Well, #1, the purpose of mining would not be for use on Earth, but for use in space, and for that every mineral on the Moon is useful, being many km/sec closer to anywhere in space than minerals on Earth.
Second, the Moon had a (very ancient) volcanically active past - the Mare basins on the near side are volcanic basalts, there are several mountainous regions that appear to be volcanic rather than caused by impacts, and numerous "rille" formations thought to be collapsed lava tubes, etc. One of the mineral deposits associated with some of this is the 'KREEP' that includes some concentrations of heavy metals, including thorium and uranium.
Third, the Moon's surface is exposed directly to the solar wind and apparently has quite high and useful (if we had fusion power plants) concentrations of Helium-3. That is probably the only mining target that would actually be worth transporting back down to Earth.
Actually, the current Elsevier company was founded in 1880 - the name was based on the 16th century Elsevier family publishers, but there's no direct connection that I know of - see the Company History
Other than that, I thought your comment was interesting - you're not on the side of the publishers, but you're trying to be one anyway? It's a funny business... good luck!
Well, right now we're reviewing 25,000 articles/year and I believe the actual numbers (for the peer review piece) are a bit more than $500. There are some economies to that sort of scale, but the fundamental human effort required to handle communications (the "court costs") for each paper is pretty well fixed.
We used to charge authors publication charges (slightly different from submission charges) - in fact we still do for at least one journal. But there's a competition for authors out there too, and the commercial publishers almost killed one of our journals a few years ago by offering free publication to the same group of authors, even though their costs to libraries were far more.
"A lot" of information being freely available isn't good enough. Any information that was produced with the aid of public money (taxpayer's money) must be made freely available by law.
The majority of what we publish is from outside the US. Did the US public pay for this research? No. Should it be available for free to the US public? Why?
Forget immoral - it would be illegal for us to hold copyrights on anything that really was "public information" - however, according to US law that only covers what is written by direct government employees, which is only a tiny fraction of researchers in this country. We do, of course, publish a few such papers every year. That information is certainly "public information", freely available. Where's the immorality in us charging you for it if you can get it free somewhere else? You'll have to get it out of the government under FOIA of course:-)
I work for APS, not AIP. Two quite different organizations, though related. AIP journals are mostly in applied or interdisciplinary areas.
Anyway, the point was of course nobody reads our journals cover to cover (though I used to do that with PRL about 10 years ago) - there's too much! That's exactly why a well-known authority in the form of a journal is needed in most fields. People do browse through the titles and abstracts, and they search for particular subject areas they're interested in. Helping that somewhat now are the Virtual Journals that provide a subject-specific cut through a series of high-quality peer-reviewed journals, and seem to be quite popular.
The "value proposition" may be wearing thin, but interestingly enough Phys Rev D (which covers the hep-* related areas) has seen faster submission growth than most of our other journals the last few years, so there must be a lot of authors that see some value in going through our processes...
Undoubtedly Microsoft would argue that they are not monopolists, because there are so many other operating systems out there. The trouble is that libraries can't afford to subscribe to hundreds of journals. Also, there has been a lot of consolidation in the journal market recently. IIRC, Elsevier bought up a large number of previously independent journals and then proceeded to raise their prices exorbitantly.
So who's the monopolist, us, or Elsevier? Or all of us together? I can't speak for the commercial publisher(s), but we're non-profit, and definitely not profitable (we eke out a couple of percent above cost in the journal business if we're lucky). The only analogy to Microsoft really is the same as for any other information good - there are increasing returns to scale, and we do have more subscribers than most physics journals would. But our marketing department (2 people) still has to work really hard to get subscriptions - one thing that makes it easier now are state-wide or country-wide "site licenses" that make everything free at point of use to every researcher in that country.
Maybe there's another business model that would work for us, but we haven't found it yet.
Your business is largely based on government-funded research. If you want to feed at the public trough, then you need to expect that the government will have something to say about it. To me, it seems absurd that papers describing publicly funded research should be the intellectual property of a particular organization.
Which government? 70% of our papers come from outside the US. A good portion of our papers come from industry (at least they used to before the Bells and IBM cut back their research labs). We publish a few papers every year that we do not hold copyright to because they were produced as work directly for the US government, and are therefore not subject to copyright at all. The one reason we still even retain copyright rather than just asking for a license to the content (we grant the author back all the rights anyway) is due to certain European legal issues relating to derivative works, electronic format vs. paper etc. If we hadn't held the copyright (as some journals have not) we would have had a lot of trouble getting the rights to scan in our old journals and put them up online - and anybody else trying to do it would have had exactly the same problem (contacting the authors as legal copyright holders for hundreds of thousands of articles decades after the fact is no small feat).
