Group items tagged

Duncan and Xurxo have a look at this - just discussed today :-)

Who are the most ruthless capitalists in the western world? Whose monopolistic practices make Walmart look like a corner shop and Rupert Murdoch a socialist? You won't guess the answer in a month of Sundays. While there are plenty of candidates, my vote goes not to the banks, the oil companies or the health insurers, but - wait for it - to academic publishers.

fully agree ... "But an analysis by Deutsche Bank reaches different conclusions. "We believe the publisher adds relatively little value to the publishing process … if the process really were as complex, costly and value-added as the publishers protest that it is, 40% margins wouldn't be available." Far from assisting the dissemination of research, the big publishers impede it, as their long turnaround times can delay the release of findings by a year or more." very nice also: "Government bodies, with a few exceptions, have failed to confront them. The National Institutes of Health in the US oblige anyone taking their grants to put their papers in an open-access archive. But Research Councils UK, whose statement on public access is a masterpiece of meaningless waffle, relies on "the assumption that publishers will maintain the spirit of their current policies". You bet they will. In the short term, governments should refer the academic publishers to their competition watchdogs, and insist that all papers arising from publicly funded research are placed in a free public database. In the longer term, they should work with researchers to cut out the middleman altogether, creating - along the lines proposed by Björn Brembs of Berlin's Freie Universität - a single global archive of academic literature and data. Peer-review would be overseen by an independent body. It could be funded by the library budgets which are currently being diverted into the hands of privateers. The knowledge monopoly is as unwarranted and anachronistic as the corn laws. Let's throw off these parasitic overlords and liberate the research that belongs to us."

It is a really great article and the first time I read something in this direction. FULLY AGREE as well. Problem is I have not much encouraging to report from the Brussels region...

nice article ... though the colouring used seems a lit awkward to me ...

Beautiful and inspirational piece.

Thinking about it, probably Open Source today is more faithful to the "scientific method" than most science, as far as the communication and sharing of information is concerned. We badly need to get rid of the dictatorship of journals and assorted bullshit like impact factors...

Amazing pictures...

distributed computing of distributed electricity sources...

An short article about something called biomimetics. To all I understand, it is not.

we should team up with them ....

Should astronauts on long term missions have (chat) bots to talk to in realtime so that they won't go mad with their fellow astronaut buddies...?

5 espressos a day is good, 7+ may cause addiction, with 170 on a single day you might have a problem...

"When in the desert he came up with the idea to use the two dominating features in the desert -- the sun and the sand -- in his next project.". I wonder where we should send him next.

Arts project with implications for space science... Awesome! Note how this guy is dressed in the middle of an Egyptian desert, lol...

Torquay's disturbingly close to Plymouth... Good quote: "I'm the only woman in the country who's got a mummy for a husband". Yay.

additional info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Himba_people#Exceptional_color_perception

Yeah that's interesting stuff... We have one prof in the lab who used to do some research related exactly to this (http://www.tech.plym.ac.uk/socce/staff/tonybelpaeme/research.html). Similar question (i.e. if/how language is involved in the formation of a concept) is also valid for numbers, see for instance this recent story: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20095-without-language-numbers-make-no-sense.html

Greenwich could lose its place at the centre of global time if a move to "atomic time" is voted in by the International Telecommunication Union in Geneva in January 2012.

Haha this is really a British article... Already since 1972 we don't use GMT but UTC, which is based on atomic clocks. However British continue to call it GMT... The question is to drop the leap second in UTC, and France is definitely for this change (for scientific motives of course...;) I don't see how this is connected to winter time however... And they shouldn't worry Greenwich is still the beginning of the world with 0 degree longitude !

"the end of GMT as an international standard could accelerate the move to keep British Summer Time into the winter, letting us have lighter evenings." As I understand it, if GMT looses its "prestigious" status, then it would be easier to push through all-year BST in UK.

Commit Assist Tool allows predicting bugs in large code bases typically found in AAA-games.

serious gaming came back!

A pioneering team from IBM in Zurich has published single-molecule images so detailed that the type of atomic bonds between their atoms can be discerned.