Isn't that dangerous though? No one knows what the citations are really about more than the people that wrote them. If you cite a reviewer's paper without reading the paper first, you risk looking like an ass when your paper hits their desk!
True, and I'm not saying it's a wise idea to do if you can possibly avoid it. But often you can get a pretty good idea about what the paper says from reading the abstract (which is generally freely available on-line, even if the paper itself isn't)
As someone who has written a number of scientific papers (and yes, sometimes, but not often, cited articles that I haven't read), I think there are a couple of reason contributing to the problem:
1) Cost of journals -- often there is an article that ought to be cited in your work (because it was published before yours, and is related), but is in a journal unavailable at your university's library. There are thousands of journals, and their high costs (often thousands of dollars a year each) means that no library can have them all. But why not simply ignore an article you haven't read? Read on.
2) Pride of Reviewers -- When a scientific article is sent to a journal, it is passed on to several researchers who are doing similar work for peer review. While it would nice to think that reviewers are not so petty, the fact is, if you haven't cited their work, they might get angry and reject the paper. So, authors feel that it is better safe than sorry and cite freely.
In my experience, it is extremely rare to find a journal/conference publication that includes enough information in the methods section to allow others to either check or verify the work or use the findings themselves.
Probably depends on the field of research. Working in physics, I've never had that problem
So, you knew that Schon was faking data long before anyone else figured that out? He *was* a physicist, you know, and published in the most respected physics journals.
I suspect if Microsoft were to buy Borland, they would invest in Delphi for.Net (to bring in all the Delphi developers) and sell Kylix to the MKS people or something. They wouldn't just let it die because they know it's a lot of developers they can either gain or lose.
If Delphi went.NET (which wouldn't be that hard -- just add a Pascal compiler with access to the.NET API and call it "Delphi" -- sure it wouldn't be backwards compatible, but neither is VB.NET), what would be the point of Kylix? The whole point was that Kylix was compatible with Delphi, making cross platform development possible.
Despite the fact that intuitively thermophiles seem like weird kooks, in many molecular phylogenetic analyses, thermophiles occupy the deepest branches, suggesting that life adapted to low temperature from high temperature rather than the inverse. This is also supported by the fact that the origin of life is constantly being forced backwards in time due to new evidence. As the early earth was very hot, this also supports a thermophilic origin of life.
That being said, not all phylogenetic analyses support the thermophile-early hypothesis. That's because different genes may have different histories due to horizontal transfer. Further work on whole genome phylogeny will be useful for clarifying the issue.
Re:sigh .. there is no such thing as "macroevoluti
on
Shapes of Time
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Biological evolution is change in the gene pool of a population over time. That's all that it is
You seem to have a narrow view of evolution derived from the classical genetics viewpoint circa 1930. As someone who has written papers on molecular evolution, I could equally claim that "changes in the gene pool" is a fictious concept because from the molecular viewpoint it is obviously just DNA mutations. And a chemist looking at the situation could say "no, it is just chemical reactions" and the physicist could say "no, it is just subatomic interactions". Science works on many different levels. Like the story of the blind men and the elephant, the true story can only be put together from integrating the various viewpoints.
Tune in tomorrow for our next exciting episode, where I learn to use the 'Preview' button.:)
Heck, I thought misspellings were par for the course for Banks' fans. Feersome Endjinn and all that you know.
Re:The other way around
on
Equilibrium
·
· Score: 2
Yes, yes, I *know* Orwell was a Trotskyite and fought in the Spanish Civil War on the side of the socialists -- that's why the Trotsky analogs in his books are always favorably protrayed, and the Stalin analogs are Satanic.
The problem with saying "the pigs aren't communists but fascists" is that Orwell beats the reader down with Soviet analogies. In real life, Trotsky introduced the concept of the five year plan and Stalin opposed it. Later Trotsky was exiled, and Stalin suddenly was in favor of the five year plan -- the opposition was just to get rid of Trotsky. The story of Snowball's windmill and exile is of course really the story of Trotsky's five year plan. The humans running the neighboring farms are the fascists; the ending where the pigs are hard to distinguish from humans is a reference to Stalin's treaty with Hitler.
And as for 1984, if it wasn't really about the Soviet Union, why is the opposition leader (Emmanuel Goldstein) described as a Jewish intellectual who once was influenential in the Party but had since fallen out of favor -- exactly like Orwell's hero Leon Trotsky?
Re:The other way around
on
Equilibrium
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Well, perhaps the best way to look at this was to see what the original source (Orwell's novels) actually contained. It is a cliche to say "Orwell wasn't talking about the Soviet Union; he was talking about where Western society was headed". But that just isn't supported by the books.
