I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore
What am I mad about? Oh, God.
I’m mad about Bush receiving Michael Crichton in the White House, to be reassured that climate change is a hoax even as the Northwest Passage opens up for the first time in a few million years. I’m mad about the Democrats’ failure to capitalize on the Enron scandal, and particularly the infamous “Grandma Millie” tapes (having just watched the film Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room). I’m mad about Pius XII, the man who arm-twisted Germany’s 23 million Catholics into cooperating with the Nazis despite their initial opposition, being considered for sainthood (I’m in the middle of a book about it, Hitler’s Pope by John Cornwell). I’m mad about my own procrastination in writing a popular article for Scientific American about the limits of quantum computing. I’m mad about a public school system that condemns any math or science tracking as “elitist,” while the football and basketball programs aren’t similarly condemned. I’m mad about people who declare that “a proof of P!=NP would be worthless, since what if there were an algorithm for SAT that took 1.0000001n steps?,” as if no one had ever had such a perceptive insight in the 50-year history of complexity theory.
But, as for the “not gonna take it anymore” part, one does have to restrict one’s focus a bit. So recently I decided to concentrate my anger on overpriced journal subscriptions — and in particular, on the gouging of university libraries by companies like Kluwer and Elsevier. I’ve just written a three-page polemic about this issue (technically a book review), which is going to appear in SIGACT News, possibly with a rebuttal and counter-rebuttal. I’d be grateful for comments. Note that what I write about scientists’ “peculiar anger deficiency” applies to many other issues, global warming being one obvious example. There comes a time when it’s no longer enough to be correct: you also have to be angry!
Thanks to Bill Gasarch, both for commissioning the review and for suggesting the title of this post.
Note: My diatribe is also available in HTML and postscript.
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Comment #1 April 2nd, 2006 at 6:00 pm
Michael Crichton ? the same Michael Crichton from Congo and Sphere and ER?
Comment #2 April 2nd, 2006 at 6:17 pm
It’s him: http://www.brookings.edu/views/op-ed/fellows/sandalow20050128.htm
What if he’s right, Scott? What if GW is a mass hysteria from our age?
Comment #3 April 2nd, 2006 at 6:27 pm
Ha! Who’s going to believe you now that you have a criminal record
Comment #4 April 2nd, 2006 at 7:04 pm
What if he’s right, Scott? What if GW is a mass hysteria from our age?
What if the Earth is 6,000 years old? What if beef actually comes from chickens? So many unknowns in life! 🙂
There’s no longer a serious debate about whether (1) the Earth is getting significantly warmer or (2) we’re the cause. The debate is purely a quantitative one: what the impacts will be, and in which regions; the role of cloud cover, forests, and ice caps in making things better or worse; how much time we have till the shit really hits the fan; whether the Kyoto Protocol is too little, too late to even be worth it; whether the cost of curbing GHG’s for real would exceed the cost of adapting to a Jurassic climate; etc.
If the “talking points” of the global warming contrarians strike you as plausible, spend a couple hours reading realclimate.org. The effect is similar to reading creationists followed by Richard Dawkins, or Holocaust deniers followed by Hannah Arendt.
Comment #5 April 2nd, 2006 at 7:06 pm
Ha! Who’s going to believe you now that you have a criminal record
Believe me about what?
Comment #6 April 2nd, 2006 at 8:14 pm
>>What if he’s right, Scott? What if >>GW is a mass hysteria from our age?
>What if the Earth is 6,000 years old? >What if beef actually comes from chickens?
What if Lubos Motl just explained to us that GW is nothing but mass hysteria 😎
Comment #7 April 2nd, 2006 at 9:23 pm
That was rather joe-bob-briggs-like. ‘Was I writing a review? Oh yeah, about that thing I’m supposed to be reviewing…’
Odd that your anger hasn’t gotten in the way of your academic career (in fact, it seems to have accelerated it by getting you to skip out of high school). Mine made me drop out of college.