As I mentioned in another post, our authors are perfectly free to post their articles on the web, free, for download. They can even post the version that we copy-edited, exactly as published in the journal, as long as they attach the appropriate copyright statement. The only thing we're not doing, which you seem to be demanding, is to make the things available on our own servers, for free. Or to collect them and organize them and then post them to somebody else's servers. Well sorry, that's not our current business model. You may remember some internet companies that tried that sort of thing. They're not around any more.
If you'll check out our journal web pages, you'll see there is a LOT of information already freely available. Almost all scientific journals make all the abstracts free, for example, and you can browse through hundreds of thousands of article listings to find the one you want. If you know exactly which one you want, you can pay for full text individually - few people seem to want to do that though.
I am writing this becuase i am curious: given your unique perspective, what would you say in response to people complaining about this quantity-over-quality-emphasis problem with the mainstream scientific journals?
Standard answer: one person's quality is another person's "filler"... As somebody once said, the most important paper for your research is the one you didn't read, with the critical discovery that would have cut years off your study.
The quantity published these days is simply due to the enormous volume of actual research that is being done. If you actually look, the number of papers published per scientist hasn't changed in decades - it's the number of scientists (worldwide) that has grown so much.
Would you say that this is a real problem, or are the people making these allegations misguided?
I don't know that misguided is quite the right word. It's one of those "grass is always greener" things - or perhaps more nostalgia in this case. Things are really no different than they were 40 years ago, except for the volume of actual research being done. Communication is more important than ever, of course!
If the scientific journals can successfully validate the accuracy of research, but are unable to discern whether the research actually has any value or not and filter based on that, does that lessen the value of the journals?
What does it mean to have value? Sometimes the value of a particular piece of research seems minimal for a decade or two, and then suddenly is realized as a critical foundation for a whole new research area. That said, every journal has different, specific criteria that they try to select for, and whether what they are doing is valuable or not is really measured in the marketplace: citation statistics are of course one way to measure, but the fact that a journal is widely subscribed, widely read, and that authors really want to publish there is the result of a real competition for quality and value. Maybe the competitive landscape could be organized better, but I think the value is there, and continues to be there, as long as we're all doing the jobs we're supposed to be doing.
Are we a "near monopoly"? There are hundreds of physics journals out there, in competition for authors and readers. It's a pretty free market, in my opinion, though you'll hear all sorts of arguments on that front. I assume we receive so many papers because we do our job well. Even though we publish a lot, I believe the total number of physics articles published worldwide (and we receive about 70% of our submissions from outside the US) is about five times our volume. And there's always Science or Nature!
Now the economics are a little odd because we sell subscriptions primarily to libraries, which are sort of a captive market. However, you'd be surprised at the number of small colleges and public libraries and such that subscribe - if they weren't happy, what reason would they have to continue?
The key point is your #4:
This simply begs the question of whether there is anything inherently good about "what we normally mean by peer review." Your colleagues are going to form opinions of the quality and reliability of your work anyway. A lot of bad and/or unimportant stuff gets published in journals, so peer reviewing simply doesn't fulfill the whole function of quality control. Since we need further quality-control beyond traditional peer-reviewing, why do we need traditional peer-reviewing?
I don't know that we do. Perhaps we don't. It's an experiment worth trying. But is it an experiment that's sufficiently important to have the government force it on us (as some have suggested)?
Here's a triumph of illogic: traditional peer-reviewing is works badly; therefore we must continue to use it.
Ummm. So you're in favor of more rigorous review? Wouldn't that be more expensive? It seems to me the current system works reasonably well, is improving in speed and efficiency, and at only a couple of percent of research dollars, is reasonably affordable.
The main complaint of the public library of science people etc. seems to have been that the research isn't available free online. Well, in our happy medium in physics we have no problem with researchers posting their research on their own web sites, or on the e-print server, etc. Go ahead and do it! That makes it available free - but don't expect the journal publishers to make everything free for you; we're doing a different job here.
when I was last in the High Energy Physics community the e-print archive was the definitive reference.