In both 1984 and Animal Farm, all the main characters were exact analogies for Soviet figures. Big Brother and Napoleon were obviously Stalin, and Goldstein and Snowball were obviously Trotsky. The problems of Western society, as real as they are, just didn't enter into the equation.
Stop me if I am wrong (and I could, english is not my native language), but when you put a "French" adjective (with a capital letter) you mean "from France" and not "in french".
Actually, in English, all references to names of languages are capitalized. One speaks in English or French (and not in english or french)
Er, Tintin *is* a French comic -- it's in French! Just because it's from Belgium doesn't change that. If the Americans can speak English, the francophone Belgians certainly speak French.
Buy books and rip the binding off. I can usually estimate pretty well how many pages I'm going to read. Just rip a chunk off at a time, the glue binding keeps them all attached.
If that works for you then great, but I guess your reading material consists mostly of mass-market paperbacks. Quite often, I can't easily locate copies of stuff I read in dead-tree form. For example, lately I've gotten into George Orwell. Sure, you can find "1984" and "Animal Farm" in any bookshop, but finding "Down and Out in London and Paris" or "Burmese Days" is a bit harder. Luckily, one can find them on the web.
Exactly -- eBooks are an application of PDA's that the designers never really thought of, and one in which the PDA fulfills much better than full-size dedicated eBook hardware. I like to read books, but often I don't have one with me when I have a few free minutes. A PDA is far more portable than a paperback book and I almost always have mine in my coat pocket.
...for the lethality of removing introns is simply that this may mess up gene regulation. The amount of mRNA transcript produced by each gene has to be carefully regulated for all parts of the cell to function properly. Having junk of the appropriate length in a gene is one way of slowing down the production of a transcript that the cell may not need a lot of. But, hey, that explanation just isn't as sexy as something involving fractals, now is it?
Yes, and because of the Computer Science orientation of most/. readers, they know that some professor's AI project is not going to take control of the nuclear arsenal of the US ala Terminator's Skynet. They understand that such scenarios are just fantasy. And yet similar paranoia applied to a field they don't know that much about is treated like a realistic worry. It's funny, really.
Well, you are confusing two eras here -- the golden age of Computer Shopper (early '90s) with the golden age of Creative Computing (early '80s). And as someone who remembers both eras, I can assure you that Creative Computing did have fewer ads and more content than Computer Shopper. Then again, nobody I knew (including me) actually read any of the so-called "articles" in Computer Shopper -- we just bought it to find the lowest price for RAM and hard drives in the dark ages before the Web.
Now, Creative Computing, well, think of Dr. Dobbs Journal with more of sense of wonder and less "learn this new technology and maybe you won't lose your job at the next rightsizing" attitude
Nice, but what would be cooler than "Brazil" terminals would be working versions of the speakwrite terminals from the John Hurt/Richard Burton version of "1984". You could even set up the interface to do voice recognition of Newspeak: "times 3.12.83 reporting bb dayorder doubleplusungood refs unpersons rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling"
Why can't you understand that just because you can convert the arithmetic value of a year's wages in China to US Dollars, it doesn't actually mean that it has the same *monetary* value? There's this thing called "cost of living", you see. It turns out that for the most part, barring extremes of wealth and poverty, everything consts *proportionally* the same wherever you are in the world.
I have never lived in China, but as an American living in Canada I am quite familar with buying imported American goods. Logically, if this mythical adjustment for "cost of living" really exists, when I buy a book, movie, or CD from America, it should cost just the same in Canadian dollars as it does in American dollars. But it doesn't! It costs 1.5x as much because Canadian dollars are worth less than American dollars. This is of course one of the reasons why there are many more Canadians in American than Americans in Canada.
The difference is in public places airplanes where people who can't stop chatting have to resort to talking with strangers such as myself, I can generally stop their inane chatter by not responding to it. I don't *want* to talk or have to listen to Bob the salesman from Oklahoma City. When these chatterers have cell phones this tactic doesn't work, unfortunately.
Hey, I'm all for open source stuff and I actually even have OpenOffice installed on my work (Windows) laptop. However, you are naive if you think non-geeks can use it at present. I tried to convince a co-worker to use it on her machine at home as she had no office suite installed. She tried it for a week, but concluded that it "sucked".
Why did she feel that way? Well, 1) The keystrokes are complely different -- we can deal with that, but others are less forgiving and 2) The inevitable formating problems when importing MS documents -- again maybe not a biggie for us, but it is for "normal" folk.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't that dangerous though? No one knows what the citations are really about more than the people that wrote them. If you cite a reviewer's paper without reading the paper first, you risk looking like an ass when your paper hits their desk!