Any idea when your SA article will post? I’d like to read it. After my quantum duelist post, a few people posted complaining that shooting oneself in the head is a non-linear interaction, which resulted in me having three thoughts (1) that subtlety is way over the heads of anyone reading this example (2) I’d like to see a rigorous explanation of how the theory of quantum computation actually works, and (3) I wonder if you might open the box to observe the quantum duelist’s bullet hit himself in the head, but before the act has happened yet.
Comment #8 April 2nd, 2006 at 10:13 pm
bram,
I read your ‘quantum duelist’ post and I do not think she would kill herself as you describe it.
The wave-function in your thought experiment would simply be
|l) + |r) after the coint-toss and all, where |l) indicates the state of duelist standing at the left (shooting to right) etc.
The two states as you describe the experiment are orthogonal, (l|r) = 0
Your analogy with the double-slit experiment is not valid; Interference is not a result of the photon ‘interacting with itself’.
Comment #9 April 2nd, 2006 at 10:39 pm
Scott –
I’m a global warming believer, but I’m willing to accept the possibility that I might be proved wrong, but given the evidence at present, it doesn’t seem likely. Despite his confusion on GW, inviting Chricton to the WH can only increase the local IQ.
But Wolfgang – The consensus scientific view is very definitely that “the photon interferes with itself” in the double slit experiment – or have I misunderstood your point?
Comment #10 April 2nd, 2006 at 11:02 pm
wolfgang,
When trying to explain something for a popular audience, it’s all too easy to say something which is technically accurate but which the popular audience can’t possibly hope to paraphrase without obliterating its meaning. In such circumstances it’s far better to give simplifications which get the point across accurately. While saying ‘the particle interferes with itself’ may not be technically accurate (although I believe that’s a debatable point, having a lot to do with the quantum definition of ‘interfere’ being different from the intuitive notion of ‘interfere’) it gives an impression to the general public which is accurate enough to be useful.
As for the quantum duelist, I could have explained the dual slit experiment verbatim, but decided to raise the stakes to murder for dramatic effect, and didn’t think the slightly more complicated scenario would be any different. I’ll withhold making an actual judgement about whether the duelist scenario works at all until I understand the math. Intuitively I find it a little hard to believe that there’s no scenario which behaves even vaguely like that.
Comment #11 April 3rd, 2006 at 12:31 am
scott,
you are undeniably correct about the academic publishing situation, and the community’s rather spineless reactions.
but is this stand easier for you to make? the choice not to review for offending journals is easy–everyone loves an easy way out of refereeing. but the choice of where to publish is more difficult. which prestigous journals would you publish in were it not for their price-gouging closed-access policies?
jacm, sicomp, and physical review* are academic or society publications, and now focs/stoc special issues are in sicomp. have you ever wanted to send a paper somewhere, and then decided not to because of the publisher?
Comment #12 April 3rd, 2006 at 2:02 am
it seems an effort to change what is going on with publications has to start with famous, tenured researchers only publishing to “well-behaved” conferences and journals. many of us cannot afford to be so picky. this seems like a change that must come from the top down.
Comment #13 April 3rd, 2006 at 3:38 am
Bram:
Any idea when your SA article will post?
“Soon” (i.e., hopefully less than a year)
Comment #14 April 3rd, 2006 at 3:47 am
While saying ‘the particle interferes with itself’ may not be technically accurate (although I believe that’s a debatable point, having a lot to do with the quantum definition of ‘interfere’ being different from the intuitive notion of ‘interfere’) it gives an impression to the general public which is accurate enough to be useful.
I’ve got to side with you on this one, Bram — I say “interferes with itself” all the time.
The public will remain confused about QM, so long as scientists aren’t willing to talk about it the way a very intelligent 11-year-old would talk about it who had just understood it for the first time.
Comment #15 April 3rd, 2006 at 3:48 am
Knuth is similarly displeased with the status quo of journal pricing, particularly Elsevier’s. If you’re not familiar with his letter already, take a look.
Comment #16 April 3rd, 2006 at 4:08 am
Anonymous:
have you ever wanted to send a paper somewhere, and then decided not to because of the publisher?
You better believe it. Actually, Andris Ambainis and I withdrew a paper that we’d submitted to JCSS after we became aware of the price-gouging issue.
