got a lot of people kind of backed into a corner here.
If that sounds stupid to you, that's because it is. But that's why it happens.
If you're doing that out of 'publish or perish' and you really need a position, and so you really need publications in the big name journals, as much as I dislike that sentiment, it is understandable. Hate the game not the player and all.
But if that's not the case and you're saying that out of some smug sense of elitism towards those with less access than you, than you are part of a big problem in science. Science is for everyone, not just people in developed countries who work at an institute that can afford every journal. 'Just buy the article', how absurd. Ever seen the price on those things? Yeah, just read the abstract and hope what you want to see is in the rest of the paper somewhere, and do this dozens if not hundreds of times, dropping about $30 each time. In what world is that financially reasonable? That's only slightly less absurd then submitting a FOIA request every time.
Lucky you. I was unaware there was any institution with a subscription to every single journal out there. Last I heard, even the obscenely wealthy Ivies couldn't boast that. Must be nice.
Unfortunately, not everyone is so fortunate. Not all institutions have access to all journals. If you are a researcher or grad student at a smaller, less wealthy university, that's a problem. This is particularly true in less wealthy countries, where scientists and students have no choice but Sci-Hub. That is also a problem; just because they were born into a poorer country does not mean they can't contribute to science just as well.
For another thing, you don't need to work at a university to be a scientist. Scientists are people who do science, not people who work at universities, or research institutes, or corporations. Their tax dollars likely paid for that research in some form, why should they not be able to access it?
Yeah, for those of us with institutional access, we usually have interlibrary loan or something. If you're lucky, you can ask an author and they might respond (crapshot). But that doesn't work for everyone. And since it was more often than not publicly funded, it should be publicly accessible, not paywalled for the profit of a corporation. Science works best when everyone can see the data.
The decision is a setback for the sites that have come under increasing pressure,
No, it is not a setback for those sites. They don't gain anything by people using them, and don't lose anything by getting blocked. It is a setback for all the scientists and scientifically minded people who cannot afford the exorbitant fees the journals charge, and now have more barriers to accessing (largely publicly funded) research results.
is this just the old school tobacco lobby at work?
Hard to tell if it's that, or just some real morons. Are e-cigarettes safe? Probably not, but we know full well that cigarettes aren't safe by any definition. So they want to ban something that, while probably harmful to some degree, is likely to be less harmful than the old style cigarettes? It's not uncommon for people to be more afraid of unknown potential risks than known proven dangers, but you'd hope for better from lawmakers.
Either they didn't spend more than five seconds thinking this out (which would be unsurprising), or they're helping out some cronies in the traditional tobacco business with their competition (which would also be unsurprising). Hanlon's razor would claim they're just morons, but who really knows?
Almost everybody at Harvard/Yale/Sanford gets a 4.0, the story is 'they're all that smart'...Bullshit all day long.
When I was in grad school, I met a few fellow grad students who did their undergrad at those 'elite' sorts of universities. They were smart, no doubt, but no more so than the rest of us public state school people. They just had nicer clothes, cars, and more expensive hobbies.
I hate that myth that the elite schools are for smarter people. They're for wealthier people's kids, so that when those kids become wealthy/inherit that wealth, the ruling class has some faux meritocratic justification for it's own position in society. And unfortunately, so many of us buy it hook, line, and sinker.
Exactly. The problem isn't that they cheated. Cheating is both acceptable and expected to the point it is ingrained into the elite admissions system. The problem is that this particular group cheated the wrong way. They cheaped out on their cheating, and in the world of wealth and privilege, that's the real problem.
The primary reason 'elite' universities exist is to enable the wealthy to convert wealth into prestigious credentials. I'm always baffled that anyone thinks otherwise when it is so clearly and obviously the case. Yes, they let in a few token poor people for free, but their primary means of selection overwhelmingly favor the wealthy and connected.
The big lie they tell us is that getting in is a sign of merit, and using the connections facilitated by those universities to jump start your career also means you earned what you got. They market themselves as the apex of progressive enlightened intellectualism, but in reality, they act as the regulators of institutionalized classism and elitism. The issue in this case isn't that these people cheated. It is that they cheated the wrong way. There will be some faux outrage, then back to business as usual.
Oh, and this doozy of a quote from TFA:
"There will not be a separate admissions system for the wealthy," he added. "And there will not be a separate criminal justice system either."
Legacy admissions begs to differ. What a joke. How could anyone say that with a straight face?
