When I visited Martinique, the local version was that the alleged sole survivor of Pelee (a prisoner in an underground cell) might well have been a con artist.
1. In the days before he was "rescued", the heat would have penetrated the cell and killed him.
2. He spent the following years touring with PT Barnum's circus, advertised as the sole survivor.
The theory is that he was outside the blast area, and entered the cell after the blast before the searchers.
The sad story of St Pierre is a good example that, when the government tells you that there is nothing to fear, that it may be time to get the hell out of there. The volcano was threatening, people wanted to leave, the government said to stay.
DNA relative matching was used to close a 20-year-old unsolved rape case in the midwest recently. Police had a guess but nothing to justify a search warrant. The suspect had married and settled down after committing the crime. The suspect's daughter was a college student and had gotten a Pap smear. The lab kept the samples for 5 years for legal reasons. The police got her DNA sample from the lab w/o a search warrant and matched it to the rape victim. That gave them grounds for a warrant. The search found evidence, and they got a conviction.
Random factlets:
Approx 10% of people don't have the parents they think they do.
Even w/o a match, DNA can strongly suggest the suspect's race. Is it ok to hassle all young men of the same race as the suspect? There was a case at SUNY New Paltz some years ago where someone was attacked by a young black man. The police interviewed all male black students.
Physical evidence is not always as solid as people assume. Apart from the recent scandals at the FBI crime lab, here are 2 other cases.
Many years ago, two NYS state troopers from the Binghampton troop were convicted and jailed for fabricating fingerprints. I think it involved scotch tape.
In DC some years ago, an innocent man was jailed because an ATM surveillance video was wrongly correlated with the transactions. He was wrongly thought to have used a victim's ATM card, and his protestations about having an alibi were ignored.
In the past, the reiserFS team didn't themselves consider that ReiserFS was a production tool. They made a poorly documented incompatible internal format change.
That meant that the new drivers could not handle the old filesystems.
Their solution? If you opened an old filesystem with the new driver, the old system was automatically and invisibly migrated to the new format, w/o asking or telling the user. Now, what could go wrong with this?
1. They did this even to filesystems opened read-only. This is a total violation of the contract between the SW and the user.
2. Now, that filesystem could no longer be read by the old drivers.
3. If the filesystem was physically read-only, like a CD-ROM, it could not be opened at all. Say bye-bye to your old backups.
When I saw this, I decided that I wanted nothing more to do with ReiserFS. ext3 is fine.
More broadly, why did SuSE ever make ReiserFS the standard? They need need to decide whether they're creating a production environment or a hackers' playground. The rule should be, if it's not necessary to change, then it's necessary not to change.
Agreed that LaTeX could use a better GUI. Raw TeX is the 2nd worst programming language I've ever seen, and that includes various assembly languages. (troff was the worst). However, I have a more fundamental wish.
LaTeX needs better layout algorithms. It apparently uses dynamic programming to fill a single paragraph. However, it needs to fill whole pages and papers similarly. E.g., I want to be able to tell it to squeeze my paper, which is now 8 1/2 pages, down to 8 pages, and do it intelligently, say by compressing the font slightly. Currently, it's quite counterintuitive how LaTex breaks pages. When I shorten said paper by deleting content early in the paper, for a long time, the paper doesn't get any shorter. Then, suddenly, it gets a lot shorter.
Relatedly, LaTeX places figures counterintuitively and badly.
Internally, raw TeX is a horrible virtual machine language. E.g., registers don't even have symbolic names, but numbers, from 1 to 256.
Various intuitively simple tasks, like wrapping text around a curved box, are almost impossible to implement.
Color is not well integrated since color output didn't exist then.
Intuitively simple things, such as marking certain blocks of text to be hilited, are not done correctly (probably because that is too hard).
To be sure, LaTex does most of this much better than anyone else. I'm just an idealist, trying to make it even better. Everything needs to be reinvented periodically.
