"Computer spies have broken into the Pentagon's $300 billion Joint Strike Fighter project and made off with several terabytes of code. The Pentagon, and consequently the Wall Street Journal, suspects Chinese involvement."
- AJ Batac
from Bookmarklet
Via Neatorama: "This video has stunned scientists around the world as this bird thinks critically just like a human to catch fish. Give a fish a piece of bread and it will won't be hungry for a day but teach it to fish...well you get it."
- Mark Trapp
I used it for a while but stopped. it just didn't have a feature I needed. But, I really lke the service and it works quite well.
- Jason Shultz
from twhirl
Their customer service alone makes the service worth it. They're brilliant.
- Sameer Vasta
I was scared off by discussions in their forum about an inability to have prepaid billings (retainers). I haven't gone back in a while but I also was not sure if the look of the invoice could be modified. The way it used the web for quotes was awesome -- I may still go back to it.
- Wayne Schulz
I used it for freelance work and it was great. Support is Good, too.
- Trevor F. Smith
from twhirl
Freshbooks is great. I really like the format of the invoices and the ability to send invoices to more than one person at a company (via email or snail mail). Highly recommended.
- Laurence Toney
ppl seem to be big fans and I know a devel there. The other service I commonly hear mentioned is Harvest -- @missrogue use?
- Lloyd Budd
I'm using it and works great. I like the recurrent invoice sending to te client, and automatically connects to my Paypal account to receive my payment.
- Leandro Ardissone ⍨
Interesting. Green open access as anti-censorship tool.
- D0r0th34
Makes only one cogent argument (#4) against the adversarial model. Flaws #1-3 are good reasons to move away from an adversarial system, but have nothing to do with whether or not it's a valid model of how academia actually works. As the author says, "adversarial viewpoint has a validity in proportion to the number of people subscribing to it" -- and that would be nearly everyone in academia.
- Bill Hooker
My experience has been that most academics subscribe at most partially to an adversarial model, and that the extent to which they subscribe is highly context-dependent. I've also met many who are routinely extraordinarily generous to others. Not that I expect Bill to agree, but that is my experience.
- Michael Nielsen
Context, yes; kindness is easier to a colleague with a face (though the way some ppl treat their grad students oughta be illegal). Straight-up altruism IME is as rare as hen's teeth, and far more precious; one of the commonest reactions to the NIH public-access policy at MPOW is "wot about my CAREER? this will be BAD for my CAREER!"
- D0r0th34
I think adversarial structures will simply die out. It's only a matter of time before information technology makes this possible (edit: through new reputation and reward systems). But then, I think practically all of academia will be put on its head. Of course, not everyone will be as fast to adapt to the new reality. Therefore, you will see great divergence in opinions and strategies employed by researchers. We're already seeing that, in fact.
- Meryn Stol
Dorothea - On the straight-up altruism thing: I've seen several colleagues make extraordinary and essentially unacknowledged gestures, simply to make the pie bigger for everyone, doing the right thing for science, but not obviously for their own careers. It certainly made me think about my own values, and gave me enormous respect for those people.
- Michael Nielsen
Yes. They are personified awesome. I've seen it too, a time or two, and the impact it has on me is close to overwhelming.
- D0r0th34
"personified awesome" is a most excellent phrase!
- Michael Nielsen
The comments are interesting in the way they show a really quite different community view of what is important than what I am used to.
- Cameron Neylon
by which I mean specifically the resistance to pre-prints and concern that it makes double blind reviewing difficult
- Cameron Neylon
Seems to me that the concern wasn't so much "save double-blind reviewing!" as "preprints get us in trouble with our favorite conferences/publishers because they get in the way of double-blind reviewing."
- D0r0th34
True - it's just not a concern that I've heard before...
- Cameron Neylon
Oh, I've heard a lot of variations on "I won't do it because my publisher won't like it."
