The ISP will continue to send them bills and they will have to pay up or face bad credit ratings, won't be able to get mortgages or car loans and so on.
The FA posits no innovation is happening and takes as exhibit #1 the space program.
I'll grant you that the space program is not doing well on the face of it: no more shuttle, no mission to Mars, no faster than light devices or anything exciting today. In fact space is relatively boring because we can now go to LEO easily, but putting up humans there has little value. Now going very far away from LEO is terribly hard, and we don't know how to do it efficiently. Also most people only care about big, spectacular things for very short amounts of time. Remember the Apollo program ? People were bored by Apollo XII already. Do you remember the name of the Apollo XIV commander ? Look, shiny !
Exploring space is hard? Blame physics and nature. There isn't any other way to explore the solar system but to spend very long boring months in a tiny cabin, exposed to high doses of radiation, with the certainty of not being able to come back, for very little return (yay, we went to Mars, how cool is that?). No wonder no one is going. Plus it costs many billions, and and we are in a recession. Instead we are sending robots, and those work very very well. We have sent robots to all the planets except Pluto, how that for exploration? Space exploration is happening on a budget, live with it.
In fact there would be a way to go big and spectacular again, but for this we would have to face building a behemoth in space of many hundreds of tons capable of using nuclear weapons as fuel. Perhaps the Chinese will do it in a few decades. Look up "Orion spacecraft" if interested.
Meanwhile there is plenty of innovation back at altitude near zero. This does not mean we are not doomed. We are going to face an energy crisis of staggering dimension in the coming decades, and we are not doing enough to ward it off right now. This is where we need so spend our true innovation dollars, and for the most part, we are kind of doing it.
We now are in a situation where we have to pay both library subscriptions and publication fees, but hopefully more and more journals will become free access, and so library subscription fees will become lower. Meanwhile having to pay for publication will probably even out the two costs, with the added benefit that researchers will now think twice about sending a paper for publication for the mere sake of it. Less drivel, more content (one can hope).
Also, for the most part papers are based on PhDs work. An average PhD student might put out one journal paper per year. The 1-3k publication fees are peanuts compared to their salaries. It is cheaper than sending them out to some conference. Anyway, the publication fees are written in the grant proposals now.
Of course, no grant => no publication, but that was always the case.
Mostly the salary of staff who still have to manage the review process (the secretaries, the general editor, etc), people who manage the journal issues, the typesetters, the webmasters, etc, plus bills and incidentals. It adds up quickly.
Publishers do none of the work you speak of. Lining up the reviewers and managing the reviews is done by editors, who are all senior scientist volunteers! Again this is driven by prestige.
They do, however, help the review process along by providing web resources for reviewers to use, and they do in fine handle the typesetting of the articles, and the printing, distribution and such.
One of my fairly senior colleague complained recently that as he is advancing in his career, he is asked and expected to provide increasingly boring and stressful work: become associate editor of some journal, area chair of some conference, then somehow general chair of increasingly prestigious conference (where turning a benefit is expected), and eventually main editor of some journal, where he has to manage the associate editors and fix conflicts. You generally don't sign up to research for this.
One thing that I believe is important: even after today, the 3GS is still sold by Apple, it is now the cheapest available IOS5 device. This means it is still supported for another year.
I'm a bilingual Franco-Australian, computer science professor and researcher at a French institution. I have already written, translated and published several technical books in both French and English. I can basically translate almost as fast as I can type in either direction, and faster still with dictation software.
I'm willing to help by translating a couple of chapters. I'm sure there are dozens like me with similar or better skills. Your book could probably be all done in two weeks tops. You only have to divvy up the work and collect the translated chapters.
Even better, put the French version of the book under a suitable license under Git somewhere, and watch the work unfold before you.
You are not being honest with yourself. Apple has well and truly moved out of the fanbois base and now sells to the masses. Non-tech people totally love it. They barely have to do any marketing about the iPad, it's been very hard to get these past few months, it's been literally flying out of the shelves.
The iPad is good, face it. Eventually the PC industry might make a few good contenders but right now they suck. Win7 is not up to the task, Android is in between states waiting for 4.0 to come out and finally merge the smartphone and tablet versions with a reasonable "market". WebOS is a goner with HP calling it quits.
I understand you not liking Apple's products. No one is forcing you to buy them, you probably don't need them anyway. But you have to admit Apple has caught the PC industry on the backfoot with this one.
Science is like sex: sometimes something useful comes out of it, but this is not the reason we are doing it.
