I'm currently about to start fiddling with gnuplot to create graphs for inclusion in LaTeX with the packages "epic" and "eepic". The nice thing with that is that text isn't converted to graphics (not even vector graphics) but retains it's notions of being characters that should be drawn with a font. Can R do the same for me?
Yes, I think so. Check out this Sweave demo: http://www.stat.umn.edu/~charlie/Sweave/. Sweave is overkill for what you are talking about, but gives an idea of how to do it. This being R, I'm certain there are many other ways to accomplish the same thing, but I'm just beginning to fiddle with LaTeX myself.
I'm not baffled, I'm intimately familiar with this problem. Unfortunately.
I'm the biological sciences, and not only do most of the major journals accept only electronic submissions, the majority of them _require_ DOC format. They won't take PDF or anything else.
He says he wants to submit documents in.doc format, but he doesn't want to buy a copy of Word. Huh???? How the heck is he going to look at his.doc file and check that it's correct after translation? (OOo isn't a solution, because it's not 100% compatible with Word.)
Gee, maybe like me he uses linux, and doesn't have Windows at all, thus making the aquisition of Word somewhat problematic. (Yes, I know it's still possible.) It's not that I don't have the budget to buy Office, it's more that Office is rather pricy for the purpose of occasionally formatting articles. And I'd rather spend that money elsewhere.
He acts all self-righteous about not using MS products, but he wants to take the path of least resistance and cave in to a particular journal that wants to use a proprietary MS format???
Gee... the options are: 1. Get tenure based on my publication record in top journals in my field; or 2. Restrict publishing to only journals that don't require DOC format. Assuming that I can find any.
If he's already got papers written in LaTeX format, then the time required to convert them to.doc (and debug all the resulting problems) would be a ridiculous, unjustifiable waste of time that he could be spending on research.
Well, yes. But doing research is a useless activity unless you publish the results. In an ideal world the publication process would be more flexible and straightforward, but we aren't there, and yet we still have to publish.
Maybe I'm behind the times, because I've been out of the research game for a while, but I've never heard of any journal that required machine-readable submissions at all.
As I mentioned above, I'm afraid you are out-of-date. Most journals will only take electronic submissions. (Which is actually not a bad thing - it's cut down on peer-review times dramatically, especially for journals published in Europe but peer-reviewed mostly by scientists in the US.) If only they were more flexible about formats!
I use Linux pretty much exclusively, and an odd assortment of software to produce the text, tables, figures, and so on. I end up putting all the bits together in OpenOffice.org simply because of the DOC file conversion. I've only had major trouble with one journal, but that journal had serious problems, and more than one of them. I managed to fix them without resorting to using the computer of one of my support staff (with Windows and MS Office), happily since he was already gone for the day and I needed to get this back in instantly if not sooner.
The number of people advocating the high-minded solution of boycotting journals, and so on, must not be in positions where their jobs and possibilities of promotion depend on publishing frequently, and in the "right" places. Mine does, and if it comes right down to it I'll figure out how to run MS Office rather than not publish. (but that would be a serious, serious PITA!)
I would dearly love to be able to submit figures in PostScript, but no dice on that either. Converting them to bitmaps is a nasty solution, but that's what the publishers want.
Why would you write it like that having to worry about capitalisation anyway, when you could just write "I helped my uncle Jack get off a horse" instead?
Because then you bring in word order issues:
I helped my uncle Jack get a horse off.
1) GIS support. Very important for what I do. This is probably due to how closely they work with GRASS (which I haven't used yet).
Hm... I guess I'll have to look into it. I've been using MySQL because of the abundance of documentation available. It does talk to GRASS (GIS) and to R (stats software) but an improved interface would be a possible reason to switch. I rely heavily on those two programs.
Too bad there isn't the abundance of documentation available for PostgreSQL (as in, I can't go to my university library and check out a couple books).
WHY???? Show me ONE big corporation which needs to play movies on the users desktops!
Is the US government big enough? I realize it's not a corporation, but much of our mandatory training has gone to online sources, most of which use some audio and video. Often if not always in media player formats.
Another example, probably also found in the corporate world - conferences with all the hot-shots that they want us to know about, but don't want to pay for us to attend. Either streaming video or archived video (or both) used so that we can be just as bored, I mean enlightened, as the attendees, but from our own desks. Again, media player formats.