My own current policy is this:
(1) I don’t send anything to journals owned by the big price-gougers like Kluwer, Elsevier, and Academic Press. That includes Theoretical Computer Science, Computational Complexity, JCSS, Information Processing Letters, Information and Computation, and several others.
(2) I don’t send much to commercially-owned journals, period. One exception is Quantum Information & Computation, a “bargain” at ~$350/year compared to most journals.
(3) While I do submit to society journals like SICOMP, J. ACM, and Physical Review, I try to send more and more to open-access journals like Theory of Computing.
(4) I post everything to my home page, as well as to the arXiv and/or ECCC as appropriate.
Comment #17 April 3rd, 2006 at 4:16 am
Knuth is similarly displeased with the status quo of journal pricing, particularly Elsevier’s.
Yeah, I cited him approvingly in my review. Knuth is not exactly a wild-eyed radical, and tends not to open his mouth unless he’s sure he knows what he’s talking about.
(I’ve always thought that would be a good trait to learn… 🙂 )
Comment #18 April 3rd, 2006 at 4:29 am
it seems an effort to change what is going on with publications has to start with famous, tenured researchers only publishing to “well-behaved” conferences and journals. many of us cannot afford to be so picky. this seems like a change that must come from the top down.
I disagree. Even thinking like a career-minded cynic, I find that people care less and less about which journal your paper eventually appears in (with a few exceptions like Science and Nature). They do care about STOC and FOCS, but those are society-run anyway.
In any case, there’s a second academic reputation you need to build up: your reputation as a person who stands up for principle.
Comment #19 April 3rd, 2006 at 8:07 am
bram,
> I’ll withhold making an actual judgement about whether the duelist scenario works at all until I understand the math.
Think about a charged, single particle. At time t there is a non-zero probability that it is in location x1 and location x2 (very close to x1). It would be the exact analog to your ‘quantum duelist’, if the two ‘copies’ (at x1 and x2) would interact with each other and accelerate.
This would mean that the quantum mechanics of a single, charged (but otherwise free) particle differs substantially from the q.m. of a neutral particle of same mass, which is not the case.
CIP,
my point was that the photon does not *interact* with itself. At least not in QM and quantum field theory is not the issue here 😎
PS: Even in the blogosphere the duel does not happen. You have smart person S, who thinks that GW is a disaster and you have smart person L , who thinks that GW is just hype. But they do not interact and the states |S> and |L> are actually orthogonal to each other 😎
Comment #20 April 3rd, 2006 at 8:19 am
You have smart person S, who thinks that GW is a disaster and you have smart person L , who thinks that GW is just hype. But they do not interact and the states |S> and |L> are actually orthogonal to each other 😎
🙂
I do check Lubos’s blog occasionally. I don’t know if <S|L>=0, but it’s at most an extremely small epsilon.
Comment #21 April 3rd, 2006 at 9:23 am
chutzpah sundae throws off the reader and doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
Comment #22 April 3rd, 2006 at 10:34 am
Bram Cohen:
Funny thing about anger. I’m not really ever angry, just frustrated/disappointed, but my irritation with academia made me both skip out of high school AND drop out of college, or rather, finish college then get the hell out of academia into business.
Comment #23 April 3rd, 2006 at 10:46 am
Hey Scott,
Re: Review of The Access Principle
There was a 2-day symposium in January called
Economics of Open Content that discussed how to make a living off of giving away content for free. There were two lenses: Academia and Entertainment.
There’s definitely a tension between the moral imperative of openly and freely distributing knowledge vs. the practical reality of being economically sustainable.
There are two-days worth of audio presentations that talk about this dynamic, and Open Access certainly comes up as being a huge aspect of it.
The most relevant presentation to your review that I’ve heard so far is by John Willinsky in his presenation called “The Economics of Knowledge as a Public Good” that starts after the Richard Stallman piece that starts at ~24:00 (there are some annoying audio looping errors during the first 24:00.)
And here’s the schedule for the two days.