- D0r0th34
The idea is that altruistic behavior in science works because a collective of people can beat out any single adversarial opponent. Why, then, do the adversarials tend to organize and communicate better? Because viewing change as a threat connects more strongly to motivation, via emotion rather than intellect? Sounds like altruism is doomed (to remain really rare) unless we can get past that.
- Mr. Gunn
@Michael: I may be a little... jaded... it's true. I'll add only that I got that way for a reason; I didn't *start out* all cynical and vicious. Few people do, I think.
- Bill Hooker
Mr Gunn - on that issue, I think people naturally get selfish when they feel under extreme pressure themselves. Personally, I think that a lot of problems with adversarial culture would be solved by (a) training a more sustainable number of scientists; and (b) creating a culture in which leaving academia is seen as being just as worthwhile as becoming a hotshot prof.
- Michael Nielsen
Bill - I know there's a lot of variability, both between groups, and between fields. I've seen enough of the adversarial behaviour to know that I'd probably leave any field where that was really dominant. Life is too short.
- Michael Nielsen
Right on Michael! Seems like point (b) could help point (a). Are you suggesting adversarial people should be incentivized to leave academia, and how do you do that without making academia overall a less desirable place to be?
- Mr. Gunn
Strangely enough, I'm a non-adversarial person who left academia.
- Mr. Gunn
+1 for Michael's a) and b). Academia is just terrible at helping people with their career development, for numerous reasons. If more young scientists were made aware of alternatives at the beginning, we'd have less bitter, twisted postdocs at the end ;-)
- Neil Saunders
Mr Gunn - I wasn't quite suggesting that. I just mean that when resources feel less scarce, people aren't so adversarial. I've seen a very strong relationship between scarcity of resources (more precisely, the feeling that resources are scarce, which is not the same thing) in different fields, and how adversarial people are.
- Michael Nielsen
I know exactly what you mean, Michael. My apologies for asking such a leading question. ;-)
- Mr. Gunn
No need to apologize, Mr. Gunn. It was a perfectly reasonable question.
- Michael Nielsen
The official Chinese translation of President Barack Obama's inauguration speech omitted his references to communism and dissent, and a live broadcast on state television Wednesday quickly cut away to the anchor when sensitive topics were mentioned. The comments by the newly installed U.S. president veered into politically sensitive territory for China's ruling Communist Party, which maintains a tight grip over the Internet and the entirely state-run media. Beijing tolerates little dissent and frequently decries foreign interference in its internal affairs.
- Alejandro
"In the last in the series Professor Jim Al-Khalili explores how studying the atom forced us to rethink the nature of reality itself. He discovers that there might be parallel universes in which different versions of us exist, finds out that empty space isn't empty at all, and investigates the differences in our perception of the world in the universe and the reality."
- ~C4Chaos
from Bookmarklet
I remember studying gradients in calculus in college and it was and still is one of my favorite mathematical concepts ever! Gradients were explained as the most efficient, drip drop slide of a grain of sand down a sandhill.
- Roney Smith
I buy my pork related products from sources that aren't horrible. If you buy your meat from Whole Foods, you'll pay more but get much higher quality meat that's nothing like the company profiled. Yes, much of the pork industry is disgusting.
- Internet's Tad
Nick, THANK YOU SOOO MUCH FOR POSTING THIS!!!!!
- Anna Haro
I'm not a vegetarian now, but when I lived in rural Missouri I was. Whole Foods cannot be found on every street corner, and not everyone can afford it anyway. What's really sad is that if you're poor in the midwest you're probably eating pork and therefore contributing to massive pig-shit lagoons that are extremely dangerous to your own safety. Vegetarianism is a nutritious and affordable habit we could all learn something from.
