The second is that DRM actually works; actually there have been convincing arguments that this will never work, especially considering the fact that a D->A->D conversion will produce very good results (probably as good as 128 bit MP3) and is basically impossible to prevent.
This is a particularly good point for audio/music files (as compared to software or video). Music has to be converted to a pretty simple analog signal to be "used" and this signal is very cheap to convert back to bits (without DRM) with very high fidelity (much better than 128 kbps MP3). One of the things I really like about digital is that it's made higher quality recording equipment relatively inexpensive and available to smaller artists. If you look at the quality of the recordings that people trade, it's very low (as mentioned in many posts)-- you can hear the difference between a CD and an MP3 even with pretty crummy headphones.
The music industry is trying to fix a business problem with technology. They've gotten focussed on producing larger runs of fewer artists and demanding that we like it. Now that music is essentially free to distribute, they don't know how to make money on it (hint: think about a radio with a nearly infinite number of channels) There's just not much coming out of the major labels these days that I want to listen to. I still buy a fair number of CDs, but generally of artists that self-produce them and sell them on their own websites, on CDBaby, or at their shows (and the occasional back-catalog disc from a major).
There's a lot of great stuff that the majors will never bring to you, but that you can get from the artists while giving them a few bucks.
Sure, it requires energy, but it doesn't release a lot of solvents into the air (solvents which also require energy to produce). Relative to other ways to clean things, it's pretty benign. Relative to just making people who use the computers put clothespins on their noses, it's not.
Even better than steam is probably supercritical CO2, which can mimic various non-polar organic solvents by varying Temp and Pressure. Polar solvents can be mimicked by adding small amounts of other solvents-- it's used for cleaning wafers, decaffeinating coffee, and is moving into drycleaning. It's environmentally friendly-- generally no new CO2 is made in collecting the CO2 for it.
here's a link: http://pubs.acs.org/cen/topstory/7938/print /7938no tw2.html
Can't stand them. (yeah, all the astronomers I know are going to come and kill me now, but I think most of them know my aversion)
For note taking they're not as fast as pencil and paper, and I really prefer to read equations in the normal 2-D equation format. I've used them occasionally for papers.
When a friend was writing her thesis, she was going nuts trying to lay out large numbers of enormous equations in LaTex. She shelled out for Expressionist, which can generate output for Word or LaTeX, and knocked off about 80 really ugly equations in a day or two, with a low error rate. I didn't have nearly as many, or nearly as gnarly, and I can't remember if I used Mathtype or Expressionist.
It may take a long time (or forever) to go paperless, but it is possible to reduce the amount of paper if the technologies are convenient to use.
I've been on a campaign to reduce the amount of paper that people give me, and it seems to be working well. The problem that I have with paper is that when I set it down, it just sits there. If I close an electronic file it's still available in its original location, rather than sitting somewhere in a pile of stuff on my desk (though I've been known to have someone ask me for a paper document, spin around stare at many heaps of paper for a few seconds, reach directly into one of them and pull out the document).
The main ways I reduce paper are: - if someone is going to give me a copy of something that originated in electronic form, I make them send it electronically. Usually these are the kind of thing I want to read once and archive, and electronic is the easiest way to keep it anyway.
- if someone is going to make a paper copy of something for me, I scan it instead. The copy machine near my office actually makes decent resolution, reasonably compact pdf files even faster than it copies. It dumps them to a server, and I pull them off. It's actually easier than making copies, and other people can do it with that copier as easily as I can. The full version of acrobat can even OCR these, and I've even used it to OCR a full page DNA sequence from a piece of paper with no errors.
- occasionally I'll go through my old paper files and scan things into archives (this doesn't happen often, usually when someone asks me for a copy of a document I'll scan it for them instead).
- I usually take notes with my laptop. I find it's much easier than using a pda, and then things are filed right away. I still experiment with the best way to do this. It's not very good for things like equations, but I don't have to do much of that lately anyway (at least not on the fly). I try to use notebooks for actually doing math expressions, rather loose paper.
Since I've started doing this (a year or more) I've greatly reduced the amount of new paper that accumulates in my files, though I still have a fair amount of old paper. Some things still use a lot of paper anyway, like proposals, which have to be printed, and you often have to go through a bunch of printed versions to get them reviewed and formatted accurately.
