Enrollment at America's leading universities has been increasing dramatically, rising nearly 15 percent between 1993 and 2007.... Between 1993 and 2007, the number of full-time administrators per 100 students at America's leading universities grew by 39 percent, while the number of employees engaged in teaching, research or service only grew by 18 percent.
I don't know too much about the UK, but I assume a public university in the UK is still mostly funded by the government. Over here, the funding has dropped a lot, and even public universities are essentially becoming businesses to make up. That leads
College is not more expensive today. It's just that the state has subsidized less and less of the cost over the couple of decades, making it appear to cost more.
Yes and no. Both are true. In support of your second statement, read this article about the University of Illinois:
For the first time in the Universityâ(TM)s history, it now receives a larger portion of its operating budget from tuition than from the state appropriation. In 1970, U of I received $12 in direct state tax support for each $1 in tuition revenue; in 2010, it was 80 cents from the state for every $1 in tuition. Families are filling the ever-widening gap left by the state in the form of higher tuition payments.
However, another factor is that the administrative staff at universities has grown at a much faster pace than the number of students. I wish I could find the link, but it was something like: Number of students has, say, doubled since the 1970's - number of administrative staff has increased six-fold. Universities now have more programs that simply have litle to do with education. The president's office now "needs" more staff to handle those bloated programs. Someone has to pay for those salaries.
I never was at a point where a lens was not compatible with my camera.
This has been repeated ad nauseum by others, but it seems I'll have to repeat it again:
ALL lenses made for Pentax SLRs (film or digital) work with Pentax digital SLRs (no adapters needed). This is not true for Olympus, Nikon or Canon. If you bought a Pentax lens 30 years ago, it'll work right out of the box on a Pentax DSLR.
So it just seems silly that so many people replying to his post keep pointing out lens compatibility. Pentax is king in this regard.
And the flip side is that the P'n'S that you bring to everything can never take a really decent photo.
Sorry, but utter BS.
I was once part of a photography club. The members would regularly have internal competitions. The winning entries were more often than not from high quality non-DSLRs. The photographers had years of experience, owned DSLRs, but ultimately found smaller cameras to be more convenient.
Technical aspects (camera features, optics, etc) do help, but they are merely one reason among many that you get good photos. Other factors are opportunity, photographer skill, and yes, the number of photos you take.
As someone once said:
Most of Ansel Adams's photos were crap. I know that because most of all photographers' photos are crap - you just see the good ones.
If you're buying a camera that will reduce the likelihood of you taking photos, then you're likely going to get fewer good photos than with an inferior camera with which you take a lot more photos.
To get to the rest of your comment:
The quality of the P'n'S image will limit what can be done, sometimes severely limit it. A DSLR camera will let you go further since the raw image is better.
Many non-DSLR's offer raw. This isn't 2001.
At this point I believe all DSLRs offer a.tiff or.raw format that the Gimp can work with, or an uncompressed.jpg format which is usually just as good as a.tiff.
First, almost all good point and shoots offer TIFF. When I bought my first digital point and shoot in 2001, all the "good" cameras offered uncompressed TIFFs.
But that's all irrelevent because: A TIFF format is almost useless. You simply have a huge file with no lossy compression. This does not give you the extra manipulation headroom that you get with RAW. The benefits of RAW do not carry over to TIFFs.
These uncompressed files give you all the detail that the camera actually saw.
Not true. Uncompressed TIFFs have less information than RAW.
Print and distribute hard copies, for which they charge outrageous subscription fees anyway.
ACM and IEEE institution subscription fees are not as outrageous the major culprits (Elsevier, etc). That's generally true for professional organizations - they charge universities considerably less, and are more receptive to feedback from them. Usually when universities complain about the costs, they're not complaining about ACM or IEEE
To add insult to injury, we have to assign copyright over to the publisher so we have to ask for permission to use our own work in the future.
Yes, but wouldn't you agree that the IEEE (and probably the ACM) are not being too unreasonable by allowing you to publish the proof/preprint? As you yourself noted, it's as good as the final version.
Explain why my adviser would complain about paying for open access journals, and comment that normal journals don't ask for money, while paying for money in normal journals.
But the fees are there, and you should see what the likes of IEEE or Science charge the University library for a subscription.
I'm well aware of it, and it's completely irrelevant. We're discussing if one has to pay to publish, not if one has to pay to subscribe.
Either you're submitting to an open access journal (or something similar (e.g. PubMed)), or want special treatment (e.g. color), or it's a sleazy journal, or things are just wildly different in your discipline than in physics and IEEE.
