Today’s comic is the epitome of xkcd. A bit of humor, a bit of wonder, a bit of truth, and large chunk of geek. I really enjoyed it (and I especially liked seeing Ford Prefect!) Here’s another of my favorites from a few months ago. Don’t forget to read the mouse-over text.
It looks like a lot of great new features are getting picked up in the next version of WordPress (2.7), due out sometime in the next few months. One of the biggest changes is (again) revamping the administrative interface (my end of this blog), which I am very excited about. I like the current admin interface better than the previous one, but this new one, codenamed Crazyhorse, is promising to be even better. They put time, effort, and money into usability testing and seeing how people naturally expect things to work (with eye lasers!), and they even asked our opinions. This is in addition to a number of other incredibly useful features, such as automatic upgrading of WP software and the ability to browse and install plugins from within WP.
All of this just reinforces my love of WordPress and Automattic. They’re currently leading their field, but are they sitting back on their haunches waiting for someone to challenge them? No way. They’re pushing their software forward at an amazing speed, and doing a heck of a good job at it. No wonder Matt Mullenweg (founder of WP) is on the list of the Top Entrepreneurs Under 30.
Some people say that anesthesiology is kind of boring like 98% of the time. But what about that other 2%?
There’s an interesting discussion over on /. about the future of Blu-ray. Despite beating out HD-DVD a few months back, this format has yet to take off. Too much DRM? Failing economy? Players and movies too expensive? No good titles? Don’t see the benefit of upgrading when you’ve only got a 22″ CRT TV? Take your pick folks. My theory is it’s some combination of all of the above, but the main culprit is that it’s not that much better than regular DVD to justify re-buying my entire movie collection, at least at its current market price.
I read an article on Ars Technica [via /.]the other day that made me very worried about the future of scientific discovery in the US. With our currently failing economy, I don’t understand how we can still be making such idiotic decisions about the future of some of our most innovative industries.
The scientific research industry is fueled by governmentally funded programs like the NIH and NSF. As a taxpayer and citizen, I cannot believe the idiocy of some of statments against open access in Congress. There is a particularly poignant response on the /. article demonstrating how the greed of publishing companies in a dying industry are attempting to use their financial power and influence over government to squelch dissenters that oppose their bottom line. Let’s face it. With electronic distribution of written material available, the publishing industry as we know it is dying. There’s no way to stop it aside from them increasing their hold of copyrights and copyright law. There is no reason that publishing companies should be taking any sort of “ownership” of research that they publish. With the minuscule cost of publishing something online today, the publishers truly have almost no overhead to publish a scientific article. This was not the case 20 years ago when they had to print and ship their journals across the globe, but today they simply have to put it online. Their work is practically done for them by PubMed, the Google of biomedical science research. Sure, they need to find peer reviewers (one of the cornerstones of research), but do you think that publishing companies actually pay these reviewers? (No.) If that’s the case, why are they still charging thousands of dollars to researchers in order to publish an article? I think it’s because they used to have a reason to, and now that they don’t, it just means bigger profit margins. People don’t like it? They’ll pay the government to make them like it.
This article and the /. post made me start to wonder if an open access journal had already been started. A quick Google search showed me that it had: the Public Library of Science (PLoS). The PLoS is an open access journal published in the United States that guarantees that all of it’s material is available free of charge online. Not only that, but everything is released under a liberal Creative Commons Attribution license, the researchers retain their own copyright, and most importantly, the article is fully available on the day of publication. People don’t have to wait until tomorrow to learn about the discoveries of today. They can just dive right in. This is in stark contrast to the practices of current publishing conglomerates, who take over copyright and make non-subscribers wait a year or more (if at all) to access the material. Now, surely this is good for the publisher’s bottom-line, but you have to stop an ask yourself: Is this good for science?
Since most government-funded scientific research is done at large institutions with many faculty researchers, the scientists might not fully understand the problem. Their institutional affiliation gives them the ability to join together and pay the large fees for a subscription to the most popular journals. But some smaller institutions do not enjoy the luxury of being able to subscribe to anything. And even the largest institutions can’t subscribe to everything. There are simply too many journals. There are also many individuals, like students, and private researchers who wish to learn about what innovations our tax dollars are leading to and where these innovations might lead. Open access would likely generate a renewed interest in basic science and discovery, helping to fuel growth of the field. So should this even be an issue in today’s society? I mean scientists are generally trying to help us better understand the world we live in, the diseases we fight, and the things that affect us. The fact that a project has received a sliver of the ever dwindling government funding demonstrates that it’s a worthwhile project that will very likely yield extraordinary results for the world. Shouldn’t those results be available to anyone?
