But of course that's also a larger problem in academia where tenure expectations are often based on the reputation of publications, which usually emphasizes publication in "high-quality" journals... and those are often older ones that are part of these publishing empires. Shifting to open-access publication for research requires commitment from many major researchers in a discipline to actively promote open-access journals and shift the focus away from other journals... but junior scholars often can't take such a risk and publish where they know others will evaluate their work as "influential," regardless of access.
Putting stipulations on grant money like I mentioned above might solve some of these issues, since it will drive researchers to find ways to publish and/or drive journals to find ways to make such funding more accessible.
The golden rule is that "He who has the gold, makes the rules." Open-access publishing is expensive (though there is a large variability in the cost). Payment for this has to come from somewhere. It will be budgeted into grants, but funding agencies are not known for being generous and it is difficult to know how to allocate funding for open-access publication. Universities may also have internal funding available to support open-access publishing. As a researcher, if your funding comes from a source where you do not have the final say (e.g. it is held by the university to fund papers they deem "exceptional", or held by a superior who wants to save it for papers they care about) then you can either go to a non open-access journal that will let you publish for free or not publish your finding (which contributes to the lack of publication of "uninteresting" null results).
Tobias: Oh, my God, we’re having a fire. Sale. Oh, the burning! It burns me! Evacuate all the schoolchildren! (Screaming. Singing “Amazing Grace.”) This isn’t a fever! (Continues singing.) Can’t even see where the knob is! (Dramatic sigh.) And scene.
Roger Danish: Um... would you like to try that a little simpler... maybe?
The neuroscience doesn't lie: the region of the language processing center lights up; portions of programming are similar to foreign languages.
Woah, hang on there! "The neuroscience" is NOT some fMRI data figure showing a bit of the brain being more active in one condition than it is in some other condition. Neuroscience is a set of theories, skills, and tools that allow us to ask and answer such questions as: "What conditions do we scan patients under in order to isolate the effect we are interested in?" "What does the strength and location of the BOLD signal we pick up in our fMRI scan actually mean?", and "How can these results be interpreted in a higher-level framework for how these cognitive tasks are performed?"
Trying to pick faults in this study is part of "the neuroscience".
You want to see bits of the brain "lighting up"? You're going to need to get some genetically modified mice. If you want to understand the brain it's not that simple.
This is not facial recognition attached to a database of faces.
Not yet.
...
And "not soon" either. The performance of face recognition systems with large databases is pretty terrible. I recommend checking out Peter Kovesi's talk on why "Video Surveillance is Useless" for identification.
He may have found a way to teach the humanities that "give you uncertainty, doubt and skepticism" but those concepts are fundamental to understanding how science works and students should be getting them in their science courses. As much as some scientific education is didactic fact-loading, it is equally possible to deliver a humanities course which is dogmatic - and possibly more common seeing as the route between a text and its accepted interpretation might be significantly more difficult to lead a student through than the route between some scientific evidence and the theory that it supports.
I am also confused at how him defining psychology as a "soft" science then allows him to lump it in with the humanities?
"Many people worry that with the much higher levels of student debt, cash will be too tightly squeezed to live on once post-2012 starters graduate. Yet actually, today's university starters will have MORE cash in their pockets each month than those students who've just graduated. Graduates who started their course before Sept 2012, repay 9% of everything earned above £15,795. Those starting in 2012 and beyond see that increased to £21,000. That means those earning above the £21,000 threshold have £470-a-year more in their pockets than now."
Point 20
"The maximum possible loan combining tuition fees and maintenance is £16,675 a year; £50,000 over a three-year course. This is a frightening amount, and indeed many are frightened of it. Yet it's important to not just jump at this figure, but look at it in regards to how much of that you'll actually have to repay. In fact, when you examine this debt, it's far more like an additional tax than a loan for the following reasons:
It's repaid through the income tax system
You only repay it if you earn over a certain amount
The amount repaid increases with earnings
It does not go on credit files
Debt collectors will not chase for it
Bigger borrowing doesn't increase repayments
Many people will continue to repay for the majority of their working life"
The new system is "a fairer alternative" to the previous system for people on low incomes however. The number of people from the lowest economic stratum applying to university has increased under the new system. One of the major issues it has introduced, claims that young people can "no longer afford to go to university", is an atrocious lie that will cause more harm than the system it is attempting to attack.
I have problems with how the change in funding arrangements will affect universities structurally (further marketisation) but to the students it is arguably a better deal. The only case I am aware of where it does cause problems is where students are taking a second undergraduate degree (which the state is not obliged to give them a cushy loan for).
