As part of a scientific conference I run, I act as a publisher for the proceedings. I can assure you that the cost of publishing is absolutely NOT "basically nothing".
Well as part of the scientific conference I run, I acted as publisher for the proceedings and we did it all online for nothing but the organizational effort via arXiv. So yes it can be done for that price if you do it online. Besides who on earth wants printed copies of proceedings today? I think I've only ever looked things up in proceedings about twice and at least in my field, almost no conferences bother with them anymore (we don't now) because all the talk slides are online through the conference website so there really is no need for them. Just wait for the actual paper.
I'm surprised that she felt the need to contribute to the same problem in others by writing this stupid story although I suppose if you are trying to sell the cure it helps to drum up some business first.
But I am finding it hard to find a place in my heart to enable companies to "own" published scientific research.
They do not - they own the copyright on a paper. There is absolutely nothing to stop the author writing another paper with the same information and making that freely available. Indeed most papers in my field are preceded by a preprint on arxiv which is completely free.
If you're a scientist and you publish your findings, it should be free.
Agreed. The problem is that the reason that all these academic publishers exist has almost entirely vanished but there is a huge inertia in the system to change because many people's academic performance is evaluated based on where and how often they publish.
Personally, I think we need to go back to what we had before publishers took over. The current system grew out of scientific societies which would publish a regular bulletin based on letters from members who wrote in about a discovery they had made. As science took off the societies grew and printing thinker bulletins, more frequently with a larger circulation became a huge, expensive and time-consuming job given old printing presses. So the job was spun off to publishers who were good at doing this and they made their money to support the work by charging a subscription.
Today the journals need to be returned to the scientific societies which started them. The cost of publishing is basically nothing if you do it on the web and we academics already provide all the reviewing and correction of the content. The publisher is just involved in formatting and typesetting which is less important and easier to do if you publish online vs. a printing press.
No. It might be the cautious assumption but that does not mean that someone who expects some level of privacy has unreasonable expectations. There are many different levels of private email correspondence. For example, if I email my wife to let her know that I will be home late because of work I would not expect my employer to fire me for personal use of work email. However, if you tried to run a small business of eBay selling things through your work email then yes I would expect any employer would likely fire you for that!
This means that there is a certain grey area between what an employer wants to let you do and what a reasonable person might assume that they can do. Hence this ruling seems to make a lot of sense: employers can do what they want with an employee's email account, they just have to say exactly what they will do and what they will allow beforehand. This way everyone's different assumptions about what is ok do not matter because the rules are spelled out.
It's going to be a very short conversation because the sun is going to die before we get our first reply. In addition, they probably don't have much to say because their first message was directed towards some newly evolved algae.
No it is the same with one additional constraint. Both maths and science papers have to be logically consistent but a science paper also has to agree with nature. If a paper is published claiming that a particular measurement will have a value X you can debunk it two ways. First you could find an error in the mathematical calculation of the value X and secondly, you could go and measure the value and find that it is not X. So it is just like maths with the additional constraint that the maths not only has to be correct but that it also has to accurately describe nature.
How about a comparison of the quality of their graduates?
US graduates, at least in physics, have to spend several years taking a lot of courses to get to the same level that a Canadian graduate can get to with far fewer courses. The US system provides a slightly broader but very much shallower education which makes US graduates far weaker than comparable graduates from Canada or Europe when it comes to knowledge of the subject they graduated in. This is why the US needs such extensive graduate programs for MSc/PhD students to bring them up to the level to compete on the international stage. At the post-grad level the US is just as good as anywhere else because of this but after a bachelor's degree, the US standard of knowledge in a subject is decidedly lower than most other countries I'm aware of.
This also reflected in the textbooks we use for first year courses which are aimed at the US market and which are becoming increasingly below the standard we need in Canada and indeed this has now lead to several publishers to work on Canadian-specific versions.
Yes, but what you get wrong is that the "descendants of immigrants" are natives by definition and it is completely wrong to say that "The only natives are in Africa...".
...to settle what is now the United States and places beyond to the south.
I'm now curious to know whether Canada's aboriginal peoples came from somewhere else or whether knowledge of geography in the US has declined to the point that you no longer know where even Canada is.
The native population is the one born there. That is literally what native means: a person associated to a place by birth. So unless you actually believe that every pregnant woman migrates from the shores of North America back to Europe or Asia to give birth like some form of demented salmon there is quite a large native population in North America now.
Everyone in the Americas is technically an immigrant or a descendant of immigrants.
