Isn't there a simple answer? Americans are more efficient than other countries in allowing personal decisions even at a young age on future career plans - so those who are destined for scientific careers can go at it gung ho from first grade, and the others can basically ignore it and leave that science stuff to the science geeks. Maybe the balance should be a bit different - on the other hand overall the balance is determined pretty well by market forces (how well are scientists paid, exactly?) - so maybe our system is just fine....
The article talks about the machinery of cells as an example of existing nano-machinery on which we should base the development of artificial nano-machines - but the proteins and other bio-molecules in a cell are actually pretty large compared to some of the things we can do even now with STM microscope tips and carbon nanotubes. Even the smallest virus is 0.05 microns across, and we're already regularly making semiconductor components on that scale. Admittedly the virus has some complex internal structure. But biology uses a very limited set of chemical elements (mainly C, H, O, N) and I think one of the main ideas with nano-machines was that there's no need to restrict yourself to the limited set of things used in biology...
All you need is enough size in the object. A molten interior helps, but I don't think is essential. If you think of the planet as a loose collection of many objects rather than a single solid object, gravity tends to act just as with a liquid or gas, bringing everything to an 'equipotential surface', i.e. a sphere. The spinning of the Earth actually distorts its shape slightly from a sphere. But it's basically a matter of size (and density). As you get down to smaller bodies, in particular the asteroids, they get less and less spherical - you've probably seen pictures of Eros from the NEAR mission: basically a dumb-bell shape, not a sphere at all.
Except the article refers to a consensus reached 25 years ago, but I believe the actual "collision with a Mars-sized body" consensus came from the Kona, Hawaii meeting in 1984. So that's only 17 years... And basically this model is just an incremental improvement (will a big increment - 20,000 body simulation instead of 3,000) over previous simulations of the process. Still interesting though!
The paper was published online last week at the official Physical Review Letters web site, though you need a real subscription (most universities have one) to get in.
The first example given (can't read the rest since the site seems to be/.'ed) does seem to be a situation where the person transmitting the information appears authoritative. But the ways in which the computer store staff person got his information was not far from the traditional rumor mill; it's a long-standing fact of history that truth rarely catches up to rumors!
Freeciv seems to have a lot of the look-and-feel of xconq (with lots more detailed city development and unit types) - and that was available at least back in 1988 when I recall wasting hours on it - actually the first version came out even before X was synonymous with X version 11 (we ran version 10 for a while...).
So, I think the OSS version actually came first...
Baen is a great example - I've read a few of their free samples, and one month's worth of their new releases (it had an author I was particularly interested in, and I read 3 of the other 4 books it came with because I got into them after the first chapter) - and all for $10. I read these all (mostly) on an old monochrome (486) laptop, in HTML format. Worked just fine, but in the end it was a bit of a strain on the eyes. And it definitely wasn't as easy as having a novel you could carry around and curl up on the couch or bed with. But I enjoyed the books anyway!
You say "Surprisingly little fuss"; perhaps in the mainstream press it's received little attention, but it's spawned quite an industry in the cosmology field, with a new concept called "quintessence" as a possible source of vacuum energy. There are definitely some interesting things still to be found out - however we've known for quite some time that 90% of the mass of the universe is "not ordinary matter", so it's always seemed pretty obvious to me we likely still have a lot to learn.
That said, I doubt Podkletnov's effect has any reality; people have been trying to reproduce the effect from his first reports and found nothing. More cold fusion-type hype, in my opinion.
It's physics if the researchers are physicists:-) There's a lot of overlap, since physics is inherently a very mathematical subject. But the particular ideas concerning scale-invariant systems (power-law behavior of various sorts), dynamical behavior, and percolation networks come out of statistical mechanics, a branch of physics. Specifically, a lot of this was developed starting with the theory of critical phenomena in the 1970's. The move to self-organized criticality (sandpile, wildfire, earthquake etc. models) and more generally now "complexity theory" has spread to quite a number of fields from biology to economics, but there are still a lot of physicists involved in this kind of research.
I was at grad school with Toni Feder a dozen years ago, and since she got hired at Physics Today I've always taken note of her articles; we talk on the phone once in a while too. She's always finding something interesting and slightly controversial in what you would think were boring physics or astronomy subjects - good stuff!
