Others seem to be describing some good solutions to getting the map scanned, so here's how to geocode and rectify the image using the open source Grass GIS software:
Step 0:
- You need to have a location already created in grass, with some contemporary data in it (physical features, roads etc where there's some concurrence with the map you're trying to geocode). The projection you've used doesn't matter much - a later step is going to be rectifying (ie distorting) the scanned map to match the projection of the digital map. The created location does need be at least as large as the scanned map (ie if the map is everything in a 5 km radius of some town, the grass location also needs to encompass at least a 5 km radius of the same town).
Step 1:
- Come up with a list of features/points which exist on both maps. Depending on the scale of the map, this could be intersections of specific roads, locations of towns, peaks of mountains etc. You're going to need an absolute minimum of five points for the rectification process to have any chance of working; more than fifteen is much better. Try and select points which are unlikely to have moved over time (coastline or river features for example). In grass, mouse over each point and record the coordinates.
Step 2: import the scan
In grass, do: r.in.gdal input=[path to scanned file] out=[Mapname] location=templocation
Quit grass
Step 3: target, point, rectify
Open grass, but this time in the 'templocation' you created in step 2
d.mon will open a window; i.points will display the scan in it. Select the mapname in the dialog that appears, then one by one select each of the points you've identified as having concurrence with the modern map. In the terminal window, enter the coordinates for the point taken from the list you created in step 1. When done marking points, click 'quit'.
i.rectify -a group=groupMapname extension=_1 order=1
Depending on the size of your map and your processor speed, this bit may take a while. When done, quit grass.
Step 4: admire output
Open grass in the modern location. The scanned map will be available as a raster layer for display. The scan will have been rectified so the map matches the projection of the modern map layers - ie you'll be able to see what's moved and changed, and what exists now that didn't then etc. There's other grass commands which will help you convert features of interest (rivers, roads, contour lines, whatever) into vectors if you really want.
If all this seems too hard, have a look at qgis - also open source mapping software; it's more gui-oriented and I know it has a georectifying plugin. I've just never used it.
As someone who recently passed off a pile of code of about that size in poorly written and poorly documented php to someone.. All I can say is I'm very very sorry, and I had *no idea* my personal side project would work better than the original commercial offering and be declared 'mission critical' three months before I left for greener pastures..
Jabref? http://jabref.sourceforge.net/ It's open source & cross platform (java). I use it to manage about 1500 articles and related academic texts in a mix of pdf, odt, and doc. You can add notes about files. It can operate as a standalone or can be connected to a shared mysql database (to allow sharing of the files, their cites, and any notes you add). The one thing it can't do directly is annotate the original documents, but you could presumably annotate them using something else before replacing them in the database. Finally, it allows saving of metadata to pdfs, which I think can be used to save your notes about the file to the pdf metadata. Not so useful for non-pdf documents though. Finally, it pipes direct to latex and has a good plugin for openoffice, so if you use openoffice or latex you're in business..
Galileo Galilei saw the moons of Jupiter with a refracting telescope with much less power than a 4" reflector. And I still remember the shock of seeing Saturn's rings in person for the first time in a 4" reflector borrowed by my high school more than 20 years later. I say go for it.
You might want to look into the fact that teacher's unions are also present and, if anything, more powerful in countries like Australia, the UK, Canada. ie places where children completing high school do better at written english than children completing high school in the United States.
I've taught college sociology in both Australia and the United States (ie a topic in which the ability to write clearly is central to grading and to entry into graduate programs) and the principal difference between the two countries appears to be the Australian willingness to fail college students who cannot write, and the willingness of Australian schools to hold students back a year if they are not meeting basic standards. In the US, poorly performing students are simply passed on to the next year level and eventually to college. Since they tend to be paying for their college education (rather than having it paid for by the taxpayer, as in Australia), colleges are equally reluctant to simply fail them, meaning at least some US students manage to graduate from college while remaining functionally illiterate. At which point they get screwed, since the workplace (and graduate schools) have little patience for functional illiteracy.