Basically, there was a push in the early 90's to put this stuff under some long overdue regulations, so the snake oil industry organized a huge campaign to defend their business model. They ran ads about how evil government was coming to take your precious, essential, life giving, natural supplements away for their Big Pharma cronies, or something to that effect, and their customers wrote a lot of letters to politicians demanding the supplement manufactures be given leeway.
It worked, con artists successfully convinced the public (enough of it anyway) to act against their own best interests, and that's how you can sell homeopathy as a sleep aid, curry powder as a weight loss pill, the latest superfruit fad as the wonder everything pill, and other items of questionable benefit as something with the deceptive appearance of medical value. You just have to say the magic words "These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease" on your product.
I always think of that video of the sea turtle with a straw up its nose that some people removed (video is exactly what you're think, and none too pleasant to watch). The concerns regarding practicality and alternatives raise a point, but still, people have to adapt to what needs to be done, not just ignore the problems caused by disposable plastics.
And I can't even see it without allowing scripts. I use NoScript and I see nothing, and since I don't feel like allowing whatever script is apparently necessary to display basic HTML, I'm not going to see anything either. Scripts are not needed to display basic text and images. Calling this site '90's style' is like calling a bacon falafel burger with cheese 'authentic Jewish food'.
I hope this is an ad, because if it isn't, that means people are actually impressed by this.
We're talking about the country that arrested someone over a Nazi pug joke. We know exactly which way they're going with regards to surveillance and thoughtcrime.
I was thinking the same thing. I remember seeing 'interactive movies' as far back as the SegaCD, and visual novels are a huge thing with about the same premise (I think, never actually played one).
China, India, the entirety of Europe, the US...pretty much all of them actually. Can you name me a single civilization that relies primarily on perennial staples? Because I honestly can't think of any, with the possible exception of certain advanced semi-nomadic gathering based indigenous systems (but even then no distinction is made based on crop type).
How many perennial staple crop have you eaten at all recently, let alone consumed in substantial quantity? You might be able to get some pigeon pea, but even then, that's typically eaten with rice. Plantains count, but their use as a staple crop varies heavily by region.
I honestly have no idea how anyone could say anything even close to what you're claiming, unless you're just confusing the terms perennial and permaculture.
Really? So all those societies and civilizations that depended on annuals or annually harvested root crops like corn, wheat, rice, millet, cassava, potato, yam, sweet potato, taro, teff, ect. have all collapsed because of their crop choice? Sounds like something someone who knows bugger all about the topic would say to sound contrary.
What perennials staples are there? Polynesian societies made heavy use of breadfruit, and in SE Asia there's sago (the palm, not the cycad), and plantains in some parts of the world, so there's a few. Ensete are perennial, high yielding too, but they need dug up, which is apparently not what your Youtube guy is talking about. Besides that, bit of peach palm in the Amazon might count, a negligible amount of screw pine in Kiribati, maybe some wattleseed amount some Australian aboriginal groups. I'm all for increasing their cultivation but it's not really looking good for the historical victory of those species there.
I just can't see any way that statement holds true, at least, any more true than saying 'Every ancient society that drank water eventually collapsed!'. Also, there's no need for a link shortener on a site that doesn't have meaningful character limits.
In my experience, that format was only used for kids. By the time we were teenagers, that format was long gone.
Unfortunately, that's not true. They still use it on the GRE for college graduates looking to go on to grad school. Sure, the GRE is a classist scam that no one with a functioning brain takes seriously (so about half of academia), but that's still how you've got to do it, and depending on the program it might be important to know how to give them their stupid format.
It doesn't help anything. It just makes it easy for graders to grade en masse. They don't want to grade well written essays and figure out how to quantify creativity, they just want the essays to conform to their standard. You don't have to know how to write, you just have to know what boxes the graders are looking to check off and give it to them. Any other way of doing it is 'wrong.'
blaming China for any economic issues in the U.S. is misguided
You mean besides state sponsored IP theft, currency manipulation, dumping practices, and disregarding human & environmental welfare to compete on price?