Oh, and I'm absolutely certain that anyone who can describe the electron transport chain also knows the correct spelling of the membranes involved, so don't take it personally!
I'd have had to look up the details, it's been a while. (The "plant physiologist" label on my door is all a terrible mistake!)
But seriously, thanks for actually contributing something interesting and useful to the discussion - an awful lot of people don't seem to realize that just because we need O2, that doesn't mean that life does!
So WTF is a "Polar Year"?? I know a little bit about polar climate. I know the three fastest warming regions in the last two decades. I know when the first and last "Polar Years" were. I still don't know what a "Polar Year" is or how we know when the next one is.
It's a research push. They've been doing International Something Years for a long time. (International Geophysical Year, etc.) A bunch of scientists get together and push really really hard for research funding for something big. The kind of stuff done is beyond the capabilities of any one research group or any one research grant, so these let BIG research happen.
The milking machine. It fits the teat and is shaped so that a slight vacuum manipulates the teat in a way similar to the human hand. The teats are manipulated in turn as the air is directed to each teat cup (under programmed control such as a cam). The milk is delivered to a container.
I don't consider that a robot since it has to be attached by hand, and only performs a small movement. Kind of like a washing machine - it's an appliance because you put the clothes in, it agitates them, then you take them out again. A washing machine that put the laundry in for you, washed, then removed & folded would be a robot.
Robotic milkers do exist - the entire setup will feed the cow (common to feed supplements, grain, etc. in the milking parlor), position her correctly, wash, attach the milker to the udder, remove when done, and send her on her way.
Pretty cool, no?
These systems are most common in New Zealand and certain parts of Europe (early work from the Netherlands, I believe). They haven't been widely adopted in the US for economic and political reasons.
Firefox will only get a single shot with most users. If they download Firefox and have any problems with it at all they will go back to IE and never consider Firefox again.
Yes, I struggle with this constantly with my partner. I try very hard to get him to do ALL web browsing under linux, since I'm the one who gets to fix the computer when it gets lunched. He's used to the problems with Windows, but with the least little problem under linux, back he goes... As someone else said, it's the problems you are used to.
veering off wildly on a tangent: let alone getting him to do anything else under linux, or even just not web surfing as administrator under windows. I blame games. It's hard to play most of his favorite games as a normal user, and since you have to log in as admin anyway, everything gets done as admin. At least he's mostly using firefox for windows.
Oddly, the thing he has the most trouble with under linux is the filesystem. He doesn't understand the windows filesystem either, I think, but is dependent on being able to get to the desktop and my docs through the file dialog of any program. Anybody have any suggestions? Gnome, etc. has a desktop and a home (similar to my docs), but those don't automatically appear in file dialogs. He doesn't want to have to remember how to find them through the tree.
But don't try this yourself! Dog stomachs are much tougher than human stomachs - hydrogen peroxide in milk works beautifully for getting back whatever Fido ate, but could make you awfully, awfully unhappy.
Which version of.doc has your office standardized on? I have next-to-no experience with MS Word, but from what I've heard every release tweaks.doc a little.
Hee-hee! What a kidder! Expecting us to have a real, usable standard for the umpty-thousand people who work in my "company".
The policy is to distribute documents in Word or PDF format, no guidance on versions, etc. But you really don't want to get me started on IT policies at the local, regional and national level that affect me! My response is generally to keep my mouth shut lest someone discover I'm using a non-standard OS (linux) and non-standard software, and force me to conform...
My organization has standardized on DOC as the format of choice, which usually poses no problem for OOo. However... some administrators seem to be incapable of remembering this, and send out really important files in WordPerfect format.
My solution has been to use wpd2sxw to convert them, which seems to work fine for most stuff (at the very least, I can figure out what the memo is about). Since most of the windows users here (everyone but me) complain about not being able to read the WPD files, I think I might actually be ahead of the game!
The converter is available online, and does wpd2 other things as well.
my apologies, I shouldn't have assumed a masculine reality when I said "man".
On slashdot, it seems the more probable choice.:) That doesn't bother me, any more than someone saying "you guys" about a mixed group. I know, not PC of me... tsk, tsk.