Mind you: I dealt only with journals published by a professional organization (IEEE, ACM, APS, etc). Perhaps some journals published by private companies (Springer/Elsevier) may require payment, but I don't think it's common for the "good" journals.
There's a reason why a lot of academics state that they think open access will fail: It's because the latter requires payment whereas the traditional journals most academics publish in don't.
Yeah right. Have you ever tried not paying to get your article published?
Perhaps you didn't bother reading my earlier messages.
I didn't pay.
My adviser didn't pay. The one time he was asked to pay for publication, it was because he had submitted to an open access journal. When he found out they required money, he remarked that the open access model's going to fail because they require money whereas the traditional ones don't.
If you paid, then either:
You submitted to an open access journal. This may be common in the medical/biology sector.
In the journals I've published in, the two are the same.
And given the context of the discussion, the version the IEEE allows you to publish is almost the proof. From the complainer's own page, he links to the FAQ, where it says:
The new policy retains substantial rights for authors to post on their personal sites and their institutions' servers, but only the accepted versions of their papers, not a published version as might be downloaded from IEEE Xplore®.
And the first question in the FAQ is:
How does IEEE define an "accepted" version?
An accepted manuscript is a version which has been revised by the author to incorporate review suggestions, and which has been accepted by IEEE for publication.
This isn't the final formatted version, but the version that is final in content. No more revisions will be made. It is the one accepted by peer review, and is for all practical purposes as good as the published one.
Granted, the FAQ does define a preprint to be the one prior to submission, which conflicts with my usage, but then the complainer is factually incorrect in saying that the IEEE only allows preprints.
The fact, however, remains that the IEEE allows you to publicly post the final revision after peer review.
So I agree that the preprint is just as good as the final paper (sometimes better, as it can be updated on the arXiv after publication to fix typos, and doesn't have the errors that the journal makes when retyping the paper even though the latex source was provided...!), but this is not the version that the journal created - the copyright on that belongs to them.
So we're in agreement. It just seems silly to whine that you can't publish the final formatted paper, when you can publish one as good as it.
Proof: Before publication, proofs will be sent to the author (or to the contact author who submitted the paper). Typographical, illustration problems and other errors should be marked according to the instructions accompanying the proofs. This is not the time to rewrite or revise the paper, and the cost of excessive changes will be billed to the author. However, it is important to review the presentation details at this time and carefully check for any errors that might have been introduced during the production process.
Emphasis mine.
They send you the proof (which is the preprint) after all the refereeing is done and any changes the referees suggest have been implemented.
Voluntary Page Charges and Reprints: After a manuscript has been accepted for publication, the author's company or institution will be asked to pay a voluntary charge to cover part of the cost of publication. IEEE page charges are not obligatory, and payment is not a prerequisite for publication. The author will receive 100 free reprints if the charge is honored. Detailed instructions on page charges and on ordering reprints will accompany the proof.
I don't know why the second link is really upset about the preprint policy. In fact, not long ago being allowed to put preprints on a public server was considered a victory.
For those who don't know, a preprint is not the version you submitted to the journal, but the version just prior to publication: After the peer review, after the formatting, and after all corrections. It's the one they send to the author saying, "This is how your paper will look - do a a quick glance to see if you find any errors." It's almost always identical to the final paper that is published.
So if they allow preprints, then it's as good as the final paper. To complain that they don't allow the final paper is just whining.
So, why not go for an online rating system where the "peers" can vote on good papers?
Because Digg and Reddit have taught me that often the top rated items are of poor quality, and that most really good submissions/comments don't get notably high in the rankings.
Ratings is a popularity metric, not a quality metric.
You do realize, I hope, that many, if not most, for-profit journals also have publication fees?
I don't, and while some perhaps do, I suspect most of the moderately prestigious ones don't. At least not the main ones in physics or IEEE.
When I was in grad school, if someone told my advisor that a fee would be charged for publication, he'd give them an earful and publish elsewhere. And it's quite telling that he never did this because he was never asked for a fee.
NIH is probably the exception. I think as of yet, most DARPA and NSF grants don't require open access. If they do, they must not enforce it because most people I know get their funding from them and not one of their papers is open access.
I second this. Calibre has been great to me. I used to read all my news sitting at the computer. Now I have it download the news daily and package them as an epub, stripping away a lot of the pointless formatting on those sites. I can now read away from the computer.
However, if you need something "on the go" where you don't have access to your PC, then I can't help...
