And for a special price: we will upgrade the table cloth into a professional tool that "electronically" teaches your kids NOT to spill drinks nor bang their hands, arms or even heads on the table.
http://www.doublestandards.org/enemies.htm
Most US citizens have no idea why anyone could hate them. This is not surprising considering their ignorance of US foreign policy. Citizens of many countries have been the victims of US subversion, US support for corrupt dictators, and US state terrorism. I'm definitely curious as to what level of conformity we're able conclude with the things listed on this page.
It may make lesser known publications more well known, and get more citations, but it likely won't make a difference on important publications. The internet in general has made it so that the size of most bibliographies is huge (in my field 20-30 citations in a 10 page paper is common). However, despite increased access, good papers are still the ones most cited. While I can see the logic in that, it's also true that simply because papers aren't as groundbreaking, or 'of extreme important to others in the field', doesn't mean it's not sound science that others won't be able to build their work on. And we both know that kind of journal bias is going on, among other things. I believe OA repositories and OA journals aren't claiming that they have stuff of equal quality given the same frequency, but simply stuff that's also sound science which can also be very useful to others in the field. So it may not have as many groundbreaking pieces as often or even nearly as often as commercial high profile journal, but it's of acceptable quality, and it's in greater numbers. That should count for something. In a way, it's science moving forward, just in more and smaller steps.
And IT has the habit of improving the efficiency of things. Especially in terms of information distribution. It won't be long before we find a way to have good access to all sorts of scientific work of good quality without going broke paying for it.
These important works will be cited regardless of how hard it is to find (although these papers can generally be found at any university or company). I don't know. If your university/company isn't subscribed to those journals, you have to get pretty creative if you wish to get the authentic document, and not legally at that either. Granted, with the internet being the way it is, it's a lot easier nowadays to get important information of most documents (abstract, conclusions etc). But still, to get the entire article isn't that easy, especially not for students. Then there's the issue of other countries not being able to pay for checking out sound science.
All these open access journals will end up doing is causing more crap to get published. This means there is more stuff to look through when deciding what work is relevant to yours and worth citing. Is a valid concern. In its defence: OA Journals are really no different than commercial journals in the sense that they also require Peer Review. And some can be non profit but there are also plenty that are just for profit. It's just overall cheaper because their profit margins are set lower.
In honesty the costs of journals and conferences isn't so unreasonable. It kind of is...lots of universities are having trouble keeping up with the same budget for the same quantity/quality (i.e. they're not). Lots of countries are having the same issues as well.
This just makes literature search more complicated. Lessening standards and allowing for "open journals" will likely make this worse. For those who're used to getting everything from high profile journals, it's going to be a bit of a hassle to wade through all of that to find something of similar quality. For those who've never had access to such high profile journals in the first place, it's a blessing in which they can advance their own work as well. I'm cool with that.
I agree with that vision. However, the reality is that once scientists option to publish in a commercial journal, they've already made the decision to "sell their souls" as opposed to other ways to share their results to the scientific community. That being the case, it wouldn't make sense for them to endanger their relation with the commercial publishing world by doing something like violating their copyright agreements with said commercial publishers.
Being published in Open Access Journals apparently gives a higher chance of being cited. Not that strange, considering it's easier to access.
Across many fields, journal articles made openly available on the Internet are more heavily cited than those that remain behind subscription barriers, evidence that open-access articles have a greater impact on research. This chart shows results from a 10-year tracking of citations. Shown is the ratio of citations of open-access articles to citations of closed-access articles published in the same issue of a given journal, averaged by discipline. (Data from Hajjem, Harnad and Gingras 2005.)
Actually, I've always wondered whether Open Access isn't a bit too extreme as an alternative towards commercial scholarly publishing outlets.
I can completely understand their view of it being "too costly for universities" and how it's not entirely "fair" for scientists to pay for something other scientists have worked for just because journals act as the mediators, but to be completely "free of charge" for users while charging the author(s) for publishing is financially even worse for the scientist(s) in question. That's not an incentive to go OA Journals. I wish they simply found a middle way for it, perhaps charge author(s) a bit, and also charge users a bit. Might even be financially sustainable, instead of losing cash like what's happening with PloS and BioMed.
Ah well, more food for thought for my master thesis anyway.
There's really nothing special about opening up such a repository, except that it's Nature doing it, and it's sort of a hybrid model to "compete" with existing OA sources.
Bacteria is what makes the difference between me and my spouse (well, that and the boobs).
