The peer review is done for free by professors (usually their grad students and then rubber staamped by the professor)
Don't be so cynical. I've never known any professors to pass off reviewing articles to their students. I wouldn't want a crappy paper to get published, and know that it was partly my fault because I let someone unqualified review it.
In fact, recently I was asked to review a very bad paper by a journal. I wanted to show it to a couple of my students, as an example of a bad paper, and point out some things they should avoid doing when writing their own papers. I wasn't sure it was ethical for me to show the paper to my students (after all, the journal sent it to me in confidence; it was unpublished research, which I should not really be disseminating). I asked a few colleagues, and they all agreed that I shouldn't give copies to my students, even after removing the author's name.
...and then $1 / year should be enough to host the average paper in perpetuity forever
You really think $1/year is enough, to host the web site, keep everything organized, process the incoming files, etc.? I sure wouldn't want to take that job for $1/year, not even for $1/paper/year. Even if you did find someone to do it for $1/year, you still have the Internet hosting fees to pay.
I guess my problem is that I simply cannot see how the author-pays model would become more expensive for a university/organization.
It made sense to me. Right now, many universities subscribe to a journal, even if their own researchers don't publish in that journal. So the costs of the journal are being spread across many universities. If only the authors' fees paid costs for those journals, then only the authors' universities would be covering the journal's costs. So a much smaller number of universities would be splitting those costs, and the ones still paying would therefore have to pay more than under the previous system, when the costs were spread among more places.
Actually when I first read the article, I was thinking that the author fees would have to be really huge in order to bring in as much money as subscription fees currently do. Although maybe they could use a hybrid model, e.g. author fees and much cheaper subscription fees.
80-90% of the papers are from university (tenured) people. The department can easily afford to pay for each academic to submit their papers.
I don't know which universities you've been at, but many budgets are in pretty bad shape these days. Several state universities I'm familiar with are really hurting these days. Some depts can't afford many of the things they need; there's no way they could "easily" afford authors' fees. If they do pay such fees, it would be at the expense of something else they need.
In practice right now that's what happens but in reverse, in my experience. Every time I publish an article, after that I get asked to review articles by several other journals. If I don't publish for a while, I'm less likely to be asked.
I also get asked to review papers which cite my papers. In principle that's often a good way to choose reviewers, since usually papers that cite me are on related topics, and I would be more qualified to evaluate them.
If journals shift to author-pays, the problem is that people without research grants, in departments without much money floating around, won't be able to publish under that model. If someone has a good idea and writes it up well, they should be able to publish, no matter how poor they are, or how poor their department is (or even if they are unemployed). In the past, I published in one journal that charged authors a publishing fee (to help offset some of the costs), but you could sign a form saying you didn't have sufficient funding, in which case they'd waive the fee (up to once per year). That's a good system, as long as people are honest about it -- get money from those who can afford it.
Finally, I'll just mention, as many people know, the actual peer reviewing is unpaid work, at least I've never gotten paid for reviewing papers. People do it for various reasons. One reason is that it's technically part of the job requirements for university faculty. One component of faculty jobs is "service", to one's own department, college, university, and field of study. So every time I review a journal article, it's another line I can put on my annual report. If I didn't do any service, I don't think I'd lose my job, but during my evaluations by my dept, they may say something.
There are 3 components to academic jobs: research, teaching, and service; service is generally the least important one out of the three at all the universities I've been at, but it is still encouraged.
As a programmer, I am much more productive in Linux because I can tie almost everything I do in Gnome (or KDE) to a key command. I don't use the mouse very much (or at all) while programming in gvim or Eclipse, and it really slows me down when I need to, say, launch a terminal or a browser.
I also hate to use the mouse, and like to use function keys for everything. But I could never figure out how to program the function keys the way I want in Gnome or KDE. I actually use an ancient window manager (fvwm2 with AnotherLevel macros from RedHat 5) because I was able to make it do what I want.
E.g. if I have a bunch of mozilla windows open, I've got the window manager configured so that every time I hit the F9 key, it moves to the next mozilla window, bringing it into the foreground and giving it keyboard focus. I can cycle through my mozilla windows by repeatedly hitting F9.