Comment #24 April 3rd, 2006 at 10:53 am
Scott:
I seriously find it difficult to understand why you get so worked up about global warming. I don’t know what Crichton is saying, but in general calling GW skeptics equivalent to creationists or Holocaust deniers is absurd. That the Earth is becoming warmer and that human actions contribute to this are both pretty certain at this point, but they are certain like most recent and fairly sound scientific conclusions regarding difficult or complex topics are certain NOT like recent historical events and logical consequences of basic features of the world are certain.
Realistically, how frequently are rather high confidence scientific beliefs held for 20 years and ultimately rejected, especially in a field as complex and hard to experiment in as global warming? It’s certainly more than 20% of the time.
Now it may be that you are enough of an expert on this particular issue that you could ask, if you were older, not only about scientific consensus being rejected but about your personal beliefs being rejected. It may be that when you study an issue like this seriously for a few hundred hours you are capable of reaching beliefs which turn out to be incorrece significantly less frequently than the scientific consensus does. This is a grandiose claim, but I think that I can do it, though I haven’t in the case of global warming, and frankly if one is to accomplish anything significant in science you had better believe that you can do this too. Even so, how certain can you really be? 90%? 95%?
80% certainty of a hypothesis is plenty certain enough to base policy on. So is 10% certainty in some situations. But in the case of global warming the current consensus doesn’t really argue strongly for any particular policy, or if it does, it argues for policy decisions that would be sound with or without global warming, like reduced dependency on oil through better vehicular efficiency and biofuels.
Anyway, you seem to think that global warming is worthy of your attention. I don’t think it’s worthy of mine. I’d like to know why you hold your belief. I hold mine primarily because compared to the changes that have taken place over the last century, and by induction compared to the other changes likely to take place over this century, the impact of even rather severe global warming appears to be quite minor, though I wouldn’t quite say insignificant.
Comment #25 April 3rd, 2006 at 11:44 am
chutzpah sundae seems good to me. Cracked me up 🙂
And — Might it be that the reasons that big-priced journals weren’t thrown away long ago is that some big-named mathematicians and computer scientists get big bucks for being editors? So, basically, the university’s budget suffers, but they profit?
Comment #26 April 3rd, 2006 at 11:45 am
Michael:
(1) Thanks — you’ve motivated me to blog about GW soon.
(2) Strangely, a close reading of your stated position reveals its consistency with mine.
in the case of global warming the current consensus doesn’t really argue strongly for any particular policy, or if it does, it argues for policy decisions that would be sound with or without global warming, like reduced dependency on oil through better vehicular efficiency and biofuels.
I think the current consensus does argue strongly for particular policies, and that those policies — like “reduced dependency on oil through better vehicular efficiency” — would be sound with or without global warming. So the one difference is that I branch immediately on your “if it does” conditional. 🙂
(Also, I’d add that we’re currently moving about as fast as possible in the wrong direction.)
Comment #27 April 3rd, 2006 at 11:52 am
Might it be that the reasons that big-priced journals weren’t thrown away long ago is that some big-named mathematicians and computer scientists get big bucks for being editors? So, basically, the university’s budget suffers, but they profit?
I try not to attribute to greed that which can be adequately explained through laziness and inertia. 🙂
Comment #28 April 3rd, 2006 at 2:39 pm
“[P]olicy decisions that would be sound with or without global warming [include] reduced dependency on oil through better vehicular efficiency and biofuels.”
Reduced dependency on oil, yes, contingent on the chosen alternative. Biofuels (of which oil is one), no – combustion of carbon-containing fuels makes carbon dioxide.
What other alternatives exist, and how “sound” are they irrespective of the existence of global warming? (I’d be interested to know in what sense(s) you meant “sound,” Michael.)
Conservation (e.g., better home insulation, more fuel-efficient transportation) would probably cause the least economic dislocation, except for those whose retirement plans depend on continued growth of oil company or utility stocks.
Assuming conservation alone isn’t sufficient, it’s difficult to think of alternatives that could be developed rapidly enough without a political consensus on global warming. Nuclear energy is probably the next largest slice of the market after oil and coal, but I wouldn’t like to see more money thrown into this means of power generation when there’s no feasible way to clean up after it. Hydropower is geographically restricted. Wind and solar would require a huge shift in current economic arrangements, utterly unlikely in the absence of some sense of emergency.