The boobs thing tells me you're not likely a lesbian couple. Which means you, for reasons unknown to man, have either named your schlong "bacteria", or you somehow go about life without one. And I don't know which is worse, really.
Chris Rock: [On the US school shootings] Everybody is wanting to know what music were the kids listening to, or what movies were they watching. Who gives a fuck what they was watching! Whatever happened to crazy? What, you can't be crazy no more? Should we eliminate crazy from the dictionary?
Chris Rock: Everybody is talking about gun control. Got to control the guns. Fuck, that, I like guns. If you've got a gun, you don't need to work out! Cause, I ain't working out. I ain't jogging. No, I think we need some bullet control. I think every bullet should cost five thousand dollars. Five thousand dollars for a bullet. Know why? Cos if a bullet cost five thousand dollars, there'd be no more innocent by-standers. That'd be it. Some guy'd be shot you'd be all 'Damn, he must've done something, he's got fifty thousand dollars worth of bullets in his ass!' And people'd think before they shot someone 'Man I will blow your fucking head off, if I could afford it. I'm gonna get me a second job, start saving up, and you a dead man. You'd better hope I don't get no bullets on lay-away!' And even if you get shot you wouldn't need to go to the emergency room. Whoever shot you'd take their bullet back. 'I believe you got my property?'
The only reason online reputation is hard is because online identification is hard. Once you're past the identification and privacy issues you could go Google: your single/central/one point rated identity, linked with all your accounts from all over the place which should give you some sort of a global and more specified ranking (karma on./, trustworthiness on ebay, whatever rating/googlerank on google/amazon) for people to search for.
But if the universe simply exists, and was not "created" at the big bang, but the big bang is simply the furthest point in the past that the universes existance reaches, then the big bang is the beginning of causality, and doesn't have to have been caused by anything. The universe wasn't created, it simply exists from that point.
Except for the part where a dense and hot mass is apparently needed for having the big bang in the first place.
This can make the idea of something that simply exists, without having been created by something, totally counterintuitive to the point where you can fail to recognise that you're looking for the cause of something, simply because that's what we're used to doing, used to finding, not because a cause is actually required for the universe to exist.
That may be so, but how will you falsify something that apparently doesn't have or need a trigger?
Which brings us back to the point that, so far, there's absolutely nothing scientific about anything related to "the beginning".
If time (and whatever else) didn't start with the big bang, which would be consistent with the theory that it was hot and dense mass that triggered the big bang in the first place, then it's one more reason to believe that the big bang is not the beginning of the universe at all but whatever came before it.
And thus we're back at the whole "we don't know how it all began" thing. But whatever it is, according to our current theories and known data: it ain't the big bang.
No, I agree that that part is scientific, but the BB assumes a state in which something (dense and hot mass?) exists and somehow triggered the expansion.
So at best, the BB can be seen as the gun with the bullet, but not the trigger. By definition, it can not be the beginning, as it assumes something was already there to trigger it. And since science currently theorizes the BB somehow created everything; energy, mass, time etc, which btw is somewhat contradicting with the existence of the dense and hot mass, we are unable to look "further back" than BB, ie further back than which science believes is the origin of time, and observe what triggered it.
Hence, while we argue that there was in fact something that triggered BB, e.g. dense and hot mass, we can never go that far back (and perhaps further, if possible) in time and confirm. Which is why BB as the "beginning" is not scientific.
Common scientific knowledge? The idea of the Big Bang being "the beginning" isn't scientific at all, unless a complete and utter lack of evidence is science nowadays.
So it's not that weird to assume that "the truth", whatever it is, is different from whatever the big bang hopes to theorize but, at the moment can't.
I can somewhat imagine this being a bit of a possibility in the medical field, which is a large financial business if anything. But cosmology? Where's the controversy? Why wouldn't reputable journals publish rather sound theories in that field? I find that hard to believe.
"New invasion" it says, but isn't it just people doing whatever they want with their property. In this case that being photos?
If you're trying to stop people from doing whatever they want with their own (online accessible) photos, some further steps down this "new invasion" might be: "My name/company/pet is mentioned/being blasted on a website! Noooooooooo must stop them!"
That's always been a tension in open source
Open source philosophers (and detractors) have worried about the whole "free labor" idea ever since the beginning. But not a reality, and not one formed by big capitalists like MS, who was supposed to be OS' sworn enemy.
Open source is about you, not about the community. Okay...