A standard method for testing the effect of alcohol on reaction time is setting up a chalk 'gun' on the rear bumper of a car and having a driver drive it around a closed course at a fixed speed. The chalk gun fires one pellet at the ground at a randomly determined time; as soon as the driver hits the brake pedal the gun fires a second pellet. You measure the distance between the two chalk spots on the road to get reaction time. You do it several times before alcohol as a control and several times after having a few drinks. It's a great test for those people who claim they're better drivers after a couple of beers, because it inevitably shows a reduced reaction time.
I always wanted to see this reproduced with a cellphone involved instead of alcohol. Especially for my wife, who claims that she's still a good driver while on the cellphone.
Well, http://www.abetteroakland.com/ provides better, far more detailed coverage of local politics in Oakland CA than any of the available print media sources.
Because a high school teacher makes an average of around $55k in San Diego (http://preview.tinyurl.com/18r), and bright people who've gone to the effort of becoming educated to the minimum level needed to be an effective high school teacher tend to have other options which pay better. Or tend to leave teaching after a couple of years if they start as one.
Funny thing, I was just at an academic presentation on human trafficking connected with the sex trade a couple of weeks ago. I made the observation that the thing that had tended to lead to the complete end of other forms of extreme exploitation (slavery, debt bondage, and similar forms of unfree labour) was the mechanization of whatever it was that people were being forced to do, and that so far mechanizing human sexuality had proved difficult.
So I think it's fantastic that these companies are continuing to push the limits of exactly what range of basic human needs can be met through mechanization, because if there's ever eventually a product that genuinely meets this need for a large enough number of people, it'll basically end the economic viability of forced sex labour. Note that it doesn't have to meet these needs for everyone, just for enough people that setting up the infrastructure for forced sex work is no longer economically viable.
I also wonder if there'll ever be a crossover point where having a 'real doll' will be something that people are comfortable disclosing - kind of like the crossover that occurred sometime in the late 1990s - early 2000s with online dating in North America. In the 80s and earlier (for those of you who are too young to remember), meeting people online or through newspaper ads was something that was kind of desperate-seeming and embarrassing and something that people who'd met that way tended to 'hide' by making up some other story about how they'd met. Now it's basically normative, and it's rare to find people unwilling to say they met through an online dating service. Likewise, women owning vibrators went from being something no-one admitted to, to something that second-wave feminism made normative and no big deal (witness many of the comments about vibrators already in this thread, most of which aren't from 'anonymous cowards').
Anyway, I think it's going to be an interesting decade or so for people interested in the interactions between human sexuality and the labour market.
So. They still need a court order to actually authorize that 'authority' (unless you're silly enough to let them just waltz in the door), and they only get that court order if your lawyers don't earn their retainer by convincing the judge that (for example) allowing such a clause means violating medical record privacy laws (or whatever your industry ' jurisdictional equivalent is) and hence that particular clause of the contract is invalid. If auditors appear, do as other posters have suggested - ask for their court order then throw them out, and call your lawyers. If you're a tiny nonprofit or similar without lawyers a) why the hell weren't you using FOSS in the first place since you have no money, and b) call your local bar association or equivalent and find out who does pro bono for non-profits locally.
My wife, who broke her leg and was in a long-leg cast (opted for old-school rather than surgery) last year *couldn't* get a *temporary* handicapped sign for her car in California because "the system has been abused too much lately and they're cracking down". I had to repeatedly wheel her several blocks in a wheelchair to get to orthopedic appointments because street parking in San Francisco is so tight and because we couldn't use the handicapped spaces right beside the doctor's office. And San Francisco, for those of you who've never visited, is all hills (at least near UCSF).
"They have no concept of 'ownership' of land or property, and rarely stay in one place for long"
I'm going to pick on this specific example of horrendous ignorance, but believe me it's just a single example of the kind of nonsense I'm seeing on this thread.