Actually, I've seen plans for a human return to the Moon using existing (or soon to be available) launch vehicles that could do the mission in 2003 or 2004 if we really wanted to. It'd probably cost one or two billion dollars over NASA's planned budgets, and would land facilities to actually start the construction of a permanently manned base on the Moon (which would take a series of such visits to actually set up). The time is probably close to right for this - I hope it goes somewhere and doesn't just get swallowed in the NASA bureaucracy never to emerge!
The popular image that scientists dispense "facts" is simply wrong! The product from scientific activity is "explanations", not "facts". Sometimes those explanations are pretty good, and allow you to make good predictions. In climate science the goal is to explain climate around the world and throughout history; there are a lot of "facts" there that need explaining: why is the Sahara a desert? Why ice ages? Why is the temperature in San Francisco always somewhere around 65 degrees? Why in particular were the 1990's the warmest decade in 1000 years? Some of these "facts" may be explainable by other means (for example, there are arguments that the warming trend in measurements is an illusion caused by where the measurements are being taken). But gradually, within the body of scientists working on these problems, after years of rational debate between competing concepts and explanations, consensus starts to form about which groups of explanations explain the most and are the most consistent with the facts.
Now in other sciences, say physics or chemistry, when such a consensus is reached about, for example, the concept that atoms are real objects and not mere mathematical conveniences, experience has shown that these concepts give us great power in predicting and manipulating the world around us. Somehow the nature of these rational debates within science is such that we actually do uncover something fundamental about the real world when we settle on such explanations. But at the point when "consensus" is reached, it's sometimes hard for any given scientist to enumerate all the reasons why one explanation is better than a competing one. And adherents of the competing, particularly older, explanations generally hang on for years after the consensus has shifted. So it's easy for an outsider to come in and say "look, these scientists don't have any idea what they're talking about - they've never seen an atom, they even tell us it's impossible to see one - and here are ten expert scientists with dozens of respected publications who categorically say there's no such thing as an atom."
But despite the opposition, the consensus group makes predictions based on their explanations, confirms them (or not) with later experience, and over the years gains confidence in those predictions. This is the fundamental rational process by which science works, and it is hard to deny its overall reliability.
Now, given that, should a preliminary explanation, still disputed by some segment of a scientific group, be used to influence public policy? In some respects one could give the predictions a percentage likelihood of being correct - the consensus group would probably run close to 100%, the naysayers close to zero - what if you average the two using the number of proponents of each view. Ok, there you have a rough idea - the predictions on global warming have (by this method using some made-up numbers) a 65% chance of being correct.
The question then is - is a 65% chance of major climate catatsrophe enough for us to change our ways? In Europe and much of the rest of the world, that question has been answered "Yes". Only in the US does it seem we need 99% certainty of major disaster before we do anything. Or am I wrong?
There are Russian launchers for both cargo (Proton, not to mention Energiya) and people (Soyuz) that can easily handle what Bigelow needs, for 1/5th to 1/10th Shuttle prices. It'd be nice to have American companies that can do it too, but I think Bigelow's plans on this are pretty realistic if he can make use of the Russian hardware.
It's not a hoax. I know some of the technical team involved. They're pretty serious about it. And $500 million ain't chicken feed.
Why has nobody else done it? I dunno, but somebody's got to be first in anything. Now's the right time for this to happen; and Bigelow's in the right place. Should be interesting!
As Kennedy said in his original speech, the Moon is the key to our further development of space. Whether we're going to Mars, to orbital habitats in L5, to the asteroids, or just trying to manufacture and service satellites, solar power stations, or space stations in Low or Geo-synchronous Earth Orbit, lunar resources can bring costs down immensely. And as others here have mentioned, there's amazing science to be done from the lunar farside. And the view of Earth is pretty amazing too...
Convinced we have to do it? Wondering why NASA has been ignoring the Moon most of the last 30 years? The Moon Society at http://www.moonsociety.org/ was started this past year to provide a central grass-roots organization to advocate for lunar science and development, public or private. There's still a great need there for volunteer help - come join us and help make this happen, before another decade is out!
selling hospital generators and portable generators in the next few years, having fuel cells in commercial vehicles by 2005? This is starting to look like it will actually happen! Wow!