He's not wrong about the war part. Bush, Cheney, and their cronies emptied the country's coffers to enrich a handful of millionaire and billionaires in the military industrial complex with their bullshit wars. What they did is inexcusable, especially when you consider the opportunity cost of not investing that vast sum of money elsewhere (ex infrastructure, education, healthcare, research, alternative energy, ect.). Think of what we could have if that money was spent productively, like finding cures for diseases (much more likely to hurt you than a terrorist) or aerospace, or any number of other things, and the US needs to get it's shit together when it comes to planning for the future. But China isn't playing entirely fair either.
he American multinational companies made millions and millions of dollars from globalization,
When Joe Schmoe's job disappeared, he didn't see a gain, it was so a millionaire could have even more. It's not hard to understand why some people are unhappy.
The major difference being that at least eBay is honest about what they are, and when you buy from Seller X, you get items from Seller X. Amazon wants to be a marketplace and an individual market, and apparently has been known to bin items together under the assumption that they're all identical, so Item A bought from Seller X might be Seller Y's item. How are you supposed to trust that?
My understanding is that they deliberately try to be far fetched. If it costs as much to send out one spam message as it does a million, so they don't want to bother with the ten people who just might be dumb enough to fall for it; they want to specifically target the one person who is definitely dumb enough to fall for it.
They're not trying to tip marks off, they're putting that in there as a selection measure so that only the most likely to actually go through with the scam reply.
Moving production to Mexico would be great. Mexico is a free, democratic, reasonably friendly country. Yes, they've got their share of problems (several of which they can thank the US for given that our war on drugs is what fueled their cartels), but until such time as the ruling party of China makes some major reforms, I would much rather my money be going to Mexico than to the dystopia that China is building.
Besides, economic opportunity for Mexico is the best way to ease the border issues....I don't see any Canadians trying to immigrate illegally, do you?
Well, I for one won't be satisfied until the International Olympic Committee finally includes Hungry Hungry Hippos as an official sport. Hey, you've got to push the hippo button fast and at the right time, so that makes it a sport now, and it's time it gets the respect every sport deserves. Hippo champions are athletes too, just as much as the gold medalists who spend thousands of hours training and living a strict exercise & diet regime.
Slashdot Mirror
is there any reason to create the sort of roadblocks and barriers in front of valuable research
Honest answer: it's part of a bigger problem. If you want a job, you need to publish papers. If you want to publish papers, you have to do it in the major journals. It's called 'publish or perish' and it is killing academic science. But a lot of people in charge are too damned lazy to do anything about it, even though everyone with two brain cells to rub together knows it is terrible.
So people do it because they have to. If you do the right thing, if you take a stand and refuse to play that game, you will not be rewarded for it. Someone else will get the job. Sad fact of the matter.
The journals meanwhile are all too willing to play ball, and charge obscene fees for the papers that are published in the journals. They surely know the stupid culture of science that enables this, so they've got a lot of people kind of backed into a corner here.
If that sounds stupid to you, that's because it is. But that's why it happens.
If you're doing that out of 'publish or perish' and you really need a position, and so you really need publications in the big name journals, as much as I dislike that sentiment, it is understandable. Hate the game not the player and all.
But if that's not the case and you're saying that out of some smug sense of elitism towards those with less access than you, than you are part of a big problem in science. Science is for everyone, not just people in developed countries who work at an institute that can afford every journal. 'Just buy the article', how absurd. Ever seen the price on those things? Yeah, just read the abstract and hope what you want to see is in the rest of the paper somewhere, and do this dozens if not hundreds of times, dropping about $30 each time. In what world is that financially reasonable? That's only slightly less absurd then submitting a FOIA request every time.
Lucky you. I was unaware there was any institution with a subscription to every single journal out there. Last I heard, even the obscenely wealthy Ivies couldn't boast that. Must be nice.
Unfortunately, not everyone is so fortunate. Not all institutions have access to all journals. If you are a researcher or grad student at a smaller, less wealthy university, that's a problem. This is particularly true in less wealthy countries, where scientists and students have no choice but Sci-Hub. That is also a problem; just because they were born into a poorer country does not mean they can't contribute to science just as well.
For another thing, you don't need to work at a university to be a scientist. Scientists are people who do science, not people who work at universities, or research institutes, or corporations. Their tax dollars likely paid for that research in some form, why should they not be able to access it?
Yeah, for those of us with institutional access, we usually have interlibrary loan or something. If you're lucky, you can ask an author and they might respond (crapshot). But that doesn't work for everyone. And since it was more often than not publicly funded, it should be publicly accessible, not paywalled for the profit of a corporation. Science works best when everyone can see the data.
