open access

one of the big issues in academia nowadays is the question of whether open access journals are going to supplant traditional publication venues and cause a sea change in the way research as a whole is conducted and reported. a lot of the best academic journals nowadays are commercial, having been bought over by various monstercorps of the kind that take over the galaxy (think k-mart for universities). unlike k-mart, however, these entities typically make you pay out the wazoo for subscriptions and individual articles, all in the name of ensuring that you get the best possible science, i.e. facts you can trust. open access journals, of course, make use of the magic of the interw3b to bring all that stuff to you free of charge, so that any hillbilly with a 56k modem can logon and learn about the cytotoxicity of timosaponin AIII.

proponents of open access cite the argument that information wants to be free, and not just that -- academics have a responsibility to make the information they generate free, so as to encourage greater accountability and availability, and the more rapid progress of research as a whole. there is, in fact, some evidence that open access boosts citations, although i'd take that with a grain of salt until more and better data start rolling in.

now, i really do buy these arguments, and i feel that those against open access are generally old fogies who don't understand that video always kills the radio star, you can't stop the beat etc. now that i'm on the cusp of actually submitting something to an open access journal however, i do feel a little twinge of unhappiness about it, and for the very ignoble reason that it just doesn't feel as good. it feels something like editing an article on wikipedia, except that instead of 20 minutes it's taken me 20 months. there's very little nervous anticipation -- as long as you've done real science your paper's going to be accepted. there's no smug satisfaction in engaging in the dick-measuring contest of who-has-papers-in-journals-with-higher-impact-factors. it's platonic. it's how science should be reported, and it's utterly joyless.

at least there are rating systems and opportunities for peer commentary. trust that i'll be logging on every day to see if anyone's said anything new about the article. for that matter i have an idea: SCHOLARLY HOT OR NOT. every day, a new paper on the main page, scale of 1 to 10. is it HOT or NOT?

From The Alchemaster's Apprentice, Walter Moers:

One evening -- the two of them were standing in front of a kitchen cupboard -- Ghoolion suddenly laid aside the egg he was peeling. Unlocking the door, he invited Echo to look inside the cupboard and tell him what it contained. Echo did as he was bidden, but all he could see was a dusty jumble of unidentifiable kitchen utensils.

'No idea,' said Echo. 'Just junk of some kind.'

'That,' Ghoolion said in a voice quivering with rage, 'is my dungeon for useless kitchen utensils. There's one such in every kitchen worthy of the name. Its inmates are kept there like especially dangerous patients in a mental institution.'

He reached into the cupboard and brought out an odd-looking implement.

'What cook,' he cried, 'does not possess such a gadget, which can sculpt a radish into a miniature rose? I acquire it at a fair in one of those moments of mental derangement when life without a miniature rose-cutting-gadget seems unimaginable.'

He hurled the thing back into the darkness and brought out another.

'Or this here, which enables one to cut potatoes into spirals five yards long! Or this, a press for juicing turnips! Or this, a frying pan for producing rectangular omelettes!'

Ghoolion took gadget after gadget from the cupboard and held them under Echo's nose, glaring at them angrily.

'What induced me to buy all these? what can one do with potato spirals long enough to decorate a banqueting hall? What demented voice convinced me in a whisper that I might some day be visited by guests with an insatiable hankering for turnip juice, rectangular omelettes and potatoes five yards long?'

He hurled the gadgets back into their dungeon with a look of disgust. Dust went billowing into the air and Echo sneezed involuntarily.

'Why, I ask myself, don't I simply chuck them all on to the rubbish dump? I'll tell you that too. I keep them for one reason alone: revenge! I keep them just as medieval princes kept their enemies on starvation rations. A quick death on a rubbish dump would be too merciful. No, let them languish in a gloomy dungeon, condemned to everlasting inactivity. That's the only condign punishment for a rectangular omelette pan!'

So saying, Ghoolion slammed the cupboard door and turned the key three times in the lock. Then he went on cooking as if nothing had happened.

From that day on, Echo regarded the kitchen cupboard -- and the bottommost compartment in particular -- with new eyes. No longer a cupboard, it was a medieval fortress whose dungeon harboured a terrible secret. He often slunk past it, and when all was quiet he would put his ear to the door and listen. And he sometimes fancied he could actually hear Ghoolion's pitiful captives whimpering for mercy -- pleading to be allowed to rust away on a rubbish dump.

the annual potluck in our estate was held today, and there was the usual assortment of tasty delights, and kids running everywhere and skinning their knees, and the first hints of fall in the slightly chilly air. at the end of the meal, the brother and the housemate and i mused over the fact that some of the dishes had been completely cleaned out, while there was still food in several others. the Theory was this: that for dishes pre-cut into discrete portions, people feel less shy about taking the last piece than for dishes that are not. because: without pre-slicing, a form of zeno's paradox operates, where increasingly smaller pieces can get cut off from the remainder of the dish without a person feeling like they've been the greedy bastard who took the last portion. supporting evidence: pre-sliced lasagna (finished), unsliced shepherd's pie (unfinished), pre-sliced chocolate cake (finished), various salads (unfinished), etc. experiments need to be run.

not that profound, but intensely true

from this NYT op-ed

The problem is, we only get one chance at this, with no do-overs. Life is, in effect, a non-repeatable experiment with no control. In his novel about marriage, “Light Years,” James Salter writes: “For whatever we do, even whatever we do not do prevents us from doing its opposite. Acts demolish their alternatives, that is the paradox.” Watching our peers’ lives is the closest we can come to a glimpse of the parallel universes in which we didn’t ruin that relationship years ago, or got that job we applied for, or got on that plane after all. It’s tempting to read other people’s lives as cautionary fables or repudiations of our own.

A colleague of mine once hosted a visiting cartoonist from Scandinavia who was on a promotional tour. My colleague, who has a university job, a wife and children, was clearly a little wistful about the tour, imagining Brussels, Paris, and London, meeting new fans and colleagues and being taken out for beers every night. The cartoonist, meanwhile, looked forlornly around at his host’s pleasant row house and sighed, almost to himself: “I would like to have such a house.”

One of the hardest things to look at in this life is the lives we didn’t lead, the path not taken, potential left unfulfilled. In stories, those who look back — Lot’s wife, Orpheus and Eurydice — are lost. Looking to the side instead, to gauge how our companions are faring, is a way of glancing at a safer reflection of what we cannot directly bear, like Perseus seeing the Gorgon safely mirrored in his shield.

there was quizzo at the bar last night, which we did horribly at, and only partially because of hockey. i've come to the tentative conclusion that being good at trivia games is less to do with what you actually know and more to do with having heard of everything at least once, and forming a vast network of weak associations*. to elaborate, i feel that my level of confidence upon generating an answer is only weakly correlated with whether the answer turns out to eventually be correct: the fatal questions are those where nothing at all comes to mind. more sporcle!

in other news, the sam adams oktoberfest is not half bad this year.

* speaking of which, i have 2 of the 4 corners of funny farm done, my major accomplishment of the year so far.

semester the 7th

4th year is the easiest year. 4th year is the year where they can't really fail you out of the program any more, but where you need to take a nice deep breath, and figure out what in tarnation to do with the shiny, but quite possibly useless three letters that are soon to be appended to the end of your name.