My apologies to those that were friends of his, but really, didn't you care enough about him to make him go see a doctor once in awhile? The man died at SIXTY FOUR for crying out loud! How much more good work could he have done if some of his friends had just convinced him to see a doctor now and again? Geez!
While I'd hardly qualify as a friend, I did live in the same town as he did for a while, met him only once in person, but communicated a few times over email. I had always planned to take him out to lunch, but alas, that'll never be.
You can either be a friend and respect him and his wishes, or you can just walk all over him and force him to do what your world view thinks is right. You can't be a friend if you do that.
That's not to say an occasional suggestion can't hurt.
I always find it sad that people don't realize that having someone else dictate aspects of your life is often worse than death. That they have their well being at heart doesn't make the situation any more tolerable. I do hope people like yourself weren't badgering him when he was ill.
I've had far more emails "lost" to spam filters than lost by the USPS. In fact, in the last 13 years, USPS has never lost a single package letter (that I know of) - sent to/by me.
There are a few that stand out in any of the areas, but in general, a bit more cooperation probably would help more than hinder.
The assumption that there isn't enough cooperation is likely a poor one. Standards do exist, and they do play relatively well with one another. No matter how much they cooperate, there will still be some difference to quibble over, and people are going to see that which makes noise (the quibbling) and not see that which works due to cooperation.
Who will win in the market? Whoever can get Angry Birds out in two months, even though it crashes now and then, or those who take six months to deliver the same functionality with fewer (but never no) crashes? You know the answer to that as well as I do. As far as insight goes, I tend to value Dick Gabriel's "Worse is Better" paper over anything that "Uncle Bob" has written.
Not sure if you're criticizing your parent, because you just made his point. Making Angry Bird with bugs quicker means the manager didn't pick all three.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm in the US.
Here's the report.
Enrollment at America's leading universities has been increasing dramatically, rising nearly 15 percent between 1993 and 2007. ...
Between 1993 and 2007, the number of full-time administrators per 100 students at America's leading universities grew by 39 percent, while the number of employees engaged in teaching, research or service only grew by 18 percent.
I don't know too much about the UK, but I assume a public university in the UK is still mostly funded by the government. Over here, the funding has dropped a lot, and even public universities are essentially becoming businesses to make up. That leads
College is not more expensive today. It's just that the state has subsidized less and less of the cost over the couple of decades, making it appear to cost more.
Yes and no. Both are true. In support of your second statement, read this article about the University of Illinois:
For the first time in the Universityâ(TM)s history, it now receives a larger portion of its operating budget from tuition than from the state appropriation. In 1970, U of I received $12 in direct state tax support for each $1 in tuition revenue; in 2010, it was 80 cents from the state for every $1 in tuition. Families are filling the ever-widening gap left by the state in the form of higher tuition payments.
However, another factor is that the administrative staff at universities has grown at a much faster pace than the number of students. I wish I could find the link, but it was something like: Number of students has, say, doubled since the 1970's - number of administrative staff has increased six-fold. Universities now have more programs that simply have litle to do with education. The president's office now "needs" more staff to handle those bloated programs. Someone has to pay for those salaries.
Bullshit.
I bought my 20 MB HD for my 8088 IBM in the early 80's. It fit quite well into the computer.
I never was at a point where a lens was not compatible with my camera.
This has been repeated ad nauseum by others, but it seems I'll have to repeat it again:
ALL lenses made for Pentax SLRs (film or digital) work with Pentax digital SLRs (no adapters needed). This is not true for Olympus, Nikon or Canon. If you bought a Pentax lens 30 years ago, it'll work right out of the box on a Pentax DSLR.
So it just seems silly that so many people replying to his post keep pointing out lens compatibility. Pentax is king in this regard.
And the flip side is that the P'n'S that you bring to everything can never take a really decent photo.
Sorry, but utter BS.
I was once part of a photography club. The members would regularly have internal competitions. The winning entries were more often than not from high quality non-DSLRs. The photographers had years of experience, owned DSLRs, but ultimately found smaller cameras to be more convenient.
Technical aspects (camera features, optics, etc) do help, but they are merely one reason among many that you get good photos. Other factors are opportunity, photographer skill, and yes, the number of photos you take.
As someone once said:
Most of Ansel Adams's photos were crap. I know that because most of all photographers' photos are crap - you just see the good ones.
If you're buying a camera that will reduce the likelihood of you taking photos, then you're likely going to get fewer good photos than with an inferior camera with which you take a lot more photos.