True, and I'm not saying it's a wise idea to do if you can possibly avoid it. But often you can get a pretty good idea about what the paper says from reading the abstract (which is generally freely available on-line, even if the paper itself isn't)
As someone who has written a number of scientific papers (and yes, sometimes, but not often, cited articles that I haven't read), I think there are a couple of reason contributing to the problem:
1) Cost of journals -- often there is an article that ought to be cited in your work (because it was published before yours, and is related), but is in a journal unavailable at your university's library. There are thousands of journals, and their high costs (often thousands of dollars a year each) means that no library can have them all. But why not simply ignore an article you haven't read? Read on.
2) Pride of Reviewers -- When a scientific article is sent to a journal, it is passed on to several researchers who are doing similar work for peer review. While it would nice to think that reviewers are not so petty, the fact is, if you haven't cited their work, they might get angry and reject the paper. So, authors feel that it is better safe than sorry and cite freely.
In my experience, it is extremely rare to find a journal/conference publication that includes enough information in the methods section to allow others to either check or verify the work or use the findings themselves.
Probably depends on the field of research. Working in physics, I've never had that problem
So, you knew that Schon was faking data long before anyone else figured that out? He *was* a physicist, you know, and published in the most respected physics journals.
I suspect if Microsoft were to buy Borland, they would invest in Delphi for .Net (to bring in all the Delphi developers) and sell Kylix to the MKS people or something. They wouldn't just let it die because they know it's a lot of developers they can either gain or lose.
.NET (which wouldn't be that hard -- just add a Pascal compiler with access to the .NET API and call it "Delphi" -- sure it wouldn't be backwards compatible, but neither is VB .NET), what would be the point of Kylix? The whole point was that Kylix was compatible with Delphi, making cross platform development possible.
If Delphi went
We're talking about Ultima 7 here. Ultima 5 was the last in the series to make it to the ][...
You have to understand the British. RISC-PC fans are at least as fanatical as Amiga fans are. There is a market, believe it or not.
Despite the fact that intuitively thermophiles seem like weird kooks, in many molecular phylogenetic analyses, thermophiles occupy the deepest branches, suggesting that life adapted to low temperature from high temperature rather than the inverse. This is also supported by the fact that the origin of life is constantly being forced backwards in time due to new evidence. As the early earth was very hot, this also supports a thermophilic origin of life.
That being said, not all phylogenetic analyses support the thermophile-early hypothesis. That's because different genes may have different histories due to horizontal transfer. Further work on whole genome phylogeny will be useful for clarifying the issue.
Biological evolution is change in the gene pool of a population over time. That's all that it is
You seem to have a narrow view of evolution derived from the classical genetics viewpoint circa 1930. As someone who has written papers on molecular evolution, I could equally claim that "changes in the gene pool" is a fictious concept because from the molecular viewpoint it is obviously just DNA mutations. And a chemist looking at the situation could say "no, it is just chemical reactions" and the physicist could say "no, it is just subatomic interactions". Science works on many different levels. Like the story of the blind men and the elephant, the true story can only be put together from integrating the various viewpoints.
Tune in tomorrow for our next exciting episode, where I learn to use the 'Preview' button. :)
Heck, I thought misspellings were par for the course for Banks' fans. Feersome Endjinn and all that you know.
Yes, yes, I *know* Orwell was a Trotskyite and fought in the Spanish Civil War on the side of the socialists -- that's why the Trotsky analogs in his books are always favorably protrayed, and the Stalin analogs are Satanic.
The problem with saying "the pigs aren't communists but fascists" is that Orwell beats the reader down with Soviet analogies. In real life, Trotsky introduced the concept of the five year plan and Stalin opposed it. Later Trotsky was exiled, and Stalin suddenly was in favor of the five year plan -- the opposition was just to get rid of Trotsky. The story of Snowball's windmill and exile is of course really the story of Trotsky's five year plan. The humans running the neighboring farms are the fascists; the ending where the pigs are hard to distinguish from humans is a reference to Stalin's treaty with Hitler.
And as for 1984, if it wasn't really about the Soviet Union, why is the opposition leader (Emmanuel Goldstein) described as a Jewish intellectual who once was influenential in the Party but had since fallen out of favor -- exactly like Orwell's hero Leon Trotsky?
Well, perhaps the best way to look at this was to see what the original source (Orwell's novels) actually contained. It is a cliche to say "Orwell wasn't talking about the Soviet Union; he was talking about where Western society was headed". But that just isn't supported by the books.
In both 1984 and Animal Farm, all the main characters were exact analogies for Soviet figures. Big Brother and Napoleon were obviously Stalin, and Goldstein and Snowball were obviously Trotsky. The problems of Western society, as real as they are, just didn't enter into the equation.