The historic problem hasn't been that Aboriginals haven't had a concept of land ownership, rather than they have a whole body of legal concepts which are more complex than the feudally-based concepts brought by Europeans, and hence were rarely recognized as such. Let me give you an example. Any one geographic space may have multiple rights and duties associated with it. The right to hunt geese during the early part of the wet season. The right to collect turtle eggs when turtles are hatching on beaches. The right to move through the area. The right to set up camp during the dry season when there are few food resources. The 'ownership' of, or association with specific dreamtime entities whose stories connect with that area in some way. These different types and levels of ownership can and often are held by different groups, families, and individuals. There's any number of examples of what has gone wrong when Europeans have attempted to engage with this system even with good intent. A mining company, for example, might seek permission to do exploratory drilling, and ask around to find out who 'owns' the land. Directed to some imposing looking elder, they ask if he is the owner of the land and he says yes. They ask if there's any religiously sensitive places in the area and he says no. The offer a payment in exchange for exploratory drilling. All good, right? Except when the mining company rolls the drills out, all hell breaks loose with other groups of people turning up saying that they're the owners and they weren't consulted at all and there's a number of important religious sites within the area and so on. The mining company throws its hands up in disgust and declares the local community is just trying to screw them for more money. The real problem being the elder they consulted in the first place turns out to have rights to hunt in the area during parts of the year (and hence felt fine saying yes he 'owned' the land because loosely translated he did), but was either unaware or didn't care that other groups also had ownership rights over different aspects of the land and that there's a number of sacred spaces connected to exclusively-female dreamtime stories that he was (appropriately) unaware of, and so on. And this is what can happen when people are acting with good intentions, let alone if someone is actually deliberately trying to screw the locals over. Aboriginal law has complex, multi-layered conceptions of legal rights and ownership where there are many simultaneous and overlaying categories of ownership; European property law is largely an extension of feudal property law and, by contrast, is simple, static, and does not allow for simultaneous multiple types of ownership. To the frustration of both Europeans and Aboriginals, trying to shoehorn Aboriginal property law into European property categories for the sake of expediency and to allow things like mining or property development to be pursued in a timely manner has rarely produced entirely satisfactory results.
To get back to my original point, the idea that Aboriginals "no concept of 'ownership' of land or property" merely displays breathtaking ignorance, and the fact that this is a widespread understanding among European Australians is, I think, both a national embarrassment and the basis for much of the ongoing misunderstandings between Australians of all backgrounds.
So that's why the US is one of the few nations not to ratify the Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on their Destruction (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottawa_Treaty)..
"If you consider something at 'University' a Youth Mistake. Most people are generally at the age of adulthood since then."
I've taught undergraduates. Undergraduates are, how do I say this delicately..? Complete Fucking Morons. More to the point, they've just left home for the first time and are highly susceptible to whatever their even stupider peers suggest to them. Need we go further into the consequences of peer pressure while 'being at university' that exhibit (a), the North American Frat Boy (and his many, many international equivalents before the rest of you start laughing at the stupid yanks again).
By all means, charge, prosecute, try, and if found guilty (and only then) punish people for their actions. Continuing to punish people for decades after they've done their punishment is almost always dubious and counterproductive. To argue that this guy should be punished for something that never even got to the 'prosecute' stage is simply obscene.
Funny thing, I was just driving home from the Hollywood farmer's market yesterday in LA. My wife, on seeing the Capitol Records building, said "Wow, they still exist? What do they *do* now anyway?" I laughed and said "I think they just sue people for a living". The only visible connection to music anywhere on the building was a poster promoting some Beatles re-release in a window. A poster for a group of musicians who stopped creating new music almost half a century ago..