I've got a ton of such keys programmed, e.g. ctrl-shift-F7 goes to the next xdvi window, F10 goes to my emacs window, and so on.
Can Gnome/KDE be made to do this? As opposed to programming them to run a particular command when I hit various function keys?
Real bonus points would be to have the above behavior, but be clever enough that if I hit say F9 and there aren't any mozilla windows open, to then run a new mozilla process to open one.
The Nature article mentions that the natural materials silver and gold work well for visible-light shielding. So maybe if you dress up in a suit made of silver and gold, no one will see you. Or at least, pretend not to see you.
Will their next research grant proposal say "we're working on an invisibility shield. Please send more silver and gold for us to continue the work"?
OK, last one. Their research paper on arxiv.org begins the analysis section with "consider a spherical scatterer of radius a..." It reminds me of the story about the dairy farmer who goes to a mathematician/physicist/scientist-of-your-favorite -discipline for advice about improving efficiency of his dairy farm. After going away and doing the analysis, the scientist comes back and begins with "consider a spherical cow..." So maybe these guys can make microscopic spherical cows invisible, but only to a single frequency of light (or by covering said microscopic spherical cows in silver and gold if using visible light)?
All jokes aside, obviously these guys are not ready to make an invisible car or airplane. But who knows what benefits the research will have down the road. When you start research, you don't always know where it will lead, or how long it will take to get somewhere very useful. If we demanded that all research projects produce immediately useful results, most research would not get funded.
Check out this story from way back when. In the words of one of slashdot's own editors, "Without proper verification, this story would not have run. Period." Hard to believe, isn't it? This place has evolved over time.
You don't know much about academic publishing. Academics routinely ignore the author order to refer to the senior person in the lab/institute, or to give a favourite author more credit.
I've published 6 journal articles and a couple of book chapters, in fields ranging from mathematical biology to physics to philosophy, so I know enough to get by.
Refer to them in what context? When publishing a paper in a journal, when you reference another paper with 3 or more authors, you cite it as "Foo et al" where Foo is the first author of that paper. You don't get to choose which author you want to list.
I suppose when talking at a conference, or just posting stuff on a web page, you could refer to other peoples' work however you like. But if you don't list the first author's name first, it makes it hard for other people to find the paper you're referring to. (Although in this case their paper isn't published yet anyway.)
If Rubin was really the team leader, he should have been first author. Maybe Rubin is head of the lab this project was done in, but presumably he wasn't head of this particular project. After skimming through the web site and paper, I didn't see anything indicating why Rubin's name was the one chosen for the slashdot summary, so I was just curious.
Why does the slashdot summary say the work was done by "Avi Rubin et.al." when Rubin was the 5th out of 6 authors on the paper? Why not say Steve Bono et. al., since he was the first author?
You jest, but... I have a web page which has some information a bit related to monkeys. Many people find that page when they do a search for "monkey pictures", which I've noticed when skimming through my web logs.
One day quite some time ago, I came across someone who had found my web page by searching for "monkey pictures" but who had also added a "-sex" to avoid pages mentioning sex. Ever since then, I've wondered what they had come across earlier when searching for monkey pictures which made them feel they needed to add a "no sex" option to their search...
another interview with her
on
Google Tidbits
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Among other things, it talks about how many links they have on the main Google page. There's also a funny bit about some guy who sometimes sends them e-mail containing only a 2-digit number. They finally figured out the guy was e-mailing them the number of words on the main Google page, presumably to let them know he is getting annoyed when there are too many (e.g. when it got up to 52 words).:-)
Oh, and there's a much bigger version of the picture of her from the previous interview, here.
I agree that the addition of the "I'm Feeling Lucky" does keep the main google page from looking too barren.
I don't use it myself, because I always like to see where I'm being sent before I click on something. The "I'm Feeling Lucky" button doesn't permit this. So I always do a regular search, which shows where the links go before I click on them.
Since so few people apparently use it, I wonder if they'll replace it with something else if they come up with some other clever idea, something else to keep the "Google Search" button from being too lonely.