No, anyone born in the Americas is a native. So while I am native to Europe my kids are native to North America. Native literally means a person associated to a place by birth and comes from the latin verb "to be born".
With the cost of tuition and text books, people should be scamming them.
Have you looked at the cost of tuition in Canada? It is far, far less than the US and now even the UK. At UAlberta the typical total tuition costs (all union, transit etc. fees included) for a Canadian (resident or citizen) student taking a full course load are ~$8k/year for science - and those are Canadian dollars so about US$6k. If you want accommodation and food in a residence the cost rises to just under $16k/year (CAD). You can do the calculation here. The institute in question, Grant McEwan, should be even cheaper. Compare that to the standard £9,000 tuition (~$14,500) in the UK and ~US$40-60k for a top university in the US.
As for the text books, those profits go to the publishers, not the university and frankly the price has started to tick off so many of us faculty that we are either writing our own or using free/open resources at least for lower level courses.
Overly fast trains are too easy to sabotage anyhow. Would you rather be in a train crashing at 600mph or 60mph?
These trains are designed to compete with planes, not other trains. However, even then they would be a lot more difficult to sabotage than today's high speed trains which run at 1-200mph, not 60 mph, above ground on open tracks which are accessible by just about anyone at any time. Trains in tunnels are far better protected than other trains and even compared to an aircraft which could be targetted by anti-aircraft missiles as happened in Ukraine a few years ago.
The other advantage is that failures of the train are likely to be more survivable than aircraft failures since they can carry more weight for protection and a power failure should not mean automatic disaster (although when going 600mph through a tube it clearly is a possibility).
That's irrelevant: we do exactly the same thing in science too. The only difference is that, in addition to looking for flaws in the logic, we can test a paper's assertions against data - either existing or new.
True but reducing an incentive to innovate may well create bigger problems than it solves. If car manufacturing moves somewhere else because they do encourage robotic innovation making it cheaper to build the cars there then you will still have large unemployment problems and not have jobs maintaining and running the robots to offset the lost manufacturing jobs nor whatever tax revenue from the companies you already get.
History shows that fighting innovation and technological advancement never works in the long run. It might throw up problems but the best strategy is to learn how to deal with those problems, not to dissuade innovation and hope that you never have to deal with them.
A 2500 pound vehicle to carry one 1-pound pizza. That's efficient.
The only time physicists use pounds is as a currency unit which would make this an economics question and a vehicle costing 2,500 pounds sounds pretty efficient to me. However, I'm not sure I would want to eat a pizza which cost one pound. Sometimes you can be too efficient.
Audits cost time and money and you have to prove every little thing you claimed on your tax returns.
Exactly so don't you want governments to use all publicly available data to ensure they only audit the people who need auditing rather than wasting both their time and other's auditing people who have filled in their returns honestly?
I would have objections if they were forcing websites to disclose private information on users but if people have posted this information on a publicly available website for all to see they should not complain when someone does see it and if that data reduces the number of audits of honest people we all benefit.
If you took a scoop of the "diamond rain" from Neptune and put it at earth room temperature/pressure, would it stay as a crystal or would it become a gas?
Just like any diamond on Earth's surface, it will slowly convert into graphite. Diamond is an unstable allotrope of carbon on Earth and always decays to solid graphite regardless of how it was formed. So despite claims to the contrary diamonds are not forever, at least on Earth. However, since the diamond decay process is a lot slower than the human decay process most people don't worry about it.
The physicists at SLAC are clearly well aware of the various allotropes of carbon and the physical conditions needed to form diamond since their experiment was involved reproducing the absurdly high pressure conditions on Uranus showing that this lead to the formation of diamond. Hence they have taken the steps needed to show that the "metric crapton" (although I'm pretty sure that's not actually a metric unit) of carbon in Uranus very likely does exist as diamond.
Given that we have exactly 1 example to work with, how do we know that other intelligent species could have arisen 1 billion years earlier?
While I agree that all of this discussion is based on a huge pile of suppositions and not worth a lot the timescale for evolution is actually on a reasonable statistical standing. We know that there are stars which have been around for billions of years longer than our solar system and assuming some of these have planets like Earth it seems reasonable to suppose that, if our one sample is not many sigma from the mean, on some of these intelligent life could have evolved a billion or more years before it did on Earth.
Where it falls down is that Earth may be many, many sigma from the mean - we just do not know with a sample size of one.
We have some pretty concrete ideas about construction of megastructures, such as Dyson spheres
There is no way to know whether, by the time we have the technology to build mega-structures which can block all light from a star, that these are actually useful. If we discover an easy way to harness fusion or even something more exotic - for example small, contained singularities can convert mass to energy - then there would be no need for such structures.