I investigated the problem thoroughly, created a patch, and submitted it. Why did you submit it if it was OS and you could have just patched it yourself?
Everyone else benefits because it fixes more bugs in the shared code base. Then it's not just about you but about "everyone", right? You know, the community?
People work on projects they want to work on; projects don't get developers just because someone declares their product open source. Open source is not a magic incantation to summon developers. I never said nor implied that.
Of a system being worked on by the users for the users to gain a better system through the networking effect, now is slowly becoming another means for industries to get cheap labor. From the OS community POV quite saddening.
From a commercial POV, if prices do go lower and more people would buy/use it with the backings of corporate Marketing, compared to when it was just OS and mouth to mouth, it might (emphasis on MIGHT) spread more awareness and interest in genuine/creative software.
1. When it comes to articles, users prefer searching/browsing over having something randomly thrown into their laps to read. Odds of that happening are rather slim IMO. 2. Comparing "news" sites like digg to hotornot is not very fair because while digg has a "time - excitement" factor, hotornot does not. What I mean with that is: if you saw a pic that was submitted 3 months ago, the person in the pic is still the same hottie or not so hottie, that won't change. You're rating things that are essentially disconnected from what's happening in "real life". If you happen to stumble upon an article that goes on about Ubuntu's newest release 3, or God forbid, 4 weeks later, big odds are that you've read this somewhere else 3-4 weeks ago. No excitement, so why digg it up?
I can think of ways to soften the first issue, such as with recommender systems, so random is not entirely random, but with some pointed logic behind it. But, ironically, the better this system works, the closer we're to the voting issues again.
As for 2: don't know any "solutions" atm, if possible at all. I would personally never join a "news" site for the sake of voting where the only way I can vote is to randomly go through articles I never intended to read. it'd annoy me more. Might as well not vote and just read what I want, comment, and get the heck out.
So your idea works if people are somehow willing to receive random articles when they visit sites, and those articles aren't somehow bound by time.
Humans have a significant impact on their environment but who's to say its a negative imapact. If we want to play the part of nature for a moment and begin to think in timescales of billions of years then human activity so far is utterly insignificant and since nature has no point of view it's impossible to say whether that insignificant activity was either a positive or a negative one.
I'd like to think that in terms of billions of years, nothing really matters relatively, barring the total destruction of Earth, which is rather unlikely. Even if we nuked the entire Earth, certainly within billions of years, it'll go back to being habitable. Don't want to go "tree hugging" on ya, but relatively, that is compared to any other species, I'd argue that we're hands down the most significant in delivery a negative impact. Parasitic even.
We may well not be doing ourselves any favours by some of our activity around the world at the moment but simply moaning about evil man apes raping the Earth is helping no one ( and simply not true ) and simply diverts attention from the real actions we could be taking to improve our quality of life.
That's exactly what's being contrasted right now: nature vs "our" quality of life.
'Fuck Earth. Take your tree-loving sacrificial rain-dance bullshit back to whatever liberal leaf-licking college you barely crawled tripping off LSD out of with your "degree".'
Is a very ignorant thing to say. Not to mention bigoted.
'If you're such an idealist, go live in a cave and stop promoting the ecosystem-damaging resource consumerism that yes, even your using this computer whose case is likely comprised of many plastics and synthesized oil by-products is promoting. The epic volume of clothes barely covering your gargantuan Slashdotter body? Yep, you guessed it, something you're wearing is likely synthesized as a by-product of crude oil!'
That almost sounds like: "Cuz we can't catch em all, we might as well not start on any of em". Also, being hypocritical doesn't per definition exclude you from being right, and definitely not in this case. It simply means that you're not (entirely) part of a solution. The fact that humans have a pretty significant negative impact on nature is a fact. What's wrong with being reminded of that FACT once in awhile?
Just because you think science is above this silly old thing known as nature doesn't make it so. Rather, that notion would be the most unscientific thing I've ever heard.
But I wouldn't call it an "evolution" per se. They're not our better versions. They're things we could create that could replace us. There's a difference. Evolving to the next level and having the "old" type, which depending on how you see it isn't really an old type anymore perhaps, go extinct is not the same as literally creating something of the next level and have it wipe us out themselves.
Which other creature "gave birth" to its own natural enemy and went extinct because of it?
Slashdot Mirror
And for a special price: we will upgrade the table cloth into a professional tool that "electronically" teaches your kids NOT to spill drinks nor bang their hands, arms or even heads on the table.