Comment #29 April 3rd, 2006 at 6:53 pm
Scott, the journal Computational Complexity is published by Springer.
It is a for-profit publisher but it is as good as a professional society when it comes to pricing, allowances for free access in the copyright agreements, and support for theory. (If we had to boycott Springer, then we would have to give up Crypto, Eurocrypt, Asiacrypt, Icalp, Random, Approx,…)
Comment #30 April 3rd, 2006 at 7:11 pm
Luca: Thanks for the correction!
Comment #31 April 3rd, 2006 at 9:05 pm
Luca wrote: … the journal Computational Complexity is published by Springer.
It is a for-profit publisher but it is as good as a professional society when it comes to pricing, allowances for free access in the copyright agreements, and support for theory.
One year of CC is about 300 pages and you have to pay more than $500 for that. Springer’s “Open Choice” asks you to pay $3000 for them to make your article available for open access.
It seems to me that this journal is firmly in the “You have to pay dearly to work for us” camp. (They do accept credit cards though.)
Comment #32 April 3rd, 2006 at 9:08 pm
jud: biofuels are made from plants, which get their carbon from the atmosphere, so there’s no net effect (except for energy costs in planting, harvesting, processing).
Comment #33 April 4th, 2006 at 6:55 am
“[B]iofuels are made from plants, which get their carbon from the atmosphere, so there’s no net effect (except for energy costs in planting, harvesting, processing).”
Sure, but I figure that if we prudently anticipate increased CO2 production from the developing world, the “developed” world should to the extent possible try to obtain energy in ways that have a more favorable impact on CO2 levels than a net addition (albeit less of one than most methods in mass use today).
Comment #34 April 4th, 2006 at 5:36 pm
Scott, it’s not strange that our opinions are consistant. Rational truth seekers shouldn’t disagree. We reasonable approximations to that ideal can avoid disagreeing too much if we make sure to lay out our positions extremely meticulously.
Unfortunately, in practice even the best rationalists are better at being locally rational than at being globally rational. For instance, they are better at reaching correct beliefs than at acting according to them and better at reaching correct beliefs regarding a particular topic than at allocating attention to topics in a utility maximizing fashion.
I didn’t criticize your beliefs about global warming, but rather your meta level belief that global warming is a worthy topic to which to allocate enough attention to reach reliable beliefs.
I’m also trying to encourage the meta-level belief “most of my beliefs should probably be held at a lower level of certainty, in light of heuristics and biases research etc, in order to make my belief-network more closely approximate that of a well calibrated Bayesian”
Jud: Reduced dependency on oil depends pretty strongly on improved batteries, ultracapacitors, and other energy storage technologies (probably not H2, it will take too long). Once we can store energy reasonably efficiently in “plug-in hybrids” we can also generate most of the energy we need via wind, nuclear, and solar, using cars to arbitrage across time. Currently, low emisions capital intensive energy sources such as these are not viable because they don’t adequately match peak supply with peak demand.
Obviously, improved insulation and other conservation measures can have an appreciable impact even faster. Tax incentives must encourage efficiency, but since taxes on heating oil etc are regressive our income tax should be made more progressive to (more than) compensate.
Of course that won’t happen with the current mobsters in power.
Comment #35 April 4th, 2006 at 5:45 pm
Great book review, Scott. The opening is fantastic. The plain speaking about the book itself, at the end of the review, is refreshing too.
Comment #36 April 4th, 2006 at 6:20 pm
Unfortunately, in practice even the best rationalists are better at being locally rational than at being globally rational.
Sorry man, what can I do? Not all of us have the good fortune to be as globally rational as you are. 😉
Comment #37 April 4th, 2006 at 6:22 pm
Jonathan: Thanks!
Comment #38 April 4th, 2006 at 7:17 pm
“Reduced dependency on oil depends pretty strongly on improved batteries, ultracapacitors, and other energy storage technologies (probably not H2, it will take too long).”
Re H2 taking too long, yes, especially when the means of making sufficient H2 available is considered. Ways of obtaining the energy to build energy making or storage technologies (including building any necessary manufacturing facilities) should also be taken into account in assessing the true effects on global warming (assuming, arguendo at least, that human-produced CO2 is a contributor) of batteries, capacitors, solar panels, insulation, etc.
