4 ms·

Of course it is, science works differently then 30 years ago. But the output, at the end, is still papers which look not only like 30 years ago, but like 100 ye

by ktpsns 8y ago

Of course it is, science works differently then 30 years ago. But the output, at the end, is still papers which look not only like 30 years ago, but like 100 years ago! With Latex, we have a powerful tool at the hand which makes sure every single student can write himself a perfectly shaped PDF which looks timeless. It doesn't even matter whether your favourite open access journal renders the paper as HTML -- they only took the Latex and transformed it. It also doesn't matter that we have meta search engines for literature references (for instance http://inspirehep.net/ http://inspirehep.net/ or https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/ https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/), or that we do have archives for uploading scientific data (https://zenodo.org/ https://zenodo.org/ or in general https://www.re3data.org/ https://www.re3data.org/): The papers are still non-interactive, still linear (not clickable hypertext). Science is old fashioned and slowly moving...

SiempreViernes 8y ago
The output of science is human knowledge, the printouts is only the transport layer. For conveying results, the fact is that making graphs with sliders is usually not worth the effort: you can always make a static figure that tells the same story, and usually with much less effort spent on making sure your sliders don't show anything distracting. You seem to object simply on the basis that an existing system is old, do you also find it objectionable that some typefaces we use can be traced back thousands of years?
- ktpsns 8y ago
  Just as much as "a picture is worth a thousand words", I claim a movie can be worth a thousands of pictures. Of course it heavily depends on the research field. I recently worked in fluid dynamics where it is natural to watch movies and publications only have still images, which is always worse. Everybody finds them worse but nevertheless the community sticks to an overtaken way of sharing results.

by ktpsns 8y ago

SiempreViernes 8y ago

The output of science is human knowledge, the printouts is only the transport layer. For conveying results, the fact is that making graphs with sliders is usually not worth the effort: you can always make a static figure that tells the same story, and usually with much less effort spent on making sure your sliders don't show anything distracting. You seem to object simply on the basis that an existing system is old, do you also find it objectionable that some typefaces we use can be traced back thousands of years?

ktpsns 8y ago
Just as much as "a picture is worth a thousand words", I claim a movie can be worth a thousands of pictures. Of course it heavily depends on the research field. I recently worked in fluid dynamics where it is natural to watch movies and publications only have still images, which is always worse. Everybody finds them worse but nevertheless the community sticks to an overtaken way of sharing results.