Fuel cell improvements may also be critical for space development - particularly for a lunar base where the 14-day "night" means you need some kind of large-capacity energy storage system. Fuel cells using in-situ oxygen and in-situ or imported hydrogen could solve that problem very nicely!
I've been spending quite a bit of spare time working with various grass-roots groups on lunar mission planning for the relatively near term, and one of the significant issues (out of a couple dozen) is the communications infrastructure. If you don't want to keep hogging the "Deep Space Network" of radio antennas, there is a real need for a simple and flexible standard that allows you to route information through one of a collection of geosynchronous satellites - a packet-switched protocol has some big advantages over traditional fixed circuits, and if you're going to go with packets, why not IP? So this has some real practical consequences for current planning, and I'm glad to see progress is being made.
That's my congressman!
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One Republican incompetent (Mike Forbes) replaced by another. Sigh. Grucci was head of a fireworks company here before becoming leader of the Town of Brookhaven (affectionately known as "Crookhaven" - the Republican Party Chief here got busted a couple of years ago for some Mafia-related business). And now in Congress... his opponent in the general election was a nice old lady who had almost no money to run on (Mike Forbes, previously a republican, had spent all the Democrat's money in his primary challenge, which he lost to this woman, an environmental lawyer). And the people out here pride themselves on their environmental awareness too! Almost makes me ashamed to live here. Luckily I get to vote against him again next year...
Umm, did you actually read the article? And do you actually know anything about science? The article had nothing to do with the earth's 4 billion year history; these computer models merely take the oceans into better account and by having two models that wonderfully match the OBSERVED pattern of ocean warming based on greenhouse gas forcing, provide yet another skein in the web of evidence and logic that implicates humanity.
Of course the Bush Administration has zeroed out a lot of this research in its current budget; they clearly prefer ignorance to science to support their agenda. And it seems clear whose side you are on - who is making the 'trifling investment' I wonder? By the way, you might ask the Army Corps of Engineers why the Mississippi has been shortening lately (one of the more minor impacts of humanity on the face of the planet)...
Next time you might want to post as a regular slashdot user rather than an "Anonymous Coward" - most people here don't get to read AC comments unless they've been "moderated up", which is a shame since you've brought up some important points.
First, either 1-2% is way too much, or it's not, so I don't understand why you say it's ok but then "we are vastly overcharged for such services". You can do the exercise at your institution in fact - compare the total budget for research journal subscriptions in the library (probably under $1 million for a typical mid-size university) with the total research funding + university researcher salary numbers. The real problem is accessibility for smaller institutions and developing nations, which under the old paper-based pricing model would have to pay the same as a big institution for access to the same material. But electronic content means publishers can (and have already started to) differentially price so that the smaller institutions can get access to far more for the same price, or even get a discount.
Your second, and main point, concerns copyright. We've had this debate for a long time; the problem is that if a publisher gets only a license and not copyright ownership, the publisher loses the right to publication in new forms (such as bringing older content into the electronic world). Do you really want a system where each author has to be consulted (as copyright owner) before his content gets included in any new database, for example? In any case, our attempt at resolving this has been to be very liberal in rights granted back to authors, once they give us copyright; for example our authors retain full rights to repost their articles to web sites or on preprint servers. They just can't use the actual file we created for the article without our copyright notice and a link to the official journal version, and they're not allowed to provide it to another publisher who will resell it for a fee, without getting our permission. In the last 5 years we've had roughly this policy in place, we've not had any authors come to us needing more than these rights.
We've also made some attempts at liberalizing access as far as we could be comfortable with it. One of our journals has been completely free from its start 3 years ago, and is doing quite well; it's funding comes from national laboratories and institutions that "donate" for its support, rather than paying a subscription price. Something like that model would be great to generalize if institutions could actually be committed to it - even for a small journal it's rather a lot of work though. The "public library of science" could be interpreted as another route to this sort of funding mechanism - but it's a backhanded route; why not make it explicit and provide free access (in exchange for institutional "donations") from the start rather than waiting six months?
Anyway, I'll check out the debate you mention at the publiclibraryofscience site; probably worth bringing out some of the old arguments again in the new forum.
it became evident that those who have something to lose from a truly open-source literature are all making "this is more complicated than you think" arguments.
Well, I hate to tell you this, but if it's not "more complicated than you think", it is certainly different from what you think.