The role of academia is not to produce successful widgets, it is to produce successful ideas. As it turns out, in computer science, ideas are embodied in software, some of which eventually is picked up somehow and becomes successful. However academia shouldn't be judged by its capacity to produce widgets, this is entirely the wrong metric. It is engineering's role to turn ideas into products and services. This doesn't mean PhD graduates can't go on to become successful engineers, on the contrary, they might better understand the whole lifecycle from great idea to great product.
In Academia you get the absolute best and worst at the same time, like in any other field.
Honestly, this is why managers avoid hiring Ph.D.s like the black plague in the software development world.
I think you should tell Google that, they should stop their practice to hire the best PhDs. While some research work is not good, some is totally excellent, and more often than not, game changing. Think that the Web initiated at the CERN, the research environment par excellence, to cite only one example.
While only 40% of research gets cited, this is not necessarily an indicator of the quality of the research itself or the researcher. An individual researcher can have simultaneously papers that are not cited at all and others that are cited hundreds or thousands of times.
If Apple had very thin margins it would simply cease to be Apple. It would stop doing R&D and the design work that you hate. However, you don't have to buy or even like Apple to enjoy the benefits of their R&D. Android's interface would likely never had seen the light of day without Apple's iPhone, or at the very least much later. Do you remember Symbian from the smartphone market leaders of 2006 ?
So you should encourage fanbois. Keep them buying Apple's products. It's not your loss, it is actually your gain.
1- the lives of real people, including scientists, are private, whereas that of a fictional character are all open to anybody to summarize, analyze and discuss 2- the achievements of real people are sometimes controversial. Who could say with certainty that Cooley and Tukey invented the FFT, while it was used by Gauss in his astronomy work to speed up his calculation, but thought it unimportant enough to report compared to his number theory work? That itself may be controversial. Science is littered with misappropriated credit. For instance George Dantzig did not invent the first solution the the LP problem. Fourier knew about it ; people in the Soviet Union were using it before WWII. Hence writing about real people, particularly scientists, is hard. 3- There are far far far fewer people interested in the life of non-glamorous people than even minor fictional characters. 4- Who cares? People write about what they want in wikipedia. Someone writing on stargate does not prevent someone else writing on Paul Dirac.
Right, what could be simpler: just gather the symptoms, get a diagnostic, treat the patient. Done.
Fitzpatrick M (2000). The Tyranny of Health: Doctors and the Regulation of Lifestyle. Routledge. ISBN 0415235715.
"To some of its critics, in its disparagement of theory and its crude number-crunching, Evidence-Based-Medicine marks a return to 'empiricist quackery' in medical practice . Its main appeal, as Singh and Ernst suggest, is to health economists, policymakers and managers, to whom it appears useful for measuring performance and rationing resources."
Excellent analogy between TeX and fixed gear cycling. Fixed gear cycles are what professional couriers use, as well as at speed track competition. Of course it is not for everybody, but for those things it is the only game in town.
One does not have to particularly like M. Jobs, but one would have to be of extraordinary bad faith to pretend his influence in IT isn't huge. One doesn't have to like Apple products to see that they are different, sometime inspiring and often well made. Sure nobody is perfect, but Apple under his leadership has done pretty amazing things over the years, from the Apple I and ][, to the Ipad via Macintosh and Ipod, who can deny this? Yet I'm reading lots of comments, doubtless from great leaders, denigrating his influence and character. How sad.
M. Jobs is leaving most likely because he doesn't seem himself recovering enough to be at Apple's helm. I personally wish him the very best.
Not quite. Hopefully we can agree that Einstein's best work is his general theory of relativity. He was a patent clerk from 1903 until 1909. He did publish four major papers in 1905 including his work on special relativity and the photoelectric effect, but he did his most advanced work on GRT from about 1909 until 1917, with bits published in between. He then did his best work when he was in academia. He continued to do still widely cited work until at least 1935, when he published his EPR paper. I think during and after the war he was a bit isolated at Princeton.
It is not quite true that established researchers stop being productive or even as productive as before they were known. Look at Feynman or Gell-Mann for instance, they did plenty of amazing work after their Nobel prize. Look at Marie Curie, she did enough good work after her first Nobel to get a second.
Slashdot Mirror
The ISP will continue to send them bills and they will have to pay up or face bad credit ratings, won't be able to get mortgages or car loans and so on.
The law says you can't get new service while the suspension is in effect. The ISP are well and truly covered.
ISP are losing nothing. While the internet connection is cut off, it continues to get billed.
By now not having internet connection is like not having electricity: unthinkable for most people.
While your connection is cut off due to HADOPI, you continue to pay for it, and you are not allowed to go to another ISP.