I still print things like directions and maps that I might have to carry in the car or on travel, but I usually scan things like travel itineraries.
sheds some new light on the DARPA terror pool
on
How Well Do You Estimate?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The server seems to be slow but eventually responsive, so I got a peek at the results and part of the test.
When Poindexter tried to set up a terror gambling pool to predict terror events, he was relying on something like this-- that collective knowledge would somehow converge on the right answer, or something close enough to be useful.
The results from this survey suggest that that's probably true for something where the guessers/bettors actually have some real knowledge, however deeply buried in their memories it might be, but in areas where people have no information (the GDP), or worse, have been hearing sensationalized opinions (average amount that people get on the dole), they can be not only wildly wrong, but have no idea how wildly wrong they can be.
The terror pool gave me the impression that it was going to collect and integrate the wild ass guesses of its members to somehow develop predictions, but it wasn't clear that anybody would have anything better than WAGs, making it possibly of negative value, rather than providing the collected wisdom that was intended.
A sort of trivial example is if I ask a bunch of people to guess the number of jellybeans in a jar. If I show them the jar, the mean guess will probably be pretty close to the true value. In this case, each person is making an estimate based on seeing the beans and the jar.
If I don't show them the jar, or tell them anything about it, they can only make wild guesses, and I could have a tiny jar with a single jellybean, or a jar the size of the Rose Bowl with however many jellybeans that holds. In this case they're making guesses rather than estimates, and the statistics won't tell you anything about the number of beans in the jar (but may tell you something about how the guessers think of jellybeans and jars).
My mom already thinks her digital cable is like a time machine, because nearly everything she's ever watched is still on.
With 1700 channels, everything that was ever shown on TV could be rebroadcast on a regular basis-- there could even be multiple Love Boat channels, a channel for each Star Trek season, one for the good Star Trek movies, and one for the bad...
I've always wanted to start a journal called "Journal of Null Results" where people can publish research that's well done, but came up with a result that doesn't qualify as earthshaking or "sexy".
Publishing null results would help people avoid repeating things that have been done already, as well as help refine research to see if there is a positive result hidden in the null.
In the case of big medical studies it could provide a great source for data mining, where metastudies of a bunch of null results might suggest something that would be hard to see without a lot of overlapping data.
Peer reviewed journals are not freely accessible to the public in libraries. Part of the problem many libraries (including at extremely well funded institutions) is that subscription prices are so high that they are dropping journal subscriptions, and there's no way they can carry everything anyway. The high impact journals (science, nature, phys. rev., NEJM, JACS, etc) won't get dropped, but then most of those aren't even that expensive for a personal subscription. A lot of the archival journals where longer, more detailed versions of research are published will get dropped.
Another part of the problem is that you have to be near a major research university (preferably with a med school) that has library access for the general public. If you're in a major urban this is probably reasonable, but if you aren't, then you're out of luck.
Plenty of people distribute pre-peer review versions of papers via the various preprint servers. Astronomy, math, much of physics (and probably other fields) have very active preprint servers and people often refer to the papers there as they come out. Papers still get contributed to the refereed journals in these fields because they do add value-- they provide comments that improve the quality of the papers, and they help distill things down to a managable number of papers to look at if you don't have time to read the daily digest of abstracts from the pre-print servers.
Any journal that adds value through its peer review process will probably remain, as long as it can find a way to fund itself, which may be easier since costs will be lower too. Print costs can be very high, particularly considering the page counts, small print runs, and cost of high quality coler repro. The actual distribution cost of electronic journals is relatively low. And as mentioned elsewhere, the costs of electronic typesetting, reviewing, and some of the editing are borne by volunteers.
You don't get to take the shuttle for a ride, but you do get to access the data from major telescopes and instruments. Several years ago, NASA eliminated proprietary data rights from data from missions and instruments (there may still be some on small R&D contracts and sensitive earth observations [e.g. high res mapping data]). Mission data has to be deposited in one of the various NASA archives within ~6 months of reaching the ground, and is readily accessible. Any scientist who wants to use it can get access, and showing how you will do this is part of the proposal process. It hasn't stopped people from proposing missions that will take many years of their lives without any guarantee of success (and no personal financial gain other than having a job for that time).
