Month: October 2008

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• The Collapse of Peer Review « The Scholarly Kitchen
  • “Ellison has painstakingly documented the decline of articles published in top economics journals by authors working in the highest-ranked schools. These authors are continuing to publish, but are seeking other outlets, including unrefereed preprint and working paper servers.”
• Open Access Day – FriendFeed Room
  • A FriendFeed Room for Open Access Day, October 14.
• Paul Ginsparg: The global-village pioneers
  • Superb. Many choice quotes, including this one: “If scholarly infrastructure can be upgraded to encourage maximal spontaneous participation, then we can expect not only an increasing availability of materials online for algorithmic harvesting — articles, datasets, lecture notes, multimedia and software — but also qualitatively new forms of academic effort. “
• Ober, J.: Democracy and Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens.
  • “argues that the key to Athens’s success lay in how the city-state managed and organized the aggregation and distribution of knowledge among its citizens. Ober explores the institutional contexts of democratic knowledge management, including the use of social networks for collecting information, publicity for building common knowledge, and open access for lowering transaction costs. He explains why a government’s attempt to dam the flow of information makes democracy stumble. Democratic participation and deliberation consume state resources and social energy. Yet as Ober shows, the benefits of a well-designed democracy far outweigh its costs.”
• Editorial: APS now leaves copyright with authors for derivative works
  • There are some significant caveats (read the whole thing!), but the thrust is: “When you submit an article to an APS journal, we ask you to sign our copyright form. It transfers copyright for the article to APS, but keeps certain rights for you, the author. We have recently changed the form to add the right to make ‘‘derivative works’’ that reuse parts of the article in a new work.”
• Timo Hannay: The Future Is A Foreign Country
  • The text for Timo’s superb presentation about the future of scientific publishing at the recent Science in the 21st Century Workshop.

Click here for all of my del.icio.us bookmarks.

Click here for all of my del.icio.us bookmarks.

• The story of the WorldWide Telescope « Jon Udell
  • Quoting Jim Gray in 2002: “Most scientific data will never be directly examined by scientists; rather it will be put into online databases where it will be analyzed and summarized by computer programs. Scientists increasingly see their instruments through online scientific archives and analysis tools, rather than examining the raw data. Today this analysis is primarily driven by scientists asking queries, but scientific archives are becoming active databases that self-organize and recognize interesting and anomalous facts as data arrives. “
• Nascent: Social Not Working?
  • A stimulating talk by Timo Hannay about Science 2.0.
• Peter Norvig: Presidential Election 2008 FAQ
  • A great deal of useful information about both campaigns.
• xkcd – Height
  • xkcd does “Powers of Ten”. Very cool.
• Jay Walker’s Library
  • Lust.
• Media Bias: Going beyond Fair and Balanced: Scientific American
  • A clever way to test for bias: “Groeling collected two different data sets: in-house presidential approval polling by ABC, CBS, NBC and FOX News and the networks’ broadcasts of such polls on evening news shows from January 1997 to February 2008. Groeling found that, with varying degrees of statistical significance, CBS, NBC and ABC showed what Groeling calls a pro-Democrat bias. For instance, CBS was 35 percent less likely to report a five-point drop in approval for Bill Clinton than a similar rise in approval and was 33 percent more likely to report a five-point drop than a rise for George W. Bush. Meanwhile FOX News showed a statistically significant pro-Republican bias in the most controlled of the three models Groeling tested: its Special Report program was 67 percent less likely to report a rise in approval for Clinton than a decrease and 36 percent more likely to report the increase rather than the decrease for Bush.”
• Adding Noughts in Vain: Shock: Global Warming Still Happening!
  • Useful discussion of the last 30 years of data on global temperatures.

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