The USS Constitution, the 200 year old wooden warship docked in Boston Harbor, is protected by a security cordon including metal detector, X-ray, and divers checking under the ship.
It was a fearsome weapon in 1800. However, if you smuggled sufficient gunpowder abord and fired its cannons now, the ship would probably split apart.
The story sounds slightly unlikely. The ARPANet was so small then that everyone knew almost everyone else. There were no malicious people on the net. Also, ITS had, SFAIK, no internal security, and anyone could create his own account (and then access others' accounts). So, passwords would have added nothing.
ITS also had a feature where someone could eavesdrop on someone else's session, to offer help. I don't think it required the consent of the eavesdroppee.
In case it needs to be said, this was a research machine. Production work was done on machines with passwords.
Contemporaneously with this, at a college a few miles up the river, an undergrad was using the DARPA funded PDP-10 to implement a simulator with which to create the first BASIC interpreter for a micro, which he then sold. There was a rumor that he used so much time that DARPA complained. Using a government computer for private commercial gain is a big no-no. That kid later said that he skipped his CS lectures to attend management classes, which explains a lot about the company he co-founded. A few years ago he bought the college a new CS building.
NASA is threatening to cut the rovers' budgets precisely because they are so popular and successful. They do this for all their space probes. The astronomers did this recently for the Arecibo telescope. If I were at the OMB or in Congress, I'd deduct double the needed money from NASA's budget and move these missions, together with their budgets and staff, to another agency. Then I'd demand that any future proposed missions contained an honest budget for future costs.
It's basically the same reason politicians get casinos approved by saying that they'll use the taxes to fund education. It's the same reason politicians tout unrealistically low budgets for major projects like the Big Dig.
This is not a comment on the value of any of the programs I mentioned, but only a complaint about the lies that were told to get them approved.
DARPA has dozens of projects and various different management styles in the several offices.
Nevertheless, the comments about DARPA being about only research and producing a final report are completely at variance with my personal experience with DARPA. In contrast, I like to joke that, under Tether, DARPA is not about research at all. It's more about engineering and assembling existing pieces of research into a working prototype. The Grand Challenge is an excellent example of this. The ultimate success metric is that some part of DoD picks up the work and transitions it into a deployed product.
DARPA staff don't do the research/engineering themselves. They travel the country to search for the leaders in the field, whether university or industry, and pay them. Typically those have 18 months to show preliminary results, or the funding is stopped.
Slashdot readers who think they have a crazy idea that could benefit defence should consider sending a DARPA program manager an 8 page white paper summarizing their idea. It's really exciting working with such intelligent people.
The funding was cut because its own community of researchers no longer considers it to be very important. Specifically a panel of experts was tasked to prioritize expenditures in radio astronomy. IIRC, Arecibo was ranked approximately fourth.
There are more cost-effective solutions, such as very long baselines and antenna arrays. Those have advantages like being able to resolve smaller angles.
The radio astronomers might have been playing a Washington-monument game. (The legend is that Congress threatened to cut the Parks budget, so the NPS threatened to close the Washington Monument.) That is, they hoped that the public outcry that has, in fact, occurred on/. would lead to more money coming into their field. I, personally, have no sympathy for such tactics. When I was in the government, I suspect that experts may have tried that on me once or twice. I never caved.
Good science requires ruthlessness. The idea that any particular icon or business is too big or too famous to fail has been very bad for the economy and would hurt the US scientifically.
Kmail is nice but has some weird omissions, at least for the latest version in SuSE 10.2. I've used it for a few years, have 5GB of mail with about 30K messages. However, I'll switch to claws when there is time.
You cannot select messages based on date. The simple act of selecting all messages sent to me during the last week containing the string 'billg' is not possible. The closest approach is to search all messages in the folder, list the hits by date and select the tail of the list. That is much worse for big folders because search is so slow. Indeed this is so slow as to be useless.