While scientific publishing rakes in "hundreds of millions a year" (maybe a billion world-wide total (not net) revenue) the total costs of scientific research worldwide are a couple of orders of magnitude bigger than that. Counting both grants (close to $30 billion now at NIH alone) and salaries, that's a lot of money. From the publishing perspective, they are providing a communications, peer review, and ranking service to science, coming at a cost of 1 to 2% of the total spent on science. Is that such a terrible charge for such apparently useful services?
The "public library of science" provides only one of the three services I mentioned (communications), and simply assumes the other services publishers provide will continue on somehow even while they are forced to give up some or all of their revenue from their monopoly on communications. Where do you propose the money come from to support these services? Would you be willing to pay all the costs ($1000 to $4000) as an author? What about authors of important research with not so much funding (at institutions in Africa, say). Or should government grants support these activities? Without laying that support foundation, taking away journal revenue is a sure-fire recipe for failure, one way or another.
I read the Nature debate on this before it appeared here on/., and we've been debating something like this pretty strenuously online for the past 3 years over at Sigma Xi. The issue that has caused the Nature debate is a proposed boycott of journals that refuse to make papers older than 6 months available free online (specifically to the "Public Library of Science", but free redistribution beyond that seems to be assumed). As several people in the Nature debate have pointed out, this puts all the burden for paying for what journals do on the market for immediate "news" - quality articles, and is likely to have several quite serious detrimental effects.
Where I work (The Physical Review, published by the non-profit American Physical Society) we've spent the last few years scanning in all our old papers (going back over 100 years) to make them available online for a fee. Last month people downloaded over 150 Gigabytes of these old papers from our site (something like 200,000 individual papers downloaded) -- but these would never have been put online without a publisher with a steady revenue stream to sink a few million dollars into them. And in the long run we expect them to more than pay for themselves, so as we're non-profit that lowers the cost to libraries and other subscribers of the new material we publish.
What about those ridiculous journal prices? Some of the publishers are indeed for-profit companies (Elsevier Science being the biggest now) and many of them have Microsoft-sized monopoly profit margins of 30 or 40% on their scientific journal business. Which is why boycott or other proposals that strike all journals equally are going to weaken us with our 0% profit margin a lot faster than a commercial publisher...
But journal pricing is a tricky business. Unlike what has been suggested by others in this forum, except for very high-volume items (probably no journal in the sciences qualifies), printing and distribution are very far from dominating the costs these days. For us they amount to 20-25% of total costs, and are dropping quickly as our subscribers move to online subscriptions. Another big area of costs for us is the copy-editing process that turns whatever files or pieces of paper we get from the authors into a coherent component of a larger body of work. Costs in this area have actually increased in recent years because we are doing a lot more "tagging" of the content; everything we publish now has an SGML file behind it ready for re-use (for example in constructing reliable online links to other articles cited by the authors). This amounts to roughly 30-35% of total expenses for our journals.
The final piece of the cost for us, around 40-45% of the total, is in the management of peer review. We pay the salaries of a large number of editors (PhD physicists, some full-time, some part-time) who make the decisions about what hoops they need authors to jump through to actually get their article published. Often, particularly for the papers we end up rejecting, this involves mediating a strenuous scientific debate between referees and authors. This is hard intellectual work, and involves 1 to 3 or more hours of effort for each of the 24,000 papers we receive every year. And you need a support staff, building, equipment, etc. adding overhead to it all.
And then you have to divide these costs by the number of subscribers to get a per-subscriber journal price. Some of the very high-priced journals are that way mostly because they don't have many subscribers; it's a vicious circle. Which makes it hard to compare the real costs of one journal with another, unless you factor in total circulation figures.
Could this all really be done free? Certainly not with the same level of quality. Is this level of quality actually necessary? Well, we hope so: people seem to be still paying for it. Our goal is as far as possible to lower our costs, to lower the prices we charge, and to broaden the distribution of the information. We're definitely looking at new markets (the 100+ year archive is one of them) to help broaden our cost base and keep those prices down. Electronic publishing allows you to do a lot more - lower prices to developing countries for example is easy to do. The purpose of our parent organization is "to advance and diffuse the knowledge of physics", and any way we can do that better, we'll try doing it. But giving all our stuff away for free just doesn't make any sense, at least not yet.
