rflrob

40 ms·

421.
by rflrob 15y ago
At about 0:24, I can convince myself that I see someone in a black and white shirt on the very right hand side of the frame.
422.
by rflrob 15y ago
> The journal companies essentially have a monopoly on the market. They must and should be broken up for the good of scientific research. The studies were funded by the public, and should be accessible to the public. The problem is that
423.
by rflrob 15y ago
The sad fact of the matter is that it probably wouldn't affect scientific collaboration. A large fraction of scientific research is done at universities that generally have subscriptions to these journals (albeit at a relatively large pric
424.
by rflrob 15y ago
I think the key idea you've hit on is that paper is relatively permanent, even when we don't need it to be. For lots of moderate term stuff, it could easily be replaced if only it weren't quite as cheap.
425.
by rflrob 15y ago
Strictly speaking, you could probably even revoke copyright protection for porn entirely. The relevant clause of the constitution reads, "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inve
426.
by rflrob 15y ago
> Since porn is on the internet, it is NOT easily accessible to minors. That seems to be entirely beside Santorum's point. His particular brand of politics is largely against any kind of sexual freedom. Gay rights, abortion, even cont
427.
by rflrob 15y ago
It's an API, so I have this code running now: for i in xrange(10000): print i trivia = requests.get('http://numbersapi.com/%d' % i).text math = requests.get('http://numbersapi.com/%d/math' % i).text if
428.
by rflrob 15y ago
If what you're implying here is that they should be offering a bounty for discovery of bugs, I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, but to expect them to get a policy about that and to allocate funding for those bounties on a Sunday, wit
429.
by rflrob 15y ago
It may be worth pointing out that the OP's appeal to the relevance to biology may not be quite so relevant. Speaking as a bioinformaticist, most of the time we're interested in matching strings with some number of mismatches. In that case
430.
by rflrob 15y ago
> Insurgent Games only open sourced once they gave up, so they clearly know that open sourcing all your code is not a good idea when you're selling games. To be a bit pedantic, all you can really say is that they didn't know whether ope
431.
by rflrob 15y ago
>I would love to release my data in an open format. But the software I'm using is proprietary - and the format is therefore closed. > >Here's the problem: Scientific software sucks. It's stuck 20 years ago. Usually a pain in the
432.
by rflrob 15y ago
"Except that source code can sometimes obfuscate the intent." The source code, no matter how opaque and poorly written, can never really make things less clear. That's because it must be able to be interpreted by a computer. Good pseudocod
433.
by rflrob 15y ago
There is the factor that a lot of the code scientists write is hacky, one-off, and fragile. The kinds of people who care about releasing their code also feel at least a little embarassed about the code quality. There's at least one license
434.
by rflrob 15y ago
> In my admittedly anecdotal experience, the rate of full grown adults who casually ignore the sinks after finishing up their business and leaving a stall seems to be disturbingly high I dunno about stalls, but there is some not totally
435.
by rflrob 15y ago
Do we necessarily care about the overall size of the industry? When I listen to music, I care more about the composer and musicians than the guy who writes the contracts. If more artists are able to make money producing good quality music
436.
"Why do you need a machine" DNA sequencer on a USB stick(pathogenomics.bham.ac.uk)
1 points by rflrob 15y ago|0 comments
437.
by rflrob 15y ago
> The journal industry already has a vice-like grip on the research institutions. They can keep raising the subscription prices, and, to stay alive, the research institutions have to pay up. While it's generally true that research insti
438.
by rflrob 15y ago
While the public does have an interest in research becoming public after a reasonable period of time, I think the government is going to have a hard time declaring that it wants to unilaterally sidestep a multibillion dollar industry that i
439.
by rflrob 15y ago
>>You don't seem to object to your getting a doubtless hefty paycheck resting on huge tuition rates I disagree with this assertion that his paycheck is particularly hefty. Professor Bainbridge earned $263k in 2008 (I can't seem to
440.
by rflrob 15y ago
Here's the question, though: are the risk-taking humans risk-taking because they're infected, or are they infected because they're risk taking. Correlation, unfortunately, doesn't imply causation. The "fatal attraction to cat urine" studie
441.
by rflrob 15y ago
Depending on where he's based (I'm assuming California), a large fraction is likely fossil fuel based, but there's lots of natural gas (which is at least a low-carbon FF), but also nuclear, hydro, and wind. It's also not unreasonable to as
442.
by rflrob 15y ago
There are plenty of ways to calculate the value of a clean atmosphere, though I agree that a good calculation is difficult, and the question of who should pay for it and how isn't easy either (but more of an ethics-politics question than th
443.
by rflrob 15y ago
Reading the paper (paywalled, unfortunately), it seems that the big breakthrough was not that a microbe can degrade polyurethane (there's almost a dozen other citations), but that this one can do it both aerobically and anaerobically. That
444.
by rflrob 15y ago
Scanning through the abstract[1], it seems pretty likely to me that they did the actual screening in a lab, and it's merely that the fungus was originally from the rainforest. In fact, one of the 21 authors on the paper is from a Peruvian u
445.
$100 Open Peer Review for Academic Publishing(openrepub.org)
2 points by rflrob 15y ago|0 comments
446.
Publisher statements that may get me on the boycott-peer-review bandwagon(scientopia.org)
1 points by rflrob 15y ago|0 comments
447.
by rflrob 15y ago
The problem with that approach is that given the orbital dynamics of the Sun-Earth-Mars system, there's a relatively brief window every couple of years when it makes sense to launch a mission. If there's a crippling error in the first launc
448.
by rflrob 15y ago
There's plenty of science still to be done on the moon, and when you combine the recent discovery of water in the craters and the theory that the moon is composed of Earth ejecta from an impact, and there's a reasonably strong science case
449.
by rflrob 15y ago
The problem is, humans are so much more effective than robots at planning and independent decision making, which is critical when there's a 8-40 minute communications round trip time. The two wildly successful MER probes Spirit and Opportu
450.
by rflrob 15y ago
As a moderate-liberal firmly embedded in a very liberal university, I nevertheless think that support for or against SOPA/PIPA falls less on liberal-conservative lines (see, e.g. http://projects.propublica.org/sopa/ ) than some other axis

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