Also, you cannot tag messages. The only way to mark the messages on a certain topic is to use a separate folder, which is overkill.
You cannot delete an attachment from a message.
It uses imap in a very picky way and refuses to talk to servers that other mail client have no problem with.
People have reported losing stored mail when an index file gets corrupted.
etc. etc. My sense is that the development team is working hard but has inadequate resources. Finally, some of the above might be fixed in SuSE 10.3; however I've been unable to upgrade yet.
I forgot to mention something relevant that is known to all academics but apparently unknown to many/. readers.
There are two types of publishers: for-profit and non-profit. The for-profit publishers are commercial corporations like Elsevier. They, as is their duty to their shareholders, charge what the market will bear, do everything they can to jack up their prices, etc. One for-profit journal might cost an individual $200/year; while a library would pay $500-$1000/year or more. All numbers are approximate.
The non-profits are the professional societies like IEEE. In the US, a non-profit organization is allowed the privilege of being a non-profit in return for providing some benefit to society. IEEE's income is membership fees (I pay IEEE $200/year incl some journals), conference registration fees (perhaps $200/day), journal subscriptions ($40-$100/year), and misc. The professional societies set the prices just high enough to break even (and pay overhead). That's a totally different philosophy.
Even a narrow field may have 10 relevant journals. If your work is interdisciplinary, then there may be 30 journals (and many conferences) that occasionally publish something interesting. Everyone is starting new journals.
While both classes of journals are technically obsolete, only the for-profit journals' prices are breaking the libraries' budgets. First the smaller colleges like RPI got hit. (RPI cancelled most of its print journals and is now cancelling many of its online subscriptions.) However even Stanford, Cornell, etc, are now feeling the pinch. The current solution for the poorer libraries is to pay for any individual articles that researchers ask for. In response, the commercial publishers may now charge $20 for one article, and that's rising.
As a researcher, I feel it my moral duty to support the society journals whenever possible. However, sometimes the publishers' journals are excellent. There's a feedback loop here. A journal is defined to be good if papers (mostly in other journals) cite its papers. Therefore people want to publish there, so its editors get to select the best, etc. This is related to the concept that sometimes the best SW for a particular app is commercial.
More tidbits:
In at least two recent cases, the complete board of editors of a for-profit journal have gotten so angry at their own journal's price (set by the publisher) that they've quit en masse and formed a competing non-profit journal.
For-profit publishers can be sensitive on this topic. Around 1994,
Gordon & Breach sued the American Institute of Physics and American Physical Society for publishing a survey showing that their journals were among the most expensive. AIP/APS won. See http://barschall.stanford.edu/index.html
My own feeling: It's time for a reorganization of the whole higher-ed and research system. Abstractly, things have never been better (in many fields of CS). I can do research on a laptop; I can learn what a researcher in Tasmania is doing from his website. However, the institutional system is more and more obsolete and irrelevant, and indeed, more and more, hindering progress.
The publishers' real problem is not free journals, but rather libraries trying to stop paying the publishers' vastly increased charges. "Free journals" is merely the latest library tactic.
Many librarians and researchers didn't start out caring about the principle of free journals. The publishers' greed forced it on them. Even major research libraries are cancelling subscriptions. The libraries are doing that because the journal prices have been increasing so fast. First the libraries tried switching from paper copies to online subscriptions. So the publishers raised the online prices. Further, the publishers bundled many journals together so that libraries could not cancel the least used titles. The libraries try to form consortia to share subscriptions, but the publishers' license terms stop that.
Even "free" journals cost someone money. PLOS is quite expensive to publish in. Their model is charging the author not the reader.
One factor driving rising journal prices is the increased concentration as big publishers like Elsevier buy their competitors. Some years ago, Elsevier stated their business model as, approximately, serving assistant profs trying to get tenure. In 2005, their profit was 655 million euros on income of 2097 million euros ( http://www.reed-elsevier.com/ ) That's not a bad profit margin.