The second problem is that if a species does survive even a relatively small amount of time, it should be able to spread throughout a galaxy.
Again we would only notice if they stayed. It's possible that they have explored the galaxy and that their rate of settlement is a lot slower. Alternatively perhaps they are not interested in exploring or have very tight social groups which makes exploring less undesireable/useful. There are really just too many unknowns to sensibly conclude that there is any sort of "filter" - it's certainly possibly but likely? we just cannot say.
if there's no FTL travel, and it's likely there is not, then HOW would we hear from someone ?
We need a bit more than the absence of FTL we also need EM radiation broadcasts to have a limited technological span. While transmission power is an issue 2 million years is a blink of the eye to evolution: an intelligent species could potentially have evolved a billion years earlier than us. However, if in another century or so we find a better way than EM radiation to transmit information - or avoid transmission into space - then our signal will be a very thin spherical shell even on a galactic scale.
Of course, the other alternative is that the evolution of intelligent life is vanishingly small and that we are largely alone in the galaxy. We only have a sample size of one so we have literally no idea how likely intelligent life is to evolve.
Have you tried a software emulator? Modern machines are easily powerful enough to emulate it accurately at full speed without glitches. For 8 bit machines like the BBC Model B there is even a full speed emulator in javasscript that runs in a webpage. This even plays the tape and disk sounds when loading! When you have several orders of magnitude more computing power you don't need hardware emulation to provide an amazingly accurate simulation.
I loved my Amiga, but now it's time for me to put aside childish things...
...and just use a free, open source software emulator if I ever want to reminisce. Why would you want to spend good money on hardware to emulate an old machine when there is a free software emulator to run it on the machine you already have at faster speeds than the original?
How did you dare to use a computer to post that? Computers rely on scary atomic and quantum physics and contain toxic chemicals. How do you know they are safe to use if you haven't verified the science behind them by doing the experiments yourself?
Even worse, they also emit electromagnetic radiation. It's well known that gamma rays are electromagnetic radiation too and even experts say that they are dangerous. So please, until you have done the experiments yourself to confirm that computers are safe to use please stay away from them. You aren't just risking your life but your electromagnetic emanations may also risk the lives of others too.
Slashdot Mirror
As part of a scientific conference I run, I act as a publisher for the proceedings. I can assure you that the cost of publishing is absolutely NOT "basically nothing".
Well as part of the scientific conference I run, I acted as publisher for the proceedings and we did it all online for nothing but the organizational effort via arXiv. So yes it can be done for that price if you do it online. Besides who on earth wants printed copies of proceedings today? I think I've only ever looked things up in proceedings about twice and at least in my field, almost no conferences bother with them anymore (we don't now) because all the talk slides are online through the conference website so there really is no need for them. Just wait for the actual paper.
I'm surprised that she felt the need to contribute to the same problem in others by writing this stupid story although I suppose if you are trying to sell the cure it helps to drum up some business first.
But I am finding it hard to find a place in my heart to enable companies to "own" published scientific research.
They do not - they own the copyright on a paper. There is absolutely nothing to stop the author writing another paper with the same information and making that freely available. Indeed most papers in my field are preceded by a preprint on arxiv which is completely free.
If you're a scientist and you publish your findings, it should be free.
Agreed. The problem is that the reason that all these academic publishers exist has almost entirely vanished but there is a huge inertia in the system to change because many people's academic performance is evaluated based on where and how often they publish.
Personally, I think we need to go back to what we had before publishers took over. The current system grew out of scientific societies which would publish a regular bulletin based on letters from members who wrote in about a discovery they had made. As science took off the societies grew and printing thinker bulletins, more frequently with a larger circulation became a huge, expensive and time-consuming job given old printing presses. So the job was spun off to publishers who were good at doing this and they made their money to support the work by charging a subscription.
Today the journals need to be returned to the scientific societies which started them. The cost of publishing is basically nothing if you do it on the web and we academics already provide all the reviewing and correction of the content. The publisher is just involved in formatting and typesetting which is less important and easier to do if you publish online vs. a printing press.
Yeah, shouldn't that be the base assumption?
No. It might be the cautious assumption but that does not mean that someone who expects some level of privacy has unreasonable expectations. There are many different levels of private email correspondence. For example, if I email my wife to let her know that I will be home late because of work I would not expect my employer to fire me for personal use of work email. However, if you tried to run a small business of eBay selling things through your work email then yes I would expect any employer would likely fire you for that!