High Energy Physics isn't all of physics; also our publication schedule is fast enough now we can get things up online a week or two after we receive them, if it's justified. Do people read everything in the arxiv? Maybe in those fields that are limited enough. But what we in the journal business do is sift through those submissions and try to point out the ones that are important. The arxiv caused us to do our job better - as far as I can tell, we seem to have reached a sort of peaceable coexistence...
Don't tell me it costs $500 dollars for top researchers to read a paper and offer criticism.
It's true anyway. The cost is in human time: a couple dozen hours per paper of a person looking at what needs to be done with it, making sure it's going to reviewers in the field who are available at this time, reading their responses to find what, if any, of substance needs to be done by the authors, reading author responses and making acceptance/rejection decisions. There are many ways of doing it more automatically, cheaper, easier; unfortunately none of them seem to be associated with a prestigious journal. Cause and effect?
The analogy to a court system isn't precise, but the expenses involved in recording and monitoring the proceedings to ensure fairness are not dissimilar.
In the meantime, government action is needed to mandate that all papers eventually be made free to the public; perhaps six months after initial publication, perhaps 1 year.
Many journals already do this. We don't, but we offer our back file, scanned at several million dollars cost, for a quite inexpensive personal or institutional subscription. Should the old stuff be paid for by current subscriptions, or should it pay for itself? All economic and market questions for the publishing business. Funny that scientists seem to think they have all the answers here.
I work for the Physical Review journals at the American Physical Society, and I've been somewhat involved in these debates from the physics publisher side of things for the last 8 or so years - for example in the American Scientist Forum discussion that's been going on since 1998...
Anyway, I wish Brown all the best success, but as others have mentioned, it's a somewhat harder problem than it first seems (at least he's asking for $20 million, which is somewhat realistic for handling real peer review for a substantial number of articles - 10's of thousands at least).
What's behind this nebulous "peer review" concept, at least for us, is a complex and historically based system of checks and balances involving communications between authors, editors, and (anonymous and non-anonymous) reviewers; we're essentially a legal/court system for scientific articles. There's a lot of information-related issues in there, and information technology helps a lot (that's the part I'm involved in). But fundamentally, at least the way we do it, there needs to be a paid, responsible human being reading most communications and monitoring the process, and as far as we've been able to work out, you can't get the cost under about $500 or so per article.
Now, just distributing the papers can be done essentially for free (to as many people as would want to read for about $1-5 per article, for hardware, software, disk, network, etc.) which is what the famous physics e-print archive does so well. Of course it doesn't cost publishers any more than that to distribute articles online either - the costs are in the review part (and whatever copyediting they do), not in distribution.
You'll hear about journals now that are essentially free - this is almost always for one of two reasons:
The journal is very small, and some institution is picking up all the salary and incidental costs - $500/article works out to just $50,000/year for a 100 article/year journal.
The journal is heavily skimping on the "peer review" side of things - publishing conference proceedings papers for example with no review beyond the acceptance of the paper at the conference. Nothing wrong with that, but it's not what we normally mean by peer review.
Given the $500/article cost, the other question is does science really need this level of peer review, or can it get by with less? Well, we've already seen a couple of instances of scientific fraud that slipped by in physics in the last few months even with the current level of review - is skimping really a good idea? And is the $500 minimal cost or even $1000-$2000 typical cost per article now all that bad, compared to the typical $50,000-$100,000 research grant that generally funded such research?
Yet another proposed solution has been to publish fewer papers in those journals that receive the full peer-review treatment. Unless authors miraculously constrain themselves somehow, the only way that would save us money would be to reject a lot of things without review (because the costs are in the review process itself) - but then you've thrown out the whole "peer" process you're using to determine what's published!
So, maybe Brown has found a way through this morass - but the scientific system has a complex, little studied dynamic in which peer review as it currently stands plays an important role... if we really can't afford it (the old way) any more, we're headed into some uncharted waters...
Don't people do this all the time with Sounding rockets? Although maybe the point is that NASA runs that program too, and this is really independent? Still, it doesn't seem that big a deal...
Personally I think advertisers should give up on the graphics and go back to basics: Kuro5hin textads are unobtrusive but actually quite effective (I read them a lot more than fashy graphics or popups - and the 'haiku' opportunities are endless). The web isn't like a broadcast medium, it's driven by the user, not the broadcaster; ad agencies need to re-think their approach.
int i = 23 as in his example would, if I understood correctly, make a construct like i++ impossible. How would a for loop work? This doesn't quite make sense to me - maybe you'd need both mutable and immutable classes for the primitive types?