Legislated monopolies don't need to be innovative. Innovation threatens their power structure
Yes, but only because innovation threatens all power structures, private or public.
And today someone who filmed a building for each hours would be arrested as a terrorist suspect...
Stop me if I am wrong (and I could, english is not my native language), but when you put a "French" adjective (with a capital letter) you mean "from France" and not "in french".
Actually, in English, all references to names of languages are capitalized. One speaks in English or French (and not in english or french)
Tintin is not a French comic, it's from Belgium.
Er, Tintin *is* a French comic -- it's in French! Just because it's from Belgium doesn't change that. If the Americans can speak English, the francophone Belgians certainly speak French.
Buy books and rip the binding off. I can usually estimate pretty well how many pages I'm going to read. Just rip a chunk off at a time, the glue binding keeps them all attached.
If that works for you then great, but I guess your reading material consists mostly of mass-market paperbacks. Quite often, I can't easily locate copies of stuff I read in dead-tree form. For example, lately I've gotten into George Orwell. Sure, you can find "1984" and "Animal Farm" in any bookshop, but finding "Down and Out in London and Paris" or "Burmese Days" is a bit harder. Luckily, one can find them on the web.
Exactly -- eBooks are an application of PDA's that the designers never really thought of, and one in which the PDA fulfills much better than full-size dedicated eBook hardware. I like to read books, but often I don't have one with me when I have a few free minutes. A PDA is far more portable than a paperback book and I almost always have mine in my coat pocket.
...for the lethality of removing introns is simply that this may mess up gene regulation. The amount of mRNA transcript produced by each gene has to be carefully regulated for all parts of the cell to function properly. Having junk of the appropriate length in a gene is one way of slowing down the production of a transcript that the cell may not need a lot of. But, hey, that explanation just isn't as sexy as something involving fractals, now is it?
Yes, and because of the Computer Science orientation of most /. readers, they know that some professor's AI project is not going to take control of the nuclear arsenal of the US ala Terminator's Skynet. They understand that such scenarios are just fantasy. And yet similar paranoia applied to a field they don't know that much about is treated like a realistic worry. It's funny, really.
Well, you are confusing two eras here -- the golden age of Computer Shopper (early '90s) with the golden age of Creative Computing (early '80s). And as someone who remembers both eras, I can assure you that Creative Computing did have fewer ads and more content than Computer Shopper. Then again, nobody I knew (including me) actually read any of the so-called "articles" in Computer Shopper -- we just bought it to find the lowest price for RAM and hard drives in the dark ages before the Web.
Now, Creative Computing, well, think of Dr. Dobbs Journal with more of sense of wonder and less "learn this new technology and maybe you won't lose your job at the next rightsizing" attitude
Hey, I work for a Canadian company, but it's run by an Harvard MBA -- they run Canada too.
Nice, but what would be cooler than "Brazil" terminals would be working versions of the speakwrite terminals from the John Hurt/Richard Burton version of "1984". You could even set up the interface to do voice recognition of Newspeak: "times 3.12.83 reporting bb dayorder doubleplusungood refs unpersons rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling"
Why can't you understand that just because you can convert the arithmetic value of a year's wages in China to US Dollars, it doesn't actually mean that it has the same *monetary* value? There's this thing called "cost of living", you see. It turns out that for the most part, barring extremes of wealth and poverty, everything consts *proportionally* the same wherever you are in the world.
I have never lived in China, but as an American living in Canada I am quite familar with buying imported American goods. Logically, if this mythical adjustment for "cost of living" really exists, when I buy a book, movie, or CD from America, it should cost just the same in Canadian dollars as it does in American dollars. But it doesn't! It costs 1.5x as much because Canadian dollars are worth less than American dollars. This is of course one of the reasons why there are many more Canadians in American than Americans in Canada.
The difference is in public places airplanes where people who can't stop chatting have to resort to talking with strangers such as myself, I can generally stop their inane chatter by not responding to it. I don't *want* to talk or have to listen to Bob the salesman from Oklahoma City. When these chatterers have cell phones this tactic doesn't work, unfortunately.
Hey, I'm all for open source stuff and I actually even have OpenOffice installed on my work (Windows) laptop. However, you are naive if you think non-geeks can use it at present. I tried to convince a co-worker to use it on her machine at home as she had no office suite installed. She tried it for a week, but concluded that it "sucked".
Why did she feel that way? Well, 1) The keystrokes are complely different -- we can deal with that, but others are less forgiving and 2) The inevitable formating problems when importing MS documents -- again maybe not a biggie for us, but it is for "normal" folk.