Journals are obsolete. They're slow to publish, rarely have color, don't have videos, etc. We academics publish in them because administrators use them to judge us. However, when we need something, we search the web, not the libraries. I put my own research first on the web, so that people can find it. Later I write papers.
Finally, to respond to the comment that publicly funded work should be free: That would be nice, but there's a US law giving universities ownership in discoveries resulting from NSF-funded research. What do other countries do?
Fastlane doesn't use PDF forms. All its forms are web-based. It lets you upload documents in PDF, Word, LaTeX, and several other formats, which it converts to PDF. It then checks that the PDF is well formatted. It's amazing how nonportable PDF can be. (I can provide details if there's interest.) Fastlane also has modules for submitting reviews of proposals and then managing the panel review meetings. All of this is hosted on servers that are so fast that hundreds of people can be accessing it, usually w/o visible delay.
Disclaimer: I've been using fastlane for several years in different capacities, have watched it grow, and like it a lot.
Why did I post this now, when grants.gov has been around for awhile? Our university just starting requiring us to use it. They're also complaining about the increased work this will cause them. I don't know that I believe them there.
Up until June 4 1844, there used to be hundreds of thousands of birds quite like penguins in the Northern Hemisphere. They were called Great Auks. Indeed, the word 'penguin' is said to have referred to the great auk before the southern hemisphere penguins were discovered. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Auk.
"On June 4, 1844, three fishermen named Jon Brandsson, Sigurdr Islefsson and Ketil Ketilsson made a trip to the Icelandic island of Eldey. They had been hired by a collector named Carl Siemsen who wanted auk specimens. Jon Brandsson found an auk and killed it. Sigurdr Islefsson found another and did the same. Ketil Ketilsson had to return empty handed because his companions had just completed the extinction of the great auk." - http://www.abdn.ac.uk/~nhi708/treasure/auk/index.h tml
Slashdot Mirror
When I visited Martinique, the local version was that the alleged sole survivor of Pelee (a prisoner in an underground cell) might well have been a con artist.
1. In the days before he was "rescued", the heat would have penetrated the cell and killed him.
2. He spent the following years touring with PT Barnum's circus, advertised as the sole survivor.
The theory is that he was outside the blast area, and entered the cell after the blast before the searchers.
The sad story of St Pierre is a good example that, when the government tells you that there is nothing to fear, that it may be time to get the hell out of there. The volcano was threatening, people wanted to leave, the government said to stay.
DNA relative matching was used to close a 20-year-old unsolved rape case in the midwest recently. Police had a guess but nothing to justify a search warrant. The suspect had married and settled down after committing the crime. The suspect's daughter was a college student and had gotten a Pap smear. The lab kept the samples for 5 years for legal reasons. The police got her DNA sample from the lab w/o a search warrant and matched it to the rape victim. That gave them grounds for a warrant. The search found evidence, and they got a conviction.
Random factlets:
Approx 10% of people don't have the parents they think they do.
Even w/o a match, DNA can strongly suggest the suspect's race. Is it ok to hassle all young men of the same race as the suspect? There was a case at SUNY New Paltz some years ago where someone was attacked by a young black man. The police interviewed all male black students.
Physical evidence is not always as solid as people assume. Apart from the recent scandals at the FBI crime lab, here are 2 other cases.
Many years ago, two NYS state troopers from the Binghampton troop were convicted and jailed for fabricating fingerprints. I think it involved scotch tape.
In DC some years ago, an innocent man was jailed because an ATM surveillance video was wrongly correlated with the transactions. He was wrongly thought to have used a victim's ATM card, and his protestations about having an alibi were ignored.
In the past, the reiserFS team didn't themselves consider that ReiserFS was a production tool. They made a poorly documented incompatible internal format change.
That meant that the new drivers could not handle the old filesystems.