It has been suggested that in some amblyopes the extra-striate cortex that handles motion processing develops in an unusual fashion. There are some papers from the same lab that made the Tetris game in the article that investigate this.
Although you shouldn't think of it this way if you don't want to get burned eventually, people see funding a Kickstarter as an investment they put in to get something back from it. With science that wouldn't work, because you cannot honestly guarantee that you will get a result. It's the wrong format.
I wonder about the relationship between Kickstarter games and illegal downloading. It would not surprise me if Kickstarted games avoided some of the losses that normally come from pirates ripping the software off because people need to put the money in initially for the project to get funded. You cannot count on pirating the sequel to Torment because if not enough people pay for it then it won't get made etc. Even if it is already funded, your own money going into it will add more capacity and make the game better.
I agree, Dreamfall was a disappointment. It felt like work to get through, and most of that was fueled by my love of TLJ. The gameplay was awful (and hard! I don't know many people who bothered to finish it because there were some sequences that were a brick wall difficulty-wise), and the story finished with a very unsatisfying cliffhanger ending.
For a couple of years after I played it I would have been excited to find out what happened next. Now though I have kind-of written it off. If I hear it is good when it comes out I will pick it up.
I don't subscribe to Changizi's theory, but that objection doesn't really work. Apes do not have infinitely dark faces where no changes in colour can be distinguished. It's not necessarily all about the face anyway. I happened to have Changizi's book on the shelf next to me and he does address this... sort of.
I think what is frequently seen as a "breakthrough invention" is actually judged from an instrumental perspective. Does the thing you've created either satisfy a recognised need (frequently these "inventions" are called "discoveries"), or does it create a new need (for example, that for instantaneous voice communication over long distances)?
I think one of the driving factors is that in the rich parts of the developed western world there aren't many long-standing needs left to be met. New things have come along but they require more separate people and technologies involved to make them work. The ability to be continuously connected to an all-pervading mobile internet service is, I think, the latest of these invented "needs".
The false-positive/false-negative (false alarm/miss) tradeoff is going to depend on what the criterion for detection is set at. The measurement you want to look at really is how well this scanner can segregate "individual with dangerous explosive chemical" from background noise. These sorts of measures are considered secret, and I imagine the company publishing them for this device would be a great way to have nobody able to buy it.
IMO the definition should be modified to exclude self-citations. Scientists like to cite their earlier work (and should, if it is on the same topic), but the h-index as currently defined temps spamming your papers with self-cites just to drive your index up.
That wouldn't work. Where do you draw the line? Do you not count citations from papers with the same first-author? If you do that then savvy scientists will rotate authorship on papers from their lab. Do you make it so that no citations count when there are any common authors between the citer and citee paper? That's even more unworkable considering how much scientists move around and collaborate across institutions. The only smart thing for a scientist to do then would be to strategically omit authors off a paper so that they can then cite it in the future. Even if you implemented this harshest rule, scientists would still pressure their friends to cite their papers when even vaguely related to the friends' research.
ALL 'clinical trials' are actually HUMAN experiments, the only reason they do animal experiments, even though they are useless, is because most people are as stupid and gullible as the Slashdot crowd
Not all research is clinical research. We gained a lot of knowledge about how the visual system works in the brain from neurophysiology experiments performed on cats (check out Colin Blakemore's work for that, and you can have a look at some of his explanation for animal research at the same time).
That doesn't make sense. Couldn't your competitors just subscribe to the journal that you publish in? (thus negating the justification you give for the paywall)
Unfortunately this is more of a case of the government facilitating matters for the publishers. It is frustrating to see well-intentioned people (with sufficient knowledge ONLY to see that something called "Open Access" would be a good idea) rejoicing over this. The Finch report has completely discounted the Green OA strategy in favour of Gold OA. Rather than allowing publishers to adjust to modern reality by reducing their role in the dissemination of research, they are instead going to be paid big stacks of public money to carry on with their exorbitantly-priced open access options .
Slashdot Mirror
But of course that's also a larger problem in academia where tenure expectations are often based on the reputation of publications, which usually emphasizes publication in "high-quality" journals... and those are often older ones that are part of these publishing empires. Shifting to open-access publication for research requires commitment from many major researchers in a discipline to actively promote open-access journals and shift the focus away from other journals... but junior scholars often can't take such a risk and publish where they know others will evaluate their work as "influential," regardless of access. Putting stipulations on grant money like I mentioned above might solve some of these issues, since it will drive researchers to find ways to publish and/or drive journals to find ways to make such funding more accessible.
