veddox

76 ms·

691.
by veddox 10y ago
Unfortunately, yes. Of course a lot of it depends on the journal, but there are enough out there that will publish just about anything. Even the more serious journals sometimes let "bad apples" slip through. In the end, peer revie
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by veddox 10y ago
Ubuntu automatically encrypts private keys while not in use, and I store the encryption password in KeePass.
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by veddox 10y ago
As long as each group of writers sticks to its ideal audience, there's no problem. The conflict starts when academics are asked to write for a popular audience, or a scientist reads something a non-scientist wrote about his field. Then
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by veddox 10y ago
I'm hoping the remark about "real science" was ironic, otherwise I would have to take pretty strong offense now ;-)
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by veddox 10y ago
Yes, that's what I meant.
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by veddox 10y ago
> That is the opposite of my experience. I can't deny you your experience (especially as you have more of it than I do), at the same time, I can only echo my own. I don't know what your field is, mine is biology, and while we t
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by veddox 10y ago
Unfortunately, when the journalist fails and gets the science wrong, the result is a whole bunch of people with silly ideas about science (as if we didn't have enough of those already). When the scientist fails and gets the language wr
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by veddox 10y ago
Absolutely. Surround yourself daily with people using the same language as you, and you begin to forget that the language your group uses is not the language most other people use.
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by veddox 10y ago
A very interesting article! Being in academia myself (though admittedly still as a student) and having done some writing for magazines, I can thoroughly relate to this discussion. Academic writing is all about compressing complex topics and
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by veddox 10y ago
By "commandline tool" do you mean a password encryption program? Implementing your own cryptographic procedures is highly inadvisable (unless you're an expert in the field). If you're not storing particularly sensitive d
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by veddox 10y ago
That doesn't change much, IMO. Sure, finding the exact book you need in a collection of several million can seem daunting, but after you've learnt the system, it takes about three minutes (most of which is walking time). And learn
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by veddox 10y ago
It sounds like a lot of stuff that the author complains about falls under Sturgeon's Law. To paraphrase him: "Sure, 90% of FOSS is crud. That's because 90% of everything is crud." Not to lessen the many valid criticisms
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by veddox 10y ago
We live in a society where almost everybody's first instinct when looking up facts is: "Google it". And the second: "Check Wikipedia". It really isn't astonishing that students have the same attitude when they
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by veddox 10y ago
Oh my goodness - it never occurred to me that a library could be scary. As a book lover, I was positively thrilled the first time I entered my university's 3-million-book-library... Although having said that, I can absolutely empathize
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by veddox 10y ago
Oh my, what a nightmare! Didn't know whether to laugh or cry while reading it :D
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by veddox 10y ago
As somebody looking to go into research (in a STEM field), this is a rather chilling article... And it's by far not the first time I have heard about this problem of getting a long-term job in academia. I'm just wondering: this gu
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by veddox 10y ago
Upvoting: If I find a comment thought-provoking and well argued, or if it gives interesting, insightful or funny information, I upvote it. Occasionally I also upvote previously downvoted posts if I think the downvote unwarranted. Comments t
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by veddox 10y ago
I'd heard about this one before, but it's great to see some research done on it. If you think about it, humans communicating with birds is not all that astounding - interspecies communication abounds in nature. Nonetheless, it doe
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by veddox 10y ago
Thank you for sharing this! > Don't build an engine instead of a game Only too true... That's a trap I always fall into. I guess programmers are so hard-wired to abstracting problems they that need solving they end up doing a
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by veddox 10y ago
Yes, it's a good thing we don't build our bridges the way we write our code...
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by veddox 10y ago
Wow, incredible! Sounds like a real-life movie :-)
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by veddox 10y ago
The Jargon File is always a good source for stories like that :D "Do what I mean (DWIM)" is another good entry for that ( http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/D/DWIM.html )
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by veddox 10y ago
Yeah, I like Lenovo too - this is currently my third Lenovo laptop, all ran Ubuntu pretty much without a hitch.
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by veddox 10y ago
I never understood why people didn't like chiclet keyboards until I recently bought a T420. Now, I don't want to go back ;-)
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by veddox 10y ago
I subscribe to an email newsletter by a major German news-website (www.dw.com). Every morning and evening, I get the most important news delivered to my inbox, one paragraph per item. It takes about a minute to scan and I am "up to dat
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by veddox 10y ago
> Are you a global warming denier? I did not say anything to that effect in my previous comment. In fact, your question is so mindbogglingly groundless I am not even going to bother answering it. > The article can be used as a tool by
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by veddox 10y ago
Well put. Modern science is an incredibly high-tech business in so many fields. Whether it's an expedition to Antarctica, building a new radio telescope or even "just" buying an electron microscope - you're gonna have to
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by veddox 10y ago
If we had unlimited funding, most of the other problems would indeed take care of themselves. The problem is the "unlimited" part...
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by veddox 10y ago
My favourite proposed solution for the paywall problem is to launch a platform akin to iTunes - one giant repository of academic articles available to anyone at a low cost. (Kind of like SciHub, except the people who deserve to get some mon
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by veddox 10y ago
Define "good data". It really does depend on your field. One of our biology professors once told us that any r^2 value above 0.5 could be considered "not bad" on a linear regression in biology - I daresay physicists are

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