Their solution? If you opened an old filesystem with the new driver, the old system was automatically and invisibly migrated to the new format, w/o asking or telling the user. Now, what could go wrong with this?
1. They did this even to filesystems opened read-only. This is a total violation of the contract between the SW and the user.
2. Now, that filesystem could no longer be read by the old drivers.
3. If the filesystem was physically read-only, like a CD-ROM, it could not be opened at all. Say bye-bye to your old backups.
When I saw this, I decided that I wanted nothing more to do with ReiserFS. ext3 is fine.
More broadly, why did SuSE ever make ReiserFS the standard? They need need to decide whether they're creating a production environment or a hackers' playground. The rule should be, if it's not necessary to change, then it's necessary not to change.
Agreed that LaTeX could use a better GUI. Raw TeX is the 2nd worst programming language I've ever seen, and that includes various assembly languages. (troff was the worst). However, I have a more fundamental wish.
LaTeX needs better layout algorithms. It apparently uses dynamic programming to fill a single paragraph. However, it needs to fill whole pages and papers similarly. E.g., I want to be able to tell it to squeeze my paper, which is now 8 1/2 pages, down to 8 pages, and do it intelligently, say by compressing the font slightly. Currently, it's quite counterintuitive how LaTex breaks pages. When I shorten said paper by deleting content early in the paper, for a long time, the paper doesn't get any shorter. Then, suddenly, it gets a lot shorter.
Relatedly, LaTeX places figures counterintuitively and badly.
Internally, raw TeX is a horrible virtual machine language. E.g., registers don't even have symbolic names, but numbers, from 1 to 256.
Various intuitively simple tasks, like wrapping text around a curved box, are almost impossible to implement.
Color is not well integrated since color output didn't exist then.
Intuitively simple things, such as marking certain blocks of text to be hilited, are not done correctly (probably because that is too hard).
To be sure, LaTex does most of this much better than anyone else. I'm just an idealist, trying to make it even better. Everything needs to be reinvented periodically.
The USS Constitution, the 200 year old wooden warship docked in Boston Harbor, is protected by a security cordon including metal detector, X-ray, and divers checking under the ship.
It was a fearsome weapon in 1800. However, if you smuggled sufficient gunpowder abord and fired its cannons now, the ship would probably split apart.
The story sounds slightly unlikely. The ARPANet was so small then that everyone knew almost everyone else. There were no malicious people on the net. Also, ITS had, SFAIK, no internal security, and anyone could create his own account (and then access others' accounts). So, passwords would have added nothing.
ITS also had a feature where someone could eavesdrop on someone else's session, to offer help. I don't think it required the consent of the eavesdroppee.
In case it needs to be said, this was a research machine. Production work was done on machines with passwords.
Contemporaneously with this, at a college a few miles up the river, an undergrad was using the DARPA funded PDP-10 to implement a simulator with which to create the first BASIC interpreter for a micro, which he then sold. There was a rumor that he used so much time that DARPA complained. Using a government computer for private commercial gain is a big no-no. That kid later said that he skipped his CS lectures to attend management classes, which explains a lot about the company he co-founded. A few years ago he bought the college a new CS building.
NASA is threatening to cut the rovers' budgets precisely because they are so popular and successful. They do this for all their space probes. The astronomers did this recently for the Arecibo telescope. If I were at the OMB or in Congress, I'd deduct double the needed money from NASA's budget and move these missions, together with their budgets and staff, to another agency. Then I'd demand that any future proposed missions contained an honest budget for future costs.
It's basically the same reason politicians get casinos approved by saying that they'll use the taxes to fund education. It's the same reason politicians tout unrealistically low budgets for major projects like the Big Dig.
This is not a comment on the value of any of the programs I mentioned, but only a complaint about the lies that were told to get them approved.
DARPA has dozens of projects and various different management styles in the several offices.