The golden rule is that "He who has the gold, makes the rules." Open-access publishing is expensive (though there is a large variability in the cost). Payment for this has to come from somewhere. It will be budgeted into grants, but funding agencies are not known for being generous and it is difficult to know how to allocate funding for open-access publication. Universities may also have internal funding available to support open-access publishing. As a researcher, if your funding comes from a source where you do not have the final say (e.g. it is held by the university to fund papers they deem "exceptional", or held by a superior who wants to save it for papers they care about) then you can either go to a non open-access journal that will let you publish for free or not publish your finding (which contributes to the lack of publication of "uninteresting" null results).
Tobias: Oh, my God, we’re having a fire. Sale. Oh, the burning! It burns me! Evacuate all the schoolchildren! (Screaming. Singing “Amazing Grace.”) This isn’t a fever! (Continues singing.) Can’t even see where the knob is! (Dramatic sigh.) And scene.
Roger Danish: Um... would you like to try that a little simpler... maybe?
Tobias: No.
The cerebellum helps to coordinate motor skills, it doesn't initiate movement.
The neuroscience doesn't lie: the region of the language processing center lights up; portions of programming are similar to foreign languages.
Woah, hang on there! "The neuroscience" is NOT some fMRI data figure showing a bit of the brain being more active in one condition than it is in some other condition. Neuroscience is a set of theories, skills, and tools that allow us to ask and answer such questions as: "What conditions do we scan patients under in order to isolate the effect we are interested in?" "What does the strength and location of the BOLD signal we pick up in our fMRI scan actually mean?", and "How can these results be interpreted in a higher-level framework for how these cognitive tasks are performed?"
Trying to pick faults in this study is part of "the neuroscience".
You want to see bits of the brain "lighting up"? You're going to need to get some genetically modified mice. If you want to understand the brain it's not that simple.
Not yet.
And "not soon" either. The performance of face recognition systems with large databases is pretty terrible. I recommend checking out Peter Kovesi's talk on why "Video Surveillance is Useless" for identification.
http://www.peterkovesi.com/projects/index.html
He may have found a way to teach the humanities that "give you uncertainty, doubt and skepticism" but those concepts are fundamental to understanding how science works and students should be getting them in their science courses. As much as some scientific education is didactic fact-loading, it is equally possible to deliver a humanities course which is dogmatic - and possibly more common seeing as the route between a text and its accepted interpretation might be significantly more difficult to lead a student through than the route between some scientific evidence and the theory that it supports.
I am also confused at how him defining psychology as a "soft" science then allows him to lump it in with the humanities?
Here's a good impartial look from somebody who understands debt: http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/students/student-loans-tuition-fees-changes
Point 8
"Many people worry that with the much higher levels of student debt, cash will be too tightly squeezed to live on once post-2012 starters graduate. Yet actually, today's university starters will have MORE cash in their pockets each month than those students who've just graduated. Graduates who started their course before Sept 2012, repay 9% of everything earned above £15,795. Those starting in 2012 and beyond see that increased to £21,000. That means those earning above the £21,000 threshold have £470-a-year more in their pockets than now."
Point 20
"The maximum possible loan combining tuition fees and maintenance is £16,675 a year; £50,000 over a three-year course. This is a frightening amount, and indeed many are frightened of it. Yet it's important to not just jump at this figure, but look at it in regards to how much of that you'll actually have to repay. In fact, when you examine this debt, it's far more like an additional tax than a loan for the following reasons:
It's repaid through the income tax system
You only repay it if you earn over a certain amount
The amount repaid increases with earnings
It does not go on credit files
Debt collectors will not chase for it
Bigger borrowing doesn't increase repayments
Many people will continue to repay for the majority of their working life"
The new system is "a fairer alternative" to the previous system for people on low incomes however. The number of people from the lowest economic stratum applying to university has increased under the new system. One of the major issues it has introduced, claims that young people can "no longer afford to go to university", is an atrocious lie that will cause more harm than the system it is attempting to attack.
I have problems with how the change in funding arrangements will affect universities structurally (further marketisation) but to the students it is arguably a better deal. The only case I am aware of where it does cause problems is where students are taking a second undergraduate degree (which the state is not obliged to give them a cushy loan for).
It has been suggested that in some amblyopes the extra-striate cortex that handles motion processing develops in an unusual fashion. There are some papers from the same lab that made the Tetris game in the article that investigate this.