I can relate to your complaint about being cited in inappropriate or disappointing ways. Twice now one of my papers has been cited, and an exact phrase I used in my paper was directly quoted. Fine, except that quote was not at all the point of my paper. The interesting thing is, both people quoted exactly the same phrase, so I think what happened is the second person read the first person's paper who quoted me, and then simply cited the same quote from my paper. It really makes me wonder if the second person even ready my paper.
I haven't read that second paper yet, only glanced at it, but I'll be reading it shortly, since the journal sent it to me to review it!
Oh, and I have seen utter crap published in decent journals now and then. One of the worst examples I remember was not from scientists who were known to me, so I don't think their paper passed peer review simply based on their reputations. I think you must realize there is a large degree of stochasticity in the review process -- you can write a great paper, but when 3 people review it, for whatever reasons, one or even two of them may simply decide they don't like it, then you're out of luck. If you could re-submit it to the same journal and have them select 3 new reviewers, there's a very good chance they'd all like it (of course, journals don't allow you to do this, but you can submit the same paper to another journal of equal "quality" later and all the reviewers may love it, even though you didn't change a thing).
So I can believe that a crap paper can pass review just by luck sometimes, if it happens to get a cohort of "easy" reviewers assigned to it. Although admittedly, in the example you mention, the reviewers may very well have been swayed by the author's reputation. I don't have enough experience yet to say whether or not the journal editor was also likely influenced in this way, but I'd really like to think he/she wasn't.
My most brutal trip through peer review was last year, when one journal had 7 (!) people review my paper. I don't believe it was because the paper was of questionable quality, either. I think maybe they asked a bunch of people to review it, figuring X% of them would say "yes", but that in fact they ALL said yes. I got back a MOUNTAIN of comments to respond to. Then, right after that I banged out a little paper in a few weeks and sent it to another journal of equal standing, and they wrote back in about a month and said they'd publish it as-is, with no changes at all (and in fact I didn't even get any reviewers' comments back). Now I know that second paper wasn't as "good" as the first one, but it was 100 times easier to publish it.
Oh, and just to put all this in context, I got my PhD 3 years ago, and am in my 3rd year in a tenure-track position, and my field is theoretical biology.
That description you gave (branching to chaos, then three clean branches appear, and descend into chaos again), is not a description of the standard predator-prey model as you claimed, which is a system of two ordinary differential equations. Instead, the phenomenon you described comes from the discrete-time logistic equation of a single population with a carrying capacity (per-capita output per time step is a linearly decreasing function of current population size), which is a difference equation, rather than differential equation.
Note that you can see some pretty interesting "pre-painted" gear directly at the company's website.
Thanks! I was going to click on one of the five links to the company's website in the review, but I was afraid maybe the review site was in cahoots with Flexiglow or something, and felt a bit reluctant to click on their whoring links. But here in the pure and innocent environment of Slashdot, I can safely click on the link you provided.
...when the customer is clearly going to be screwed, they always try to spin it as some sort of benefit.
In my local supermarket, they've put anti-theft devices on one wheel of each shopping cart. It makes the wheel lock up if you remove the shopping cart from the parking lot.
My favorite part about it is they sign they have posted letting people know about this feature. The sign prominently says that this is "for the convenience of the customer". Yeah, it's a great convenience for me --- for years I've been wishing they'd put an anti-theft gizmo on the shopping cart wheels; it's been such an inconvenience without it. Those marketing folks just have to squeeze their crap in wherever they can, huh?
Oh, yeah, another pet peeve: why is election coverage about who's ahead, rather than who's going to do what in office?
Probably for the same reason most of the movie coverage talks about how much money the movies have earned, or predicting how much they will earn, rather than other aspects of the movies.
At least that's one nice thing about Ebert and Roeper's show, they practically never say "oh, this movie is going to earn tons of money" (except sometimes in an unhappy way when they review a crappy movie which they know everyone is going to go watch). They simply review the movies.
I wish I were getting kickbacks from the publishers for textbooks. (Well, not really, it would certainly influence some people's decisions of which book to use, and I'd rather not have that even be a factor.)
Anyway, I've never heard of such a thing.