Amen. While I was finishing grad school I got to the point where I hoped my own institution *didn't* have hardcopies of a journal that was old enough to not exist in digital form, because then I had an excuse to request it via ILL - which these days almost always means someone at the institution which does have it scans it and emails you the pdf, usually within a couple of days. If my own institution had it in hardcopy, I'd have to cross town to the library and go and copy it myself.
I find myself wishing/hoping that all these pdfs being created by library staff at academic institutions for ILL are being retained, and that they'd be put online somewhere (the publisher's site, the library's site, whatever) to avoid more ridiculous duplication (excuse the pun) of effort.
The other thing I'd really love to see is a piratebay solely for academic papers, so that people not affiliated with a large research university can access the fruits of research their taxes probably paid for. The US National Institutes of Health (one of the single larges sources of biomedical research funding in the US) recently moved to require free access to articles derived from research they funded within one year of publication is a very nice start, but..
Typical microsoft approach. Take an everyday activity (cooking, writing a letter) and add bells and whistles to the point where you need a serious hardware upgrade to even get started any more..
Portugal. Decriminalized *all* drugs (including heroin etc) in 2001. With considerable success from almost any public health or criminological perspective:
As I understand it, they're under sporadic pressure by the US and Sweden and other holdouts for demonstrably failed drug policy to revert to the bad old days, but the benefits have been so significant neither the Partido Socialista or any of its viable competition has shown any real sign of buckling.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, sorry, I realized after I clicked 'submit' that it wasn't clear that I meant coastlines ad rivers are examples of what not to use.
Thanks for providing correct terminology too - very helpful for searches!
Others seem to be describing some good solutions to getting the map scanned, so here's how to geocode and rectify the image using the open source Grass GIS software:
Step 0:
- You need to have a location already created in grass, with some contemporary data in it (physical features, roads etc where there's some concurrence with the map you're trying to geocode). The projection you've used doesn't matter much - a later step is going to be rectifying (ie distorting) the scanned map to match the projection of the digital map. The created location does need be at least as large as the scanned map (ie if the map is everything in a 5 km radius of some town, the grass location also needs to encompass at least a 5 km radius of the same town).
Step 1:
- Come up with a list of features/points which exist on both maps. Depending on the scale of the map, this could be intersections of specific roads, locations of towns, peaks of mountains etc. You're going to need an absolute minimum of five points for the rectification process to have any chance of working; more than fifteen is much better. Try and select points which are unlikely to have moved over time (coastline or river features for example). In grass, mouse over each point and record the coordinates.
Step 2: import the scan
In grass, do: r.in.gdal input=[path to scanned file] out=[Mapname] location=templocation
Quit grass
Step 3: target, point, rectify
Open grass, but this time in the 'templocation' you created in step 2
i.target group=groupMapname location=[modern map location name] mapset=PERMANENT
i.group group=groupMapname in=Mapname
d.mon start=x0
i.points groupMapname
d.mon will open a window; i.points will display the scan in it. Select the mapname in the dialog that appears, then one by one select each of the points you've identified as having concurrence with the modern map. In the terminal window, enter the coordinates for the point taken from the list you created in step 1. When done marking points, click 'quit'.
i.rectify -a group=groupMapname extension=_1 order=1
Depending on the size of your map and your processor speed, this bit may take a while. When done, quit grass.
Step 4: admire output
Open grass in the modern location. The scanned map will be available as a raster layer for display. The scan will have been rectified so the map matches the projection of the modern map layers - ie you'll be able to see what's moved and changed, and what exists now that didn't then etc. There's other grass commands which will help you convert features of interest (rivers, roads, contour lines, whatever) into vectors if you really want.
If all this seems too hard, have a look at qgis - also open source mapping software; it's more gui-oriented and I know it has a georectifying plugin. I've just never used it.
Good luck.
No, but I love that so many people can immediately think of a likely suspect..
As someone who recently passed off a pile of code of about that size in poorly written and poorly documented php to someone.. All I can say is I'm very very sorry, and I had *no idea* my personal side project would work better than the original commercial offering and be declared 'mission critical' three months before I left for greener pastures..