To get to the rest of your comment:
The quality of the P'n'S image will limit what can be done, sometimes severely limit it. A DSLR camera will let you go further since the raw image is better.
Many non-DSLR's offer raw. This isn't 2001.
At this point I believe all DSLRs offer a .tiff or .raw format that the Gimp can work with, or an uncompressed .jpg format which is usually just as good as a .tiff.
First, almost all good point and shoots offer TIFF. When I bought my first digital point and shoot in 2001, all the "good" cameras offered uncompressed TIFFs.
But that's all irrelevent because: A TIFF format is almost useless. You simply have a huge file with no lossy compression. This does not give you the extra manipulation headroom that you get with RAW. The benefits of RAW do not carry over to TIFFs.
These uncompressed files give you all the detail that the camera actually saw.
Not true. Uncompressed TIFFs have less information than RAW.
Seriously, how did this comment get moderated up?
Print and distribute hard copies, for which they charge outrageous subscription fees anyway.
ACM and IEEE institution subscription fees are not as outrageous the major culprits (Elsevier, etc). That's generally true for professional organizations - they charge universities considerably less, and are more receptive to feedback from them. Usually when universities complain about the costs, they're not complaining about ACM or IEEE
To add insult to injury, we have to assign copyright over to the publisher so we have to ask for permission to use our own work in the future.
Yes, but wouldn't you agree that the IEEE (and probably the ACM) are not being too unreasonable by allowing you to publish the proof/preprint? As you yourself noted, it's as good as the final version.
Your adviser is just not telling you.
OK - Now you're just being stupid.
Explain why my adviser would complain about paying for open access journals, and comment that normal journals don't ask for money, while paying for money in normal journals.
But the fees are there, and you should see what the likes of IEEE or Science charge the University library for a subscription.
I'm well aware of it, and it's completely irrelevant. We're discussing if one has to pay to publish, not if one has to pay to subscribe.
Either you're submitting to an open access journal (or something similar (e.g. PubMed)), or want special treatment (e.g. color), or it's a sleazy journal, or things are just wildly different in your discipline than in physics and IEEE.
Mind you: I dealt only with journals published by a professional organization (IEEE, ACM, APS, etc). Perhaps some journals published by private companies (Springer/Elsevier) may require payment, but I don't think it's common for the "good" journals.
There's a reason why a lot of academics state that they think open access will fail: It's because the latter requires payment whereas the traditional journals most academics publish in don't.
Yeah right. Have you ever tried not paying to get your article published?
Perhaps you didn't bother reading my earlier messages.
I didn't pay.
My adviser didn't pay. The one time he was asked to pay for publication, it was because he had submitted to an open access journal. When he found out they required money, he remarked that the open access model's going to fail because they require money whereas the traditional ones don't.
If you paid, then either:
That is a "proof", not a "preprint".
In the journals I've published in, the two are the same.
And given the context of the discussion, the version the IEEE allows you to publish is almost the proof. From the complainer's own page, he links to the FAQ, where it says:
The new policy retains substantial rights for authors to post on their personal sites and their institutions' servers, but only the accepted versions of their papers, not a published version as might be downloaded from IEEE Xplore®.
And the first question in the FAQ is:
How does IEEE define an "accepted" version?
An accepted manuscript is a version which has been revised by the author to incorporate review suggestions, and which has been accepted by IEEE for publication.
This isn't the final formatted version, but the version that is final in content. No more revisions will be made. It is the one accepted by peer review, and is for all practical purposes as good as the published one.
Granted, the FAQ does define a preprint to be the one prior to submission, which conflicts with my usage, but then the complainer is factually incorrect in saying that the IEEE only allows preprints.
The fact, however, remains that the IEEE allows you to publicly post the final revision after peer review.
So I agree that the preprint is just as good as the final paper (sometimes better, as it can be updated on the arXiv after publication to fix typos, and doesn't have the errors that the journal makes when retyping the paper even though the latex source was provided...!), but this is not the version that the journal created - the copyright on that belongs to them.
So we're in agreement. It just seems silly to whine that you can't publish the final formatted paper, when you can publish one as good as it.
Nope, the preprint at least some journals allow you to publish on a preprint server is the version prior to you submitting the paper.
Perhaps in some journals, but not in IEEE, which is one of the two he was complaining about:
From the IEEE submission guidelines:
Proof: Before publication, proofs will be sent to the author (or to the contact author who submitted the paper). Typographical, illustration problems and other errors should be marked according to the instructions accompanying the proofs. This is not the time to rewrite or revise the paper, and the cost of excessive changes will be billed to the author. However, it is important to review the presentation details at this time and carefully check for any errors that might have been introduced during the production process.