Some of the other posts (not having read the actual article presumably) and the space.com report itself seem a bit confused about the way the term "ice age" is being used here. Based on estimates (somewhat shaky, as was pointed out in another comment) of the galactic rotational speed of the spiral arms relative to stars like our Sun, this paper shows a surprising correlation over the past billion years between times our solar system was within a spiral arm, and periods of significant glaciation lasting 10's or 100's of millions of years.
According to the calculations in the article, the solar system has passed through the four spiral arms ("Orion" or Sagittarius-Carina, Scutum-Crux, Norma, and Perseus) a total of seven times over the last billion years, or roughly once every 150 million years. We've actually only recently left the Orion arm (heading for Perseus) so the cosmic-ray flux is still quite high, and according to the author's diagram, we are STILL experiencing a major glaciation period. Since the last "ice age" as we know them ended just over 10,000 years ago, that time scale is WAY to short to show up on the scale of this article. In other words, we're still in the middle of an ice age, as far as this paper is concerned.
While the thickness of the spiral arms is such that we pass through them in about 30 million years, the cosmic ray effects last 50-60 million years or more, depending on the level of star-formation within the arms at any given time. The author also notes that it is believed our galaxy had a peak in star production about 300 million years ago, and had much lower star production prior to about 1 billion years ago (until you get back to the 2-3 billion year period and earlier, for which we don't have much in the way of geologic records). In addition to the ice age records, the author also looks at records from iron meteorites radio-isotope dating to get another measure of cosmic ray flux in those periods, which also seems to correlate.
Anyway, interesting stuff, but on a time scale much bigger than we normally think about when we think of ice ages. The ice age before the current one according to this model dates to before the rise of the dinosaurs; go back a couple more and it's before we have any evidence of complex life on Earth!
Lack of communication in the space biz
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Back to the Moon?
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· Score: 5, Informative
It always amazes me how limited the picture most people seem to have, even in the media, of the huge variety of space-related efforts that are going on. If it isn't on NASA's list (even if NASA people are involved in it) or occasionally on a European or Japanese list, it's as if it doesn't exist. Here's a short list of lunar missions and projects currently in development, private and public:
SMART-1 from ESA (the only one this BBC article mentions)
Many of these have received approval - some of the commercial missions seem to have had a bit of trouble finding funding or overcoming regulations and have announced delays of a year or so, but then the government missions have been delayed too.
What's missing on this list? Where's NASA you say? Interestingly NASA has spent over 50 times as much on Mars missions as on missions to the Moon since Apollo 17 left in Dec 1972. But that may change now that the NRC has put a lunar return among the highest priority missions.
Sounds like the business plan for Applied Space Resources - they haven't been able to raise much money yet though I hear.
NRC recommends a sample return mission
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Back to the Moon?
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· Score: 2
#2 on the new planetary exploration priority list from the National Research Council is a sample return mission from the South Pole basin of the Moon. So if NASA doesn't have plans right now, they're going to be thinking about it real hard real soon.
Umm, there's rather a lot of excellent open-source java work out there. Sun may not have released their JVM source code, but they're not the only ones writing VM's - check out Kaffe for a GPL version. The truth is that the java and perl worlds don't overlap a lot, but we just moved our shop from perl/mod-perl to java servlets and jsp's (Jakarta struts) and it's been well worth it. Java's not going to disappear anytime soon!
Coincidentally, I saw this/. item just as I had finished reading Stross's "Antibodies", a short story, in a collection of the best science fiction of 2000. I'd never heard of the guy before, but his writing is wonderfully close to my experience and that of most/.'ers - I guess he's a bit new as a recognized author so not many of us know much about him. What I've read so far seems very promising though!
Umm, you have any idea how much energy the average car uses up? If you drive 12,000 miles a year, at 20 miles/gallon, that's 600 gallons of oil or about 14.5 barrels, energy content = about 25,000 kWh per year (see this Conversion table). So your car is using about 4 times as much energy as your house. If you drive a lot and have a gas guzzler it's probably 10 times as much or more.
GM's idea is actually a pretty good one - it could easily be much cheaper to power your house from the fuel cell in your car than from the electric grid (high efficiency and no transmission losses, and no middle-men).