Jabref? http://jabref.sourceforge.net/ It's open source & cross platform (java). I use it to manage about 1500 articles and related academic texts in a mix of pdf, odt, and doc. You can add notes about files. It can operate as a standalone or can be connected to a shared mysql database (to allow sharing of the files, their cites, and any notes you add). The one thing it can't do directly is annotate the original documents, but you could presumably annotate them using something else before replacing them in the database. Finally, it allows saving of metadata to pdfs, which I think can be used to save your notes about the file to the pdf metadata. Not so useful for non-pdf documents though. Finally, it pipes direct to latex and has a good plugin for openoffice, so if you use openoffice or latex you're in business..
Galileo Galilei saw the moons of Jupiter with a refracting telescope with much less power than a 4" reflector. And I still remember the shock of seeing Saturn's rings in person for the first time in a 4" reflector borrowed by my high school more than 20 years later. I say go for it.
Time to flood the idiots with forms filled in with wonderful organization names. Time to register the TeddyBear's Picnic again: http://www.theage.com.au/national/police-spying-on-activists-revealed-20081015-51k0.html
"What's the problem? I blame teachers' unions."
You might want to look into the fact that teacher's unions are also present and, if anything, more powerful in countries like Australia, the UK, Canada. ie places where children completing high school do better at written english than children completing high school in the United States.
I've taught college sociology in both Australia and the United States (ie a topic in which the ability to write clearly is central to grading and to entry into graduate programs) and the principal difference between the two countries appears to be the Australian willingness to fail college students who cannot write, and the willingness of Australian schools to hold students back a year if they are not meeting basic standards. In the US, poorly performing students are simply passed on to the next year level and eventually to college. Since they tend to be paying for their college education (rather than having it paid for by the taxpayer, as in Australia), colleges are equally reluctant to simply fail them, meaning at least some US students manage to graduate from college while remaining functionally illiterate. At which point they get screwed, since the workplace (and graduate schools) have little patience for functional illiteracy.
A standard method for testing the effect of alcohol on reaction time is setting up a chalk 'gun' on the rear bumper of a car and having a driver drive it around a closed course at a fixed speed. The chalk gun fires one pellet at the ground at a randomly determined time; as soon as the driver hits the brake pedal the gun fires a second pellet. You measure the distance between the two chalk spots on the road to get reaction time. You do it several times before alcohol as a control and several times after having a few drinks. It's a great test for those people who claim they're better drivers after a couple of beers, because it inevitably shows a reduced reaction time.
I always wanted to see this reproduced with a cellphone involved instead of alcohol. Especially for my wife, who claims that she's still a good driver while on the cellphone.
Well, http://www.abetteroakland.com/ provides better, far more detailed coverage of local politics in Oakland CA than any of the available print media sources.
Because a high school teacher makes an average of around $55k in San Diego (http://preview.tinyurl.com/18r), and bright people who've gone to the effort of becoming educated to the minimum level needed to be an effective high school teacher tend to have other options which pay better. Or tend to leave teaching after a couple of years if they start as one.
Funny thing, I was just at an academic presentation on human trafficking connected with the sex trade a couple of weeks ago. I made the observation that the thing that had tended to lead to the complete end of other forms of extreme exploitation (slavery, debt bondage, and similar forms of unfree labour) was the mechanization of whatever it was that people were being forced to do, and that so far mechanizing human sexuality had proved difficult.
So I think it's fantastic that these companies are continuing to push the limits of exactly what range of basic human needs can be met through mechanization, because if there's ever eventually a product that genuinely meets this need for a large enough number of people, it'll basically end the economic viability of forced sex labour. Note that it doesn't have to meet these needs for everyone, just for enough people that setting up the infrastructure for forced sex work is no longer economically viable.