Comment #39 April 5th, 2006 at 12:11 am
Sorry man, what can I do?
Michael did make some suggestions.
Comment #40 April 5th, 2006 at 3:06 am
completely off topic: do these new theory school rankings seem a little strange to anyone else? http://www.cc.gatech.edu/images/pdfs/usnwr2007_theory_rankings.pdf
Comment #41 April 5th, 2006 at 3:40 am
Scott, that is alarming about Michael Crichton and Dubiya if true.
Note that Freeman Dyson has an odd opinion of this whole global warming fiasco. He thinks that it might be a good thing because he believes it will make the Sahara desert wet again.
See this article.
Comment #42 April 5th, 2006 at 5:52 am
Great article, Scott. My dad’s teaching literature in Senegal this year, and while of course humanities are a different story (e.g. publishers add more value), has said that grad students often find themselves needing some text for their dissertation and having to use only whatever excerpts they can find on the web.
And to change topics,
I think the key difference between worries about global warming and running out of oil is when it comes to coal, which we have hundreds of years of and which can be turned into oil with a process that (I think) becomes economically viable when oil is around $40/barrel.
This was recently discussed at
http://crookedtimber.org/2006/03/23/carbon-too-much-not-too-little/
Comment #43 April 5th, 2006 at 7:31 am
completely off topic: do these new theory school rankings seem a little strange to anyone else?
Your link got cut off (try this), but yes, they do. I admit I’m not impartial here, but the main question raised by putting Stanford above Berkeley is what they mean by the word “theory.”
Comment #44 April 5th, 2006 at 7:53 am
Note that Freeman Dyson has an odd opinion of this whole global warming fiasco. He thinks that it might be a good thing because he believes it will make the Sahara desert wet again.
It already seems to have warmed Southern Ontario, something I don’t lose sleep over. The question is, how much warming is the “optimal” amount? Is it worth flooding a few countries out of existence, maybe shutting down the Gulf Stream, etc. to get milder winters for a while in Canada and Russia and maybe trees in the Sahara? When should we stop? It would be nice if we thought it through rather than pursuing the “drunken sailor” approach.
Comment #45 April 5th, 2006 at 8:05 am
Followed your link to “Hitler’s Pope” because I’d seen a TV prog (here in the UK) that claimed his bad rep was undeserved. Can’t remember enough to make the argument myself, but it was quite convincing at the time.
Saw this comment below at Amazon — makes some of the same points as the prog. YMMV.
>>>I hope Cornwell gets professional help for whatever motivated him to author this.
Rychlak’s book “Hitler, the War, and the Pope” needs to be read if you choose to read this one.
Law professor historian Ron Rychlak(nonCatholic) has shown proof author Cornwell was biased and telling lies, starting from the front cover of “Hitler’s Pope”.
That cover picture story is interesting and demonstrative of Cornwell’s penchant for manipulative tactics to get the result he wanted. The building in the cover photo is the office of both the Weimar government and later Hitler. Go to the UK Amazon site and notice that the cover photo for the same book is different than the cover on the American Amazon site. They both naturally were the same(they both were the UK cover) when the book was originally published, but the surprise phone call by Rychlak to an American radio show Cornwell was on, not only forced Cornwell to then alter the photo, but change the inset text that described the photo. But Cornwell still apparently couldn’t help himself, he still was manipulative, so instead of eliminating the photo he carefully eliminated the parts of the photo and blurred the other parts that proved it was not a visit to Hitler, but to the Weimar government – Hitler’s rivals before he took power. Cornwell was further forced to reprint the book and change the text inside the book falsely claiming that the picture was taken after Hitler gained power.
Some of Cornwell’s misrepresentations and falsifications were exposed after Rychlak published his analysis of Cornwell’s facts, so I suggest reading what Rychlak has published on the web in addition to reading Rychlak’s book.
Comment #46 April 5th, 2006 at 8:08 am
You wrote:
So recently I decided to concentrate my anger on overpriced journal subscriptions — and in particular, on the gouging of university libraries by companies like Kluwer and Elsevier.