What works in a small $5 kit won't work for a manned sub-orbital, or even worse, orbital rocket. Nor can you build a regeneratively cooled liquid fueled rocket engine and expect to make the parts small enough to drive a tiny rocket.
Obviously the materials and details are different. But fundamentally, you're doing the same thing. When I put together an Estes kit, I don't worry about the construction of the engine, I just buy a $2 engine and plug it in. That's basically what Rocket Guy here is doing, though he's buying a few more off-the shelf components and having to do a bit more detail work than you would with a 1 lb 2-ft rocket made of cardboard, there's absolutely no reason he shouldn't have every expectation of success.
Reminds me of when we were at a physics convention and one of the guys (who was not quite at master level) took on a street hustler chess player in a match. Hustler-guy wasn't quite up to winning, though the game looked close. Some businessman comes up to watch, and finds out we're physicists and starts going on about "rocket scientists testing their wits against a guy on the street"... we felt insulted. The NASA and Boeing and Lockheed guys who do rockets are just dumb engineers after all!
The point being, there are lots of much harder things to do in life than building a box that just goes up and down off some fire in its tail. NASA and Boeing and Lockheed people like everybody to think it's really really hard and expensive and requires all those fancy engineering studies, but it really doesn't. Go check out your local hobby store for model rockets, if you don't believe me.
Slashdot Mirror
That's Paul Blase, CTO of TransOrbital - he knows what he's talking about :-)
Well, #1, the purpose of mining would not be for use on Earth, but for use in space, and for that every mineral on the Moon is useful, being many km/sec closer to anywhere in space than minerals on Earth.
Second, the Moon had a (very ancient) volcanically active past - the Mare basins on the near side are volcanic basalts, there are several mountainous regions that appear to be volcanic rather than caused by impacts, and numerous "rille" formations thought to be collapsed lava tubes, etc. One of the mineral deposits associated with some of this is the 'KREEP' that includes some concentrations of heavy metals, including thorium and uranium.
Third, the Moon's surface is exposed directly to the solar wind and apparently has quite high and useful (if we had fusion power plants) concentrations of Helium-3. That is probably the only mining target that would actually be worth transporting back down to Earth.
Actually, the current Elsevier company was founded in 1880 - the name was based on the 16th century Elsevier family publishers, but there's no direct connection that I know of - see the Company History
Other than that, I thought your comment was interesting - you're not on the side of the publishers, but you're trying to be one anyway? It's a funny business... good luck!
Well, right now we're reviewing 25,000 articles/year and I believe the actual numbers (for the peer review piece) are a bit more than $500. There are some economies to that sort of scale, but the fundamental human effort required to handle communications (the "court costs") for each paper is pretty well fixed.
We used to charge authors publication charges (slightly different from submission charges) - in fact we still do for at least one journal. But there's a competition for authors out there too, and the commercial publishers almost killed one of our journals a few years ago by offering free publication to the same group of authors, even though their costs to libraries were far more.
The majority of what we publish is from outside the US. Did the US public pay for this research? No. Should it be available for free to the US public? Why?
Forget immoral - it would be illegal for us to hold copyrights on anything that really was "public information" - however, according to US law that only covers what is written by direct government employees, which is only a tiny fraction of researchers in this country. We do, of course, publish a few such papers every year. That information is certainly "public information", freely available. Where's the immorality in us charging you for it if you can get it free somewhere else? You'll have to get it out of the government under FOIA of course
I work for APS, not AIP. Two quite different organizations, though related. AIP journals are mostly in applied or interdisciplinary areas.
Anyway, the point was of course nobody reads our journals cover to cover (though I used to do that with PRL about 10 years ago) - there's too much! That's exactly why a well-known authority in the form of a journal is needed in most fields. People do browse through the titles and abstracts, and they search for particular subject areas they're interested in. Helping that somewhat now are the Virtual Journals that provide a subject-specific cut through a series of high-quality peer-reviewed journals, and seem to be quite popular.
The "value proposition" may be wearing thin, but interestingly enough Phys Rev D (which covers the hep-* related areas) has seen faster submission growth than most of our other journals the last few years, so there must be a lot of authors that see some value in going through our processes...