Although profs who use their own books do get royalties off those copies their own students buy. In my mind, it is in morally gray territory. One could say "OK, profs won't get royalties from students in courses they teach". (Then what happens to those royalties? Best would probably simply be to make the text that much cheaper for those students.) But that prof may still have significant influence over the text used by courses which are taught by others in his/her dept, or friends/colleagues at other places, etc. No solution would be perfect.
I haven't published any textbooks (yet), so I can still be relatively unbiased about this.:-)
I am a (relatively new, i.e. not yet tenured) professor.
I also hate those "study aid" websites because of the ones I've seen, when you buy the book, it includes some kind of license to access the web site. When the book is then re-sold used, the new buyer doesn't have access. Now I haven't paid attention to how they control access; I'm sure if the original buyer of the books made an effort, they could pass along necessary info, e.g. write the password to access the web site in the textbook itself, so the person who buys it used could also have access. But some publishers have been touting benefits to me such as, students can do on-line quizzes, and the web site will keep track of the grades on them, etc. Which raises two more issues: 1) how do I know their data are secure, and 2) I'm sure the publishers realize this whole thing is another way to prevent people from buying used books. Especially if they can get people hooked on that web site, and make access to the site be tied to a particular person (i.e. having info about their grades).
Because of that (mainly reason (2)), I want nothing to do with those other "services" associated with books. And I have warned other faculty in my dept not to fall for these scams.
Oh, and fortunately no new editions of the linear algebra text I teach from have come out in the short time (2 years) I've been teaching it. It's a $100 book, but it really is better than cheaper ones I've looked at. Another prof in my dept uses a book that costs something like $15, I definitely gave it a long hard look, but there is just no way I could make the students use that one.
What i do like about the cartridge is the fact that they will stand the test of time much better than our slowly corroding DVD and CD media. I think all my old Atari 2600 carts will still boot.
I thought so too. But recently I dug out my Mario 64 for the Nintendo 64, which I'd bought when it came out, but somehow never got around to playing it much. Now when I try to play it, the game always freezes up sometime during the first level. I had the cartridge stored in a nice enough place, not too hot/cold/humid, so I'm not sure what the problem is. I'm pretty bummed, I was all set to finally play through the game, now that I've totally beaten Mario Kart Double Dash on Gamecube.
I filled out fake info when applying for my supermarket card. But the problem is, I almost always use a credit card when grocery shopping. Even if I resort to tricks that others have suggested, e.g. swapping shopper cards with friends, if the store really wanted to track me, they could do it via the credit card ("oh, this credit card is tied to shopper card #4382 this week; last week that credit card was tied to shopper card 7765").
It's a pain to go back to using cash. To really avoid being tracked, I'd have to use cash (I wouldn't mind continuing to use the shopper card with fake info to save a few bucks). I'm just not enough of a privacy nut that I'm willing to suffer the inconvenience of using cash all the time.
Thanks for the LugNet link. I found it there, it was 956 Auto Chassis. It came out in 1977, so I was 9 at the time. Boy am I ticked that I gave up my lego stuff as I got older. I think my parents talked me into selling them off at a tag sale.
I did some googling, and haven't actually been able to find any pictures of the car set I'm thinking of. It wasn't the car with the engine in back. The engine was in front, 4-cylinder. It had rack and pinion steering. Anyone know which one I mean, or know of any pics of it?
When I was a kid, one of the highlights of my experiences with Lego was when I got the Technics set which let you build a car with working steering, and the engine cylinders moved when you rolled the car. It also had instructions for building a motorcycle, I believe. It was a pretty big set. I built tons of stuff from that, along with the combined pieces from my zillions of other small "normal" sets that I had.
Wow, I would really love to have one of those car Technic sets again. Anyone else remember that one?
We really enjoy the Thomas train sets too, since we do all the track layouts. Toys are fun.
My sister's kids (2 and 4 years old) love Thomas too, but wow that stuff is expensive. I mean, $90 for one little piece like a crane or a building or something! It's insane. Small track kits can easily run $150 from what I saw.
I got the 4-year-old a couple of Thomas PC games, which he likes playing. It took him a while to learn how to use the mouse, but now he's quite good at it. He can build tracks in the game, fly Harold the Helicopter, and other stuff (it doesn't take away from his enjoyment of the "real" Thomas toys either -- not trying to turn him into a little video game addict).