Yes! I loved the Science of Discworld books as a kid, possibly because I was already a big fan of the Discworld books.
Although you shouldn't think of it this way if you don't want to get burned eventually, people see funding a Kickstarter as an investment they put in to get something back from it. With science that wouldn't work, because you cannot honestly guarantee that you will get a result. It's the wrong format. I wonder about the relationship between Kickstarter games and illegal downloading. It would not surprise me if Kickstarted games avoided some of the losses that normally come from pirates ripping the software off because people need to put the money in initially for the project to get funded. You cannot count on pirating the sequel to Torment because if not enough people pay for it then it won't get made etc. Even if it is already funded, your own money going into it will add more capacity and make the game better.
I agree, Dreamfall was a disappointment. It felt like work to get through, and most of that was fueled by my love of TLJ. The gameplay was awful (and hard! I don't know many people who bothered to finish it because there were some sequences that were a brick wall difficulty-wise), and the story finished with a very unsatisfying cliffhanger ending. For a couple of years after I played it I would have been excited to find out what happened next. Now though I have kind-of written it off. If I hear it is good when it comes out I will pick it up.
I don't subscribe to Changizi's theory, but that objection doesn't really work. Apes do not have infinitely dark faces where no changes in colour can be distinguished. It's not necessarily all about the face anyway. I happened to have Changizi's book on the shelf next to me and he does address this... sort of.
I think what is frequently seen as a "breakthrough invention" is actually judged from an instrumental perspective. Does the thing you've created either satisfy a recognised need (frequently these "inventions" are called "discoveries"), or does it create a new need (for example, that for instantaneous voice communication over long distances)? I think one of the driving factors is that in the rich parts of the developed western world there aren't many long-standing needs left to be met. New things have come along but they require more separate people and technologies involved to make them work. The ability to be continuously connected to an all-pervading mobile internet service is, I think, the latest of these invented "needs".
Still, I am glad a science project got funding.
Unfortunately this is a zero-sum game.
If he casts the same actors then comparing the two movies will be a pretty fair test of which franchise is better.
The false-positive/false-negative (false alarm/miss) tradeoff is going to depend on what the criterion for detection is set at. The measurement you want to look at really is how well this scanner can segregate "individual with dangerous explosive chemical" from background noise. These sorts of measures are considered secret, and I imagine the company publishing them for this device would be a great way to have nobody able to buy it.
IMO the definition should be modified to exclude self-citations. Scientists like to cite their earlier work (and should, if it is on the same topic), but the h-index as currently defined temps spamming your papers with self-cites just to drive your index up.
That wouldn't work. Where do you draw the line? Do you not count citations from papers with the same first-author? If you do that then savvy scientists will rotate authorship on papers from their lab. Do you make it so that no citations count when there are any common authors between the citer and citee paper? That's even more unworkable considering how much scientists move around and collaborate across institutions. The only smart thing for a scientist to do then would be to strategically omit authors off a paper so that they can then cite it in the future. Even if you implemented this harshest rule, scientists would still pressure their friends to cite their papers when even vaguely related to the friends' research.
ALL 'clinical trials' are actually HUMAN experiments, the only reason they do animal experiments, even though they are useless, is because most people are as stupid and gullible as the Slashdot crowd
Not all research is clinical research. We gained a lot of knowledge about how the visual system works in the brain from neurophysiology experiments performed on cats (check out Colin Blakemore's work for that, and you can have a look at some of his explanation for animal research at the same time).
If the government is giving pubic $ to companies for research
It's college students who fund themselves by stripping, not professors.
That doesn't make sense. Couldn't your competitors just subscribe to the journal that you publish in? (thus negating the justification you give for the paywall)
Thank you for being one of the few people who has noticed that this is not actually good news.
Unfortunately this is more of a case of the government facilitating matters for the publishers. It is frustrating to see well-intentioned people (with sufficient knowledge ONLY to see that something called "Open Access" would be a good idea) rejoicing over this. The Finch report has completely discounted the Green OA strategy in favour of Gold OA. Rather than allowing publishers to adjust to modern reality by reducing their role in the dissemination of research, they are instead going to be paid big stacks of public money to carry on with their exorbitantly-priced open access options .
Finch's open-access cure may be 'worse than the disease' - Times Higher Education http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=420392&c=1
Why the UK Should Not Heed the Finch Report - Stevan Harnad http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2012/07/04/why-the-uk-should-not-heed-the-finch-report/
Matlab mobile is a remote interface for interacting with a session running on another computer.
Fiction is for making you think, not for telling you what to think.