This means that there is a certain grey area between what an employer wants to let you do and what a reasonable person might assume that they can do. Hence this ruling seems to make a lot of sense: employers can do what they want with an employee's email account, they just have to say exactly what they will do and what they will allow beforehand. This way everyone's different assumptions about what is ok do not matter because the rules are spelled out.
It's going to be a very short conversation because the sun is going to die before we get our first reply. In addition, they probably don't have much to say because their first message was directed towards some newly evolved algae.
No it is the same with one additional constraint. Both maths and science papers have to be logically consistent but a science paper also has to agree with nature. If a paper is published claiming that a particular measurement will have a value X you can debunk it two ways. First you could find an error in the mathematical calculation of the value X and secondly, you could go and measure the value and find that it is not X. So it is just like maths with the additional constraint that the maths not only has to be correct but that it also has to accurately describe nature.
How about a comparison of the quality of their graduates?
US graduates, at least in physics, have to spend several years taking a lot of courses to get to the same level that a Canadian graduate can get to with far fewer courses. The US system provides a slightly broader but very much shallower education which makes US graduates far weaker than comparable graduates from Canada or Europe when it comes to knowledge of the subject they graduated in. This is why the US needs such extensive graduate programs for MSc/PhD students to bring them up to the level to compete on the international stage. At the post-grad level the US is just as good as anywhere else because of this but after a bachelor's degree, the US standard of knowledge in a subject is decidedly lower than most other countries I'm aware of.
This also reflected in the textbooks we use for first year courses which are aimed at the US market and which are becoming increasingly below the standard we need in Canada and indeed this has now lead to several publishers to work on Canadian-specific versions.
Yes, but what you get wrong is that the "descendants of immigrants" are natives by definition and it is completely wrong to say that "The only natives are in Africa...".
...to settle what is now the United States and places beyond to the south.
I'm now curious to know whether Canada's aboriginal peoples came from somewhere else or whether knowledge of geography in the US has declined to the point that you no longer know where even Canada is.
There is no such thing as native population.
The native population is the one born there. That is literally what native means: a person associated to a place by birth. So unless you actually believe that every pregnant woman migrates from the shores of North America back to Europe or Asia to give birth like some form of demented salmon there is quite a large native population in North America now.
Everyone in the Americas is technically an immigrant or a descendant of immigrants.
No, anyone born in the Americas is a native. So while I am native to Europe my kids are native to North America. Native literally means a person associated to a place by birth and comes from the latin verb "to be born".
With the cost of tuition and text books, people should be scamming them.
Have you looked at the cost of tuition in Canada? It is far, far less than the US and now even the UK. At UAlberta the typical total tuition costs (all union, transit etc. fees included) for a Canadian (resident or citizen) student taking a full course load are ~$8k/year for science - and those are Canadian dollars so about US$6k. If you want accommodation and food in a residence the cost rises to just under $16k/year (CAD). You can do the calculation here. The institute in question, Grant McEwan, should be even cheaper. Compare that to the standard £9,000 tuition (~$14,500) in the UK and ~US$40-60k for a top university in the US.
As for the text books, those profits go to the publishers, not the university and frankly the price has started to tick off so many of us faculty that we are either writing our own or using free/open resources at least for lower level courses.
Overly fast trains are too easy to sabotage anyhow. Would you rather be in a train crashing at 600mph or 60mph?
These trains are designed to compete with planes, not other trains. However, even then they would be a lot more difficult to sabotage than today's high speed trains which run at 1-200mph, not 60 mph, above ground on open tracks which are accessible by just about anyone at any time. Trains in tunnels are far better protected than other trains and even compared to an aircraft which could be targetted by anti-aircraft missiles as happened in Ukraine a few years ago.
The other advantage is that failures of the train are likely to be more survivable than aircraft failures since they can carry more weight for protection and a power failure should not mean automatic disaster (although when going 600mph through a tube it clearly is a possibility).
No, it's maths, not science.
That's irrelevant: we do exactly the same thing in science too. The only difference is that, in addition to looking for flaws in the logic, we can test a paper's assertions against data - either existing or new.
True but reducing an incentive to innovate may well create bigger problems than it solves. If car manufacturing moves somewhere else because they do encourage robotic innovation making it cheaper to build the cars there then you will still have large unemployment problems and not have jobs maintaining and running the robots to offset the lost manufacturing jobs nor whatever tax revenue from the companies you already get.
History shows that fighting innovation and technological advancement never works in the long run. It might throw up problems but the best strategy is to learn how to deal with those problems, not to dissuade innovation and hope that you never have to deal with them.