But what are you going to say, "Hey person of unknown gender"? C'mon, really!
Your story is pretty good too, but I like mine better because it ends with beer...
A few years ago (pre "homeland security"), I was coming back from Lincoln, NE. Plane delayed, plane delayed more, plane cancelled. Rerouted who knows where (sent to airport sort of near home, then to airport very far from home, then back to airport nearest home).
Get home, no luggage. Surprise, surprise!
24 hours later, still no word from airline, so I call them (US domestic carrier). They have a record of having received my bag, but have no idea where it is (and actually admitted this to me). Give up on idea of ever seeing luggage again.
Next morning, delivery guy drops my bag off at my house. Lock has been cut off, of course, and bag searched. But... bag has a British Airways tag (!!!) and a full six-pack of microbrew beer inside. US beer, but still. And made in a state on the other side of the country from anywhere my bag was supposed to be.
What we never figured out, though:
Was it an apology for so completely screwing up?
Or were the baggage handlers drinking on the job & needed to hide the evidence?
Re: (Sperm sample required, sorry ladies)
on
NYT on Spam Cops
·
· Score: 1
But would it be worth it for a lady to go through all that trouble to obtain said qty of sperm just to read NYtimes.com?
Trouble? If it's trouble, you're asking the wrong guy... Excuse, maybe...:)
How many "ordinary scientists" have $40k burning a hole in their pocket?
And who would admit to being an ordinary scientist anyway!?
Well, I sure don't... (have the $40K, that is). I managed to talk my way into getting a Palm from end-of-year money last year, but a new computer, let alone one that pricy? Not a chance! (The Palm was for collecting field data, and has already more than saved its worth in my time.)
I'd be thrilled to get even part of this prize, though I don't think I'm eligible, because then I could replace my web server, which is an old PC I scavenged out of the trash. It does okay with the basics, but database queries take an awfully long time...
I'm a fairly ordinary scientist, not a grad student or post-doc, employed in a gov't research lab. We have enough money for salaries, and some support staff, and basic research support, but not much in the way of extra goodies, and we're certainly not rolling in dough. (Although some of those other cooler gov't labs might be!)
We're not allowed to even apply for the most common sorts of outside grants, though gov't scientists are eligible for some. The real advantage, from my point of view, is that we are then not tied to the typical 3-year grant cycle, and have the freedom to do much longer, and potentially more valuable, studies.
So, what you're saying is that you didn't read the article? I know, it's hard to read the entire thing, because it is SEVERAL sentences - but it clearly stated that Ohio University was NOT going to charge all students... The plan that they're considering is opt-in; if you do not choose to use the service, you pay nothing.
I know, people here can barely read the articles, let alone what happens when someone brings in valid outside information... Sheesh! What _were_ they thinking?
Penn State's service is NOT opt-in, everyone ends up paying for it, even those poor Mac & Linux users who can't play. And yes, that even includes students living off-campus, who can't play at all regardless. (But of course it's okay, because Penn State isn't raising its IT fee because of Napster...) They do intend to make it possible for off-campus students and even faculty to download music eventually.
The detail, the incredibly tumultuous times... all these historically great scientific figures who hadn't worked out how to do science yet.... The political upheaval... the fights over the calculus... the amazing picture of London it built up...
I'm having a hard time actually finishing it, but I'm fascinated by Stephenson's view of the world at that time... all these very bright people, who as a _culture_ just realized that they don't know _anything_ and want to figure it all out!
Through most of European history received wisdom a la Aristotle was the definition of how the world worked. Remarkably suddenly, this was overcome, and the world changed. Or rather, the perception of the world changed, and people set out to learn the way things really worked, instead of accepting explanations that were centuries old.
It's just amazing.
If you are so inclined, and are at an institution that subscribes, you can read the original articles online - Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society are online back to their origins in 1665 at JSTOR (which by the way is a great resource).
I haven't seen anyone else bring this up (and actually saw some posts claiming they use Excel for statistics and its "nice graphics").
Excel charts are generally horrible- the default values tend to include extraneous "chartjunk" (to borrow a word from Tufte). It is tedious to get a nice-looking chart from your data, and seems to be very difficult to produce any even mildly-complicated graphics. I use R for charts, and I'm familiar with several linux charting apps of varying degrees of complexity, but I'm not sure whether there are any good OSS apps for Windows.
