Indeed. And its great if you are at the conference and if you are one of the people informally discussing the paper. But an open electronic forum would be a completely different thing. Because if I come across an interesting paper now, I will have no way of finding out what people at the conference were thinking and saying about it. And even though the papers are peer reviewed I also will not be able to see what the reviewers thought were the strong/weak points of the paper. I just know that for one reason or another they found it worthy to be published. Also, the peer review process definitely does not guarantee that all papers that appear at one conference or journal are of the same quality. In fact, it often can be pretty arbitrary.
I think this could be quite valuable indeed.
Another thing that I would love to see is to have an index for scientific papers such as the excellent Citeseer http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/ coupled with a moderated discussion forum like the one here at slashdot for discussion of the strong/weak points of each scientific paper. If well done, I think this would be a huge benefit to the research community.
I read through the white paper describing the 'Bayesian Noise Reduction' and I just can not see how it is in any way Bayesian. It is a bunch of heuristics, which sound pretty reasonable and probably work great in practice. But why call it Bayesian? It is great to see that Bayesian techniques such as Naive Bayes Classifiers get applied with great success in the spam setting. But it is somewhat annoying if people use the word 'Bayesian' as just meaning 'sophisticated' or 'awesome'. It does actually have a meaning.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_inference
Slashdot Mirror
'other launch-related expenses' sounds like 'party money' to me.
Indeed. And its great if you are at the conference and if you are one of the people informally discussing the paper. But an open electronic forum would be a completely different thing. Because if I come across an interesting paper now, I will have no way of finding out what people at the conference were thinking and saying about it. And even though the papers are peer reviewed I also will not be able to see what the reviewers thought were the strong/weak points of the paper. I just know that for one reason or another they found it worthy to be published. Also, the peer review process definitely does not guarantee that all papers that appear at one conference or journal are of the same quality. In fact, it often can be pretty arbitrary.
I think this could be quite valuable indeed. Another thing that I would love to see is to have an index for scientific papers such as the excellent Citeseer http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/ coupled with a moderated discussion forum like the one here at slashdot for discussion of the strong/weak points of each scientific paper. If well done, I think this would be a huge benefit to the research community.
I read through the white paper describing the 'Bayesian Noise Reduction' and I just can not see how it is in any way Bayesian. It is a bunch of heuristics, which sound pretty reasonable and probably work great in practice. But why call it Bayesian? It is great to see that Bayesian techniques such as Naive Bayes Classifiers get applied with great success in the spam setting. But it is somewhat annoying if people use the word 'Bayesian' as just meaning 'sophisticated' or 'awesome'. It does actually have a meaning. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_inference