Emphasis mine.
They send you the proof (which is the preprint) after all the refereeing is done and any changes the referees suggest have been implemented.
They all do. The "prestigious" ones especially and yes IEEE does too.
From the IEEE submission guidelines:
Voluntary Page Charges and Reprints: After a manuscript has been accepted for publication, the author's company or institution will be asked to pay a voluntary charge to cover part of the cost of publication. IEEE page charges are not obligatory, and payment is not a prerequisite for publication. The author will receive 100 free reprints if the charge is honored. Detailed instructions on page charges and on ordering reprints will accompany the proof.
Emphasis mine.
So you'd advocate non-anonymous referees?
I don't know why the second link is really upset about the preprint policy. In fact, not long ago being allowed to put preprints on a public server was considered a victory.
For those who don't know, a preprint is not the version you submitted to the journal, but the version just prior to publication: After the peer review, after the formatting, and after all corrections. It's the one they send to the author saying, "This is how your paper will look - do a a quick glance to see if you find any errors." It's almost always identical to the final paper that is published.
So if they allow preprints, then it's as good as the final paper. To complain that they don't allow the final paper is just whining.
So, why not go for an online rating system where the "peers" can vote on good papers?
Because Digg and Reddit have taught me that often the top rated items are of poor quality, and that most really good submissions/comments don't get notably high in the rankings.
Ratings is a popularity metric, not a quality metric.
You do realize, I hope, that many, if not most, for-profit journals also have publication fees?
I don't, and while some perhaps do, I suspect most of the moderately prestigious ones don't. At least not the main ones in physics or IEEE.
When I was in grad school, if someone told my advisor that a fee would be charged for publication, he'd give them an earful and publish elsewhere. And it's quite telling that he never did this because he was never asked for a fee.
Call me when you get medical researchers to sign up for something like this.
All papers whose work was funded by the NIH is required to be open access.
NIH is probably the exception. I think as of yet, most DARPA and NSF grants don't require open access. If they do, they must not enforce it because most people I know get their funding from them and not one of their papers is open access.
Disable your extensions. At work, I've had 50+ tabs remaining open for weeks at a time, with no performance degradation.
At home, I have to restart Firefox every few days.
Difference? One has loads of extensions, and the other one doesn't.
I second this. Calibre has been great to me. I used to read all my news sitting at the computer. Now I have it download the news daily and package them as an epub, stripping away a lot of the pointless formatting on those sites. I can now read away from the computer.
However, if you need something "on the go" where you don't have access to your PC, then I can't help...
My apologies to those that were friends of his, but really, didn't you care enough about him to make him go see a doctor once in awhile? The man died at SIXTY FOUR for crying out loud! How much more good work could he have done if some of his friends had just convinced him to see a doctor now and again? Geez!
While I'd hardly qualify as a friend, I did live in the same town as he did for a while, met him only once in person, but communicated a few times over email. I had always planned to take him out to lunch, but alas, that'll never be.
You can either be a friend and respect him and his wishes, or you can just walk all over him and force him to do what your world view thinks is right. You can't be a friend if you do that.
That's not to say an occasional suggestion can't hurt.
I always find it sad that people don't realize that having someone else dictate aspects of your life is often worse than death. That they have their well being at heart doesn't make the situation any more tolerable. I do hope people like yourself weren't badgering him when he was ill.
I've had far more emails "lost" to spam filters than lost by the USPS. In fact, in the last 13 years, USPS has never lost a single package letter (that I know of) - sent to/by me.
The largest size Sony should do it for you - although perhaps only barely...
It's not cheap.
There are a few that stand out in any of the areas, but in general, a bit more cooperation probably would help more than hinder.
The assumption that there isn't enough cooperation is likely a poor one. Standards do exist, and they do play relatively well with one another. No matter how much they cooperate, there will still be some difference to quibble over, and people are going to see that which makes noise (the quibbling) and not see that which works due to cooperation.
Who will win in the market? Whoever can get Angry Birds out in two months, even though it crashes now and then, or those who take six months to deliver the same functionality with fewer (but never no) crashes? You know the answer to that as well as I do. As far as insight goes, I tend to value Dick Gabriel's "Worse is Better" paper over anything that "Uncle Bob" has written.
Not sure if you're criticizing your parent, because you just made his point. Making Angry Bird with bugs quicker means the manager didn't pick all three.