The PLoS has grown stronger since its inception, but it’s still generally small potatoes compared to the likes of Nature Publishing Group and even JACS. The PLoS now has separate journals in many of the biomedical sciences like biology, genetics, and medicine, and they even have a fast-track publication called PLoS ONE for those high priority articles.
So how is it that this journal, with its inherent ability to accelerate scientific discovery, has managed to stay beneath so many radars? The answer to that is two-fold. The scientific community does not currently seem to recognize both the underlying problem with current publishing companies and the innate ability of a publisher like PLoS to solve this problem once and for all. At the heart of this issue is the notoriety of publication. In order to be successful as a researcher, scientists want to be published in big name journals. Every one of them would love to have a publication in Nature or the NEJM. It’s extraordinarily competitive, and thus only the best of the best research makes it there. But scientists have lost sight of the fact that this notoriety is man-made. Nature is only as famous as it is because everyone wants to publish there. They get the best articles because of it. So if they want to break free of the hold that publishers have over their research, they need to set their own standards. If they want PLoS or any open access journal to be able to defeat the giants, or even get them to start listening, they have to remind the publishers that without their research, the publishers have no industry. Scientists do the work, and they should get to say what happens to it. In all likelihood, any attempt to dictate terms to a publisher is going to fail (at least at this point). But the scientific community needs to remember that they hold the power. They are the ones doing the research, and they are the ones volunteering to peer review. If the publishers won’t meet their demands, they need to meet their own demands. So listen up scientists: In this age of the Internet, you do not need them anymore. Take your research and your peer reviewers and make your own, new notoriety. Once they see you doing that, they’ll either follow suit or not. At that point, it won’t really matter.
But the reason that this has not happened and probably will not happen in near future is that scientists don’t see the dire need for open access because most of them are given most of the access they need. The sooner they realize that they need to demand open access to their work so that other scientists and the public can benefit from it, the better. Once they get past the encumbrance of permissions and red tape laid out by the publishers, they can get on with their life’s work in a much more open, collaborative environment. Otherwise, the publishing industry is going to keep tying researchers’ hands behind their backs, making it harder for them to exchange ideas, just so that they can continue to squeeze every possible dollar out of this industry. This is not good for the scientists, and it’s especially not good for science.
Ars Technica wrote up an article on a new open-source textbook offering from Flat World Knowledge. I’m very interested to see how it works out.
So there’s been lots of new stuff I’ve been able to fiddle with recently. I started a Twitter account, so if you have an account there, let me know so I can follow you. The reason I went with Twitter, over something like Facebook’s status message is that it’s able to be plugged into the rest of my online life. You know the old mantra: one life, one status message? 
For example, by updating my status on Twitter, it also updates: my Facebook status message (via the Facebook Twitter application), my buddy status in Pidgin (which controls my status for AIM, GoogleChat, and more) (via the Pidgin Twitter Status plugin), and even my blog (see the box “Poo-Tee-Weet?” on the right) (via Twitter For WordPress). I still haven’t convinced myself how much I’m going to use Twitter, but for the unfamiliar, it’s a way to share a brief message with your friends online. It might be the answer to “what are you doing?”, “what are you thinking?”, or even just a quote or a link. You can even update your status via text message so that things can stay current if you’re doing something interesting away from the computer. We can’t ever get too far away from the net, right? Previously, I didn’t use the FB status messages very much, but I’m hoping that I’ll keep up with Twitter at least somewhat regularly.
Also, Sadie liked using Google Chrome, but found it a bit buggy still. It kept freezing on her and/or becoming really slow. So I suggested trying to use Firefox regularly in lieu of her usual IE 7. She really enjoyed that Chrome’s home page had a visual listing of all your most regularly viewed pages, which was an interesting twist on Opera’s Speed Dial. I found that a plugin by the same name for Firefox and I think that’ll work out pretty well for her. I’ve actually been using this for the past day, and I like it as well. It’s nice to be able to program your commonly used websites in for a nice quick shortcut. And even better, I like that similar to a phone’s speed dial, it’s easier to access these bookmarks with a keyboard shortcut. Ctrl+1, Ctrl+2, etc. now gets me to my most commonly viewed sites.