So who's the monopolist, us, or Elsevier? Or all of us together? I can't speak for the commercial publisher(s), but we're non-profit, and definitely not profitable (we eke out a couple of percent above cost in the journal business if we're lucky). The only analogy to Microsoft really is the same as for any other information good - there are increasing returns to scale, and we do have more subscribers than most physics journals would. But our marketing department (2 people) still has to work really hard to get subscriptions - one thing that makes it easier now are state-wide or country-wide "site licenses" that make everything free at point of use to every researcher in that country.
Maybe there's another business model that would work for us, but we haven't found it yet.
Which government? 70% of our papers come from outside the US. A good portion of our papers come from industry (at least they used to before the Bells and IBM cut back their research labs). We publish a few papers every year that we do not hold copyright to because they were produced as work directly for the US government, and are therefore not subject to copyright at all. The one reason we still even retain copyright rather than just asking for a license to the content (we grant the author back all the rights anyway) is due to certain European legal issues relating to derivative works, electronic format vs. paper etc. If we hadn't held the copyright (as some journals have not) we would have had a lot of trouble getting the rights to scan in our old journals and put them up online - and anybody else trying to do it would have had exactly the same problem (contacting the authors as legal copyright holders for hundreds of thousands of articles decades after the fact is no small feat).
As I mentioned in another post, our authors are perfectly free to post their articles on the web, free, for download. They can even post the version that we copy-edited, exactly as published in the journal, as long as they attach the appropriate copyright statement. The only thing we're not doing, which you seem to be demanding, is to make the things available on our own servers, for free. Or to collect them and organize them and then post them to somebody else's servers. Well sorry, that's not our current business model. You may remember some internet companies that tried that sort of thing. They're not around any more.
If you'll check out our journal web pages, you'll see there is a LOT of information already freely available. Almost all scientific journals make all the abstracts free, for example, and you can browse through hundreds of thousands of article listings to find the one you want. If you know exactly which one you want, you can pay for full text individually - few people seem to want to do that though.
Standard answer: one person's quality is another person's "filler"... As somebody once said, the most important paper for your research is the one you didn't read, with the critical discovery that would have cut years off your study.
The quantity published these days is simply due to the enormous volume of actual research that is being done. If you actually look, the number of papers published per scientist hasn't changed in decades - it's the number of scientists (worldwide) that has grown so much.
I don't know that misguided is quite the right word. It's one of those "grass is always greener" things - or perhaps more nostalgia in this case. Things are really no different than they were 40 years ago, except for the volume of actual research being done. Communication is more important than ever, of course!
What does it mean to have value? Sometimes the value of a particular piece of research seems minimal for a decade or two, and then suddenly is realized as a critical foundation for a whole new research area. That said, every journal has different, specific criteria that they try to select for, and whether what they are doing is valuable or not is really measured in the marketplace: citation statistics are of course one way to measure, but the fact that a journal is widely subscribed, widely read, and that authors really want to publish there is the result of a real competition for quality and value. Maybe the competitive landscape could be organized better, but I think the value is there, and continues to be there, as long as we're all doing the jobs we're supposed to be doing.
Are we a "near monopoly"? There are hundreds of physics journals out there, in competition for authors and readers. It's a pretty free market, in my opinion, though you'll hear all sorts of arguments on that front. I assume we receive so many papers because we do our job well. Even though we publish a lot, I believe the total number of physics articles published worldwide (and we receive about 70% of our submissions from outside the US) is about five times our volume. And there's always Science or Nature!
Now the economics are a little odd because we sell subscriptions primarily to libraries, which are sort of a captive market. However, you'd be surprised at the number of small colleges and public libraries and such that subscribe - if they weren't happy, what reason would they have to continue?
The key point is your #4:
I don't know that we do. Perhaps we don't. It's an experiment worth trying. But is it an experiment that's sufficiently important to have the government force it on us (as some have suggested)?
Ummm. So you're in favor of more rigorous review? Wouldn't that be more expensive? It seems to me the current system works reasonably well, is improving in speed and efficiency, and at only a couple of percent of research dollars, is reasonably affordable.
The main complaint of the public library of science people etc. seems to have been that the research isn't available free online. Well, in our happy medium in physics we have no problem with researchers posting their research on their own web sites, or on the e-print server, etc. Go ahead and do it! That makes it available free - but don't expect the journal publishers to make everything free for you; we're doing a different job here.
