Daily Archives: February 12, 2009

Nothing Fair About It

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A number of articles about a new bill bent on destroying public access to government-funded research

The Fair Copyright in Research Works Act is a lot of things, but fair ain’t one of them

Allan Adler, VP of the Association of American Publishers, issued a statement in which he had the gall to say that “Government does not fund peer-reviewed journal articles—publishers do.”

That’s just not true. The NIH spends over $28 billion in taxpayer money annually to fund research. Researchers write articles about their findings, and their peers review those articles, without compensation from publishers. Without the research, there would be nothing to publish. Largely due to historical accident, publishers manage the peer review process, helping journal editors to badger referees into reviewing articles, generally for no pay. The value of the scientific expertise that goes into refereeing dwarfs that of the office expenses incurred by publishers in managing the process. The referees’ salaries are paid by universities and research institutes, not by publishers. Basically, we have a system in which the public pays for the research, the universities pay for the refereeing, the publishers pay for office work to coordinate the refereeing, and also for some useful editing. Then the publishers turn around and sell the results back to the universities and to the public who bore almost all of the costs in the first place.

Congress Hears Debate Over Bill That Would Forbid NIH-like Public Access

Open Access: The Time to Act is Now

Please contact your Representative no later than February 28, 2009 to express your support for public access to taxpayer-funded research and ask that he or she oppose H.R.801. Contact your Representative directly using the contact information and draft letter below, or via the ALA legislative action center [link forthcoming 2/11]. As always, kindly let us know what action you’re able to take, via email to stacie [at] arl [dot] org.

Click the link for more.

H/t to D H.

A Little Morality Play

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Imagine you are a teacher, giving tests over the course of several years. Even though you mention other behavior that is forbidden, for a long time you never tell your students that copying from a crib sheet, or another student, is wrong. It’s never listed as being against the rules. You leave the room when giving an exam, and you grade on a curve. What do you suppose will happen? If a C student does better, and in doing so starts outperforming others, forcing their grades down, will all of them chose integrity over better grades? Of course not.

You ask the students if they cheated. What answer will you get?

Phelps gets suspended, A-Rod gets … nothing

Yeah, Michael Phelps got suspended. Why? Because if he smoked pot, he broke the rules. Baseball, on the other hand, had no punishment for steroid use for the time in question. Steroids, specifically, were not “banned” until 2002, and that’s not even right, because there was no punishment for their use until 2004. So yeah, A-Rod did something commonly accepted as cheating in almost every sport, but up until baseball tested for them and had punishment, there was nothing to distinguish steroid use from vitamin supplements and eating your spinach (other than steroids needing a prescription, but that doesn’t seem to be the objection) except public perception, and public perception doesn’t sign the paycheck. So A-Rod will get some well-deserved derision and maybe lose some sponsorship money, too, but the organization that is Major League Baseball shouldn’t get free pass here, and nor should the players’ union — they resisted the implementation of these rules. Anyone discussing this? I don’t know — I’ve tried to avoid these stories. Too many sanctimonious sports pundits abound. (Personally, I think all modern electronic devices are performance-enhancing, so they’re all hypocrites if they use a word processor or cellphone to get their job done)

(Oh, and one could substitute law enforcement people not giving other law enforcement people e.g. parking tickets as another example of this, to name another example completely at random. Do they start parking illegally? You betcha.)

Crockpot, not Crackpot

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I bought a crockpot last fall, partly because I got tired of not being able to do any stovetop cooking below a certain temperature, owing to the nature of my gas stove. I kept looking for inserts to boost the pot up higher, but never found any (though I did find a tip to just wad up aluminum foil in a fat toroid; predictably, this “D’oh” moment was after I got the crock pot). My recipe repertoire isn’t that extensive. This being the internet, what are the odds that someone in the blogohedron has devoted time to crockpot cooking? Pretty good. There’s a blogger who devoted all of last year to crockpot cooking.

A Year of Crockpotting

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 30, 2007

A CrockPot Resolution
I will use my crockpot everyday in 2008.

And I will post the recipes and pictures.

Everyday.

seriously.

stop laughing.

This is huge for me, because I usually give up my New Year’s Resolutions on about the 4th. But, I’ve started working for these people and so I’m thinking that I best be making a blog.

So here it is.

2008. The Year of the CrockPot.

it’s actually the year of the rat.

AFAICT, the fact that it was the year of the rat did not figure into things any more than this, though I haven’t gone through all of the journal. Guinea Pigs (or are they gerbils?) though — that’s another story.

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