- Jason Wehmhoener
i'm hitting the LIKE button very reluctantly. in this case it should be called "DO NOT FORGET"
- sean808080
Luter, the owner of Smithfield, wants to expand in Europe, particularly in Poland and Romania. The bastard! After having killed millions of fish, made countless people sick here in the US, and ruined rivers and watersheds in North Carolina for everybody, now wants to do the same in Europe. And smarmy politicians here in the States have done nothing to stop him -- after getting hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations from him, that is. People like this are the real terrorists.
- Raoul Pop
So has Mona read this? Just wondering... ;-)
- Ňicķ
Whoa! this entire article is GROOOOOOOOOSSSSSSS!!! wow. this is ungodly farming folks. this Pig Farming CEO dude's is sick in the head from all those fumes! Vegetarianism has for a long time been proven to be good for you and the environment...this should be on the front page news, but it's not.
- Susan Beebe
Thanks sincerely for the reminder...
- Bill Sodeman
hmmmm... not good for Bacon, but breakfast is still for winners.
- Thomas Hawk
It's why I don't eat meat, thanks for this post. Reblogging.
- Ryan
My pork does not come from these sorts of places. However, I will never buy Smithfield again even in an emergency pinch situation. Thanks for the link.
- ThePicMan
ba-dee ba-dee ba-dee That's yuckie, folks! ...
- Mark Elster
I just emailed Paula Dean the link to this RS article. I am sure she will never see it, but I am sick of her Smithfield commercials on FoodTV.
- ThePicMan
If you are feeling like you really want to dig your soul out of the doghouse (as maybe I did...), $4,000 buys one permanent well for an entire village. They give you the GPS coordinates of your specific village too. Feels awesome.
- Christopher Sacca
i've reshared this to the community service room.
- Anika
I've been a fan of (and donor to) WaterPartners International, http://www.water.org, for a few years now. UNICEF http://www.unicef.org/ also provides clean water through its Water for Life initiative, which I learned of through this documentary http://www.mtv.com/thinkmt... by Jay-Z and my cousin, Arunabha Ghosh, then of the UN.
- Ruchira S. Datta
I think that clean water gives the best leverage to your charitable dollars. Unsanitary water is a major cause of completely preventable disease, which keeps children from going to school and poor people from going to work, besides causing suffering in itself. So the benefits from your donation to clean water accrue in a virtuous circle.
- Ruchira S. Datta
"Chances are that I probably have already lost more than half the people who started reading this post because it is too long winded or is in need of an editor to make it short and snappy. I’ve lost count of the number of comments I’ve had on past posts that say almost those exact words. Everyone wants the TechCrunch and Digg style synopsis posts because they are too busy to take time...
more...
- Alexander van Elsas
"If this is indeed the case then I think we are really losing something very valuable - the ability be a truly knowledgeable society. When this happens I believe there is indeed a dumbing down of our society. If we are really happy being fed smaller chunks of information we are removing the ability to make real value judgements. It also becomes much easier to manipulate us, to polarize...
more...
- Alexander van Elsas
"Even if you're a hyper-organized, task-oriented worker with an expansive mind and endless ambition, you won't get a lot done if your mind and body are demanding you curl up and doze off. Luckily, you can overcome a late night of net surfing, a rough morning, or just the post-lunch stupor without becoming an over-wired mess. We've put together 10 of the best ways to jumpstart your brain and get back into a productive groove, and all of them are tricks you can put to work this Monday."
- ~C4Chaos
from Bookmarklet
n 2003, artist Sunny Buick conceived and curated SCI-FI Western, an exhibition of art inspired by both science fiction and the American frontier. Taking the analogy of space as the new Old West to the next level, the participating artists juxtaposed B-movie imagery from westerns and science fiction with bizarre and surprisingly poignant results.
- michael sean wright
from Bookmarklet
good question cyndy, i'll try to look into that.
- MG Siegler
Turn-by-turn would be totally awesome. Push notification is second, cut/paste is third. I do wish there were a cut/paste feature, but I wouldn't use it nearly as much as turn-by-turn directions.
- Cheryl Jones