Slashdot Mirror
The peer review is done for free by professors (usually their grad students and then rubber staamped by the professor)
...and then $1 / year should be enough to host the average paper in perpetuity forever
Don't be so cynical. I've never known any professors to pass off reviewing articles to their students. I wouldn't want a crappy paper to get published, and know that it was partly my fault because I let someone unqualified review it.
In fact, recently I was asked to review a very bad paper by a journal. I wanted to show it to a couple of my students, as an example of a bad paper, and point out some things they should avoid doing when writing their own papers. I wasn't sure it was ethical for me to show the paper to my students (after all, the journal sent it to me in confidence; it was unpublished research, which I should not really be disseminating). I asked a few colleagues, and they all agreed that I shouldn't give copies to my students, even after removing the author's name.
You really think $1/year is enough, to host the web site, keep everything organized, process the incoming files, etc.? I sure wouldn't want to take that job for $1/year, not even for $1/paper/year. Even if you did find someone to do it for $1/year, you still have the Internet hosting fees to pay.
I guess my problem is that I simply cannot see how the author-pays model would become more expensive for a university/organization.
It made sense to me. Right now, many universities subscribe to a journal, even if their own researchers don't publish in that journal. So the costs of the journal are being spread across many universities. If only the authors' fees paid costs for those journals, then only the authors' universities would be covering the journal's costs. So a much smaller number of universities would be splitting those costs, and the ones still paying would therefore have to pay more than under the previous system, when the costs were spread among more places.
Actually when I first read the article, I was thinking that the author fees would have to be really huge in order to bring in as much money as subscription fees currently do. Although maybe they could use a hybrid model, e.g. author fees and much cheaper subscription fees.
80-90% of the papers are from university (tenured) people. The department can easily afford to pay for each academic to submit their papers.
I don't know which universities you've been at, but many budgets are in pretty bad shape these days. Several state universities I'm familiar with are really hurting these days. Some depts can't afford many of the things they need; there's no way they could "easily" afford authors' fees. If they do pay such fees, it would be at the expense of something else they need.
In practice right now that's what happens but in reverse, in my experience. Every time I publish an article, after that I get asked to review articles by several other journals. If I don't publish for a while, I'm less likely to be asked.
I also get asked to review papers which cite my papers. In principle that's often a good way to choose reviewers, since usually papers that cite me are on related topics, and I would be more qualified to evaluate them.
If journals shift to author-pays, the problem is that people without research grants, in departments without much money floating around, won't be able to publish under that model. If someone has a good idea and writes it up well, they should be able to publish, no matter how poor they are, or how poor their department is (or even if they are unemployed). In the past, I published in one journal that charged authors a publishing fee (to help offset some of the costs), but you could sign a form saying you didn't have sufficient funding, in which case they'd waive the fee (up to once per year). That's a good system, as long as people are honest about it -- get money from those who can afford it.
Finally, I'll just mention, as many people know, the actual peer reviewing is unpaid work, at least I've never gotten paid for reviewing papers. People do it for various reasons. One reason is that it's technically part of the job requirements for university faculty. One component of faculty jobs is "service", to one's own department, college, university, and field of study. So every time I review a journal article, it's another line I can put on my annual report. If I didn't do any service, I don't think I'd lose my job, but during my evaluations by my dept, they may say something.
There are 3 components to academic jobs: research, teaching, and service; service is generally the least important one out of the three at all the universities I've been at, but it is still encouraged.
As a programmer, I am much more productive in Linux because I can tie almost everything I do in Gnome (or KDE) to a key command. I don't use the mouse very much (or at all) while programming in gvim or Eclipse, and it really slows me down when I need to, say, launch a terminal or a browser.
I also hate to use the mouse, and like to use function keys for everything. But I could never figure out how to program the function keys the way I want in Gnome or KDE. I actually use an ancient window manager (fvwm2 with AnotherLevel macros from RedHat 5) because I was able to make it do what I want.
E.g. if I have a bunch of mozilla windows open, I've got the window manager configured so that every time I hit the F9 key, it moves to the next mozilla window, bringing it into the foreground and giving it keyboard focus. I can cycle through my mozilla windows by repeatedly hitting F9.