Slashdot Mirror
The second is that DRM actually works; actually there have been convincing arguments that this will never work, especially considering the fact that a D->A->D conversion will produce very good results (probably as good as 128 bit MP3) and is basically impossible to prevent.
This is a particularly good point for audio/music files (as compared to software or video). Music has to be converted to a pretty simple analog signal to be "used" and this signal is very cheap to convert back to bits (without DRM) with very high fidelity (much better than 128 kbps MP3). One of the things I really like about digital is that it's made higher quality recording equipment relatively inexpensive and available to smaller artists. If you look at the quality of the recordings that people trade, it's very low (as mentioned in many posts)-- you can hear the difference between a CD and an MP3 even with pretty crummy headphones.
The music industry is trying to fix a business problem with technology. They've gotten focussed on producing larger runs of fewer artists and demanding that we like it. Now that music is essentially free to distribute, they don't know how to make money on it (hint: think about a radio with a nearly infinite number of channels) There's just not much coming out of the major labels these days that I want to listen to. I still buy a fair number of CDs, but generally of artists that self-produce them and sell them on their own websites, on CDBaby, or at their shows (and the occasional back-catalog disc from a major).
There's a lot of great stuff that the majors will never bring to you, but that you can get from the artists while giving them a few bucks.
Sure, it requires energy, but it doesn't release a lot of solvents into the air (solvents which also require energy to produce). Relative to other ways to clean things, it's pretty benign. Relative to just making people who use the computers put clothespins on their noses, it's not.
Even better than steam is probably supercritical CO2, which can mimic various non-polar organic solvents by varying Temp and Pressure. Polar solvents can be mimicked by adding small amounts of other solvents-- it's used for cleaning wafers, decaffeinating coffee, and is moving into drycleaning. It's environmentally friendly-- generally no new CO2 is made in collecting the CO2 for it.
t /7938no tw2.html
here's a link:
http://pubs.acs.org/cen/topstory/7938/prin
Have you ever used TeX/LaTeX for equations?
Can't stand them. (yeah, all the astronomers I know are going to come and kill me now, but I think most of them know my aversion)
For note taking they're not as fast as pencil and paper, and I really prefer to read equations in the normal 2-D equation format. I've used them occasionally for papers.
When a friend was writing her thesis, she was going nuts trying to lay out large numbers of enormous equations in LaTex. She shelled out for Expressionist, which can generate output for Word or LaTeX, and knocked off about 80 really ugly equations in a day or two, with a low error rate. I didn't have nearly as many, or nearly as gnarly, and I can't remember if I used Mathtype or Expressionist.
It may take a long time (or forever) to go paperless, but it is possible to reduce the amount of paper if the technologies are convenient to use.
I've been on a campaign to reduce the amount of paper that people give me, and it seems to be working well. The problem that I have with paper is that when I set it down, it just sits there. If I close an electronic file it's still available in its original location, rather than sitting somewhere in a pile of stuff on my desk (though I've been known to have someone ask me for a paper document, spin around stare at many heaps of paper for a few seconds, reach directly into one of them and pull out the document).
The main ways I reduce paper are:
- if someone is going to give me a copy of something that originated in electronic form, I make them send it electronically. Usually these are the kind of thing I want to read once and archive, and electronic is the easiest way to keep it anyway.
- if someone is going to make a paper copy of something for me, I scan it instead. The copy machine near my office actually makes decent resolution, reasonably compact pdf files even faster than it copies. It dumps them to a server, and I pull them off. It's actually easier than making copies, and other people can do it with that copier as easily as I can. The full version of acrobat can even OCR these, and I've even used it to OCR a full page DNA sequence from a piece of paper with no errors.
- occasionally I'll go through my old paper files and scan things into archives (this doesn't happen often, usually when someone asks me for a copy of a document I'll scan it for them instead).
- I usually take notes with my laptop. I find it's much easier than using a pda, and then things are filed right away. I still experiment with the best way to do this. It's not very good for things like equations, but I don't have to do much of that lately anyway (at least not on the fly). I try to use notebooks for actually doing math expressions, rather loose paper.
Since I've started doing this (a year or more) I've greatly reduced the amount of new paper that accumulates in my files, though I still have a fair amount of old paper. Some things still use a lot of paper anyway, like proposals, which have to be printed, and you often have to go through a bunch of printed versions to get them reviewed and formatted accurately.