I also wonder if there'll ever be a crossover point where having a 'real doll' will be something that people are comfortable disclosing - kind of like the crossover that occurred sometime in the late 1990s - early 2000s with online dating in North America. In the 80s and earlier (for those of you who are too young to remember), meeting people online or through newspaper ads was something that was kind of desperate-seeming and embarrassing and something that people who'd met that way tended to 'hide' by making up some other story about how they'd met. Now it's basically normative, and it's rare to find people unwilling to say they met through an online dating service. Likewise, women owning vibrators went from being something no-one admitted to, to something that second-wave feminism made normative and no big deal (witness many of the comments about vibrators already in this thread, most of which aren't from 'anonymous cowards').
Anyway, I think it's going to be an interesting decade or so for people interested in the interactions between human sexuality and the labour market.
So. They still need a court order to actually authorize that 'authority' (unless you're silly enough to let them just waltz in the door), and they only get that court order if your lawyers don't earn their retainer by convincing the judge that (for example) allowing such a clause means violating medical record privacy laws (or whatever your industry ' jurisdictional equivalent is) and hence that particular clause of the contract is invalid. If auditors appear, do as other posters have suggested - ask for their court order then throw them out, and call your lawyers. If you're a tiny nonprofit or similar without lawyers a) why the hell weren't you using FOSS in the first place since you have no money, and b) call your local bar association or equivalent and find out who does pro bono for non-profits locally.
Total number of food allergy deaths per year in the US appears to be about 11. That's all foods though, not just nuts.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/meredith-broussard/food-allergy-deaths-less_b_151462.html
A secondary source, I know, but it sums things up reasonably well.
My wife, who broke her leg and was in a long-leg cast (opted for old-school rather than surgery) last year *couldn't* get a *temporary* handicapped sign for her car in California because "the system has been abused too much lately and they're cracking down". I had to repeatedly wheel her several blocks in a wheelchair to get to orthopedic appointments because street parking in San Francisco is so tight and because we couldn't use the handicapped spaces right beside the doctor's office. And San Francisco, for those of you who've never visited, is all hills (at least near UCSF).
"They have no concept of 'ownership' of land or property, and rarely stay in one place for long"
I'm going to pick on this specific example of horrendous ignorance, but believe me it's just a single example of the kind of nonsense I'm seeing on this thread.
The historic problem hasn't been that Aboriginals haven't had a concept of land ownership, rather than they have a whole body of legal concepts which are more complex than the feudally-based concepts brought by Europeans, and hence were rarely recognized as such. Let me give you an example. Any one geographic space may have multiple rights and duties associated with it. The right to hunt geese during the early part of the wet season. The right to collect turtle eggs when turtles are hatching on beaches. The right to move through the area. The right to set up camp during the dry season when there are few food resources. The 'ownership' of, or association with specific dreamtime entities whose stories connect with that area in some way. These different types and levels of ownership can and often are held by different groups, families, and individuals. There's any number of examples of what has gone wrong when Europeans have attempted to engage with this system even with good intent. A mining company, for example, might seek permission to do exploratory drilling, and ask around to find out who 'owns' the land. Directed to some imposing looking elder, they ask if he is the owner of the land and he says yes. They ask if there's any religiously sensitive places in the area and he says no. The offer a payment in exchange for exploratory drilling. All good, right? Except when the mining company rolls the drills out, all hell breaks loose with other groups of people turning up saying that they're the owners and they weren't consulted at all and there's a number of important religious sites within the area and so on. The mining company throws its hands up in disgust and declares the local community is just trying to screw them for more money. The real problem being the elder they consulted in the first place turns out to have rights to hunt in the area during parts of the year (and hence felt fine saying yes he 'owned' the land because loosely translated he did), but was either unaware or didn't care that other groups also had ownership rights over different aspects of the land and that there's a number of sacred spaces connected to exclusively-female dreamtime stories that he was (appropriately) unaware of, and so on. And this is what can happen when people are acting with good intentions, let alone if someone is actually deliberately trying to screw the locals over. Aboriginal law has complex, multi-layered conceptions of legal rights and ownership where there are many simultaneous and overlaying categories of ownership; European property law is largely an extension of feudal property law and, by contrast, is simple, static, and does not allow for simultaneous multiple types of ownership. To the frustration of both Europeans and Aboriginals, trying to shoehorn Aboriginal property law into European property categories for the sake of expediency and to allow things like mining or property development to be pursued in a timely manner has rarely produced entirely satisfactory results.