I've got a ton of such keys programmed, e.g. ctrl-shift-F7 goes to the next xdvi window, F10 goes to my emacs window, and so on.
Can Gnome/KDE be made to do this? As opposed to programming them to run a particular command when I hit various function keys?
Real bonus points would be to have the above behavior, but be clever enough that if I hit say F9 and there aren't any mozilla windows open, to then run a new mozilla process to open one.
The Nature article mentions that the natural materials silver and gold work well for visible-light shielding. So maybe if you dress up in a suit made of silver and gold, no one will see you. Or at least, pretend not to see you.
e -discipline for advice about improving efficiency of his dairy farm. After going away and doing the analysis, the scientist comes back and begins with "consider a spherical cow..." So maybe these guys can make microscopic spherical cows invisible, but only to a single frequency of light (or by covering said microscopic spherical cows in silver and gold if using visible light)?
Will their next research grant proposal say "we're working on an invisibility shield. Please send more silver and gold for us to continue the work"?
OK, last one. Their research paper on arxiv.org begins the analysis section with "consider a spherical scatterer of radius a..." It reminds me of the story about the dairy farmer who goes to a mathematician/physicist/scientist-of-your-favorit
All jokes aside, obviously these guys are not ready to make an invisible car or airplane. But who knows what benefits the research will have down the road. When you start research, you don't always know where it will lead, or how long it will take to get somewhere very useful. If we demanded that all research projects produce immediately useful results, most research would not get funded.
Check out this story from way back when. In the words of one of slashdot's own editors, "Without proper verification, this story would not have run. Period." Hard to believe, isn't it? This place has evolved over time.
You don't know much about academic publishing. Academics routinely ignore the author order to refer to the senior person in the lab/institute, or to give a favourite author more credit.
I've published 6 journal articles and a couple of book chapters, in fields ranging from mathematical biology to physics to philosophy, so I know enough to get by.
Refer to them in what context? When publishing a paper in a journal, when you reference another paper with 3 or more authors, you cite it as "Foo et al" where Foo is the first author of that paper. You don't get to choose which author you want to list.
I suppose when talking at a conference, or just posting stuff on a web page, you could refer to other peoples' work however you like. But if you don't list the first author's name first, it makes it hard for other people to find the paper you're referring to. (Although in this case their paper isn't published yet anyway.)
If Rubin was really the team leader, he should have been first author. Maybe Rubin is head of the lab this project was done in, but presumably he wasn't head of this particular project. After skimming through the web site and paper, I didn't see anything indicating why Rubin's name was the one chosen for the slashdot summary, so I was just curious.
Why does the slashdot summary say the work was done by "Avi Rubin et.al." when Rubin was the 5th out of 6 authors on the paper? Why not say Steve Bono et. al., since he was the first author?
Where can I download this monkey porn?
You jest, but... I have a web page which has some information a bit related to monkeys. Many people find that page when they do a search for "monkey pictures", which I've noticed when skimming through my web logs.
One day quite some time ago, I came across someone who had found my web page by searching for "monkey pictures" but who had also added a "-sex" to avoid pages mentioning sex. Ever since then, I've wondered what they had come across earlier when searching for monkey pictures which made them feel they needed to add a "no sex" option to their search...
There is another interview with her here.
:-)
Among other things, it talks about how many links they have on the main Google page. There's also a funny bit about some guy who sometimes sends them e-mail containing only a 2-digit number. They finally figured out the guy was e-mailing them the number of words on the main Google page, presumably to let them know he is getting annoyed when there are too many (e.g. when it got up to 52 words).
Oh, and there's a much bigger version of the picture of her from the previous interview, here.
I agree that the addition of the "I'm Feeling Lucky" does keep the main google page from looking too barren.
I don't use it myself, because I always like to see where I'm being sent before I click on something. The "I'm Feeling Lucky" button doesn't permit this. So I always do a regular search, which shows where the links go before I click on them.
Since so few people apparently use it, I wonder if they'll replace it with something else if they come up with some other clever idea, something else to keep the "Google Search" button from being too lonely.