A much bigger problem, though, is Excel's lack of statistical quality! This website provides a quick overview, with links to some more detailed references. Excel is occasionally accurate for simple analyses, but why on earth would you use an unreliable program for _anything_? The only way to be sure that Excel did your ANOVA or whatever correctly is to redo it in better stats software, and at that point I don't see the advantage.
This is an issue that comes up regularly on scientific mailing lists. Lots of people seem to take the path of least resistance and use Excel for both their analysis and presentation. Ick!
The teacher said he asked a few phd's and a few professors and they didn't know.
He should have asked a limnologist.:) Really, lake and pond aren't technical terms, but they do have a fairly standard scientific definition based on depth. Kind of like swamp and marsh...
A lake is a permanent body of water large enough to have a thermocline during some part of the summer. (You ever go swimming, and suddenly hit a layer of water that's much colder than the surface? That's the thermocline.)
A pond heats up throughout it's depth.
In areas with real winters, sometimes a pond is described as freezing solid. The actual size/depth required for the two definitions is pretty similar, as it happens.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I think so. Check out this Sweave demo: http://www.stat.umn.edu/~charlie/Sweave/. Sweave is overkill for what you are talking about, but gives an idea of how to do it. This being R, I'm certain there are many other ways to accomplish the same thing, but I'm just beginning to fiddle with LaTeX myself.
Table: Convert: Text to Table
might do what you want.
I'm the biological sciences, and not only do most of the major journals accept only electronic submissions, the majority of them _require_ DOC format. They won't take PDF or anything else.
He says he wants to submit documents in .doc format, but he doesn't want to buy a copy of Word. Huh???? How the heck is he going to look at his .doc file and check that it's correct after translation? (OOo isn't a solution, because it's not 100% compatible with Word.)
Gee, maybe like me he uses linux, and doesn't have Windows at all, thus making the aquisition of Word somewhat problematic. (Yes, I know it's still possible.) It's not that I don't have the budget to buy Office, it's more that Office is rather pricy for the purpose of occasionally formatting articles. And I'd rather spend that money elsewhere.
He acts all self-righteous about not using MS products, but he wants to take the path of least resistance and cave in to a particular journal that wants to use a proprietary MS format???
Gee... the options are: 1. Get tenure based on my publication record in top journals in my field; or 2. Restrict publishing to only journals that don't require DOC format. Assuming that I can find any.
If he's already got papers written in LaTeX format, then the time required to convert them to .doc (and debug all the resulting problems) would be a ridiculous, unjustifiable waste of time that he could be spending on research.
Well, yes. But doing research is a useless activity unless you publish the results. In an ideal world the publication process would be more flexible and straightforward, but we aren't there, and yet we still have to publish.
Maybe I'm behind the times, because I've been out of the research game for a while, but I've never heard of any journal that required machine-readable submissions at all.
As I mentioned above, I'm afraid you are out-of-date. Most journals will only take electronic submissions. (Which is actually not a bad thing - it's cut down on peer-review times dramatically, especially for journals published in Europe but peer-reviewed mostly by scientists in the US.) If only they were more flexible about formats!
I use Linux pretty much exclusively, and an odd assortment of software to produce the text, tables, figures, and so on. I end up putting all the bits together in OpenOffice.org simply because of the DOC file conversion. I've only had major trouble with one journal, but that journal had serious problems, and more than one of them. I managed to fix them without resorting to using the computer of one of my support staff (with Windows and MS Office), happily since he was already gone for the day and I needed to get this back in instantly if not sooner.
The number of people advocating the high-minded solution of boycotting journals, and so on, must not be in positions where their jobs and possibilities of promotion depend on publishing frequently, and in the "right" places. Mine does, and if it comes right down to it I'll figure out how to run MS Office rather than not publish. (but that would be a serious, serious PITA!)
I would dearly love to be able to submit figures in PostScript, but no dice on that either. Converting them to bitmaps is a nasty solution, but that's what the publishers want.
Because then you bring in word order issues:
I helped my uncle Jack get a horse off.