The FA posits no innovation is happening and takes as exhibit #1 the space program.
I'll grant you that the space program is not doing well on the face of it: no more shuttle, no mission to Mars, no faster than light devices or anything exciting today. In fact space is relatively boring because we can now go to LEO easily, but putting up humans there has little value. Now going very far away from LEO is terribly hard, and we don't know how to do it efficiently. Also most people only care about big, spectacular things for very short amounts of time. Remember the Apollo program ? People were bored by Apollo XII already. Do you remember the name of the Apollo XIV commander ? Look, shiny !
Exploring space is hard? Blame physics and nature. There isn't any other way to explore the solar system but to spend very long boring months in a tiny cabin, exposed to high doses of radiation, with the certainty of not being able to come back, for very little return (yay, we went to Mars, how cool is that?). No wonder no one is going. Plus it costs many billions, and and we are in a recession. Instead we are sending robots, and those work very very well. We have sent robots to all the planets except Pluto, how that for exploration? Space exploration is happening on a budget, live with it.
In fact there would be a way to go big and spectacular again, but for this we would have to face building a behemoth in space of many hundreds of tons capable of using nuclear weapons as fuel. Perhaps the Chinese will do it in a few decades. Look up "Orion spacecraft" if interested.
Meanwhile there is plenty of innovation back at altitude near zero. This does not mean we are not doomed. We are going to face an energy crisis of staggering dimension in the coming decades, and we are not doing enough to ward it off right now. This is where we need so spend our true innovation dollars, and for the most part, we are kind of doing it.
Please read all the way to his last sentence.
We now are in a situation where we have to pay both library subscriptions and publication fees, but hopefully more and more journals will become free access, and so library subscription fees will become lower. Meanwhile having to pay for publication will probably even out the two costs, with the added benefit that researchers will now think twice about sending a paper for publication for the mere sake of it. Less drivel, more content (one can hope).
Also, for the most part papers are based on PhDs work. An average PhD student might put out one journal paper per year. The 1-3k publication fees are peanuts compared to their salaries. It is cheaper than sending them out to some conference. Anyway, the publication fees are written in the grant proposals now.
Of course, no grant => no publication, but that was always the case.
Mostly the salary of staff who still have to manage the review process (the secretaries, the general editor, etc), people who manage the journal issues, the typesetters, the webmasters, etc, plus bills and incidentals. It adds up quickly.
Obviously, there are taxpayers outside the USA. They pay taxes for other countries, as well.
Publishers do none of the work you speak of. Lining up the reviewers and managing the reviews is done by editors, who are all senior scientist volunteers! Again this is driven by prestige.
They do, however, help the review process along by providing web resources for reviewers to use, and they do in fine handle the typesetting of the articles, and the printing, distribution and such.
One of my fairly senior colleague complained recently that as he is advancing in his career, he is asked and expected to provide increasingly boring and stressful work: become associate editor of some journal, area chair of some conference, then somehow general chair of increasingly prestigious conference (where turning a benefit is expected), and eventually main editor of some journal, where he has to manage the associate editors and fix conflicts. You generally don't sign up to research for this.
One thing that I believe is important: even after today, the 3GS is still sold by Apple, it is now the cheapest available IOS5 device. This means it is still supported for another year.
Good news for all the 3GS owners.
Hello,
I'm a bilingual Franco-Australian, computer science professor and researcher at a French institution. I have already written, translated and published several technical books in both French and English. I can basically translate almost as fast as I can type in either direction, and faster still with dictation software.
I'm willing to help by translating a couple of chapters. I'm sure there are dozens like me with similar or better skills. Your book could probably be all done in two weeks tops. You only have to divvy up the work and collect the translated chapters.
Even better, put the French version of the book under a suitable license under Git somewhere, and watch the work unfold before you.
You are not being honest with yourself. Apple has well and truly moved out of the fanbois base and now sells to the masses. Non-tech people totally love it. They barely have to do any marketing about the iPad, it's been very hard to get these past few months, it's been literally flying out of the shelves.
The iPad is good, face it. Eventually the PC industry might make a few good contenders but right now they suck. Win7 is not up to the task, Android is in between states waiting for 4.0 to come out and finally merge the smartphone and tablet versions with a reasonable "market". WebOS is a goner with HP calling it quits.
I understand you not liking Apple's products. No one is forcing you to buy them, you probably don't need them anyway. But you have to admit Apple has caught the PC industry on the backfoot with this one.
Also the MacBook Air, I totally want that one.