The decision is a setback for the sites that have come under increasing pressure,
No, it is not a setback for those sites. They don't gain anything by people using them, and don't lose anything by getting blocked. It is a setback for all the scientists and scientifically minded people who cannot afford the exorbitant fees the journals charge, and now have more barriers to accessing (largely publicly funded) research results.
is this just the old school tobacco lobby at work?
Hard to tell if it's that, or just some real morons. Are e-cigarettes safe? Probably not, but we know full well that cigarettes aren't safe by any definition. So they want to ban something that, while probably harmful to some degree, is likely to be less harmful than the old style cigarettes? It's not uncommon for people to be more afraid of unknown potential risks than known proven dangers, but you'd hope for better from lawmakers.
Either they didn't spend more than five seconds thinking this out (which would be unsurprising), or they're helping out some cronies in the traditional tobacco business with their competition (which would also be unsurprising). Hanlon's razor would claim they're just morons, but who really knows?
Almost everybody at Harvard/Yale/Sanford gets a 4.0, the story is 'they're all that smart'...Bullshit all day long.
When I was in grad school, I met a few fellow grad students who did their undergrad at those 'elite' sorts of universities. They were smart, no doubt, but no more so than the rest of us public state school people. They just had nicer clothes, cars, and more expensive hobbies.
I hate that myth that the elite schools are for smarter people. They're for wealthier people's kids, so that when those kids become wealthy/inherit that wealth, the ruling class has some faux meritocratic justification for it's own position in society. And unfortunately, so many of us buy it hook, line, and sinker.
Exactly. The problem isn't that they cheated. Cheating is both acceptable and expected to the point it is ingrained into the elite admissions system. The problem is that this particular group cheated the wrong way. They cheaped out on their cheating, and in the world of wealth and privilege, that's the real problem.
The big lie they tell us is that getting in is a sign of merit, and using the connections facilitated by those universities to jump start your career also means you earned what you got. They market themselves as the apex of progressive enlightened intellectualism, but in reality, they act as the regulators of institutionalized classism and elitism. The issue in this case isn't that these people cheated. It is that they cheated the wrong way. There will be some faux outrage, then back to business as usual.
Oh, and this doozy of a quote from TFA:
"There will not be a separate admissions system for the wealthy," he added. "And there will not be a separate criminal justice system either."
Legacy admissions begs to differ. What a joke. How could anyone say that with a straight face?
Microsoft hears you, they just don't care.
If interacting with the people sending the emails is part of your job, than rude or not, you're not doing your job.
The so-called Quack Miranda Warning.
Basically, there was a push in the early 90's to put this stuff under some long overdue regulations, so the snake oil industry organized a huge campaign to defend their business model. They ran ads about how evil government was coming to take your precious, essential, life giving, natural supplements away for their Big Pharma cronies, or something to that effect, and their customers wrote a lot of letters to politicians demanding the supplement manufactures be given leeway.
It worked, con artists successfully convinced the public (enough of it anyway) to act against their own best interests, and that's how you can sell homeopathy as a sleep aid, curry powder as a weight loss pill, the latest superfruit fad as the wonder everything pill, and other items of questionable benefit as something with the deceptive appearance of medical value. You just have to say the magic words "These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease" on your product.
I always think of that video of the sea turtle with a straw up its nose that some people removed (video is exactly what you're think, and none too pleasant to watch). The concerns regarding practicality and alternatives raise a point, but still, people have to adapt to what needs to be done, not just ignore the problems caused by disposable plastics.
And I can't even see it without allowing scripts. I use NoScript and I see nothing, and since I don't feel like allowing whatever script is apparently necessary to display basic HTML, I'm not going to see anything either. Scripts are not needed to display basic text and images. Calling this site '90's style' is like calling a bacon falafel burger with cheese 'authentic Jewish food'.
I hope this is an ad, because if it isn't, that means people are actually impressed by this.
We're talking about the country that arrested someone over a Nazi pug joke. We know exactly which way they're going with regards to surveillance and thoughtcrime.
I was thinking the same thing. I remember seeing 'interactive movies' as far back as the SegaCD, and visual novels are a huge thing with about the same premise (I think, never actually played one).
This lawsuit sounds like baloney to me.
China, India, the entirety of Europe, the US...pretty much all of them actually. Can you name me a single civilization that relies primarily on perennial staples? Because I honestly can't think of any, with the possible exception of certain advanced semi-nomadic gathering based indigenous systems (but even then no distinction is made based on crop type).