Fortunately none of my uncles are named Jack.
Hm... I guess I'll have to look into it. I've been using MySQL because of the abundance of documentation available. It does talk to GRASS (GIS) and to R (stats software) but an improved interface would be a possible reason to switch. I rely heavily on those two programs.
Too bad there isn't the abundance of documentation available for PostgreSQL (as in, I can't go to my university library and check out a couple books).
Is the US government big enough? I realize it's not a corporation, but much of our mandatory training has gone to online sources, most of which use some audio and video. Often if not always in media player formats.
Another example, probably also found in the corporate world - conferences with all the hot-shots that they want us to know about, but don't want to pay for us to attend. Either streaming video or archived video (or both) used so that we can be just as bored, I mean enlightened, as the attendees, but from our own desks. Again, media player formats.
I'd have had to look up the details, it's been a while. (The "plant physiologist" label on my door is all a terrible mistake!)
That's thylakoid, usually.
Oh, I feel extra specially geeky today!
But seriously, thanks for actually contributing something interesting and useful to the discussion - an awful lot of people don't seem to realize that just because we need O2, that doesn't mean that life does!
It's a research push. They've been doing International Something Years for a long time. (International Geophysical Year, etc.) A bunch of scientists get together and push really really hard for research funding for something big. The kind of stuff done is beyond the capabilities of any one research group or any one research grant, so these let BIG research happen.
I don't consider that a robot since it has to be attached by hand, and only performs a small movement. Kind of like a washing machine - it's an appliance because you put the clothes in, it agitates them, then you take them out again. A washing machine that put the laundry in for you, washed, then removed & folded would be a robot.
Robotic milkers do exist - the entire setup will feed the cow (common to feed supplements, grain, etc. in the milking parlor), position her correctly, wash, attach the milker to the udder, remove when done, and send her on her way.
Pretty cool, no?
These systems are most common in New Zealand and certain parts of Europe (early work from the Netherlands, I believe). They haven't been widely adopted in the US for economic and political reasons.
Yes, I struggle with this constantly with my partner. I try very hard to get him to do ALL web browsing under linux, since I'm the one who gets to fix the computer when it gets lunched. He's used to the problems with Windows, but with the least little problem under linux, back he goes... As someone else said, it's the problems you are used to.
veering off wildly on a tangent: let alone getting him to do anything else under linux, or even just not web surfing as administrator under windows. I blame games. It's hard to play most of his favorite games as a normal user, and since you have to log in as admin anyway, everything gets done as admin. At least he's mostly using firefox for windows.
Oddly, the thing he has the most trouble with under linux is the filesystem. He doesn't understand the windows filesystem either, I think, but is dependent on being able to get to the desktop and my docs through the file dialog of any program. Anybody have any suggestions? Gnome, etc. has a desktop and a home (similar to my docs), but those don't automatically appear in file dialogs. He doesn't want to have to remember how to find them through the tree.
Granted, it's not a cushion...
Hee-hee! What a kidder! Expecting us to have a real, usable standard for the umpty-thousand people who work in my "company".
The policy is to distribute documents in Word or PDF format, no guidance on versions, etc. But you really don't want to get me started on IT policies at the local, regional and national level that affect me! My response is generally to keep my mouth shut lest someone discover I'm using a non-standard OS (linux) and non-standard software, and force me to conform...
My solution has been to use wpd2sxw to convert them, which seems to work fine for most stuff (at the very least, I can figure out what the memo is about). Since most of the windows users here (everyone but me) complain about not being able to read the WPD files, I think I might actually be ahead of the game!
The converter is available online, and does wpd2 other things as well.
You could make money off that one!
On slashdot, it seems the more probable choice. :) That doesn't bother me, any more than someone saying "you guys" about a mixed group. I know, not PC of me... tsk, tsk.
But what are you going to say, "Hey person of unknown gender"? C'mon, really!
Your story is pretty good too, but I like mine better because it ends with beer...
Quite good, actually. It was, um, Wild Goose IPA from a brewery in Maryland.
I'm more of a stout kind of girl, but for a light beer it was really not bad.
A few years ago (pre "homeland security"), I was coming back from Lincoln, NE. Plane delayed, plane delayed more, plane cancelled. Rerouted who knows where (sent to airport sort of near home, then to airport very far from home, then back to airport nearest home).