High Energy Physics isn't all of physics; also our publication schedule is fast enough now we can get things up online a week or two after we receive them, if it's justified. Do people read everything in the arxiv? Maybe in those fields that are limited enough. But what we in the journal business do is sift through those submissions and try to point out the ones that are important. The arxiv caused us to do our job better - as far as I can tell, we seem to have reached a sort of peaceable coexistence...
It's true anyway. The cost is in human time: a couple dozen hours per paper of a person looking at what needs to be done with it, making sure it's going to reviewers in the field who are available at this time, reading their responses to find what, if any, of substance needs to be done by the authors, reading author responses and making acceptance/rejection decisions. There are many ways of doing it more automatically, cheaper, easier; unfortunately none of them seem to be associated with a prestigious journal. Cause and effect?
The analogy to a court system isn't precise, but the expenses involved in recording and monitoring the proceedings to ensure fairness are not dissimilar.
Many journals already do this. We don't, but we offer our back file, scanned at several million dollars cost, for a quite inexpensive personal or institutional subscription. Should the old stuff be paid for by current subscriptions, or should it pay for itself? All economic and market questions for the publishing business. Funny that scientists seem to think they have all the answers here.
Anyway, I wish Brown all the best success, but as others have mentioned, it's a somewhat harder problem than it first seems (at least he's asking for $20 million, which is somewhat realistic for handling real peer review for a substantial number of articles - 10's of thousands at least).
What's behind this nebulous "peer review" concept, at least for us, is a complex and historically based system of checks and balances involving communications between authors, editors, and (anonymous and non-anonymous) reviewers; we're essentially a legal/court system for scientific articles. There's a lot of information-related issues in there, and information technology helps a lot (that's the part I'm involved in). But fundamentally, at least the way we do it, there needs to be a paid, responsible human being reading most communications and monitoring the process, and as far as we've been able to work out, you can't get the cost under about $500 or so per article.
Now, just distributing the papers can be done essentially for free (to as many people as would want to read for about $1-5 per article, for hardware, software, disk, network, etc.) which is what the famous physics e-print archive does so well. Of course it doesn't cost publishers any more than that to distribute articles online either - the costs are in the review part (and whatever copyediting they do), not in distribution.
You'll hear about journals now that are essentially free - this is almost always for one of two reasons:
Given the $500/article cost, the other question is does science really need this level of peer review, or can it get by with less? Well, we've already seen a couple of instances of scientific fraud that slipped by in physics in the last few months even with the current level of review - is skimping really a good idea? And is the $500 minimal cost or even $1000-$2000 typical cost per article now all that bad, compared to the typical $50,000-$100,000 research grant that generally funded such research?
Yet another proposed solution has been to publish fewer papers in those journals that receive the full peer-review treatment. Unless authors miraculously constrain themselves somehow, the only way that would save us money would be to reject a lot of things without review (because the costs are in the review process itself) - but then you've thrown out the whole "peer" process you're using to determine what's published!
So, maybe Brown has found a way through this morass - but the scientific system has a complex, little studied dynamic in which peer review as it currently stands plays an important role... if we really can't afford it (the old way) any more, we're headed into some uncharted waters...
Don't people do this all the time with Sounding rockets? Although maybe the point is that NASA runs that program too, and this is really independent? Still, it doesn't seem that big a deal...
Personally I think advertisers should give up on the graphics and go back to basics: Kuro5hin textads are unobtrusive but actually quite effective (I read them a lot more than fashy graphics or popups - and the 'haiku' opportunities are endless). The web isn't like a broadcast medium, it's driven by the user, not the broadcaster; ad agencies need to re-think their approach.
int i = 23 as in his example would, if I understood correctly, make a construct like i++ impossible. How would a for loop work? This doesn't quite make sense to me - maybe you'd need both mutable and immutable classes for the primitive types?
Some of the other posts (not having read the actual article presumably) and the space.com report itself seem a bit confused about the way the term "ice age" is being used here. Based on estimates (somewhat shaky, as was pointed out in another comment) of the galactic rotational speed of the spiral arms relative to stars like our Sun, this paper shows a surprising correlation over the past billion years between times our solar system was within a spiral arm, and periods of significant glaciation lasting 10's or 100's of millions of years.