To get back to my original point, the idea that Aboriginals "no concept of 'ownership' of land or property" merely displays breathtaking ignorance, and the fact that this is a widespread understanding among European Australians is, I think, both a national embarrassment and the basis for much of the ongoing misunderstandings between Australians of all backgrounds.
If they really really want to stir up trouble they'll apply to have the bible banned because it's defamatory toward other religions.
So that's why the US is one of the few nations not to ratify the Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on their Destruction (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottawa_Treaty)..
"If you consider something at 'University' a Youth Mistake. Most people are generally at the age of adulthood since then."
I've taught undergraduates. Undergraduates are, how do I say this delicately..? Complete Fucking Morons. More to the point, they've just left home for the first time and are highly susceptible to whatever their even stupider peers suggest to them. Need we go further into the consequences of peer pressure while 'being at university' that exhibit (a), the North American Frat Boy (and his many, many international equivalents before the rest of you start laughing at the stupid yanks again).
By all means, charge, prosecute, try, and if found guilty (and only then) punish people for their actions. Continuing to punish people for decades after they've done their punishment is almost always dubious and counterproductive. To argue that this guy should be punished for something that never even got to the 'prosecute' stage is simply obscene.
Funny thing, I was just driving home from the Hollywood farmer's market yesterday in LA. My wife, on seeing the Capitol Records building, said "Wow, they still exist? What do they *do* now anyway?" I laughed and said "I think they just sue people for a living". The only visible connection to music anywhere on the building was a poster promoting some Beatles re-release in a window. A poster for a group of musicians who stopped creating new music almost half a century ago..
Anyway, that's why Capitol Canada got forgotten. They're so irrelevant no-one cares.
Amen. While I was finishing grad school I got to the point where I hoped my own institution *didn't* have hardcopies of a journal that was old enough to not exist in digital form, because then I had an excuse to request it via ILL - which these days almost always means someone at the institution which does have it scans it and emails you the pdf, usually within a couple of days. If my own institution had it in hardcopy, I'd have to cross town to the library and go and copy it myself.
I find myself wishing/hoping that all these pdfs being created by library staff at academic institutions for ILL are being retained, and that they'd be put online somewhere (the publisher's site, the library's site, whatever) to avoid more ridiculous duplication (excuse the pun) of effort.
The other thing I'd really love to see is a piratebay solely for academic papers, so that people not affiliated with a large research university can access the fruits of research their taxes probably paid for. The US National Institutes of Health (one of the single larges sources of biomedical research funding in the US) recently moved to require free access to articles derived from research they funded within one year of publication is a very nice start, but..
Typical microsoft approach. Take an everyday activity (cooking, writing a letter) and add bells and whistles to the point where you need a serious hardware upgrade to even get started any more..
Portugal. Decriminalized *all* drugs (including heroin etc) in 2001. With considerable success from almost any public health or criminological perspective:
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10080
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=portugal-drug-decriminalization
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124061360462654683.html
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1893946,00.html
As I understand it, they're under sporadic pressure by the US and Sweden and other holdouts for demonstrably failed drug policy to revert to the bad old days, but the benefits have been so significant neither the Partido Socialista or any of its viable competition has shown any real sign of buckling.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=what+is+a+medical+sociologist%3F
Sheesh..
I love the idea of arxiv, but they seem to be limiting the fields they cover (at least for the time being). I'm a medical sociologist..