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Isn't there a simple answer? Americans are more efficient than other countries in allowing personal decisions even at a young age on future career plans - so those who are destined for scientific careers can go at it gung ho from first grade, and the others can basically ignore it and leave that science stuff to the science geeks. Maybe the balance should be a bit different - on the other hand overall the balance is determined pretty well by market forces (how well are scientists paid, exactly?) - so maybe our system is just fine....
The article talks about the machinery of cells as an example of existing nano-machinery on which we should base the development of artificial nano-machines - but the proteins and other bio-molecules in a cell are actually pretty large compared to some of the things we can do even now with STM microscope tips and carbon nanotubes. Even the smallest virus is 0.05 microns across, and we're already regularly making semiconductor components on that scale. Admittedly the virus has some complex internal structure. But biology uses a very limited set of chemical elements (mainly C, H, O, N) and I think one of the main ideas with nano-machines was that there's no need to restrict yourself to the limited set of things used in biology...
All you need is enough size in the object. A molten interior helps, but I don't think is essential. If you think of the planet as a loose collection of many objects rather than a single solid object, gravity tends to act just as with a liquid or gas, bringing everything to an 'equipotential surface', i.e. a sphere. The spinning of the Earth actually distorts its shape slightly from a sphere. But it's basically a matter of size (and density). As you get down to smaller bodies, in particular the asteroids, they get less and less spherical - you've probably seen pictures of Eros from the NEAR mission: basically a dumb-bell shape, not a sphere at all.
Space.com has another version with more graphics.
Except the article refers to a consensus reached 25 years ago, but I believe the actual "collision with a Mars-sized body" consensus came from the Kona, Hawaii meeting in 1984. So that's only 17 years... And basically this model is just an incremental improvement (will a big increment - 20,000 body simulation instead of 3,000) over previous simulations of the process. Still interesting though!
It does lend some
The paper was published online last week at the official Physical Review Letters web site, though you need a real subscription (most universities have one) to get in.
The first example given (can't read the rest since the site seems to be /.'ed) does seem to be a situation where the person transmitting the information appears authoritative. But the ways in which the computer store staff person got his information was not far from the traditional rumor mill; it's a long-standing fact of history that truth rarely catches up to rumors!
Freeciv seems to have a lot of the look-and-feel of xconq (with lots more detailed city development and unit types) - and that was available at least back in 1988 when I recall wasting hours on it - actually the first version came out even before X was synonymous with X version 11 (we ran version 10 for a while...).
So, I think the OSS version actually came first...
Baen is a great example - I've read a few of their free samples, and one month's worth of their new releases (it had an author I was particularly interested in, and I read 3 of the other 4 books it came with because I got into them after the first chapter) - and all for $10. I read these all (mostly) on an old monochrome (486) laptop, in HTML format. Worked just fine, but in the end it was a bit of a strain on the eyes. And it definitely wasn't as easy as having a novel you could carry around and curl up on the couch or bed with. But I enjoyed the books anyway!
You say "Surprisingly little fuss"; perhaps in the mainstream press it's received little attention, but it's spawned quite an industry in the cosmology field, with a new concept called "quintessence" as a possible source of vacuum energy. There are definitely some interesting things still to be found out - however we've known for quite some time that 90% of the mass of the universe is "not ordinary matter", so it's always seemed pretty obvious to me we likely still have a lot to learn.
That said, I doubt Podkletnov's effect has any reality; people have been trying to reproduce the effect from his first reports and found nothing. More cold fusion-type hype, in my opinion.
It's physics if the researchers are physicists :-) There's a lot of overlap, since physics is inherently a very mathematical subject. But the particular ideas concerning scale-invariant systems (power-law behavior of various sorts), dynamical behavior, and percolation networks come out of statistical mechanics, a branch of physics. Specifically, a lot of this was developed starting with the theory of critical phenomena in the 1970's. The move to self-organized criticality (sandpile, wildfire, earthquake etc. models) and more generally now "complexity theory" has spread to quite a number of fields from biology to economics, but there are still a lot of physicists involved in this kind of research.
I was at grad school with Toni Feder a dozen years ago, and since she got hired at Physics Today I've always taken note of her articles; we talk on the phone once in a while too. She's always finding something interesting and slightly controversial in what you would think were boring physics or astronomy subjects - good stuff!