Get home, no luggage. Surprise, surprise!
24 hours later, still no word from airline, so I call them (US domestic carrier). They have a record of having received my bag, but have no idea where it is (and actually admitted this to me). Give up on idea of ever seeing luggage again.
Next morning, delivery guy drops my bag off at my house. Lock has been cut off, of course, and bag searched. But... bag has a British Airways tag (!!!) and a full six-pack of microbrew beer inside. US beer, but still. And made in a state on the other side of the country from anywhere my bag was supposed to be.
What we never figured out, though:
Was it an apology for so completely screwing up?
Or were the baggage handlers drinking on the job & needed to hide the evidence?
Trouble? If it's trouble, you're asking the wrong guy... Excuse, maybe... :)
And who would admit to being an ordinary scientist anyway!?
Well, I sure don't... (have the $40K, that is). I managed to talk my way into getting a Palm from end-of-year money last year, but a new computer, let alone one that pricy? Not a chance! (The Palm was for collecting field data, and has already more than saved its worth in my time.)
I'd be thrilled to get even part of this prize, though I don't think I'm eligible, because then I could replace my web server, which is an old PC I scavenged out of the trash. It does okay with the basics, but database queries take an awfully long time...
I'm a fairly ordinary scientist, not a grad student or post-doc, employed in a gov't research lab. We have enough money for salaries, and some support staff, and basic research support, but not much in the way of extra goodies, and we're certainly not rolling in dough. (Although some of those other cooler gov't labs might be!)
We're not allowed to even apply for the most common sorts of outside grants, though gov't scientists are eligible for some. The real advantage, from my point of view, is that we are then not tied to the typical 3-year grant cycle, and have the freedom to do much longer, and potentially more valuable, studies.
I know, people here can barely read the articles, let alone what happens when someone brings in valid outside information... Sheesh! What _were_ they thinking?
Penn State's service is NOT opt-in, everyone ends up paying for it, even those poor Mac & Linux users who can't play. And yes, that even includes students living off-campus, who can't play at all regardless. (But of course it's okay, because Penn State isn't raising its IT fee because of Napster...) They do intend to make it possible for off-campus students and even faculty to download music eventually.
I'm having a hard time actually finishing it, but I'm fascinated by Stephenson's view of the world at that time... all these very bright people, who as a _culture_ just realized that they don't know _anything_ and want to figure it all out!
Through most of European history received wisdom a la Aristotle was the definition of how the world worked. Remarkably suddenly, this was overcome, and the world changed. Or rather, the perception of the world changed, and people set out to learn the way things really worked, instead of accepting explanations that were centuries old.
It's just amazing.
If you are so inclined, and are at an institution that subscribes, you can read the original articles online - Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society are online back to their origins in 1665 at JSTOR (which by the way is a great resource).
Excel charts are generally horrible- the default values tend to include extraneous "chartjunk" (to borrow a word from Tufte). It is tedious to get a nice-looking chart from your data, and seems to be very difficult to produce any even mildly-complicated graphics. I use R for charts, and I'm familiar with several linux charting apps of varying degrees of complexity, but I'm not sure whether there are any good OSS apps for Windows.
A much bigger problem, though, is Excel's lack of statistical quality! This website provides a quick overview, with links to some more detailed references. Excel is occasionally accurate for simple analyses, but why on earth would you use an unreliable program for _anything_? The only way to be sure that Excel did your ANOVA or whatever correctly is to redo it in better stats software, and at that point I don't see the advantage.
This is an issue that comes up regularly on scientific mailing lists. Lots of people seem to take the path of least resistance and use Excel for both their analysis and presentation. Ick!
He should have asked a limnologist. :) Really, lake and pond aren't technical terms, but they do have a fairly standard scientific definition based on depth. Kind of like swamp and marsh...
A lake is a permanent body of water large enough to have a thermocline during some part of the summer. (You ever go swimming, and suddenly hit a layer of water that's much colder than the surface? That's the thermocline.)
A pond heats up throughout it's depth.
In areas with real winters, sometimes a pond is described as freezing solid. The actual size/depth required for the two definitions is pretty similar, as it happens.