How many perennial staple crop have you eaten at all recently, let alone consumed in substantial quantity? You might be able to get some pigeon pea, but even then, that's typically eaten with rice. Plantains count, but their use as a staple crop varies heavily by region.
I honestly have no idea how anyone could say anything even close to what you're claiming, unless you're just confusing the terms perennial and permaculture.
Really? So all those societies and civilizations that depended on annuals or annually harvested root crops like corn, wheat, rice, millet, cassava, potato, yam, sweet potato, taro, teff, ect. have all collapsed because of their crop choice? Sounds like something someone who knows bugger all about the topic would say to sound contrary.
What perennials staples are there? Polynesian societies made heavy use of breadfruit, and in SE Asia there's sago (the palm, not the cycad), and plantains in some parts of the world, so there's a few. Ensete are perennial, high yielding too, but they need dug up, which is apparently not what your Youtube guy is talking about. Besides that, bit of peach palm in the Amazon might count, a negligible amount of screw pine in Kiribati, maybe some wattleseed amount some Australian aboriginal groups. I'm all for increasing their cultivation but it's not really looking good for the historical victory of those species there.
I just can't see any way that statement holds true, at least, any more true than saying 'Every ancient society that drank water eventually collapsed!'. Also, there's no need for a link shortener on a site that doesn't have meaningful character limits.
In my experience, that format was only used for kids. By the time we were teenagers, that format was long gone.
Unfortunately, that's not true. They still use it on the GRE for college graduates looking to go on to grad school. Sure, the GRE is a classist scam that no one with a functioning brain takes seriously (so about half of academia), but that's still how you've got to do it, and depending on the program it might be important to know how to give them their stupid format.
It doesn't help anything. It just makes it easy for graders to grade en masse. They don't want to grade well written essays and figure out how to quantify creativity, they just want the essays to conform to their standard. You don't have to know how to write, you just have to know what boxes the graders are looking to check off and give it to them. Any other way of doing it is 'wrong.'
This is just more teach the test crap.
blaming China for any economic issues in the U.S. is misguided
You mean besides state sponsored IP theft, currency manipulation, dumping practices, and disregarding human & environmental welfare to compete on price?
He's not wrong about the war part. Bush, Cheney, and their cronies emptied the country's coffers to enrich a handful of millionaire and billionaires in the military industrial complex with their bullshit wars. What they did is inexcusable, especially when you consider the opportunity cost of not investing that vast sum of money elsewhere (ex infrastructure, education, healthcare, research, alternative energy, ect.). Think of what we could have if that money was spent productively, like finding cures for diseases (much more likely to hurt you than a terrorist) or aerospace, or any number of other things, and the US needs to get it's shit together when it comes to planning for the future. But China isn't playing entirely fair either.
he American multinational companies made millions and millions of dollars from globalization,
When Joe Schmoe's job disappeared, he didn't see a gain, it was so a millionaire could have even more. It's not hard to understand why some people are unhappy.
The major difference being that at least eBay is honest about what they are, and when you buy from Seller X, you get items from Seller X. Amazon wants to be a marketplace and an individual market, and apparently has been known to bin items together under the assumption that they're all identical, so Item A bought from Seller X might be Seller Y's item. How are you supposed to trust that?
My understanding is that they deliberately try to be far fetched. If it costs as much to send out one spam message as it does a million, so they don't want to bother with the ten people who just might be dumb enough to fall for it; they want to specifically target the one person who is definitely dumb enough to fall for it.
They're not trying to tip marks off, they're putting that in there as a selection measure so that only the most likely to actually go through with the scam reply.
Moving production to Mexico would be great. Mexico is a free, democratic, reasonably friendly country. Yes, they've got their share of problems (several of which they can thank the US for given that our war on drugs is what fueled their cartels), but until such time as the ruling party of China makes some major reforms, I would much rather my money be going to Mexico than to the dystopia that China is building.
Besides, economic opportunity for Mexico is the best way to ease the border issues....I don't see any Canadians trying to immigrate illegally, do you?
Well, I for one won't be satisfied until the International Olympic Committee finally includes Hungry Hungry Hippos as an official sport. Hey, you've got to push the hippo button fast and at the right time, so that makes it a sport now, and it's time it gets the respect every sport deserves. Hippo champions are athletes too, just as much as the gold medalists who spend thousands of hours training and living a strict exercise & diet regime.
Lying turtles? I don't see what Mitch McConnell has to do with this.