Actually, I've seen plans for a human return to the Moon using existing (or soon to be available) launch vehicles that could do the mission in 2003 or 2004 if we really wanted to. It'd probably cost one or two billion dollars over NASA's planned budgets, and would land facilities to actually start the construction of a permanently manned base on the Moon (which would take a series of such visits to actually set up). The time is probably close to right for this - I hope it goes somewhere and doesn't just get swallowed in the NASA bureaucracy never to emerge!
The popular image that scientists dispense "facts" is simply wrong! The product from scientific activity is "explanations", not "facts". Sometimes those explanations are pretty good, and allow you to make good predictions. In climate science the goal is to explain climate around the world and throughout history; there are a lot of "facts" there that need explaining: why is the Sahara a desert? Why ice ages? Why is the temperature in San Francisco always somewhere around 65 degrees? Why in particular were the 1990's the warmest decade in 1000 years? Some of these "facts" may be explainable by other means (for example, there are arguments that the warming trend in measurements is an illusion caused by where the measurements are being taken). But gradually, within the body of scientists working on these problems, after years of rational debate between competing concepts and explanations, consensus starts to form about which groups of explanations explain the most and are the most consistent with the facts.
Now in other sciences, say physics or chemistry, when such a consensus is reached about, for example, the concept that atoms are real objects and not mere mathematical conveniences, experience has shown that these concepts give us great power in predicting and manipulating the world around us. Somehow the nature of these rational debates within science is such that we actually do uncover something fundamental about the real world when we settle on such explanations. But at the point when "consensus" is reached, it's sometimes hard for any given scientist to enumerate all the reasons why one explanation is better than a competing one. And adherents of the competing, particularly older, explanations generally hang on for years after the consensus has shifted. So it's easy for an outsider to come in and say "look, these scientists don't have any idea what they're talking about - they've never seen an atom, they even tell us it's impossible to see one - and here are ten expert scientists with dozens of respected publications who categorically say there's no such thing as an atom."
But despite the opposition, the consensus group makes predictions based on their explanations, confirms them (or not) with later experience, and over the years gains confidence in those predictions. This is the fundamental rational process by which science works, and it is hard to deny its overall reliability.
Now, given that, should a preliminary explanation, still disputed by some segment of a scientific group, be used to influence public policy? In some respects one could give the predictions a percentage likelihood of being correct - the consensus group would probably run close to 100%, the naysayers close to zero - what if you average the two using the number of proponents of each view. Ok, there you have a rough idea - the predictions on global warming have (by this method using some made-up numbers) a 65% chance of being correct.
The question then is - is a 65% chance of major climate catatsrophe enough for us to change our ways? In Europe and much of the rest of the world, that question has been answered "Yes". Only in the US does it seem we need 99% certainty of major disaster before we do anything. Or am I wrong?
There are Russian launchers for both cargo (Proton, not to mention Energiya) and people (Soyuz) that can easily handle what Bigelow needs, for 1/5th to 1/10th Shuttle prices. It'd be nice to have American companies that can do it too, but I think Bigelow's plans on this are pretty realistic if he can make use of the Russian hardware.
It's not a hoax. I know some of the technical team involved. They're pretty serious about it. And $500 million ain't chicken feed.
Why has nobody else done it? I dunno, but somebody's got to be first in anything. Now's the right time for this to happen; and Bigelow's in the right place. Should be interesting!
As Kennedy said in his original speech, the Moon is the key to our further development of space. Whether we're going to Mars, to orbital habitats in L5, to the asteroids, or just trying to manufacture and service satellites, solar power stations, or space stations in Low or Geo-synchronous Earth Orbit, lunar resources can bring costs down immensely. And as others here have mentioned, there's amazing science to be done from the lunar farside. And the view of Earth is pretty amazing too...
Convinced we have to do it? Wondering why NASA has been ignoring the Moon most of the last 30 years? The Moon Society at http://www.moonsociety.org/ was started this past year to provide a central grass-roots organization to advocate for lunar science and development, public or private. There's still a great need there for volunteer help - come join us and help make this happen, before another decade is out!
selling hospital generators and portable generators in the next few years, having fuel cells in commercial vehicles by 2005? This is starting to look like it will actually happen! Wow!
Fuel cell improvements may also be critical for space development - particularly for a lunar base where the 14-day "night" means you need some kind of large-capacity energy storage system. Fuel cells using in-situ oxygen and in-situ or imported hydrogen could solve that problem very nicely!
