Comment: the future of journal publishing

Peter Coles has just written a post on what he terms the ‘academic journal racket’, and rather than add a lengthy comment, I’ll write something here.
The rational argument for electronic editing and publishing is certainly made very strongly in his post. I would like to hear a scientist at a later stage of their career [...]

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Against impact

Because I spend insufficiently little time feeling as though I’m still an undergraduate, may I politely agitate for others to follow the advice of Chris Bertram:

Those of you working in higher education in the UK already know about the barbarous proposal to make future support for research depend on a government assessment of its “impact” [...]

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Insta-Reich

Tonematrix by André Michelle is a function defined on the two-dimensional vector space over the field . And yet, it’s so much more; though self-explanatory, it might save you three seconds to know that the axes correspond to time and pitch, with the latter staggered non-linearly to prevent dissonance. It seems possible that Tokyo / [...]

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Still Tasty?

Going off on a food tangent, a blogger younger and more famous than I points us to StillTasty.com, where you can find information about whether one should eat left-overs or food bought and left uncooked for a reasonably long period.
Lacking, however, is an entry for Vegemite, which would be of great salience: I have run [...]

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Chateau Dalkeith

Well, flying from Australian to the UK is never an exhilirating experience, but all things considered it was a remarkably smooth trip all the way back to Edinburgh. New things I tried during the journey include: the Travellers’ Lounge at Kowloon Airport, where for the not quite princely sum of HKD150 (= £13 = AUD28), [...]

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Live blogging: Advance notice

Well, judging by the blog stats last night’s 20/20 live blogging was well-received, even if no-one wanted to leave a comment; I certainly had fun, so I’ll be repeating the exercise. Will try to get a bit more commentary in, as well as focussing inevitably on the conjugate problem of an accurate 20/20 bowling statistic.
Stumps [...]

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Two Messiaen Trivia

First, via The Beat, it transpires that Matt Groening drew wryly from the title of the Turangalîla-Symphonie when naming Futurama’s (Turanga) Leela. Minus one point from Berian for having been insufficiently attentive to spot that himself.
Perhaps more seriously, the Fredösphere recently excerpted transcripts from the Nixon administration:
– On May 18, 1972, Nixon talks to Henry [...]

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An Attack on Your Digital Media Libraries

Those who have spoken to me recently about such things will know of my advocacy of the iTunes movie rental service. Though their selection is limited, it is an excellent proof of concept for the general idea of how digital media should sensibly be ‘owned’. I know that the Internet is full of well-informed, passionate [...]

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ArXiv Filtering

While of course I endorse as diverse a reading of the preprint archives as is possible, we all know that there’s simply too much that goes on there for every paper to get even the most cursory of glances, let alone a proper viewing. My strategy has been to reduce the daily postings to a [...]

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The blogosphere deflates

Shocking news this morning that influential cosmology bloggers Cosmic Variance are shacking up with the Discover Magazine coterie, for reasons that simmer down to economies of scale. In the spirit of hyperbole, it seems sensible to link to Nick Carr’s recent post on the death of the blogosphere (h/t Sullivan), as well as Sullivan’s own [...]

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