Group items tagged

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...

about the advanced concepts institute of NASA. Found via twitter

Wasn't that what we actually wanted??? (del.icio.us + comments)

A group of brains thinks about science. Similar to our timeline exercise.

Very interesting analysis of scientific fields and their interconnections

Apperently the latest attack to google search. I like the display of the results.

A short FAQ on what you can expect if you do write a book

The synthesis of large diverse libraries of chemicals has been achieved using combinations of just six simple reactions

KI tool that automatically organizes files, emails, etc.

smart!

A hybrid image classification method was employed for this specific purpose by incorporating the advantages of both pixel-based and object-based image classification approaches. This was performed in two steps: firstly, a pixel-based image classification method, i.e., artificial neural network was applied to classify potential targets with similar spectral reflectance at pixel level; and then an object-based image classification method was used to further differentiate animal targets from the surrounding landscapes through the applications of expert knowledge. As a result, the large animals in two pilot study areas were successfully detected with an average count error of 8.2%, omission error of 6.6% and commission error of 13.7%. The results of the study show for the first time that it is feasible to perform automated detection and counting of large wild animals in open savannahs from space

And Paul, it includes neural networks!

I kept telling you guys but you just laughed and laughed :))

An oldie but a goodie, " As you will never be sure which are the right problems to work on, most of the time that you spend in the laboratory or at your desk will be wasted. If you want to be creative, then you will have to get used to spending most of your time not being creative, to being becalmed on the ocean of scientific knowledge"

already forwarded it to other researchers in desperation phase :-D :-D

Wisdom of crowds under a new perspective: a motivation for the island model?

"Publishing industry exerts too much influence over what scientists choose to study, which is ultimately bad for science itself"

On a related topic - a nice read written in 1939 from Abraham Flexner the founder of Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, home of some great minds on the "Usefulness of Useless Knowledge". Enjoy https://library.ias.edu/files/UsefulnessHarpers.pdf

This article is fantastic - starts already well with : "r IT not a curious fact that in a world steeped in irrational hatreds which threaten civilization itself, men and women-old and young-detach them-selves wholly or partly from the angry current of daily life to devote themselves to the cultivation ofbeauty, to the exten-sion ofknowledge, to the cure ofdisease, to the amelioration of suffering, just as though fanatics were not simultaneously engaged in spreading pain, ugliness, and suffering?" Could almost be written now

New results in NLP might allow to automate scientific discoveries by data mining of papers. Work considers 3.3M abstracts from material science, physics and chemistry and claims to discover new materials before they are published later on.

ACT did that from diigo post digging in the retreat of 2014! Still without NLP.

That's cool! Didn't know.