I've been spending quite a bit of spare time working with various grass-roots groups on lunar mission planning for the relatively near term, and one of the significant issues (out of a couple dozen) is the communications infrastructure. If you don't want to keep hogging the "Deep Space Network" of radio antennas, there is a real need for a simple and flexible standard that allows you to route information through one of a collection of geosynchronous satellites - a packet-switched protocol has some big advantages over traditional fixed circuits, and if you're going to go with packets, why not IP? So this has some real practical consequences for current planning, and I'm glad to see progress is being made.
One Republican incompetent (Mike Forbes) replaced by another. Sigh. Grucci was head of a fireworks company here before becoming leader of the Town of Brookhaven (affectionately known as "Crookhaven" - the Republican Party Chief here got busted a couple of years ago for some Mafia-related business). And now in Congress... his opponent in the general election was a nice old lady who had almost no money to run on (Mike Forbes, previously a republican, had spent all the Democrat's money in his primary challenge, which he lost to this woman, an environmental lawyer). And the people out here pride themselves on their environmental awareness too! Almost makes me ashamed to live here. Luckily I get to vote against him again next year...
that's why I have my Gnome desktop clock displaying UNIX time:
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Umm, did you actually read the article? And do you actually know anything about science? The article had nothing to do with the earth's 4 billion year history; these computer models merely take the oceans into better account and by having two models that wonderfully match the OBSERVED pattern of ocean warming based on greenhouse gas forcing, provide yet another skein in the web of evidence and logic that implicates humanity.
Of course the Bush Administration has zeroed out a lot of this research in its current budget; they clearly prefer ignorance to science to support their agenda. And it seems clear whose side you are on - who is making the 'trifling investment' I wonder? By the way, you might ask the Army Corps of Engineers why the Mississippi has been shortening lately (one of the more minor impacts of humanity on the face of the planet)...
Next time you might want to post as a regular slashdot user rather than an "Anonymous Coward" - most people here don't get to read AC comments unless they've been "moderated up", which is a shame since you've brought up some important points.
First, either 1-2% is way too much, or it's not, so I don't understand why you say it's ok but then "we are vastly overcharged for such services". You can do the exercise at your institution in fact - compare the total budget for research journal subscriptions in the library (probably under $1 million for a typical mid-size university) with the total research funding + university researcher salary numbers. The real problem is accessibility for smaller institutions and developing nations, which under the old paper-based pricing model would have to pay the same as a big institution for access to the same material. But electronic content means publishers can (and have already started to) differentially price so that the smaller institutions can get access to far more for the same price, or even get a discount.
Your second, and main point, concerns copyright. We've had this debate for a long time; the problem is that if a publisher gets only a license and not copyright ownership, the publisher loses the right to publication in new forms (such as bringing older content into the electronic world). Do you really want a system where each author has to be consulted (as copyright owner) before his content gets included in any new database, for example? In any case, our attempt at resolving this has been to be very liberal in rights granted back to authors, once they give us copyright; for example our authors retain full rights to repost their articles to web sites or on preprint servers. They just can't use the actual file we created for the article without our copyright notice and a link to the official journal version, and they're not allowed to provide it to another publisher who will resell it for a fee, without getting our permission. In the last 5 years we've had roughly this policy in place, we've not had any authors come to us needing more than these rights.
We've also made some attempts at liberalizing access as far as we could be comfortable with it. One of our journals has been completely free from its start 3 years ago, and is doing quite well; it's funding comes from national laboratories and institutions that "donate" for its support, rather than paying a subscription price. Something like that model would be great to generalize if institutions could actually be committed to it - even for a small journal it's rather a lot of work though. The "public library of science" could be interpreted as another route to this sort of funding mechanism - but it's a backhanded route; why not make it explicit and provide free access (in exchange for institutional "donations") from the start rather than waiting six months?
Anyway, I'll check out the debate you mention at the publiclibraryofscience site; probably worth bringing out some of the old arguments again in the new forum.
Yup. Though if the main site has blocked you, you should still be able to get in through a mirror site - we operate one at:
http://aps.arxiv.org/.
Send me email if you can't get in there.
Well, I hate to tell you this, but if it's not "more complicated than you think", it is certainly different from what you think.