Nevertheless, the comments about DARPA being about only research and producing a final report are completely at variance with my personal experience with DARPA. In contrast, I like to joke that, under Tether, DARPA is not about research at all. It's more about engineering and assembling existing pieces of research into a working prototype. The Grand Challenge is an excellent example of this. The ultimate success metric is that some part of DoD picks up the work and transitions it into a deployed product.
DARPA staff don't do the research/engineering themselves. They travel the country to search for the leaders in the field, whether university or industry, and pay them. Typically those have 18 months to show preliminary results, or the funding is stopped.
Slashdot readers who think they have a crazy idea that could benefit defence should consider sending a DARPA program manager an 8 page white paper summarizing their idea. It's really exciting working with such intelligent people.
The funding was cut because its own community of researchers no longer considers it to be very important. Specifically a panel of experts was tasked to prioritize expenditures in radio astronomy. IIRC, Arecibo was ranked approximately fourth.
/. would lead to more money coming into their field. I, personally, have no sympathy for such tactics. When I was in the government, I suspect that experts may have tried that on me once or twice. I never caved.
There are more cost-effective solutions, such as very long baselines and antenna arrays. Those have advantages like being able to resolve smaller angles.
The radio astronomers might have been playing a Washington-monument game. (The legend is that Congress threatened to cut the Parks budget, so the NPS threatened to close the Washington Monument.) That is, they hoped that the public outcry that has, in fact, occurred on
Good science requires ruthlessness. The idea that any particular icon or business is too big or too famous to fail has been very bad for the economy and would hurt the US scientifically.
Kmail is nice but has some weird omissions, at least for the latest version in SuSE 10.2. I've used it for a few years, have 5GB of mail with about 30K messages. However, I'll switch to claws when there is time.
You cannot select messages based on date. The simple act of selecting all messages sent to me during the last week containing the string 'billg' is not possible. The closest approach is to search all messages in the folder, list the hits by date and select the tail of the list. That is much worse for big folders because search is so slow. Indeed this is so slow as to be useless.
Also, you cannot tag messages. The only way to mark the messages on a certain topic is to use a separate folder, which is overkill.
You cannot delete an attachment from a message.
It uses imap in a very picky way and refuses to talk to servers that other mail client have no problem with.
People have reported losing stored mail when an index file gets corrupted.
etc. etc. My sense is that the development team is working hard but has inadequate resources. Finally, some of the above might be fixed in SuSE 10.3; however I've been unable to upgrade yet.
I forgot to mention something relevant that is known to all academics but apparently unknown to many /. readers.
There are two types of publishers: for-profit and non-profit. The for-profit publishers are commercial corporations like Elsevier. They, as is their duty to their shareholders, charge what the market will bear, do everything they can to jack up their prices, etc. One for-profit journal might cost an individual $200/year; while a library would pay $500-$1000/year or more. All numbers are approximate.
The non-profits are the professional societies like IEEE. In the US, a non-profit organization is allowed the privilege of being a non-profit in return for providing some benefit to society. IEEE's income is membership fees (I pay IEEE $200/year incl some journals), conference registration fees (perhaps $200/day), journal subscriptions ($40-$100/year), and misc. The professional societies set the prices just high enough to break even (and pay overhead). That's a totally different philosophy.
Even a narrow field may have 10 relevant journals. If your work is interdisciplinary, then there may be 30 journals (and many conferences) that occasionally publish something interesting. Everyone is starting new journals.
While both classes of journals are technically obsolete, only the for-profit journals' prices are breaking the libraries' budgets. First the smaller colleges like RPI got hit. (RPI cancelled most of its print journals and is now cancelling many of its online subscriptions.) However even Stanford, Cornell, etc, are now feeling the pinch. The current solution for the poorer libraries is to pay for any individual articles that researchers ask for. In response, the commercial publishers may now charge $20 for one article, and that's rising.