I can relate to your complaint about being cited in inappropriate or disappointing ways. Twice now one of my papers has been cited, and an exact phrase I used in my paper was directly quoted. Fine, except that quote was not at all the point of my paper. The interesting thing is, both people quoted exactly the same phrase, so I think what happened is the second person read the first person's paper who quoted me, and then simply cited the same quote from my paper. It really makes me wonder if the second person even ready my paper.
I haven't read that second paper yet, only glanced at it, but I'll be reading it shortly, since the journal sent it to me to review it!
Oh, and I have seen utter crap published in decent journals now and then. One of the worst examples I remember was not from scientists who were known to me, so I don't think their paper passed peer review simply based on their reputations. I think you must realize there is a large degree of stochasticity in the review process -- you can write a great paper, but when 3 people review it, for whatever reasons, one or even two of them may simply decide they don't like it, then you're out of luck. If you could re-submit it to the same journal and have them select 3 new reviewers, there's a very good chance they'd all like it (of course, journals don't allow you to do this, but you can submit the same paper to another journal of equal "quality" later and all the reviewers may love it, even though you didn't change a thing).
So I can believe that a crap paper can pass review just by luck sometimes, if it happens to get a cohort of "easy" reviewers assigned to it. Although admittedly, in the example you mention, the reviewers may very well have been swayed by the author's reputation. I don't have enough experience yet to say whether or not the journal editor was also likely influenced in this way, but I'd really like to think he/she wasn't.
My most brutal trip through peer review was last year, when one journal had 7 (!) people review my paper. I don't believe it was because the paper was of questionable quality, either. I think maybe they asked a bunch of people to review it, figuring X% of them would say "yes", but that in fact they ALL said yes. I got back a MOUNTAIN of comments to respond to. Then, right after that I banged out a little paper in a few weeks and sent it to another journal of equal standing, and they wrote back in about a month and said they'd publish it as-is, with no changes at all (and in fact I didn't even get any reviewers' comments back). Now I know that second paper wasn't as "good" as the first one, but it was 100 times easier to publish it.
Oh, and just to put all this in context, I got my PhD 3 years ago, and am in my 3rd year in a tenure-track position, and my field is theoretical biology.
That description you gave (branching to chaos, then three clean branches appear, and descend into chaos again), is not a description of the standard predator-prey model as you claimed, which is a system of two ordinary differential equations. Instead, the phenomenon you described comes from the discrete-time logistic equation of a single population with a carrying capacity (per-capita output per time step is a linearly decreasing function of current population size), which is a difference equation, rather than differential equation.
Note that you can see some pretty interesting "pre-painted" gear directly at the company's website.
Thanks! I was going to click on one of the five links to the company's website in the review, but I was afraid maybe the review site was in cahoots with Flexiglow or something, and felt a bit reluctant to click on their whoring links. But here in the pure and innocent environment of Slashdot, I can safely click on the link you provided.
Thanks again !
In my local supermarket, they've put anti-theft devices on one wheel of each shopping cart. It makes the wheel lock up if you remove the shopping cart from the parking lot.
My favorite part about it is they sign they have posted letting people know about this feature. The sign prominently says that this is "for the convenience of the customer". Yeah, it's a great convenience for me --- for years I've been wishing they'd put an anti-theft gizmo on the shopping cart wheels; it's been such an inconvenience without it. Those marketing folks just have to squeeze their crap in wherever they can, huh?
Oh, yeah, another pet peeve: why is election coverage about who's ahead, rather than who's going to do what in office?
Probably for the same reason most of the movie coverage talks about how much money the movies have earned, or predicting how much they will earn, rather than other aspects of the movies.
At least that's one nice thing about Ebert and Roeper's show, they practically never say "oh, this movie is going to earn tons of money" (except sometimes in an unhappy way when they review a crappy movie which they know everyone is going to go watch). They simply review the movies.
I am a faculty member at a university.
:-)
I wish I were getting kickbacks from the publishers for textbooks. (Well, not really, it would certainly influence some people's decisions of which book to use, and I'd rather not have that even be a factor.)
Anyway, I've never heard of such a thing.