Science is like sex: sometimes something useful comes out of it, but this is not the reason we are doing it.
The role of academia is not to produce successful widgets, it is to produce successful ideas. As it turns out, in computer science, ideas are embodied in software, some of which eventually is picked up somehow and becomes successful. However academia shouldn't be judged by its capacity to produce widgets, this is entirely the wrong metric. It is engineering's role to turn ideas into products and services. This doesn't mean PhD graduates can't go on to become successful engineers, on the contrary, they might better understand the whole lifecycle from great idea to great product.
Cheers to all.
In Academia you get the absolute best and worst at the same time, like in any other field.
I think you should tell Google that, they should stop their practice to hire the best PhDs. While some research work is not good, some is totally excellent, and more often than not, game changing. Think that the Web initiated at the CERN, the research environment par excellence, to cite only one example.
While only 40% of research gets cited, this is not necessarily an indicator of the quality of the research itself or the researcher. An individual researcher can have simultaneously papers that are not cited at all and others that are cited hundreds or thousands of times.
Agreed, like everyone is a self-appointed expert on everything. Think of these movies stars asked to comment on the economy.
Let's reverse the argument a little.
If Apple had very thin margins it would simply cease to be Apple. It would stop doing R&D and the design work that you hate. However, you don't have to buy or even like Apple to enjoy the benefits of their R&D. Android's interface would likely never had seen the light of day without Apple's iPhone, or at the very least much later. Do you remember Symbian from the smartphone market leaders of 2006 ?
So you should encourage fanbois. Keep them buying Apple's products. It's not your loss, it is actually your gain.
Because
1- the lives of real people, including scientists, are private, whereas that of a fictional character are all open to anybody to summarize, analyze and discuss
2- the achievements of real people are sometimes controversial. Who could say with certainty that Cooley and Tukey invented the FFT, while it was used by Gauss in his astronomy work to speed up his calculation, but thought it unimportant enough to report compared to his number theory work? That itself may be controversial. Science is littered with misappropriated credit. For instance George Dantzig did not invent the first solution the the LP problem. Fourier knew about it ; people in the Soviet Union were using it before WWII. Hence writing about real people, particularly scientists, is hard.
3- There are far far far fewer people interested in the life of non-glamorous people than even minor fictional characters.
4- Who cares? People write about what they want in wikipedia. Someone writing on stargate does not prevent someone else writing on Paul Dirac.
Right, what could be simpler: just gather the symptoms, get a diagnostic, treat the patient. Done.
Fitzpatrick M (2000). The Tyranny of Health: Doctors and the Regulation of Lifestyle. Routledge. ISBN 0415235715.
"To some of its critics, in its disparagement of theory and its crude number-crunching, Evidence-Based-Medicine marks a return to 'empiricist quackery' in medical practice . Its main appeal, as Singh and Ernst suggest, is to health economists, policymakers and managers, to whom it appears useful for measuring performance and rationing resources."
Excellent analogy between TeX and fixed gear cycling. Fixed gear cycles are what professional couriers use, as well as at speed track competition. Of course it is not for everybody, but for those things it is the only game in town.
One does not have to particularly like M. Jobs, but one would have to be of extraordinary bad faith to pretend his influence in IT isn't huge. One doesn't have to like Apple products to see that they are different, sometime inspiring and often well made. Sure nobody is perfect, but Apple under his leadership has done pretty amazing things over the years, from the Apple I and ][, to the Ipad via Macintosh and Ipod, who can deny this? Yet I'm reading lots of comments, doubtless from great leaders, denigrating his influence and character. How sad.
M. Jobs is leaving most likely because he doesn't seem himself recovering enough to be at Apple's helm. I personally wish him the very best.
Care to give a specific example? On the contrary I think OSX does simple things well and complicated things well also, if you know Unix.
It lacks drivers, that's for sure though.
In the server market, yes they are.
We have that with OS X already through the App Store, minus the sale so far though.
Not quite. Hopefully we can agree that Einstein's best work is his general theory of relativity. He was a patent clerk from 1903 until 1909. He did publish four major papers in 1905 including his work on special relativity and the photoelectric effect, but he did his most advanced work on GRT from about 1909 until 1917, with bits published in between. He then did his best work when he was in academia. He continued to do still widely cited work until at least 1935, when he published his EPR paper. I think during and after the war he was a bit isolated at Princeton.
It is not quite true that established researchers stop being productive or even as productive as before they were known. Look at Feynman or Gell-Mann for instance, they did plenty of amazing work after their Nobel prize. Look at Marie Curie, she did enough good work after her first Nobel to get a second.