I still print things like directions and maps that I might have to carry in the car or on travel, but I usually scan things like travel itineraries.
The server seems to be slow but eventually responsive, so I got a peek at the results and part of the test.
When Poindexter tried to set up a terror gambling pool to predict terror events, he was relying on something like this-- that collective knowledge would somehow converge on the right answer, or something close enough to be useful.
The results from this survey suggest that that's probably true for something where the guessers/bettors actually have some real knowledge, however deeply buried in their memories it might be, but in areas where people have no information (the GDP), or worse, have been hearing sensationalized opinions (average amount that people get on the dole), they can be not only wildly wrong, but have no idea how wildly wrong they can be.
The terror pool gave me the impression that it was going to collect and integrate the wild ass guesses of its members to somehow develop predictions, but it wasn't clear that anybody would have anything better than WAGs, making it possibly of negative value, rather than providing the collected wisdom that was intended.
A sort of trivial example is if I ask a bunch of people to guess the number of jellybeans in a jar. If I show them the jar, the mean guess will probably be pretty close to the true value. In this case, each person is making an estimate based on seeing the beans and the jar.
If I don't show them the jar, or tell them anything about it, they can only make wild guesses, and I could have a tiny jar with a single jellybean, or a jar the size of the Rose Bowl with however many jellybeans that holds. In this case they're making guesses rather than estimates, and the statistics won't tell you anything about the number of beans in the jar (but may tell you something about how the guessers think of jellybeans and jars).
My mom already thinks her digital cable is like a time machine, because nearly everything she's ever watched is still on.
With 1700 channels, everything that was ever shown on TV could be rebroadcast on a regular basis-- there could even be multiple Love Boat channels, a channel for each Star Trek season, one for the good Star Trek movies, and one for the bad...
I've always wanted to start a journal called "Journal of Null Results" where people can publish research that's well done, but came up with a result that doesn't qualify as earthshaking or "sexy".
Publishing null results would help people avoid repeating things that have been done already, as well as help refine research to see if there is a positive result hidden in the null.
In the case of big medical studies it could provide a great source for data mining, where metastudies of a bunch of null results might suggest something that would be hard to see without a lot of overlapping data.
Peer reviewed journals are not freely accessible to the public in libraries. Part of the problem many libraries (including at extremely well funded institutions) is that subscription prices are so high that they are dropping journal subscriptions, and there's no way they can carry everything anyway. The high impact journals (science, nature, phys. rev., NEJM, JACS, etc) won't get dropped, but then most of those aren't even that expensive for a personal subscription. A lot of the archival journals where longer, more detailed versions of research are published will get dropped. Another part of the problem is that you have to be near a major research university (preferably with a med school) that has library access for the general public. If you're in a major urban this is probably reasonable, but if you aren't, then you're out of luck. Plenty of people distribute pre-peer review versions of papers via the various preprint servers. Astronomy, math, much of physics (and probably other fields) have very active preprint servers and people often refer to the papers there as they come out. Papers still get contributed to the refereed journals in these fields because they do add value-- they provide comments that improve the quality of the papers, and they help distill things down to a managable number of papers to look at if you don't have time to read the daily digest of abstracts from the pre-print servers. Any journal that adds value through its peer review process will probably remain, as long as it can find a way to fund itself, which may be easier since costs will be lower too. Print costs can be very high, particularly considering the page counts, small print runs, and cost of high quality coler repro. The actual distribution cost of electronic journals is relatively low. And as mentioned elsewhere, the costs of electronic typesetting, reviewing, and some of the editing are borne by volunteers.
You don't get to take the shuttle for a ride, but you do get to access the data from major telescopes and instruments. Several years ago, NASA eliminated proprietary data rights from data from missions and instruments (there may still be some on small R&D contracts and sensitive earth observations [e.g. high res mapping data]). Mission data has to be deposited in one of the various NASA archives within ~6 months of reaching the ground, and is readily accessible. Any scientist who wants to use it can get access, and showing how you will do this is part of the proposal process. It hasn't stopped people from proposing missions that will take many years of their lives without any guarantee of success (and no personal financial gain other than having a job for that time).