A win win for everyone!
And IT has the habit of improving the efficiency of things. Especially in terms of information distribution. It won't be long before we find a way to have good access to all sorts of scientific work of good quality without going broke paying for it. These important works will be cited regardless of how hard it is to find (although these papers can generally be found at any university or company). I don't know. If your university/company isn't subscribed to those journals, you have to get pretty creative if you wish to get the authentic document, and not legally at that either. Granted, with the internet being the way it is, it's a lot easier nowadays to get important information of most documents (abstract, conclusions etc). But still, to get the entire article isn't that easy, especially not for students. Then there's the issue of other countries not being able to pay for checking out sound science. All these open access journals will end up doing is causing more crap to get published. This means there is more stuff to look through when deciding what work is relevant to yours and worth citing. Is a valid concern. In its defence: OA Journals are really no different than commercial journals in the sense that they also require Peer Review. And some can be non profit but there are also plenty that are just for profit. It's just overall cheaper because their profit margins are set lower. In honesty the costs of journals and conferences isn't so unreasonable. It kind of is...lots of universities are having trouble keeping up with the same budget for the same quantity/quality (i.e. they're not). Lots of countries are having the same issues as well. This just makes literature search more complicated. Lessening standards and allowing for "open journals" will likely make this worse. For those who're used to getting everything from high profile journals, it's going to be a bit of a hassle to wade through all of that to find something of similar quality. For those who've never had access to such high profile journals in the first place, it's a blessing in which they can advance their own work as well. I'm cool with that.
I agree with that vision. However, the reality is that once scientists option to publish in a commercial journal, they've already made the decision to "sell their souls" as opposed to other ways to share their results to the scientific community. That being the case, it wouldn't make sense for them to endanger their relation with the commercial publishing world by doing something like violating their copyright agreements with said commercial publishers.
"Do Be Evil" vs "Don't Be Evil"
http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDe
Good point.
Actually, I've always wondered whether Open Access isn't a bit too extreme as an alternative towards commercial scholarly publishing outlets.
I can completely understand their view of it being "too costly for universities" and how it's not entirely "fair" for scientists to pay for something other scientists have worked for just because journals act as the mediators, but to be completely "free of charge" for users while charging the author(s) for publishing is financially even worse for the scientist(s) in question. That's not an incentive to go OA Journals. I wish they simply found a middle way for it, perhaps charge author(s) a bit, and also charge users a bit. Might even be financially sustainable, instead of losing cash like what's happening with PloS and BioMed.
Ah well, more food for thought for my master thesis anyway.
Journals own the copyright of your paper (once it's been peer reviewed and approved).
So you're technically not allowed to do that.
No big deal really.
ArXiv is not the only OA repository/journal around.
Check out http://www.plos.org/ for biology and medicine topics.
There's really nothing special about opening up such a repository, except that it's Nature doing it, and it's sort of a hybrid model to "compete" with existing OA sources.
This site is very informative on the topic of Open Access.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm
The boobs thing tells me you're not likely a lesbian couple. Which means you, for reasons unknown to man, have either named your schlong "bacteria", or you somehow go about life without one. And I don't know which is worse, really.
The only reason online reputation is hard is because online identification is hard. Once you're past the identification and privacy issues you could go Google: your single/central/one point rated identity, linked with all your accounts from all over the place which should give you some sort of a global and more specified ranking (karma on ./, trustworthiness on ebay, whatever rating/googlerank on google/amazon) for people to search for.
Which brings us back to the point that, so far, there's absolutely nothing scientific about anything related to "the beginning".
If time (and whatever else) didn't start with the big bang, which would be consistent with the theory that it was hot and dense mass that triggered the big bang in the first place, then it's one more reason to believe that the big bang is not the beginning of the universe at all but whatever came before it.
And thus we're back at the whole "we don't know how it all began" thing. But whatever it is, according to our current theories and known data: it ain't the big bang.
No, I agree that that part is scientific, but the BB assumes a state in which something (dense and hot mass?) exists and somehow triggered the expansion.
So at best, the BB can be seen as the gun with the bullet, but not the trigger. By definition, it can not be the beginning, as it assumes something was already there to trigger it. And since science currently theorizes the BB somehow created everything; energy, mass, time etc, which btw is somewhat contradicting with the existence of the dense and hot mass, we are unable to look "further back" than BB, ie further back than which science believes is the origin of time, and observe what triggered it.