Although profs who use their own books do get royalties off those copies their own students buy. In my mind, it is in morally gray territory. One could say "OK, profs won't get royalties from students in courses they teach". (Then what happens to those royalties? Best would probably simply be to make the text that much cheaper for those students.) But that prof may still have significant influence over the text used by courses which are taught by others in his/her dept, or friends/colleagues at other places, etc. No solution would be perfect.
I haven't published any textbooks (yet), so I can still be relatively unbiased about this.
I am a (relatively new, i.e. not yet tenured) professor.
I also hate those "study aid" websites because of the ones I've seen, when you buy the book, it includes some kind of license to access the web site. When the book is then re-sold used, the new buyer doesn't have access. Now I haven't paid attention to how they control access; I'm sure if the original buyer of the books made an effort, they could pass along necessary info, e.g. write the password to access the web site in the textbook itself, so the person who buys it used could also have access. But some publishers have been touting benefits to me such as, students can do on-line quizzes, and the web site will keep track of the grades on them, etc. Which raises two more issues:
1) how do I know their data are secure, and
2) I'm sure the publishers realize this whole thing is another way to prevent people from buying used books. Especially if they can get people hooked on that web site, and make access to the site be tied to a particular person (i.e. having info about their grades).
Because of that (mainly reason (2)), I want nothing to do with those other "services" associated with books. And I have warned other faculty in my dept not to fall for these scams.
Oh, and fortunately no new editions of the linear algebra text I teach from have come out in the short time (2 years) I've been teaching it. It's a $100 book, but it really is better than cheaper ones I've looked at. Another prof in my dept uses a book that costs something like $15, I definitely gave it a long hard look, but there is just no way I could make the students use that one.
What i do like about the cartridge is the fact that they will stand the test of time much better than our slowly corroding DVD and CD media. I think all my old Atari 2600 carts will still boot.
I thought so too. But recently I dug out my Mario 64 for the Nintendo 64, which I'd bought when it came out, but somehow never got around to playing it much. Now when I try to play it, the game always freezes up sometime during the first level. I had the cartridge stored in a nice enough place, not too hot/cold/humid, so I'm not sure what the problem is. I'm pretty bummed, I was all set to finally play through the game, now that I've totally beaten Mario Kart Double Dash on Gamecube.
I filled out fake info when applying for my supermarket card. But the problem is, I almost always use a credit card when grocery shopping. Even if I resort to tricks that others have suggested, e.g. swapping shopper cards with friends, if the store really wanted to track me, they could do it via the credit card ("oh, this credit card is tied to shopper card #4382 this week; last week that credit card was tied to shopper card 7765").
It's a pain to go back to using cash. To really avoid being tracked, I'd have to use cash (I wouldn't mind continuing to use the shopper card with fake info to save a few bucks).
I'm just not enough of a privacy nut that I'm willing to suffer the inconvenience of using cash all the time.
Thanks for the LugNet link. I found it there, it was 956 Auto Chassis. It came out in 1977, so I was 9 at the time. Boy am I ticked that I gave up my lego stuff as I got older. I think my parents talked me into selling them off at a tag sale.
I did some googling, and haven't actually been able to find any pictures of the car set I'm thinking of. It wasn't the car with the engine in back. The engine was in front, 4-cylinder. It had rack and pinion steering. Anyone know which one I mean, or know of any pics of it?
When I was a kid, one of the highlights of my experiences with Lego was when I got the Technics set which let you build a car with working steering, and the engine cylinders moved when you rolled the car. It also had instructions for building a motorcycle, I believe. It was a pretty big set. I built tons of stuff from that, along with the combined pieces from my zillions of other small "normal" sets that I had.
Wow, I would really love to have one of those car Technic sets again. Anyone else remember that one?
We really enjoy the Thomas train sets too, since we do all the track layouts. Toys are fun.
My sister's kids (2 and 4 years old) love Thomas too, but wow that stuff is expensive. I mean, $90 for one little piece like a crane or a building or something! It's insane. Small track kits can easily run $150 from what I saw.
I got the 4-year-old a couple of Thomas PC games, which he likes playing. It took him a while to learn how to use the mouse, but now he's quite good at it. He can build tracks in the game, fly Harold the Helicopter, and other stuff (it doesn't take away from his enjoyment of the "real" Thomas toys either -- not trying to turn him into a little video game addict).