A 2500 pound vehicle to carry one 1-pound pizza. That's efficient.
The only time physicists use pounds is as a currency unit which would make this an economics question and a vehicle costing 2,500 pounds sounds pretty efficient to me. However, I'm not sure I would want to eat a pizza which cost one pound. Sometimes you can be too efficient.
Audits cost time and money and you have to prove every little thing you claimed on your tax returns.
Exactly so don't you want governments to use all publicly available data to ensure they only audit the people who need auditing rather than wasting both their time and other's auditing people who have filled in their returns honestly?
I would have objections if they were forcing websites to disclose private information on users but if people have posted this information on a publicly available website for all to see they should not complain when someone does see it and if that data reduces the number of audits of honest people we all benefit.
If you took a scoop of the "diamond rain" from Neptune and put it at earth room temperature/pressure, would it stay as a crystal or would it become a gas?
Just like any diamond on Earth's surface, it will slowly convert into graphite. Diamond is an unstable allotrope of carbon on Earth and always decays to solid graphite regardless of how it was formed. So despite claims to the contrary diamonds are not forever, at least on Earth. However, since the diamond decay process is a lot slower than the human decay process most people don't worry about it.
The physicists at SLAC are clearly well aware of the various allotropes of carbon and the physical conditions needed to form diamond since their experiment was involved reproducing the absurdly high pressure conditions on Uranus showing that this lead to the formation of diamond. Hence they have taken the steps needed to show that the "metric crapton" (although I'm pretty sure that's not actually a metric unit) of carbon in Uranus very likely does exist as diamond.
Given that we have exactly 1 example to work with, how do we know that other intelligent species could have arisen 1 billion years earlier?
While I agree that all of this discussion is based on a huge pile of suppositions and not worth a lot the timescale for evolution is actually on a reasonable statistical standing. We know that there are stars which have been around for billions of years longer than our solar system and assuming some of these have planets like Earth it seems reasonable to suppose that, if our one sample is not many sigma from the mean, on some of these intelligent life could have evolved a billion or more years before it did on Earth.
Where it falls down is that Earth may be many, many sigma from the mean - we just do not know with a sample size of one.
We have some pretty concrete ideas about construction of megastructures, such as Dyson spheres
There is no way to know whether, by the time we have the technology to build mega-structures which can block all light from a star, that these are actually useful. If we discover an easy way to harness fusion or even something more exotic - for example small, contained singularities can convert mass to energy - then there would be no need for such structures.
The second problem is that if a species does survive even a relatively small amount of time, it should be able to spread throughout a galaxy.
Again we would only notice if they stayed. It's possible that they have explored the galaxy and that their rate of settlement is a lot slower. Alternatively perhaps they are not interested in exploring or have very tight social groups which makes exploring less undesireable/useful. There are really just too many unknowns to sensibly conclude that there is any sort of "filter" - it's certainly possibly but likely? we just cannot say.
if there's no FTL travel, and it's likely there is not, then HOW would we hear from someone ?
We need a bit more than the absence of FTL we also need EM radiation broadcasts to have a limited technological span. While transmission power is an issue 2 million years is a blink of the eye to evolution: an intelligent species could potentially have evolved a billion years earlier than us. However, if in another century or so we find a better way than EM radiation to transmit information - or avoid transmission into space - then our signal will be a very thin spherical shell even on a galactic scale.
Of course, the other alternative is that the evolution of intelligent life is vanishingly small and that we are largely alone in the galaxy. We only have a sample size of one so we have literally no idea how likely intelligent life is to evolve.
Have you tried a software emulator? Modern machines are easily powerful enough to emulate it accurately at full speed without glitches. For 8 bit machines like the BBC Model B there is even a full speed emulator in javasscript that runs in a webpage. This even plays the tape and disk sounds when loading! When you have several orders of magnitude more computing power you don't need hardware emulation to provide an amazingly accurate simulation.
But this "new" Amiga is still an emulator. The only difference is that the simulation algorithm runs in an FPGA, not a CPU.
I loved my Amiga, but now it's time for me to put aside childish things...
Did you do the experiments yourself?
How did you dare to use a computer to post that? Computers rely on scary atomic and quantum physics and contain toxic chemicals. How do you know they are safe to use if you haven't verified the science behind them by doing the experiments yourself?
Even worse, they also emit electromagnetic radiation. It's well known that gamma rays are electromagnetic radiation too and even experts say that they are dangerous. So please, until you have done the experiments yourself to confirm that computers are safe to use please stay away from them. You aren't just risking your life but your electromagnetic emanations may also risk the lives of others too.