Hence, while we argue that there was in fact something that triggered BB, e.g. dense and hot mass, we can never go that far back (and perhaps further, if possible) in time and confirm. Which is why BB as the "beginning" is not scientific.
Common scientific knowledge? The idea of the Big Bang being "the beginning" isn't scientific at all, unless a complete and utter lack of evidence is science nowadays.
So it's not that weird to assume that "the truth", whatever it is, is different from whatever the big bang hopes to theorize but, at the moment can't.
Which are?
I can somewhat imagine this being a bit of a possibility in the medical field, which is a large financial business if anything. But cosmology? Where's the controversy? Why wouldn't reputable journals publish rather sound theories in that field? I find that hard to believe.
"New invasion" it says, but isn't it just people doing whatever they want with their property. In this case that being photos?
If you're trying to stop people from doing whatever they want with their own (online accessible) photos, some further steps down this "new invasion" might be: "My name/company/pet is mentioned/being blasted on a website! Noooooooooo must stop them!"
Of a system being worked on by the users for the users to gain a better system through the networking effect, now is slowly becoming another means for industries to get cheap labor. From the OS community POV quite saddening.
From a commercial POV, if prices do go lower and more people would buy/use it with the backings of corporate Marketing, compared to when it was just OS and mouth to mouth, it might (emphasis on MIGHT) spread more awareness and interest in genuine/creative software.
Nice idea, but not practical as it is IMO
2 assumptions first:
1. When it comes to articles, users prefer searching/browsing over having something randomly thrown into their laps to read. Odds of that happening are rather slim IMO.
2. Comparing "news" sites like digg to hotornot is not very fair because while digg has a "time - excitement" factor, hotornot does not. What I mean with that is: if you saw a pic that was submitted 3 months ago, the person in the pic is still the same hottie or not so hottie, that won't change. You're rating things that are essentially disconnected from what's happening in "real life". If you happen to stumble upon an article that goes on about Ubuntu's newest release 3, or God forbid, 4 weeks later, big odds are that you've read this somewhere else 3-4 weeks ago. No excitement, so why digg it up?
I can think of ways to soften the first issue, such as with recommender systems, so random is not entirely random, but with some pointed logic behind it. But, ironically, the better this system works, the closer we're to the voting issues again.
As for 2: don't know any "solutions" atm, if possible at all. I would personally never join a "news" site for the sake of voting where the only way I can vote is to randomly go through articles I never intended to read. it'd annoy me more. Might as well not vote and just read what I want, comment, and get the heck out.
So your idea works if people are somehow willing to receive random articles when they visit sites, and those articles aren't somehow bound by time.
I'd like to think that in terms of billions of years, nothing really matters relatively, barring the total destruction of Earth, which is rather unlikely. Even if we nuked the entire Earth, certainly within billions of years, it'll go back to being habitable. Don't want to go "tree hugging" on ya, but relatively, that is compared to any other species, I'd argue that we're hands down the most significant in delivery a negative impact. Parasitic even.
That's exactly what's being contrasted right now: nature vs "our" quality of life.
'Fuck Earth. Take your tree-loving sacrificial rain-dance bullshit back to whatever liberal leaf-licking college you barely crawled tripping off LSD out of with your "degree".'
Is a very ignorant thing to say. Not to mention bigoted.
'If you're such an idealist, go live in a cave and stop promoting the ecosystem-damaging resource consumerism that yes, even your using this computer whose case is likely comprised of many plastics and synthesized oil by-products is promoting. The epic volume of clothes barely covering your gargantuan Slashdotter body? Yep, you guessed it, something you're wearing is likely synthesized as a by-product of crude oil!'
That almost sounds like: "Cuz we can't catch em all, we might as well not start on any of em". Also, being hypocritical doesn't per definition exclude you from being right, and definitely not in this case. It simply means that you're not (entirely) part of a solution. The fact that humans have a pretty significant negative impact on nature is a fact. What's wrong with being reminded of that FACT once in awhile?
Just because you think science is above this silly old thing known as nature doesn't make it so. Rather, that notion would be the most unscientific thing I've ever heard.
But I wouldn't call it an "evolution" per se. They're not our better versions. They're things we could create that could replace us. There's a difference. Evolving to the next level and having the "old" type, which depending on how you see it isn't really an old type anymore perhaps, go extinct is not the same as literally creating something of the next level and have it wipe us out themselves.
Which other creature "gave birth" to its own natural enemy and went extinct because of it?