While scientific publishing rakes in "hundreds of millions a year" (maybe a billion world-wide total (not net) revenue) the total costs of scientific research worldwide are a couple of orders of magnitude bigger than that. Counting both grants (close to $30 billion now at NIH alone) and salaries, that's a lot of money. From the publishing perspective, they are providing a communications, peer review, and ranking service to science, coming at a cost of 1 to 2% of the total spent on science. Is that such a terrible charge for such apparently useful services?
The "public library of science" provides only one of the three services I mentioned (communications), and simply assumes the other services publishers provide will continue on somehow even while they are forced to give up some or all of their revenue from their monopoly on communications. Where do you propose the money come from to support these services? Would you be willing to pay all the costs ($1000 to $4000) as an author? What about authors of important research with not so much funding (at institutions in Africa, say). Or should government grants support these activities? Without laying that support foundation, taking away journal revenue is a sure-fire recipe for failure, one way or another.
I read the Nature debate on this before it appeared here on /., and we've been debating something like this pretty strenuously online for the past 3 years over at Sigma Xi. The issue that has caused the Nature debate is a proposed boycott of journals that refuse to make papers older than 6 months available free online (specifically to the "Public Library of Science", but free redistribution beyond that seems to be assumed). As several people in the Nature debate have pointed out, this puts all the burden for paying for what journals do on the market for immediate "news" - quality articles, and is likely to have several quite serious detrimental effects.
Where I work (The Physical Review, published by the non-profit American Physical Society) we've spent the last few years scanning in all our old papers (going back over 100 years) to make them available online for a fee. Last month people downloaded over 150 Gigabytes of these old papers from our site (something like 200,000 individual papers downloaded) -- but these would never have been put online without a publisher with a steady revenue stream to sink a few million dollars into them. And in the long run we expect them to more than pay for themselves, so as we're non-profit that lowers the cost to libraries and other subscribers of the new material we publish.
What about those ridiculous journal prices? Some of the publishers are indeed for-profit companies (Elsevier Science being the biggest now) and many of them have Microsoft-sized monopoly profit margins of 30 or 40% on their scientific journal business. Which is why boycott or other proposals that strike all journals equally are going to weaken us with our 0% profit margin a lot faster than a commercial publisher...
But journal pricing is a tricky business. Unlike what has been suggested by others in this forum, except for very high-volume items (probably no journal in the sciences qualifies), printing and distribution are very far from dominating the costs these days. For us they amount to 20-25% of total costs, and are dropping quickly as our subscribers move to online subscriptions. Another big area of costs for us is the copy-editing process that turns whatever files or pieces of paper we get from the authors into a coherent component of a larger body of work. Costs in this area have actually increased in recent years because we are doing a lot more "tagging" of the content; everything we publish now has an SGML file behind it ready for re-use (for example in constructing reliable online links to other articles cited by the authors). This amounts to roughly 30-35% of total expenses for our journals.
The final piece of the cost for us, around 40-45% of the total, is in the management of peer review. We pay the salaries of a large number of editors (PhD physicists, some full-time, some part-time) who make the decisions about what hoops they need authors to jump through to actually get their article published. Often, particularly for the papers we end up rejecting, this involves mediating a strenuous scientific debate between referees and authors. This is hard intellectual work, and involves 1 to 3 or more hours of effort for each of the 24,000 papers we receive every year. And you need a support staff, building, equipment, etc. adding overhead to it all.
And then you have to divide these costs by the number of subscribers to get a per-subscriber journal price. Some of the very high-priced journals are that way mostly because they don't have many subscribers; it's a vicious circle. Which makes it hard to compare the real costs of one journal with another, unless you factor in total circulation figures.
Could this all really be done free? Certainly not with the same level of quality. Is this level of quality actually necessary? Well, we hope so: people seem to be still paying for it. Our goal is as far as possible to lower our costs, to lower the prices we charge, and to broaden the distribution of the information. We're definitely looking at new markets (the 100+ year archive is one of them) to help broaden our cost base and keep those prices down. Electronic publishing allows you to do a lot more - lower prices to developing countries for example is easy to do. The purpose of our parent organization is "to advance and diffuse the knowledge of physics", and any way we can do that better, we'll try doing it. But giving all our stuff away for free just doesn't make any sense, at least not yet.