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andrewducker ([personal profile] andrewducker) wrote2012-07-17 12:00 pm
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Interesting Links for 17-07-2012

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peoppenheimer: A photo of Paul Oppenheimer at the Australasian Association of Philosophy meeting. (Default)

[personal profile] peoppenheimer 2012-07-17 08:13 pm (UTC)(link)
Before I even got through the link header, my brain was screaming "Cantor's Paradox!" The OP did a good job of answering the question. Thanks for the link.

How many infinities are there?

[identity profile] cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com 2012-07-17 11:33 am (UTC)(link)
ROFL. That's really well written. I guess one might guess the answer is "infinitely many!" but it's good to see it explained.

(And as far as I can tell accurate: it's scary to think that now I know fewer practicing mathematicians, I probably know more about infinities than almost all of my friends :))

For the record, "infinity" is more of a label mathematicians and non-mathematicians slap on stuff which is "too big to count", so it usually means ordinals and cardinals, but there are some other uses.

For instance a number is often adjoined with a +INF and -INF which work roughly the way you'd expect (INF>x for any finite x; INF+x is INF for any finite X; INF-INF not defined). There are two of those. Eg. floating point representations on a computer often have somehting like this with a special bit pattern for results which are +INF, NAN, etc.

For complex numbers, there's only one INF, which is sort of "round the edge" of the whole plain.

Although obviously, if you lumped those in with the ordinals and cardinals, the answer would still be "too many to represent" :)

[identity profile] ashfae.livejournal.com 2012-07-17 12:56 pm (UTC)(link)
I've missed the niftiness of the Screen Display Calculator to fall in smit with the Do What the Fuck You Want To Public Licence down at the bottom. Joy!
ckd: (cpu)

[personal profile] ckd 2012-07-17 06:14 pm (UTC)(link)
That imgur block reminds me of this story (with a name that's rather familiar lately in the tech news ;-) :
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/07/17/marissa-mayer-on-the-internet.html

[identity profile] anef.livejournal.com 2012-07-18 07:19 am (UTC)(link)
Somewhat at a tangent to the Alexander story, I can recommend reading "Persian Fire", by Tom Holland, which gives a fascinating overview of the older civilisations of the Middle East, and "The Crusades Through Arab Eyes", by Amin Maalouf, which is again fascinating, and does what it says on the tin.

[identity profile] steer.livejournal.com 2012-07-19 10:32 am (UTC)(link)
OK... I wanted to make a more coherent comment than twitter allows about this "gold open access".

Let me start by saying that open access is a great thing. All my papers are freely available on my website and this is completely within publisher terms. I cannot remember the last time I came across a modern paper in my field which I had to go through a paywall for. The problem tends to occur with papers from five or more years ago when people were less savvy about putting things online. In some disciplines you are nowhere if your research is not also on arxiv which is completely free and open. Thanks to google, making a copy available on the web means that everyone can find it by searching the title. My webpage often has links to the "pay" version of the article too.
http://www.richardclegg.org/pubs/
e.g.
Elsevier pay version:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002200001000111X
My free version
http://www.richardclegg.org/pubs/nsrl_jccs2009.pdf
This is entirely within Elsevier's rules.
It is what that article refers to as "green" open access.

You have to understand a little bit about how academics work to get some of the reasons why this "gold" open access a bad thing. There are so many papers coming out you can't read them all. In fact you can't read even an appreciable fraction in your field. In my field I can't even find time to read the top three journals and publication tends to be spread. Because network science is fast moving (and particular Internet science) we tend to track conferences not journals. Probably the most reputation making thing I can publish in (short of science or nature) is a conference (ACM SIGCOMM) -- not made it yet. If I publish in more minor venues or journals my work will not get read by the people I want it to get read by. So if I want my work to be out there I need to publish in certain places. If I am mandated only to publish in journals which will follow this "gold open access" cost model my work will not be so widely read. So this "free" access has a great danger of leading to UK research being ghettoised. It may be that leading journals will switch to allowing "open access for money upfront" but there's no guarantee they will.

There's a lot of "shock horror" 60% (perhaps more -- that's a figure I pulled from the air) of university library budgets go on journals. However, 99% of my library usage is on journals. That is pretty much the only use I make of my university library is to get papers and only then by the fact that accesses from inside my university "unlock" publisher paywalls. My access pattern is pretty typical (indeed, I'm more inclined to read a library book than most colleagues I think). So the high library expenditure on journals is actually under proportionate to what staff and postgrad students use -- and those are the majority users of the library. (The undergraduates are the ones there in person but that's not representative).

This proposal does not address the problem that academic publishing is profit driven because the same amount of money goes to the publishers, just by a different mechanism. So the publishers can still profiteer, they just do so by a different mechanism. (Incidentally, the "profiteering" Elsevier Reed sacked their CEO two or three years ago because of their low profits).

This problem will make things worse for non university people who wish to engage in science. A lot of people wish to publish without a formal connection to a university. (I gave the example of Einstein in the patent office -- a more common example would be a PhD student recently written up, a researcher between jobs or a retired professor who keeps coming up with good ideas). Now, what happens to their work. If the journal they want to publish in is a normal journal they're fine. If that journal is a "gold" open access journal then they've got a big problem.

Here's the real kicker though. Are the libraries going to stop paying Elsevier, Springer-Verlag et al? Of course not. Nowhere else in the world will do this "gold" open access. Any required journal subscriptions will still be required so the university will pay twice -- once to publish everything and once again to read it.
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