As a researcher, I feel it my moral duty to support the society journals whenever possible. However, sometimes the publishers' journals are excellent. There's a feedback loop here. A journal is defined to be good if papers (mostly in other journals) cite its papers. Therefore people want to publish there, so its editors get to select the best, etc. This is related to the concept that sometimes the best SW for a particular app is commercial.
More tidbits:
In at least two recent cases, the complete board of editors of a for-profit journal have gotten so angry at their own journal's price (set by the publisher) that they've quit en masse and formed a competing non-profit journal.
For-profit publishers can be sensitive on this topic. Around 1994, Gordon & Breach sued the American Institute of Physics and American Physical Society for publishing a survey showing that their journals were among the most expensive. AIP/APS won. See http://barschall.stanford.edu/index.html
There are many online stories about this. Librarians have been debating it for more than 10 years now. Here is one ref: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march01/frazier/03frazier .html
My own feeling: It's time for a reorganization of the whole higher-ed and research system. Abstractly, things have never been better (in many fields of CS). I can do research on a laptop; I can learn what a researcher in Tasmania is doing from his website. However, the institutional system is more and more obsolete and irrelevant, and indeed, more and more, hindering progress.
The publishers' real problem is not free journals, but rather libraries trying to stop paying the publishers' vastly increased charges. "Free journals" is merely the latest library tactic.
Many librarians and researchers didn't start out caring about the principle of free journals. The publishers' greed forced it on them. Even major research libraries are cancelling subscriptions. The libraries are doing that because the journal prices have been increasing so fast. First the libraries tried switching from paper copies to online subscriptions. So the publishers raised the online prices. Further, the publishers bundled many journals together so that libraries could not cancel the least used titles. The libraries try to form consortia to share subscriptions, but the publishers' license terms stop that.
Even "free" journals cost someone money. PLOS is quite expensive to publish in. Their model is charging the author not the reader.
One factor driving rising journal prices is the increased concentration as big publishers like Elsevier buy their competitors. Some years ago, Elsevier stated their business model as, approximately, serving assistant profs trying to get tenure. In 2005, their profit was 655 million euros on income of 2097 million euros ( http://www.reed-elsevier.com/ ) That's not a bad profit margin.
Journals are priced like drugs, at what the market is perceived to bear. That can be up to $2/page (w/o even any color) ( http://www.ams.org/membership/journal-survey.html )
Journals are obsolete. They're slow to publish, rarely have color, don't have videos, etc. We academics publish in them because administrators use them to judge us. However, when we need something, we search the web, not the libraries. I put my own research first on the web, so that people can find it. Later I write papers.
Finally, to respond to the comment that publicly funded work should be free: That would be nice, but there's a US law giving universities ownership in discoveries resulting from NSF-funded research. What do other countries do?
Fastlane doesn't use PDF forms. All its forms are web-based. It lets you upload documents in PDF, Word, LaTeX, and several other formats, which it converts to PDF. It then checks that the PDF is well formatted. It's amazing how nonportable PDF can be. (I can provide details if there's interest.) Fastlane also has modules for submitting reviews of proposals and then managing the panel review meetings. All of this is hosted on servers that are so fast that hundreds of people can be accessing it, usually w/o visible delay.
Disclaimer: I've been using fastlane for several years in different capacities, have watched it grow, and like it a lot.
Why did I post this now, when grants.gov has been around for awhile? Our university just starting requiring us to use it. They're also complaining about the increased work this will cause them. I don't know that I believe them there.
"On June 4, 1844, three fishermen named Jon Brandsson, Sigurdr Islefsson and Ketil Ketilsson made a trip to the Icelandic island of Eldey. They had been hired by a collector named Carl Siemsen who wanted auk specimens. Jon Brandsson found an auk and killed it. Sigurdr Islefsson found another and did the same. Ketil Ketilsson had to return empty handed because his companions had just completed the extinction of the great auk." - http://www.abdn.ac.uk/~nhi708/treasure/auk/index.h tml
No, putting it on the menu did not save it.
Yes, great species do go extinct.