And in your polemic you also wrote:
For me, the most important idea in the The Access Principle is that scholars have a duty to make their work available, not only to their colleagues, but ideally to anyone who wants it.
Do you think this is the same issue,
or may may be these are two different
problems?
Comment #47 April 5th, 2006 at 8:27 am
Do you think this is the same issue, or may may be these are two different problems?
I see them as different aspects of the same problem. Kluwer, Elsevier, et al. (1) gouge the universities that can afford to pay, and (2) prevent access from the ones that can’t (see Aram’s post above). The problem would be ameliorated if everyone just posted all their papers on the web, but amazingly, they don’t. (Except in a few fields, and even there, usually only papers written since the mid-90’s.)
Comment #48 April 5th, 2006 at 8:46 am
Well, I have never heard about people
being requested to remove
a .pdf of their Elsevier paper
from the web page.
I have heard that it could hapen
with a paper published by ACM.
(OK, my experience is limited, and I may be
deadly wrong).
This does not mean that I defend
the price policies of, say, Elsevier.
But to me open access and the
exorbitant prices of some publishers
appear to be two different problems.
Comment #49 April 6th, 2006 at 12:12 am
Yeah I think you need to check your facts about the Pope. Why would the Pope give in to a regime that killed some 200,000 Catholics? The Nazi’s didn’t only target Jews. Also “Hitler’s Pope” takes a lot of his speeches out of context, the people’s reactions and the reaction of the government were a more tell-tell sign of the Pope’s opinions.
Now mind you I agree he didn’t do enough, but then again no one did, until it was too late.
Comment #50 April 6th, 2006 at 7:08 am
“The problem would be ameliorated if everyone just posted all their papers on the web, but amazingly, they don’t.”
Somewhat ameliorated, sure. Important functions such as refereeing to weed out BS, and collection of multiple papers on a particular subject into one publication would still be missing, though. (The Knuth letter reviews more such functions.) These are great time savers for readers, and time is something readers likely feel they don’t have nearly enough of.
If you’re referring to publishing on the webspace allocated by one’s institution, I wonder if there are authors prolific enough, and institutions storage-limited enough, to make that a problem?
Comment #51 April 6th, 2006 at 7:28 am
“Why would the Pope give in to a regime that killed some 200,000 Catholics?”
So they wouldn’t kill 6 million Catholics?
Sorry, that was a bit inflammatory, but in my own opinion, “didn’t do enough” is perhaps too mild a criticism.
Comment #52 April 7th, 2006 at 6:59 pm
Hi Scott,
I joined in your anger today.
I don’t want to tak it — depts ask their faculty members to ask their coauthors to state their percentage contributions to all joint papers.
We all give our own contributions a slightly higher rating (knowing our own work better), and different people rate different aspects of a project differently (to ask the correct question, to answer the question correctly or incorrectly, to doing the writing etc).
Alphabetical order is a move towards civilization.
Now, these bureacrats are creating conflicts of interests among friends and colleagues and worse, that is totally unnecessary!
3 hours has pass, without finding a good reply to my friend — what a waste of time and also ruining of good mood!
Comment #53 April 7th, 2006 at 7:59 pm
Debbie: Blech! Blech! Blech! Maybe I shouldn’t take a faculty position for another 20 years.
Comment #54 April 8th, 2006 at 2:48 am
(a talk ends)
Organizer: Are there any questions?
Collaborator: The speaker is very generous in giving credit to his collaborators.
Organizer: Don’t worry, in private he tells us it’s all him.
Speaker writes on board: joint with (collaborator)
Organizer: oh, that was sarcastic?
Comment #55 December 21st, 2006 at 7:05 pm
[…] Back in April, I blogged about why we should all support open-access journals. But after receiving a long string of referee requests from closed-access journals, I’ve completely changed my mind about this issue. I now believe we should keep Kluwer, Elsevier, and the other publishing conglomerates rolling in dough for as long as possible, and do whatever we can to sabotage the open-access movement. Why? Because as soon as the world switches to open-access, I’ll have no choice but to start accepting referee requests again. […]