According to the calculations in the article, the solar system has passed through the four spiral arms ("Orion" or Sagittarius-Carina, Scutum-Crux, Norma, and Perseus) a total of seven times over the last billion years, or roughly once every 150 million years. We've actually only recently left the Orion arm (heading for Perseus) so the cosmic-ray flux is still quite high, and according to the author's diagram, we are STILL experiencing a major glaciation period. Since the last "ice age" as we know them ended just over 10,000 years ago, that time scale is WAY to short to show up on the scale of this article. In other words, we're still in the middle of an ice age, as far as this paper is concerned.
While the thickness of the spiral arms is such that we pass through them in about 30 million years, the cosmic ray effects last 50-60 million years or more, depending on the level of star-formation within the arms at any given time. The author also notes that it is believed our galaxy had a peak in star production about 300 million years ago, and had much lower star production prior to about 1 billion years ago (until you get back to the 2-3 billion year period and earlier, for which we don't have much in the way of geologic records). In addition to the ice age records, the author also looks at records from iron meteorites radio-isotope dating to get another measure of cosmic ray flux in those periods, which also seems to correlate.
Anyway, interesting stuff, but on a time scale much bigger than we normally think about when we think of ice ages. The ice age before the current one according to this model dates to before the rise of the dinosaurs; go back a couple more and it's before we have any evidence of complex life on Earth!
- SMART-1 from ESA (the only one this BBC article mentions)
- LUNAR-A from ISAS/NASDA (Japan).
- SELENE also from ISAS.
- TrailBlazer and Electra from TransOrbital Inc.
- Lunar Retriever from AppliedSpace Resources
- IceBreaker from Lunacorp
- Lunar Service from Celestis (you have to be dead...)
- Lunar Architecture is a subject of study for HJ Rombaut, including a recent Lunar Base design workshop
- Bill Mook's lunar tours
- The Artemis Project
Many of these have received approval - some of the commercial missions seem to have had a bit of trouble finding funding or overcoming regulations and have announced delays of a year or so, but then the government missions have been delayed too.What's missing on this list? Where's NASA you say? Interestingly NASA has spent over 50 times as much on Mars missions as on missions to the Moon since Apollo 17 left in Dec 1972. But that may change now that the NRC has put a lunar return among the highest priority missions.
Want to be involved? Check out the National Space Society and the Moon Society and you may help make some of these things happen!
Sounds like the business plan for Applied Space Resources - they haven't been able to raise much money yet though I hear.
#2 on the new planetary exploration priority list from the National Research Council is a sample return mission from the South Pole basin of the Moon. So if NASA doesn't have plans right now, they're going to be thinking about it real hard real soon.
Umm, there's rather a lot of excellent open-source java work out there. Sun may not have released their JVM source code, but they're not the only ones writing VM's - check out Kaffe for a GPL version. The truth is that the java and perl worlds don't overlap a lot, but we just moved our shop from perl/mod-perl to java servlets and jsp's (Jakarta struts) and it's been well worth it. Java's not going to disappear anytime soon!
Coincidentally, I saw this /. item just as I had finished reading Stross's "Antibodies", a short story, in a collection of the best science fiction of 2000. I'd never heard of the guy before, but his writing is wonderfully close to my experience and that of most /.'ers - I guess he's a bit new as a recognized author so not many of us know much about him. What I've read so far seems very promising though!
Umm, you have any idea how much energy the average car uses up? If you drive 12,000 miles a year, at 20 miles/gallon, that's 600 gallons of oil or about 14.5 barrels, energy content = about 25,000 kWh per year (see this Conversion table). So your car is using about 4 times as much energy as your house. If you drive a lot and have a gas guzzler it's probably 10 times as much or more.
GM's idea is actually a pretty good one - it could easily be much cheaper to power your house from the fuel cell in your car than from the electric grid (high efficiency and no transmission losses, and no middle-men).
Reminds me of when we were at a physics convention and one of the guys (who was not quite at master level) took on a street hustler chess player in a match. Hustler-guy wasn't quite up to winning, though the game looked close. Some businessman comes up to watch, and finds out we're physicists and starts going on about "rocket scientists testing their wits against a guy on the street"... we felt insulted. The NASA and Boeing and Lockheed guys who do rockets are just dumb engineers after all!
The point being, there are lots of much harder things to do in life than building a box that just goes up and down off some fire in its tail. NASA and Boeing and Lockheed people like everybody to think it's really really hard and expensive and requires all those fancy engineering studies, but it really doesn't. Go check out your local hobby store for model rockets, if you don't believe me.