To keep myself organized now that school’s started again, I’ve picked up a nice little to-do list manager called Remember The Milk (RTM). It can be used via a web interface, but I really enjoy using it with a Linux-only tool called Tasque. Tasque can be plugged into Do, so that adding tasks to my to-do list is as easy as a few button presses. The Do plugin is great because you can even add a task to your list by highlighting some text in a document, email, or webpage. For users on other operating systems, there’s a variety of RTM clients available if you don’t like having to use another website to manage your to-do list.
And then there’s Dropbox, which finally came out of private beta recently. They’ve got a freeware Linux client available, but I have yet to actually download and install it. Dropbox is a great little program that will keep a folder synchronized between all your computers. Ryan Paul of Ars wrote up a great review of it recently.
So all-in-all, just what I need. A bunch of new things to fiddle with!
I have to say that I find this article rather appalling [Sorry, Peter]. Let’s be real here for a moment. How can anyone even consider that argument poignant? Personally, I don’t care what the reasoning was for Palin or her daughter’s decision to keep their babies. The point is that both of them were free to make their choices. The problem is (and the reason things like this repeatedly get brought up is) that Palin stands firmly that all abortions should be illegal (even in the case of rape).
“Pro-life” conservatives need to get off their high horses in thinking that all “pro-choice” people want an abortion. They don’t. They just want the ability to make the decision that’s best for them and their families and not be told what to do with their own body. The real argument of the article basically states that the “pro-choice” folks are appalled that she didn’t have an abortion, despite the fact that her child would likely have Down Syndrome. My response: Who cares whether she had him or not? My issue is with the argument being made. Despite the snarky article, I find it highly suspect that it’s the “pro-choice” crowd actually making that argument. The “pro-life” crowd, on the other hand, putting words in the “pro-choice” folks’ mouths? Now that I can believe. Plus, they can use this to shove in the faces of anyone considering an abortion. I could easily see some conservatives making this argument: “Look, she had her baby even though it is going to have Down Syndrome. Now suck it up, have your baby, and be glad yours was lucky enough to be relatively healthy”. Gimme a break, folks. You’re obviously qualified to make that decision for me because your side is “more moral.” And do you really think that outlawing abortions is going to make everything all better? Many of our patients are still going to try to get them, just by other means. Wire coat hanger anyone? Does that sound safe?
And then in the end, DrRich tries to further tweak the argument by making some sort of appalling, hyperbolic statement like “Down Syndrome babies will be a burden on the health care economy.” Please. Do you really think that people will start making decisions on whether or not to terminate a pregnancy depending on how much it will cost for health care (which most people are not even cognizant enough to think about it for themselves) or whether they “want to have” a sick baby? Don’t minimize the decision of having an abortion. It’s not one to be taken lightly, and I don’t think it is by almost anyone who makes it.
If moral conservatives want to reduce the number of abortions in this country, why not encourage better sex education instead of hiding behind their shroud of preaching abstinence and then wondering why there are so many “unwanted” pregnancies. But that’s not their bag. They’d rather just tell you not to have sex, and when you do and get pregnant, they’ll tell you how to handle it from there, too.
Finally, it looks RMstudents.com, the project I’ve been working on at school, is going to take off. We implemented a lot of new features this summer that are (hopefully) going to be really useful for the students. In fact, we even received a request today from a student in the Nursing college to get them (and the rest of the University) on board. That’s very exciting. But to be honest a picture is worth a thousand words. We’ve already practically gotten more outside activity since classes started a few weeks ago than we did throughout most of last year. I think it helped that the site was up and ready for the M1s when they arrived and we’ve been able to point out some great features it offers. Let’s hope it keeps up!
RMstudents is now a more happening place than it used to be!
You also might notice that I rearranged the link structure to facilitate a more task-based approach. Hopefully it will make the website easier to use by letting people log in and get right to work doing what they came to do. To see a list of what we’ve added recently, check out the Welcome Back post.